Frequent Miler on the Air - How to spend half a million Amex points | Ep134 | 1-22-22

Episode Date: January 22, 2022

This week's episode was recording when word came in about the death of the incredible Resy offer. Still, the sweet spots discussed are highly relevant for anyone sitting on a bunch of Membership Rewards points. Listen in as we discuss how half a million points could buy you seven round trip business class tickets to Europe -- or even more valuable redemptions. 2:44 Giant Mailbag: The new Giant Mailbox 4:15 What crazy thing . . . did Marriott do this week? Get a very good deal for unused Travel Packages (probably). 8:45 Main Event: How to spend half a million Amex points 42:19 Post Roast 45:05 Question of the Week: Does booking a car rental through Hopper negate the rental car insurance from the Chase Sapphire Reserve?

Hello, Nick here to kick things off. As you can probably imagine, though we published Frequent Mile Around the Air on Saturdays, we actually recorded a couple of days sooner. This week we were talking about ways to put your membership rewards points to good use. That was inspired by the fact that I wrote a post this week about how I earned more than half a million American Express membership rewards points by buying a car. And during the show, for about the first half or three quarters, we referenced the offer that I used, which was an offer on the Amex Platinum card to earn a bunch of points and 15x at small businesses and restaurants for the first six months. And unfortunately, while we

were recording the show, we found out that that offer had been pulled. So that offer that we discussed at the beginning is no longer available for new cardholders. It's changed. The Platinum card is now offering 125,000 points after 6,000 spend in the first six months. And just 10x only at restaurants on up to 2525,000 spent during that same window. So it's not exactly the same. However, the content from the episode is still highly relevant to anyone who's been collecting Amex Membership Rewards points.

And let's be real, there's been lots of incredible ways to pick up those points over these last couple of years, and most of us have been traveling less than we did pre-pandemic. So you may be sitting on a similar number of points even without that offer. And today's content is going to be useful for you if you have been sitting on a pile of membership rewards points wondering, how am I going to put them to use? So keep that in mind as we discuss that Rezzy offer and the 15X. Remember that that offer is unfortunately no longer available. It's expired, but today's content will be valid for a long time as long as these award chart sweet spots still exist. So listen up and enjoy today's episode.

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 Mylar on the Air starts now. Today's main event, how to spend half a million Amex points. If you're a half a millionaire. Half a millionaire. You've been earning and spending half a millions at a time of Amex points, right?

Right, right. I became an Amex half a millionaire the other day in one fell swoop. So yeah, I'm excited to talk about ways to use the points. I just earned a whole bunch from buying a car. So I'm excited to talk about using them today. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Okay, cool.

So today for Giant Mailbag, I don't have any giant mail. What I have instead is a giant mail box, sort of. Wait, you have a bag, right? You have a bag. I know, but now we have- Don't tell me you're trading away Kathy's bag. No, no, no. Nice. That bag. Okay. That bag seriously travels with me everywhere. Okay, good. It carries all of my equipment for doing the podcast. So, you know, I need the giant mail bag. The giant mailbox now is an email address for people to send us feedback for the giant mail segment and to send us questions for the question of the week segment that we do at the end of each show. So it's a complicated email. Get ready. Get ready with your pen and paper and pen and paper. Old style style. It's mailbag. All one word mailbag at frequent miler dot com.

Wow. That's you know, you'll have to really, really think hard to remember that one. I imagine mailbag at frequent miler dot com. We'll flash that really, really think hard to remember that one, I imagine. Mailbag at frequentmiler.com. We'll flash that on the screen for those watching on YouTube. Oh, good, good, good, good. Yeah. So yeah, try to write that down or try to remember it. I know it's hard, but mailbag at frequentmiler.com. We will accept mailbag at frequentmiler.net if we want to confuse you, but just remember the mailbag part. Let's move on. All right. So let's talk about what crazy thing did Greg do? No, I'm just kidding. What crazy thing did Marriott do this week? Marriott did something crazy. They got a little crazy in a

good way, right? Yeah, they did. so they have stopped doing their travel packages and that doesn't sound good that does that's not really good at the same time like most of us kind of shrug like who cares because marriott travel packages used to be a great thing but once they combined with spg and redid what they were all about, they were just not a great deal. Like they were an okay deal under certain circumstances, but they just not exciting. Um, so they they've done away with them. Uh, the surprising thing they did is they announced that if you have a travel package, which it's too late to get one, if you don't have one, but if you have one, you can either hurry up and book your seven-night stay that goes with the travel package, or I think a much better deal, wait, and they will actually give you the points equivalent to

the full peak value of your travel package. So for example, if you booked a seven night stay at a property that was peak priced, peak award price that whole time, they'll give you the equivalent number of points that it would have taken to book that stay. So that's surprisingly generous for Marriott. It is. The cautionary note here is that that's what we were told. But in our Frequent Miler Insiders group, we've had a number of people who were told that they were going to get like one night basically of peak price for the points portion. So yeah, so I'm still not sure exactly what's going on. I saw those data points and I was like, well, that's not what we were told. And so I think we day, people were calling in and checking on it. And goodness knows, most of the Marriott phone agents are working from home in the pandemic.

And so they're not in the office. They may have missed an email. It wouldn't surprise me because I believe that Marriott intended to share the accurate information. I believe they understood the question and very specific in the answer. So I do expect it to be as crazy good as Greg is saying. But if you hear this and you call in and somebody tells you something different, sit tight, give it a few weeks. They're not going to cancel these out until the end of February anyway. So

unless you really need the points right now, I wouldn't panic. And even if you do, you're going to be at the mercy of whoever you get on the phone, probably. But the thing to know is if they tell you anything less than the number of points it would take to book your category at peak price for seven nights, if they tell you anything less than that, then just say, you know what? Never mind. I'll hang on to it for now. Hang up.

Call again. Wait. Check back at Frequent Miler and see if we have any update on how you can get that resolved. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I didn't know. I didn't know about that wrinkle.

So that's kind of disturbing. But as you said, it's not at all unusual for reps to have the wrong answer. Let's hope that the person who emailed us with the information was correct. I assume you've either have or are going to track back with them. Follow back up.

Yeah. Right, to see what the discrepancy is. There was one person who said that they were told something like the seven nights also, but others were not. Right. So we're, you know, it's a wait and see mode right now, but I'm confident that what we were told was probably accurate. All right. Well, a related crazy thing that Marriott did is they emailed me telling me that I only have, you know, a limited amount of time left to book my travel package, which they claim I still have unused. But to my knowledge, I don't. It certainly doesn't show up in my account.

I wouldn't be sad if they end up giving me points. You can only hope that they cancel that out at the end of February. Greg's going to be checking his account March 1st, like refresh, refresh, refresh. Looking for those points. Oh, fun times. All right. So then we're going to skip over mattress running the numbers this week because there wasn't an exciting new mattress running the numbers topic. And we are conversely excited about talking about this week's main event. Yes. Yeah.

So the Amex Resi Platinum offer, you described it well in your post the other day that basically the regular Amex Platinum card has a special offer that you could only get through the reservation site called Resi or from Frequent Miler because we'll link you to the reservation site. And if you sign up through there, after meeting the spend requirements, you get 125,000 points. Plus, you earn 15 points per dollar on up to $25,000 of spend at small businesses and dining for what is it? Six months? For six months. Yep. Yep. And so if you max all that out, if you spend 25,000 in those two categories, you will have earned a total of at least 500,000, half a million Amex points. Half a million, it's nuts, it's crazy.

It's enough to force you to go looking for an opportunity to do that, right? I mean, I think that's the thing. When I saw this offer, I was like, oh my goodness, that is enough points that I need to figure out how you can max that out. And so I wrote a post this week about buying a car and you can read more about it. I'll link to wrote a post this week about buying a car and you can

read more about it. I'll link to it in the description, but, but the key thing for me is that we, we were thinking about buying a car, but we were mostly like, you know, not right now, prices are kind of high. We don't really need it right now, but 500,000 points is such an incredible return. When am I ever going to get a return like that? Again, even if prices drop a little bit, they're not going to drop by enough to compensate for what I could earn right now. So it kind of forced my hand. I said, okay, well, I got to make a move now.

And I feel like it's the same kind of story. If you've been thinking, well, you know what? I'm going to probably remodel the kitchen in the fall. Well, I mean, hello, let's celebrate an early fall because half a million points is enough to speed that up a little bit, accelerate whatever it is. If you know you're going to spend the money eventually, and I knew eventually we'd buy a car. So rather than wait for someday, I was happy to take half a million points

now. Right. And you were able to actually find a good price, even in this very difficult market. And the dealer you found offered to let you pay with a credit card after you pushed on it, right? For only a 2% fee, which is better. Most car companies or dealerships ask for a 3% fee if they allow it at all, right? And I was surprised. I offered to pay a 3% fee with the salesperson. I don't even think that the salesperson was relatively new. And I just don't think he probably said that I was willing to pay 3%. He just said that I was willing to pay the fee because when he called back and he said 2%, like I, I almost laughed a little bit, but I was like, Oh yeah, that sounds good.

Sounds great. Right. Right. Let's do that. I love it. I love it. It's like they're haggling with you in the other direction. Right.

Right. Right. We can make that happen. So, uh, and I, at that point I had already negotiated the price too, in the sense that this is what I'm willing to pay and this is how much I want to put on the card. I'm willing to pay a 3% fee. And he came back with a 2% fee. And I was like, I just got a't want to pay a fee on top of a car price or whatever I'm buying. And just put this from perspective, when you're earning 15 points per dollar, if you value those points at only, only a penny each, which is very low for what most people would value these points at, that's a 15% return on your spend. And so to tack on 2% or 3%, you're still making an incredible 12% or 13% return on your spend. So it's not really a big deal to tack on a small fee like that in order to earn these kinds of rewards. Not at all. And it took some effort to find a good deal. I mean,

definitely prices are high. And so I said in the post, I contacted more than 200 dealerships. I was looking all like up and down the East coast and out towards the Midwest. And in a normal world, I would have probably looked nationwide and flown somewhere to pick it up. But you know, these days I just wasn't interested in flying somewhere to pick it up. I was willing to drive somewhere. So I stuck with places within like a nine or 10 hour radius. But still, I mean, it took a while to find the right deal where I felt like I wasn't overpaying and I could also use the card. So there was some effort involved in that. I wrote about how I went about it. But yeah, I mean, it was worth the effort because on the way home, my wife and I were talking about,

okay, what are we going to do with all these points? And so that's why I was excited to kind of write a post this week and say, these are some things you could do. And this is the incredible value you get. I actually, part of what inspired the post, to be honest with you, was that I had one salesperson who was kind of rude in his response. And we traded a couple of emails back and forth. And at the end, he said, how is it even worth it to use a card?

Are you going to possibly earn enough points to make this worth it? And so part of the you know, he and I finished our conversation a month ago, probably. So I wasn't writing the post specifically for his benefit. But I thought to myself, I mean, that's a valid question, right? Is it worth it? And I was thinking, is it worth it? Of course it is. I mean, I can take a vacation that's worth more than the cost of the car.

Like it's definitely worth it. So anyway, that's that's kind of the inspiration where this all came from. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to talk about that second side. So we just sort of gave the background on how to earn the points in high level. And now we're going to talk about, OK, so you don't know what to do with your Amex points. What would you do with half a million points? And I wanted to start with the things that are like the most obvious value to those who maybe aren't ready to travel internationally because preview of the second half of the conversation, most of the best value things are traveling internationally. Right. Right. Right. So for sure. Yeah. So, so the, the easiest thing you could do is to also pick up not just the vanilla platinum card, but the Schwab platinum card.

So the Schwab platinum card comes with its own very good bonus, which is after meeting the minimum spend, 100,000 points and 10X at dining and small businesses. So if you wait till you're done with the spend on your regular Platinum Card that you got through the Resi offer and then sign up for the Schwab Platinum Card, you'd be looking at another, what, 300 and some thousand points. So that's another huge windfall of points. But the reason that the Schwab Platinum Card is so interesting is it lets you cash out points to your Schwab account at a value of 1.1 cents each. So 500,000 points cash out at $5,500 if I did the math right. Yeah. And $5,500 back on a $25,000 purchase or $25,000 spend is phenomenal. I mean, you're talking better than 20% back. It's terrific. Yes. You can't complain about that.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And keep in mind the Schwab bonus also can be cashed out that way. So you're talking about you're getting closer to $10,000 of cash back.

If you just want to get cash back and you want to use the rewards for anything you want to spend on, that's what you can do. And we should mention that platinum cards do have a high annual fee. So you would be on the hook for quite a bit in annual fees if you did that two platinum card strategy. But if you got $10,000 back on your spend, that will more than mitigate the cost of the annual fee for the first year. You don't have to keep these cards forever.

If you don't want to pay the annual fee again next year, you can easily cancel it. You can open a card with no annual fee to keep your points alive and cancel the platinum, if you don't want to pay the annual fee again next year, you can easily cancel it. You can open a card with no annual fee to keep your points alive and cancel the platinum card if you don't want to keep paying. So it's not like you're not locking yourself into an expensive long-term proposition here. You can get a ton of value. And again, when are you going to get $5,500 back on $25,000 spent? It's just not something you see every day. And, you know, I showed in my post about buying a car. It could be even worth speculatively buying something to resell it because you got quite a buffer zone there in terms of like, you know, even if you sell it for a little less than you paid, you still can come out a few thousand ahead. So that's a pretty nice

baseline. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And don't forget that the Platinum's cards have value in themselves, right? So they'll give you things like $200 per calendar year towards fine hotels and resorts or the hotel collection bookings. They'll give you the Uber credits, which should be used for Uber Eats. And they stack. So if you had both of these cards that we're talking about, you'd be getting double the credits to use for those kinds of things. So, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's tons and tons of credits, tons of tons of like elite benefits and things. So check out our platinum guide for a complete list of, of the kind of benefits you would get. And you'd want to take advantage of while you have those platinum cards. Okay. So, okay. Cash out. What else can we do

if we don't want to travel abroad with our, with our Amex points? Well, if you want to travel domestically, one of the things you could do is transfer to Hilton. Hilton has a better transfer ratio than most other partners because their points are worth a little bit less and they also often have transfer bonuses. And so if you catch a transfer bonus with Hilton, what would you end up with? I mean, a whole ton of Hilton points, right? I mean, you can stay at Hilton forever. Right. So the standard transfer ratio is one to two.

So if you transfer 500,000 Amex points to Hilton, you have a million Hilton points. But when they have a 30% bonus, and which I would strongly advise waiting for at least that, um, then that means you're getting 1.3 million Hilton points, or if you're lucky enough to catch a 40% bonus or 50% bonus, it's 1.4 or 1.5 million that you'd end up with. Um, and so what can you do? Even if you just had a million Hilton points, you can, for example, the Conrad Maldives or the Conrad Bora a total of 12, you would, you know, be able to stay that 12, 12 nights in these luxury accommodations that I don't know, are often well over a thousand dollars a night. A thousand dollars a night. Right. Right. And again, I try not to value the points based on what they buy because I wouldn't actually spend that much. But I mean, still, at the end of the day, you're talking about a $12,000 stay as a side dish with your 25K spend, right?

Right, right. That's a pretty tasty side dish. Of course, I just gave two international examples, which wasn't my intent. But let's go at the lower end, the kind of more cheaper brands that include free breakfast that are often as low as 20K per night. If you're really lucky, you might be able to find 10K, but I haven't seen that in ages. But let's just say 20K per night. How many nights could you stay if you booked in five night increments because of the fifth

night free? I'm calculating. I don't know if I did my math right, but 62 nights, 62 nights, that's two months in Hilton hotels with this one sign-up boss. And that's, remember that's not with the transfer bonus either. So you could see a lot more if you got a 30 or 40% transfer bonus to Hilton. So 62 nights. And then more desirable local hotels, Hiltons, it's going to be somewhere in between, somewhere between the 12 nights and 62 nights of those two extremes, right? So maybe you're looking at a full month at a reasonably nice Hilton property.

That's crazy. I mean, it's crazy. It's insane. Think about how much it would cost you if, you know, at a reasonably nice Hilton property to stay for a month. I mean, it would just be crazy. So ridiculous, right? So you could get far more than the $5,500 in cash out value that we talked about before by transferring to Hilton, which is like the second lowest probably value on the, uh, the echelon here. And you could still get, you know, well over that and value and enjoyment too. I mean, let's, let's be clear. I'd be kind of fun, right? Whether you want to stay someplace a month or cover your vacations for the next year

or two and not have to worry about paying for the hotel because you've got all these points that you earned from this offer. So there's a joy of free in that. And it seems like that's probably a more likely use, right? That more people are going to say, oh, let me stay a week or five nights or whatever at Hilton every time I go on vacation. And so you're limited to, yeah, finding vacation spots that Hilton serves and has award availability at the standard rate, but still that's definitely doable and, and not a bad use. I mean, it's not the best use of your points, but it's, you know, it's not a bad use, especially if you got on a transfer bonus. For sure. For sure. All right. So you stay, uh, cash out $5,500, stay a lot of nights at Hilton. Next up, if you're ready to do some international travel,

then it really starts to heat up, right? Because then you got some great transfer partners. They can give you terrific values for international business or first-class flights. So, right. But, but wait, what do we have? Well,? Okay. But I do want to mention Singapore because, oh, let's talk about the Singapore deal now because the benefit of doing it can help you domestically. True, true story. Okay. Good point. So right now, if you transfer to Singapore, Chris Flyer, Singapore Airlines frequent flyer program, you can pick up Singapore elite status. You can either get silver or gold status. There's no reason to talk about silver. So gold status is what you would be interested in. If you were to transfer 250,000 points, only half the points from the

bonus that we're talking about to Singapore, Chris flyer, you would of course have 250,000 Singapore miles, but you would also get Singapore gold status right now. And that status because of their extension would be good for two years. So Singapore gold status. I mean, that sounds exciting, doesn't it? Why would we care about Singapore gold status, Greg? We wouldn't, but what we do care about is that it also gives you Star Alliance gold status, and that's where we care. Right. you Star Alliance gold status. And that's where we care. Right. Because Star Alliance gold status from a foreign airline program will get you lounge access

to Star Alliance lounges when you're flying on a Star Alliance flights. And so if you're familiar with the Star Alliance, you know, that means United lounges when you're flying United domestically in the US, which is worth mentioning. Even if you have United Elite status, you don't get free lounge access with United. But if you have Star Alliance Gold with a foreign carrier like Singapore, then you will get United lounge access

when you're flying United domestically. So that would be a terrific way to get yourself lounge access every time you fly. And you could- Other Star Alliance Gold benefits. Yeah, yeah. And you could even use those Singapore Airlines Chris Flyer miles to book your United flights

if you could find saver award availability on United. And the prices aren't bad. In fact, some of them are very good, like flying to Hawaii for what? 17,500 miles one way, which is way, way cheaper than United would charge for the same flight. Yeah.

So that 250,000 miles, I mean, for a 35K round trip to Hawaii, let's see, can you do the math quickly on me there? That's what, six, seven? I wasn't paying attention enough to that. Probably six round trip tickets to Hawaii, at least. Anyway, that's 180 and 210. So you could do a couple, at least one more. So seven round trip.

Well, you've got three per 100,000, three round trips per 100,000 Amex points. So you've got 15 round trips. 15 round trips. Well, yes. Okay. You're talking about 500,000. I was thinking 250,000.

Oh, if you just did the 250, that's right. Which would make a lot more sense. So seven or eight round trips. Yeah. So, so you would, if you transfer that 250,000 miles, you could fly to Hawaii multiple times or with multiple passengers round trip and enjoy lounge access with United while you're doing it. So, I mean, that, that right there is already. That's an amazing deal. Yeah. Yeah. Do keep in mind though, that Singapore miles do expire after three years and there's nothing really you can do, nothing reasonable you can do to extend them. So you better be pretty sure you're going to use those miles before you do. And so what else can you do with those Singapore miles if you're not going to be using them to fly

United? Well, you, your best use of Singapore miles is going to be to fly Singapore Airlines, which they have some decent award rates, not the best prices ever, but decent award rates. And more importantly, they have much greater availability for members of their own program. So if you're looking to fly Singapore, you could fly Singapore business class, not only to Singapore, but you could fly to Europe. For instance, you could fly to Frankfurt from New York in Singapore business or first class, and you'd be able to fly a couple of people round trip with this bonus. You could fly a couple of people round trip to Europe, to Frankfurt, or also I think they still have the route from Houston to Manchester. I think so. I think so.

Yeah. So Houston to Manchester, if you're looking to go to the UK. So those are a couple of options for Europe. And then, of course, you could alternatively fly just about anywhere you would like with Singapore. They fly all over, of course, the Asia Pacific region, but to a lot all the travel restrictions going on. But flights to, as Nick talked about before, the flights to Europe are still, are currently flying and bookable. So that's a good use right now. Absolutely. How much did you pay? Do you recall? You just, you booked recently on that, right? You booked first class to Frankfurt, I think. I did. I think it was 85,000 points one way for first class, which first class, let me tell you, that's Singapore suites. And now it's the new style suites,

which means in your, you don't just have a seat. You have a room that has a, it has like a bed and a big captain's chair and then some room to move around as well. So, I mean, this is not your typical first class seat. No, no, not at all. So that's a fantastic, incredible, incredible redemption. So you're talking anyway, 85 K each way. So 170,000 round trip per passenger. So you could fly with this, this one bonus, you could fly two people round trip in that first class. And I mean, I, I don't know if you have the retail price of that off the top of your head, but I mean, we're talking

many thousand, it's gotta be six, seven, eight, nine, $10,000 round trip. I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, I, I would assume it's around 10K round trip. So for two people, yeah, I mean, 20,000, it's a huge amount of value. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, all right, that's a potentially great use. And with Singapore, again, you can fly other places.

And the nice thing with Singapore is they allow a stopover in Singapore for $100 more. So if the world goes back to normal and you're ready to travel internationally, you could visit two destinations in one. So that can be a good use. So if you're ready to travel internationally, what's your next option? Well, I mean, ANA has so much value. You can transfer Amex points to ANA. And that's great if you actually want to fly ANA itself. Now, if you do, you'd be flying through Japan. And again, with travel restrictions these days, that might not be practical. But they also have some great sweet spots for flying on partners.

So one example I'm going to bring up is 104,000 points round trip to anywhere in Africa. So that means you want to fly to South Africa, to Cape town, Johannesburg, wherever 104,000 round trip business class. I mean, that's just so much cheaper than anyone else. So, so you're getting very close to five round trip business class flights all the way to South Africa or to other, you know, far flung regions like the Maldives or, you know, wherever. And yeah, almost five with your 500,000 points. Amazing.

Yeah. That's amazing. I mean, those are flights that'd be many thousands of dollars per person. Oh, absolutely. And you're talking about four or five. Right, right, right, right. It's insane. Now you will have to, you have to be to be careful when booking this way about which carrier you book.

Because, for example, if you select Lufthansa, which is a Star Alliance carrier, you're going to be on the hook for probably well over $1,000 per person in fuel surcharges and other taxes. Whereas if you found award availability on United, for example, there'd be like almost none. There would just be like airport taxes. And then there's others that are sort of in between. Turkish would be usually not bad, but would have some charges. Not the lowest either.

Yeah, SAS, I think it's non-Air Canada, doesn't have any fuel surcharges now. So there's either, yeah, SAS I think is now on Air Canada. It doesn't have any fuel cell charges now. So there's some options. There's definitely, there are good options. Yeah. I mean, you're not going to be, Star Alliance has so many partners that you have a good chance, I think, of finding a carrier that has reasonable fees for something like that. But that's not the only thing you could do with ANA Miles. That's outrageously good, right? It's not. It's not the only thing you can do

with ANA Miles. It's outrageously good. There are a lot of things you can do with ANA Miles, but the probably most outrageously good thing you can do is a round the world trip. So ANA has an incredible round the world award chart where you can book a trip around the world, flying in business class on Star Alliance carriers, visiting up to eight cities with up to 12 segments. And the cost depends on how far you fly. So it depends on the distance flown, which if you take a really short route around the Earth, you're going to pay less. If you take a really long route with lots of stops, then you're going to pay a little bit more, but whatever it is you pay is incredibly reasonable based on their around the world award chart. And you've done some work at kind of trying to figure this out yourself. I know you were originally looking at trying to book one of these. The prices are really

reasonable. They really are. They really are. And it's completely possible to fit into our topic that we're talking about now. It's completely possible and reasonable to work out a itinerary that would cost 125,000 points per person for these business class flights. That means four, 500,000 points would get you four round the world business class flights with up to, what was it? Eight or nine stops. I forget how many. Eight stops, 12 stops. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I, and that's, to put that in perspective, I priced one out that just to kind of get an idea of the cash price. And the one I priced out in a post this week was $16,000 all the way around. And that's just incredible. I mean,

you get yourself 12, 13, 14, 15, $16,000 worth of flying per passenger. And you're talking about booking four of them. Yeah. So let's say $1,000 of it, you're going to have to pay anyway for taxes and things. So we're still talking $15,000 value for each of these four. So $60,000 value, that's assuming you would value these round-the-world trips. But I mean, a couple could do round-the-world twice. Right. Family of four. I mean, it'd be a little tricky to find availability for four, but it's not impossible. But you could do it once with a family of reach. That's not an amount of money I would ever consider spending on flights to go around the world. I wouldn't travel if it was that much.

Preston Pyshko Now, exactly. As we were talking about, this is what I love about points and miles, that you could do things that would be completely inconceivable to you in any other context. Just as you said, could I scrape together the money to do that? Yes, of course I could, but because you know, I'm, I have a decent career, but I would never do it. Like I would never say I'm going to spend 15, $16,000 just for the flying portion. Right. Right. I mean, for something in the last a few hours or whatever, you know, I mean, it's quite a few hours if you're flying around the world, but even still, you know, for a fleeting experience like that.

Yeah. I mean, there's no way that I would spend that much, but it's incredible that you have the possibility to live like that for a little while. Right. To experience that. Oh, absolutely. And don't forget all these things like there's, there's hybrid things too. Like, so you could use half of the 500,000 to fly two people around the world, the other half to transfer to, for example, Hilton or even Marriott to book your hotel stays. And so, you know, you could have like the vast majority of the expenses covered

with this one, with this one bonus, which is just insane. It really is. And, you know, in the post that I wrote about it, I used examples where I showed how you could cover both the flight and the hotel. And I used Marriott hotels, though Hilton hotels probably would have made a better example in hindsight. But either way, those aren't necessarily the best use of membership rewards points, but it's incredible to think that one bonus could fund basically your entire vacation. You're going to pay something in taxes. You're going to pay for food, but you're going to spend less on an incredible high-end luxury vacation around the world than what most people spend on a basic vacation, which is totally

fine, but amazing value you can get out of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. Is there anything else? Do we cover all the main highlights here? Well, so, I mean, there's lots of other things that you could do. I mean, for instance, I said this main, main highlights of the round the world. I mean, there's lots of other options. So for instance, ANA, again, if you want to fly in luxury round trip to Japan, you could fly first class round trip on ANA using Virgin Atlantic miles. And so Virgin Atlantic charges 60,000 miles each way from the East coast to the United States, or I guess it's 55,000 each way from the West coast for ANA first class to Japan. So you're talking 120 K round trip at the high end to fly first class in a flight that, I mean, I think they charge 10 or 15,000 for that.

So it's incredible that you could do that a few times. Again, you're talking four tickets like that. Right, right. And if you could find availability on ANA's new first class product, the suite or something, I forget what they call it, but, but that looks so awesome. Um, not, you know, it's not, it's not quite a, a room like I was describing with Singapore suites, but it would still be beyond, beyond amazing, you know? So that's absolutely an incredible value and amazing that you could potentially book four of those round trips with this welcome bonus. It really is. Again, things that are just totally out of reach for the average person,

not a type of a flight that I would ever in my life take and the thought that I could take it four times. Right. Right. Again, this must be like a $20,000 round trip, something in that range. So you're talking about something like $80,000 worth of first-class flying with a welcome bonus. Crazy stuff. Absolutely insane. Absolutely. And I just looked it up. And yeah, I mean, it's just amazing to think about that because, yeah, I mean, you're talking $20,000. That's what ANA charges round trip for that.

$20,000 and you can do it four times. It's insane. So, so that's another great use. So though, of course, that's not the only great use that we could should talk about. Still, we could talk about the fact that you could use ANA miles and fly around trip to Japan over and over again. I don't even think we had that in our list of things, but 75,000 points round trip in low season for business class from the United States to Japan. So you're talking, and in high season, it's 90,000. So let's go with the high season price or Star Alliance price, 90,000 round trip in business class. So at least five, at least five round trips. At least five round trips in

business, which still, I mean, amazing, incredible. And you may find availability. Sorry, what if I want to go to Europe? If you want to go to Europe, it gets even better. So then you're going to use Virgin Atlantic miles and with Virgin Atlantic, it'll cost you 50,000 points each way to fly Delta business class to Europe. So you're talking 50,000 each way. I don't know. What is that? How many? 10, 10, 10 each way, right? 10, 10, one ways to Europe in business class. Five round trips. That's if you could find Delta availability, which is not very good, but you know what? Air France and KLM have better availability and from central to East coast, uh, us, the pricing is similar. It's just a little over five, um, 50 K one way.

So, but it can get even better than that because of course there are other programs that charge even less a and a charges 44 000 each while 88 000 points round trips that's even a little bit less but even better than that iberia has some incredible pricing during off-peak season 34 000 each way from new york or boston from the East coast of the United States to Spain. So 34,000 each way. So you're talking 64,000. How many times can you fly to Europe, Greg? Yeah. And this 500,000 point bonus. I mean, you're, you're very close to getting three per hundred K, right? Right. At 34,000.

That's close to 15 round trips. So let's just call it 14 round trips. 14. 14 one-ways. Oh, sorry. One-ways, yes. 14 one-ways. So seven round trips. Seven round trips in business class between the US and Europe.

I mean, again, you're talking round trips. Those are like $3,000 flights, round trips. So seven of them, it's just, it's amazing to think that you could do that again and again. That's just not something that's very normal. So those are all, I think, pretty incredible. Now, of course, the bad news that I have to get to after all of that is that while we were having this conversation, a message popped up on my screen as we were recording this. No way. from our volunteer Facebook moderator telling me that the shop small bonus is now gone from all of the platinum cards. And sure enough, I checked as we were talking. So after we recorded

all that, I got to tell you, unfortunately, it looks like that's gone. The restaurants are still there, but the small business is gone. Wow. That's insane. I cannot believe that happened while we were recording. Yeah. All right. So now you're going to have to eat a lot out to get those 500,000. Yeah. A lot of, a lot of dining now to get the 500,000 where you have to eat a lot, supersize that please to get, to get to the full 25K spend, which is a big bummer, but is. What a huge bummer. Wow. Okay. Well. New crazy thing. New crazy thing. What crazy thing did Amex do? They killed the small business offer as we were talking about it for this show.

Right. Wow. Right. That is not nice, Amex, but. No. No, it's not. But for everyone who got in ahead of time or who spends a lot at dining, the show will still be useful. Or for anybody who has a lot of membership rewards points, of course, you've got a lot of membership or maybe you already have a lot because goodness knows that

there are lots of Amex cards with good bonuses for membership rewards points and good category bonuses. And they had those referral bonuses last year. I feel like Amex has been tossing out points like candy for the last year or two here. So I imagine there are a lot of you out there with half a million Amex points who didn't even get to take advantage of the small business offer. So I absolutely useful for all. Just unfortunate for everybody that was like, oh yeah, I want to buy a car now. So it wasn't a waste of time listening to all this. Oh boy. Maybe we should insert some kind of thing in the beginning. I don't know.

At the beginning. Yeah. All right. All right. So I think that wraps this up, right? Is that, I think that's good enough. Yeah. Totally demoralized by the latest news.

Right. So let's go right on to the post roast where Greg is not going to mention the fact that I published a post about how great that deal was the morning it died. That's right. I won't. No, my roast is about, it's about that same post, about the post where you wrote about how to use the same thing we've been talking about, how to use the points for a fantastic vacation. And this may sound nitpicky, but I didn't like where you, so you got an incredible deal on a cruise. And so in your post, you talked about how you could cash out enough points to cover the costs that you spent. But then when you compare it to like the retail price of everything, use the retail price of the cruise instead of the cash price that you, in fact, paid.

And I feel like that's cheating because the point was to show value you get from Amex points. And that was value you could get from any kind of points that can cash out because you just got a good deal. That's a separate deal. It has nothing to do with Amex. I'll take it. That's true. I was showing that I could cover this trip that I had

planned and booked, but you're absolutely right. I could have covered that with any old points, not necessarily Amex points. Okay, all right, I'll take that, that I should have used the price I paid instead of the retail price of the cruise. Yeah, it still adds up to huge value. To a lot, to a lot.

Right, so I'm waving the flag on that one. All right, so I'm going to roast Greg here by saying, Greg, I need some posts to roast. What's been going on here? I mean, haven't seen a Greg post. I know that it's not true. You did. You did post this week about the Lowe's Ventana candy, but you've been enjoying yourself, I hope, on vacation. I have. And now I'm back. So I'll be posting again tomorrow, which will be at least yesterday, if not, if not further back for people listening, since we record ahead of time, but no, my post will be back. And, uh, yeah, so I'm back from vacation, which I can't really say I'm super enthused about, but the worst part about it is,

is being back in Michigan right now. So it's winter time, you know? And so it's, you know, you know, about the cold. I do. I know you're not in Michigan, but you're in a cold place. So yeah, we were in Arizona and it was nice and warm every single day. So I'm going to miss that. Yeah, it looked gorgeous. I tried to stop looking at Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. Nicely done. Nicely done. So it's good to have you back. All right. So that's the post roast. We're going to move into the question of the week. So this week's question came from our Frequent Miler Insiders group. Steve asked a question.

His question was, does booking a car rental through Hopper negate the Sapphire preferred rental coverage? Trying to figure out what I'm missing. Hopper's got a much better price than other places. Steve wants to know, can he book through Hopper and still get his rental car coverage? Yeah, I don't know much about Hopper, but in general, it's fine if you book through a third party for rental cars, your insurance is still, whether it's through your credit card or some other means, that'll still cover you for your rental. So yeah. Yep. Absolutely. But I thought that was probably worth addressing because I bet he's not the only

person who's wondered, does it matter where you book? And no, it matters that you pay for the entire rental with the card. So whatever card you want to use that's got primary CDW coverage, and you do want to use one that has primary coverage if you have a card that has primary coverage rather than secondary, it doesn't matter where you've rented from or how you booked your rental. It just matters that you pay the entire cost of the rental

on the card that has the insurance and you decline whatever insurance the rental car company offers at the counter. Those are the two key things that you need to keep in mind for rental car insurance. There you go. There you go. All right, that brings us to the counter. Those are the two key things that you need to keep in mind for rental car insurance. There you go. There you go. All right. That brings us to the end. So my friends, thank you very much for being out there with us today. We enjoyed having you here with us. If you enjoyed today's discussion and you'd like to get our posts in your inbox each day,

you can go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram and all the social medias. You can join our frequent miler insiders, Facebook group, where you can ask questions just like Steve did. And lots of other people will help answer them. So thank you very much for being out there with us. And we will see you again next week.

And one more thing. If you have any feedback for us or questions for us and that you would like aired on our show, I can't. What was that? We can't promise we'll air everything, but we'll look at them at least. Email mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Mailbag at frequentmiler.com.

Got it. Wrote it down. All right, cool. Bye, everybody..