Frequent Miler on the Air - Hyatt: End of year elite planning | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep329 | 10-24-25

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

As it nears the end of the year, it's time to assess Hyatt elite progress. In today's Frequent Miler on the air podcast episode, we'll focus on how to bridge the gap to the next level of Hyatt status. But we'll also talk about United & JetBlue tying their knot tighter, and how Wyndham's crappy coupon book doesn't add up.Giant Mailbag(01:21) - "We just wanted to say how much we have enjoyed the 100K Vacay challenge..."Card News(04:42) - Hawaiian card's $100 annual companion discounts & 50% companion discounts now redeemable on Alaska flights. Learn more about this here.(07:53) - Citi launches new $350 American Airlines AAdvantage Globe credit card, which you can read more about here.(09:13) - United Debit Card Coming (to join SouthWest & Wyndham debit cards)(13:40) - American Express Business Gold® adds $150 Squarespace CreditBonvoyed(15:27) - Wyndham Rewards Insider (More about it here)Crazy Thing(17:22) - Wyndham's Bad MathAwards, Points, and More(21:21) - United & JetBlue: Now reciprocal earn & burn is live(34:18) - JetBlue Mosaic changes (Learn more about them here)(40:35) - Bilt Rewards updates(44:34) - Learn more about Bilt's doing away with Milestone Rewards, which you can read about here.(47:45) - Chase offering 25% transfer bonus to Southwest through Nov 6Main Event: Hyatt: End of year elite planning(50:23) - Why we care(53:32) - Elite levels and Milestones(1:09:00) - Shortcuts(1:13:50) - Learn more about World of Hyatt adding double elite nights to welcome offer here: https://frequentmiler.com/world-of-hyatt-credit-card-temporarily-adds-extra-elite-credit-to-offer/(1:16:33) - Stack with other promos. Ex: Earn 3x Hyatt points on 2+ night stays for 90 days after registration (targeted) (Learn more about this here: https://frequentmiler.com/earn-3x-hyatt-points-on-2-night-stays-targeted/)(1:20:29) - Nick's plans(1:24:09) - Greg's plansQuestion of the Week(1:34:44) - How do you evaluate whether positioning is worth it?Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, we'll talk about United and JetBlue, tying the knot a little bit tighter. We'll talk about how Wyndham's crappy coupon book doesn't add up. And we'll discuss how to bridge the gap to the next level of Hyatt status. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, Hyatt. of year elite planning is it's getting towards the end of the year. We're starting to look at our

elite progress so far. How many nights have we earned at Hyatt and are we going to reach the elite goals we have with them? Hyatt we've long described as our favorite loyalty program. And so we're going to talk about what you can do as it gets near the end of the year to reach your goals as well. Yeah, and I think that this is a program that matters a lot to us and probably to many readers. So we'll discuss which things might be worth going for because even if you're not going to make it all the way to the top tier, there are still some things you might want to consider in terms of getting yourself towards a level with Hyatt. We'll talk more about that. But remember, if you want to jump ahead to it or you want to come back to something later on, you can always find

the timestamps in the show notes, just expand the description box. And wherever you're watching or listening to this, please give it a like, a thumbs up, a star, leave us a review. you, leave your comments and your thoughts. We love to hear from you. So thank you for that. Let's drag out this week's giant mail bag. All right, pulling out the giant mail bag. Today's giant mail comes from Annette and Leo. They write, we just want to say how much we enjoyed the 100K vacay challenge. We've had so much fun following you guys. We're definitely FM groupies and have done the coolest things because of you guys. In February, we are headed to Japan and lay flats. It's layflat business class.

Thank you for telling me not to burn those Cathay Pacific miles on hotels. So, and she goes and said, we use Cathay to book Japan Airlines, and that was great advice. So on a previous episode, we read her question about using, she was thinking of using Cathay Miles to book hotels, and we said, don't do it. And I'm really glad that worked out well. they go on to say we have amazing hotels lined up and are super excited we tell people about you all the time anyway your vacays have given us great ideas thank you p s we loved shay and thought she was great we also noticed nick said we a lot and wondered if he was referring to the mouse in his pocket well i guess i have to start there yeah go ahead what were you going to what's the deal nick why

Why do you refer to yourself as we? I didn't even notice that happening, but this is not the only time I got that piece of feedback. So clearly I did refer to we more often than I realized. I have no idea. Maybe I meant we landed like our flight landed, like the people, we being everybody on a plane. You're with a plane full of people. A plane full of people. Yeah.

Or like I did the Cominito del Rey and that was like a tour group. So when I said we there, I was referring to the, I don't know, 20 people. in the tour group or whatever it was. So yeah, I guess. I literally didn't notice having used Wii once, but like I said, not the only person Annette to call me out for that. So that was, there was nobody else with me, traveling with me. You know what?

I think people were especially attuned to it because, you know, I started first with my trip where I kept introducing additional people that I brought along. And then Stephen brought along Shay on his. And so I think that when you refer to we, people jump to the conclusion that you had like a secret additional person that you hadn't revealed yet, you know. And so that's just my guess of that. It's not that, you know, it's probably something that we all do now and then, say we in situations like you just described because it makes sense. But it's probably not that often that the audience is reading into that. Right, right.

That's probably exactly what it was. I didn't even think about it that way, but that's absolutely a good, good explanation. Anyway, backing up to the more important stuff, Annette, I am really glad that you used your Cathay Pacific miles to fly or to book Flatbed Business Class to Japan. That's terrific. That's great. And I'm glad to hear that you're using what we talk about on the show to get awesome vacations out of. So that's great.

Congratulations to you. And well done on listening and taking the advice and then applying it because, I mean, that second part is as important as the first part, right? not only just listening, but then also applying it, and you've done that. So well done. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about card news. This week's card news. We have several items up. First up, the Hawaiian cards have gotten a little bit better or their benefits have gotten a little bit better, I guess we should say. So the Hawaiian cards, business and consumer cards

come with some different discounts. So there's a $100 annual companion discount that I think comes on, I can't remember which one now, whether it's business or personal. And a 50% companion discount on on the other one, whichever that is. And that's now redeemable on Alaska flights. In the past, you could only redeem that on Hawaiian flights and only on flights between the mainland of the U.S. and Hawaii. Now you can use it on all the Alaska flights, which should make them much more highly applicable to a much wider audience. Yeah, totally. We learned this from Travel with Grant, which is another blog on boarding area. And he also did a follow-up post where he actually compared prices like with these different companion vouchers, including comparing it to using the Alaska

credit cards companion voucher, the $99 companion voucher. And, you know, not surprisingly, the Alaska cards $99 one resulted in better pricing, except he pointed out that if you are, if you have very cheap flights, like Alaska flights, the $100 companion discount could be better or even Even the 50% one could be better because you're not paying that $99, you know, fixed piece of the puzzle. Yeah. Yeah. I was actually looking at some flights myself that were the 50% would work out to be a better deal than the Alaska $99 companion voucher, specifically because of the fact that they were relatively cheap flights. So initially, when I looked at it with a $99 companion voucher, I said, well, this isn't really going to save me much of anything at all.

So I wasn't even considering using the $99 companion voucher. Then when the 50% off came, I said, well, actually, now that might make enough of a difference to consider flying Alaska. So that's really good to know. Thank you to Grant for highlighting that. And a reader pointed out another perk I'd never even heard of. Apparently, the Hawaiian Airlines card gives Hawaiian Airlines like high-level elite members up to $10 per flight. credit against in-flight purchases up to a maximum of, I think it was $100 per year. And that's apparently changed to be you can have any level of Alaska status and get that

same perk. And so that's pretty cool, but I'm having trouble finding any kind of landing page for Hawaiian that shows that. I did find a terms and conditions that listed that, but I can't find like sort of the higher level like here's what you get benefit wise mentioning this at all so i i guess i've been looking in the wrong places or they don't do a good job of listing out all the perks of these cards yeah i'm not familiar with that one myself but i but i should earn alaska silver status this year so maybe i'll find out sometime next year and put it into practice all right that's not the only card news out this week though perhaps even bigger news not necessarily better, but bigger. City launched a new $350 American Airlines Globe credit card. So a new

kind of mid-tier American Airlines credit card. And we talked about it on this week's coffee break. Yeah. Yeah. So if you want to hear all about it, check out our coffee break titled AAs Disappointing $350 Globe Cards. You get a hint right from the title what we thought about it. But what you probably don't want to do is you don't want to sleep on the fact that there's a 90,000 mile welcome bonus for this card. So if you can't, for example, qualify for the 80,000 point offer that I think is available now on the cheaper card, you might want to consider the 90,000 point offer instead. And when Greg says, if you can't qualify for the 80,000 point offer, I think what he means in between the lines there is because you've had the 80,000 point offer within the last

couple of years because you have to space those out city only allows you to get the welcome offer once every what is it 48 months now on an american airlines card so so this is a different card so this gives you an opportunity for another 90,000 miles right and you could start another 48 month clock with this one and then bounce back and forth over time there you go all right but united wanted to get into this week's news for for card news anyway and they didn't want to actually add any benefits to the credit card instead rather they're launching a debit card so a united debit card is coming which will join the southwest debit card and the windham debit card spirit airlines was also supposed to be launching a debit card this fall i haven't heard any more news about that but uh who

knows whether that's still going to happen but at any rate we see a few of these rewards debit cards coming now and so the this was i think this was brought up by somebody called sophy insider on Miles Talk, is that right? On X. And Miles Talk is where we learned about it. Yeah, so it's a screenshot of what's coming, so they leaked some information. And, you know, at a high level, it's not very exciting. It's very similar to what we've seen with the other debit cards.

You get one mile per $2. There's a 2,500 bonus each year, as long as you spend at least $10,000 on the card. One thing that really interests me, and there's no information about this, though, to really evaluate this part, is there was a bullet point that says, earn up to 70,000 miles each year on your account balance. So that suggests that maybe it's working sort of like a savings account where you're earning interest, but instead of earning interest, you're earning miles. At least that's what I'm thinking is happening there, but not exactly clear. clear. That would be nice because all these cards have a minimum balance that you have to keep in order to waive the monthly fee. In this case, the monthly fee is $4 a month. And so it would be

nice if that balance earned some kind of interest, whether it's miles or actual cash. In this case, it would be miles. Yeah. And you might ask, why do we care about a debit card? Well, I mean, there are some types of purchases where you may actually have to use a debit card, number one. number two, if you were doing something like paying taxes and you didn't want to pay the fee for a credit card, I assume you'd be able to probably use this as a debit card. And I think the fee on debit cards is only $2.50 if I remember correctly. So you're talking about earning $5,000 miles for every $10,000 in taxes that you're paying on a $2.50 fee. And if you just did the $10K, you'd earn $7,500 total miles with the $2,500 bonus miles with the $10K annual spend. So I mean, that might be

worth it for $2.50 for some folks. So it's worth keeping that in mind. One thing I don't know, did we talk about how these entities are now offering? Because I thought this was fascinating. You had pointed out an article a while back from View from the Wing explaining how we're all of a sudden seeing these rewards debit cards. I mean, it's been years here that we haven't seen any substantial rewards debit cards. And so why not? How is this happening? Yeah, what it basically is, is that back when a law was enacted that limited the earnings banks could get from debit card transactions, the law did not apply to smaller banks. And so what's happening is these airlines and hotel chains are going to smaller banks. In this case, it's Sunrise Bank, because now the debit card can earn

transaction fees and so they can, you know, so they earn from every transaction and so therefore they can provide rewards for every transaction as well. Yeah, I think that's fascinating. It's interesting that that's that's the way that they've found around it. Right. One thing to note before you think about like, you know, spending a million dollars on your taxes with a debit card is usually these debit cards have limits to how big of a transaction you can make at once. And so So, you know, wouldn't surprise me if you couldn't do more than five or 10,000 at a time. So just something keep in mind. We don't have all the details yet.

If even that much, that's a great point. Yeah, some of my debit cards have even lower amounts than that, depending on the bank. Smaller, like my small local bank is something, I don't know, like $1,000 a day or something really small on their debit card. And so since this is a smaller bank, it wouldn't shock me if they do have a lower maximum. That's a really good point. Okay. And then finally, under Card News, American Express Business Gold Card has now, the American Express Business Gold Card, rather, has now added a $150 square space credit. And so now that's a new benefit on the card.

If you spend money with Squarespace, you can get $150 back. So does this mean if I go to like a little restaurant that uses a square reader that I'm going to get my money back if I spend $150 on dinner, Craig? No. That would be really nice, but no. square space is not the square reader it is a it's a service that helps businesses set up websites basically for selling stuff so you can sell stuff through the website that they set up for you automatically and so yeah if you're if you're using it already or if you're interested in having a website to sell your stuff then and you have one of these you have a Amics gold card, then it might all work out for you. I don't know. Business gold. Business gold, be clear. Business gold. Oh, thank you. Yes. Very important. Regular gold will not cut it. I check this morning whether there were any good portal rates, and I couldn't find any portal

rates at all. Sometimes these business services have incredible portal deals, but something to watch out for. And the reason of bringing it up is because in some cases, it can actually, if the portal rate is good enough. It can pay to like set up a website, you know, using whatever the smallest plan that the company has and then get your $150 back plus get whatever the portal offers. But as I said, in this case, I'm not seeing anything. All right, but something to keep our eyes on. Very good. All right. Well, that was very good. But what is very bad is our Bonvoid section, or at least kind of, not very bad. But we'll talk about being Bonvoid. In other words, We'll talk about the ways things went wrong this week or kind of the way Wyndham went weird, I guess.

It's really more so an accurate way of saying it. Wyndham has launched Windham Rewards Insider, a coupon book you can buy for $95. Exactly. And it's not just any coupon book. It's a really crappy coupon book. So if you want to spend $95 per year on a really crappy coupon book, then you'll get benefits like a minimum 10% discount off the standard rate, which, as Stephen showed, will result in zero percent savings almost all the time.

You can get a 50 percent bonus on paid stays, but not really at all. We'll talk about that more in our crazy thing segment. You will get Wyndham Gold status, so that's something. I'm not going to list everything. Basically, if you thought what I read so far is crappy, the rest is crappy too. So it doesn't get better than that. Yeah. And the thing is a lot of these things are things that like like savings at theme parks. I mean, AAA promises that if you're a T-Mobile customer, T-Mobile like their app promises like everybody promises that. And you don't necessarily, well, I mean, you do pay for those memberships, but there are probably some benefits that you care about with those. And there probably aren't any benefits that you care about with this one. So yeah, $95. I mean, for a limited time, you get $7,500 bonus points and two additional. months for free. That's like paying more than a penny per point, though, and they sell their points for

less than a penny a point frequently enough. So even for the bonus, it's not worth buying this. It's kind of crazy. No. Kind of crazy, but not the only bit of crazy here. So let's talk about what crazy thing did Wyndham do this week? Yeah. I mean, this is still tying right into that same crappy coupon book.

So Windham, we've made fun of Windham and the past. about their bad math. Now, normally, that's in the form of where they have a portal promotion, where they advertise something like five times the rewards. And when we look at the actual rewards rates, we can't find any where it's five times what you would get without the promo. And whatever it says, often doesn't match what you actually get. Like, whatever, when you shop through the portal,

it's not always bad. Sometimes it works out in your face. But it's like never exactly the rewards amount that they say. And when I say not exactly, I mean, like if it says seven, it's not like you're getting 7.1. You're getting like 7.962 or like 8.5. And it's like, wait, but it said seven. It doesn't ever make any sense.

So, yeah, Wyndham is terrible. Yeah. Yeah. So now we get to this Wyndham Rewards Insider subscription, crappy coupon book, where it advertises that you will earn 50% more accelerated earning points on all qualifying stays. And so since Wyndham normally gives you 10 points per dollar, we assume that meant you'd earn five bonus points per dollar in addition to whatever elite earnings you get, right?

I mean, surely for $95 a year, you would think that that would seem reasonable, right? It would be reasonable. Reader pointed out that's not the right reading of this at all. Well, if you dig into the terms and conditions, you see what it really means is it's a 50% bonus on top of the bonus you get from your elite status. So Stephen, like, broke this down. If you have gold status, which is what you get with the crappy coupon book, then that means you will earn an additional half point per dollar. Half a wind of point per dollar. Yeah. Yeah. And you have to have diamond status for it to add up to a full additional one point per dollar. So it's just, it's so little. The incremental earn there is so little

that it's just not even worth considering as like, you know, it's not going to make any difference to your your total earnings for the year unless you have, unless you spend so much at Wyndham properties that, you know, well, I don't know. Why are you spending that much on Wyndham properties? But, well, you know, but I think it's worth pointing out how much is so much. So Stephen did the math and figured out that for a gold member who gets this extra half a point per dollar spent, you would have to spend $27,144 over the course of a year to earn the points necessary to essentially earn $95 worth of Wyndham points to justify paying the fee. So if you're spending more than $27,144 a year at Wyndham, maybe this coupon book is worth it for you.

As long as none of those stays are less than $100 because Stephen also points out that Wyndham tops up low earning stays to a thousand points. So you're not going to benefit at all for the cheaper, those really cheap stays from this. You're also not going to get to $27,000 too quickly, it stays that are less than $100 a night. So you'd be in trouble anyway, even if they're going to be pretty darn tough. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So Wyndham is bad at math and don't fall for it. The $95 rewards insider thing is not a thing to consider. So there you have it. Frequent Myler is a definite verdict on that one. Let's talk about awards points and more. Awards points and more. We've got some good or interesting news out this week from United and JetBlue because they have officially launched, finally, their Blue Sky venture where you have reciprocal earn and burn between the two airlines. So you can redeem your JetBlue points to fly on United or redeem your United Miles to fly in JetBlue or also earn across airlines. So you could pay for a United Flight and earn JetBlue tiles if you want or pay for a JetBlue flight and earn United Miles. That's pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah. You know, we spent a little time looking at this. This just came out this morning as we're recording, so we haven't had a lot of time to look through it. We're not seeing amazing value from this. Like we're hoping, often when JetBlue gets a new partner, they temporarily have ridiculously cheap award prices for flying that partner. We're not seeing that. So that's too bad. United's, you know, prices for flying JetBlue aren't that exciting either, at least, again, as we've seen so far. What I'm excited about, though, is the ability to book a single award that would include, for example, book a single United Award that would include JetBlue, maybe taking me to JFK, and then a Star Alliance flight onward that could all be booked now with United Miles, whereas today I can't. get to JFK with United Miles from like Detroit, for example, because United flies everyone to Newark. And so, you know, so that's going to be, that's going to be really nice. And then, you know, conversely, you'll be able to use your JetBlue miles to book, you know, for example, United to get you from wherever you live to, let's say, Boston and then JetBlue onward to Europe, for example.

So that'll be good because not only can it save points to have everything in one reservation, but almost more importantly, by having an all-in-one booking, you should be able to, ideally, check your bags all the way through if you want to. You should be at least somewhat protected if things go wrong. One flight is delayed, and then you have the onward flight to catch. So all of that is good news, if not, like, you know, spectacularly exciting. Except for people who live in New York who have been used to having much better access to JFK Star Alliance availability because people like Greg and everybody else can't use their United Miles to get to JFK because United doesn't fly to JFK. So that has probably, I think, at least in my experience, resulted in quite a bit of Star Alliance Award availability to and from Europe, especially.

I think because it's such a pain for people elsewhere to get to JFK and connect to that, and I fear that that's going to disappear quickly now that you can easily get yourself to JFK on JetBlue from so many cities. So maybe a bummer for those of us based close enough to JFK for that to be like sort of like a home airport or a home airport. I think that could end up being bad for us. But good for most people listening, I imagine. So congratulations. Yeah. So some things are not here yet, but are coming. So they said that first quarter of 26 will have revenue booking. So that means you'll be able to like, you know, pay for your United flights through the JetBlue's website. In early 2026, I guess since they're not saying

first quarter, it probably means by the end of the second quarter or they don't actually know. Anyway, early 2026 will have reciprocal perks and benefits, priority boarding, preferred, an extra leg room, that kind of thing. And also in early 2026, this is kind of a weird one. I was really surprised to read this, that United's travel extras, mileage plus travel, will transition to Paisley, which is JetBlue's wholly owned website for like booking like vacation packages and stuff like that. So what do you make of that, Nick? Isn't that kind of just so surprising, like, wow? Yeah, I would guess that this must have heavily played into the calculus for the partnership because, and I say that because we've talked several times recently about how everybody wants you to use their portal for booking hotels and vacation packages, right?

because clearly there's a good amount of commission to be made selling hotel rooms. AAA Hotels wants to sell you hotels. City wants to bonus booking through city travel. Every other credit card wants a bonus booking through their portal so that you have a reason to book through them. So I'm surprised that United would give up their own form of that unless they were doing that because they had the opportunity to make more money with JetBlue. And so JetBlue must have offered them a pretty sweet deal here in terms of managing it, I would think anyway and or this makes me more inclined to think that we may see a merger down the

road. That's what I was going to say. I don't see getting that tightly in bed with a with a partner unless you're pretty confident that a merger, i.e. United's buying JetBlue, unless you think that's coming. So I think this definitely adds support to that. Sure does. It sure does. Very interesting. Also, what I found interesting is, one of the benefits, supposedly, of this partnership was that JetBlue is going to give United a number of their slots at JFK. So United will be able to fly to and from JFK, which they can't do today. But the press release with all this says that that's going to happen as early as 2027. So as early as means it might not even happen in 2027.

Right, right. Which sounds a lot to me like you're planning some buffer time for the merger to get approved, right? Yeah, at which point I'm not even sure that it's going to make any difference. But anyway, so that's kind of interesting to me, too, that don't hold your breath if you've been waiting for United to fly right into JFK itself. Well, that's true. That's true. But, I mean, like you said, it does seem to indicate that they intend to be in a pretty

close partnership for a long time, which could very well be United buying JetBlue. So this is, I think, hopefully, good news for those of us that have been doing the JetBlue 25 for 25 thing. They're going to have Mosaic 1 status, provided that United continues to honor that, at least in the short term, having JetBlue status will give you benefits on United. And of course, the opposite is true, too. If you have United status, you'll get benefits on JetBlue. That's not coming like Greg said until early 2026.

But I wanted to also point out the fact that JetBlue still offers status matches to Mosaic. You can still match to Mosaic. Over the summer, they ran a promotion where you could match to the top tier of Mosaic. That was temporary and that's over. So they only match to Mosaic 1 and Mosaic 2. But they do match most domestic airlines elite statuses. So even Spirit Gold or Frontier or certainly, you know, if you've got status with one of the other major U.S. airlines, you can match that over to Mosaic. and you only need to earn 10 tiles to keep Mosaic 1, which requires $1,000 worth of JetBlue

Spend or 10K on their credit card, which has an elevated offer right now anyway as we record this. Or then you can bump that up. If you match to Mosaic 2, you've got to earn 20 tiles. And then you can even bump up all the way to Mosaic 3 by earning 30 tiles, I think it is within those three months, which is a good deal compared to actually earning. Mosaic 3, which would require 150 tiles ordinarily. So I mean, I think that's a pretty interesting opportunity along with that. My wife actually matched to JetBlue Mosaic through the current match to Mosaic using her American Airlines status. And her American airline status was courtesy of a

fast track from Hyatt because Hyatt offered members the Fast Track with AA a while back or they have been, I think, on an ongoing basis. So you should check in your Hyatt app. I just noticed I had this in my Hyatt app also, to fast track to AA status. So she instantly got AA gold status. And then she did do some spending on her credit card to keep it for an additional three months. But her status was technically temporary with AA. And I just screenshoted her current activity,

which didn't show the expiration date on her AA gold status, but did show everything that JetBlue asked for, which was current status, first and last name, and progress towards status this year, which included the spend she'd done on her credit card so far. and I wasn't sure whether they would approve that since she's not even quite halfway to re-qualifying for gold, but sure enough, they did. So, um, so there you have it. If you've got Hyatt status and you can do the AA fast track, you might be able to match that to JetBlue. And that might

be worth it because if you can easily earn those 10 tiles and keep mosaic through the end of next year, it sounds like those benefits will apply on United sometime in early 2026. Yeah, um, that's, you know what, that's really good news for me. Um, in a very roundabout way. So we'll talk more about this on a future episode, but I'm not planning on staying my way with Marriott to 75-night status anymore. And one of the things that 75-night status has given me is United Silver status. But I don't fly United economy often enough that it makes that big of a difference,

but it's nice when I do. And so if I could, you know, status match my way to JetBlue status and or spend 10K on the credit card a year, you know, to get some basic perks with United, hey, that's a win. So something to consider. It would be 10K now on the card to keep status for a year. But ordinarily, Mosaic 1 requires 50 tiles. So it'd be 50,000 spend on your ring. But for the match purposes, you need to.

in 10 tiles in three months. All right. So one other thing about that match, though, it's kind of interesting. And it probably won't work out as good as this is going to sound, but this is my wishful thinking, perhaps. So the way the match to Mosaic program works is they give you the temporary status for three months. And by the way, some people might wonder why I cared about that since I'm doing JetBlue 25 for 25. And the answer is I had temporary Mosaic 1 status from the Duncan flight, and that ran out. And we have a few more JetBlue flights to do. So I wanted us to have status for those last five jet blue destinations. So that's why my wife matched if you were wondering about that. But the terms of the match give you temporary status for three months. And then if you're in the

10 tiles, then you keep Mosaic 1. If you match to Mosaic 1, that is. You're in the 10 tiles. You keep mosaic 1 for the rest of the calendar year and all of the following year. And so that should probably mean that if you match now, that you would keep status through the end of next year. But what I've wonder it is if you don't meet the spend until January, which is still within three months if you're matching now, then would your status actually end up lasting through the end of the following calendar year through the end of 2027? Probably not, but it makes me curious. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe. It might, you know, some status matches work that way if you're allowed to. Sometimes they're careful about like cutting them off. Like I know,

Marriott, you started doing that. Like, people would time those, you know, matching, doing the status challenge so that the status would last two full years. And then they started like only offering the status challenge during certain times a year. So you can do that. So I don't know in this case, but that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

And I don't know whether they're going to pull the JetBlue status match at some point or not. If it continued into January, I don't know when United's elite ear ends. but I think most of them probably aren't until the end of January. So if you did this match in January, then if it still says for the rest of the current year and all of the next year, your three-month window starts in January, I would assume you would end up with JetBlue status to the end of 2027. But I don't know whether it'll still be around in January, whether you want to take that chance. Who knows? Yeah, yeah.

All right. Moving forward, JetBlue, speaking of Mosaic, has announced a number of Mosaic changes, which might make you more or less. interested in earning JetBlue mosaic status. So there's a few things that are pretty interesting here. First of all, they've extended the elite year. I was just talking about when the elite year ends. And with JetBlue, historically, you would earn status between January and December and then have it for the following calendar year from January, well, for the rest of the year in which you earn it and all of the following calendar year through December 31st. Then your status would drop again, potentially on January 1st to the following year. They've extended that now. So your elite status

ends at the end of January instead of at the end of the calendar year. And the reason for that is if you earn like the last tile you need for elite status on December 31st, historically your status would drop in January until that transaction gets processed and added to your account and then it would go back up. So they'd have people that were requalifying that had requalified towards the end of December who would lose benefits for the first few weeks of January. And that's annoying. So they've fixed that by ending the elite year at the end of the end.

to January. So that's one small thing. And that applies now. If you've got 2025 status, it will be, it will expire January 31st of 2026 instead of on December 31st of 2025. The other interesting thing I think coming is that family tiles are coming on February 1st, 2026. This is kind of neat. So if you've got kids that are under 12 years old, the tiles that they would earn can count towards the parents elite status. And that's interesting. if you travel with a family often, if you travel a lot, I mean, it's definitely a bummer that this wasn't around during Jeplu's 25 for 25, because if you're a parent, you've been paying for your kids travel, you know, that the tiles they're earning are in their account and not in yours

doesn't help you towards earning elite status, whereas this will make it possible for your kids travel to help you earn elite status. The spend that you're doing on their travel will count towards elite status for you. So I think that's a big enhancement that nobody else is offering to my knowledge. There are some of the programs that allow mileage pooling, but nobody I don't think that allows, like, status earn pooling, right? Right. Yeah, not that I can think of it, but I think this is brilliant.

And I do hope other programs copy this. I was going to say airlines, but why not hotels too? Well, I guess because kids aren't usually booking hotels on their own. But I don't know why they cut it off at 12. Yeah, I don't either. I don't either. But that's, you know, that's an interesting question because some of these programs don't allow you to sign up a kid under 13 online. I don't know what the, I don't know what the magic of 13 is. There must be some legal something or other there. But also, most programs that offer a discount for kids offer it up to age 12. So again, there must be some reason for that. I don't know what it is. But at any rate, you'll be able to earn tiles for your young kids while they're young. So that's. kind of cool. There's also going to be some increased earnings for Mosaic 3 and 4. It's not a huge difference, just a little bit more. Mosaic 4s are going to get lounge access, which is something we've known for a while, but still no lounge is open yet. So not all that special yet. There are changes

coming to perks you pick, and it sounds like bad news because they didn't tell us anything about it other than the fact that it's going to change. And so any perks that you pick in 2026 will expire on January 31st of 2027 and they didn't tell us any more than that. So that's kind of odd, I think, that they didn't explain that more because perks you pick include things like early boarding or like a waived pet fee. So if you picked those in December, you'd only get them for like a month based on what my rate of the press release, which seems weird to me. So I don't know what's going on there. I would say if you earn perks you pick and you have the ability to wait to pick them, maybe it's worth waiting to see what changes happen there. And then finally, there are a couple of

negative changes coming. So Mosaic 1 members currently get two free check bags. You're only going to get one starting on February 1st of 2025. I assume that's still going to extend to everybody on your reservation. So probably not a problem for a lot of people. But if you travel solo and you tend to check two bags, that's certainly a bummer. You'll only get one moving forward. The other big change is with even more seating. So as things stand right now, if you have Mosaic status, if you have Mosaic 2, 3, or 4,

then at the time of booking, you can pick even more seating for you and up to eight travel companions on the same reservation. If you have Mosaic 1, you can't pick the even more space seats until check-in, but again, you can pick them for you

and up to eight companions on the same reservation. Starting on February 1st of 2025, though, that's going to change where Mosaic 2, 3, and 4 members are, rather, I take that back. Mosaic three and four members will be able to extend that benefit, the even more ceding to up to four companions on the same reservation, but Mosaic one and two

are only going to get that for up to two companions on the same reservation. So if you travel with a family and your Mosaic one or two, depending on how many people there are in your family, that could certainly be a bummer. And note that that and the check baggage changes apply both to new and existing bookings. So even if you already booked months ago, still these changes are going to apply to your bookings. Yeah, yeah. And unfortunately, if you book with all four of you, you can't just move like three of you to preferred seating because they're not going to let you divide people up like that unless you book them separately. So can't leave your kids in the back of the plane while you move up front. You can't leave your kids. I wonder maybe you could leave an adult. I'm not sure if you, I don't know. I'm betting you'd have to book separately to do that. Maybe. Maybe. I mean, you pick everybody's seat individually is the only reason why I think that maybe that's.

It's not true because you pick everybody's seat anyway. I mean, you could leave someone wherever you want when you check in. We'll see. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty confident. That might be. It might be. I mean, I didn't have to pick even more seats for all four people on my reservation when I checked in before.

So I'm not sure why I would have to in the future. But we'll see whether it's free or not. I guess that's really the question. So you might be right. You've had more experience with that. All right. Let's talk about built rewards updates. Built is out with a whole bunch of updates.

Yeah. So starting in 2026. We're going to be able to, well, built is going to be partnering with a mortgage lender. UWM, which is apparently one of the biggest, if not the biggest mortgage lender. So there will be details coming. We don't have them all yet, but there will be way to earn built rewards when paying your mortgage. Before I go on to other things, let me just mention this is a little bit disappointing because we sort of, we had the, you know, impression that they were going to open this up to all

mortgage lenders, just like they had opened it to all landlords when you're paying rent. But that doesn't seem to be the case. And, you know, so, so anyway, at least it is coming and at least it is to a huge, huge lender. But that's not all happening with Bilt. There's just several, a bunch of little things going on. So built has introduced home delivery where they've partnered with GoPuff. So you can earn built points when getting stuff delivered from GoPuff. And apparently it's well integrated that apparently they'll show up with a built like branded bagging or packaging or something.

So that's kind of fun, I guess. You could also redeem your points for that. but I think that's going to be really bad value, so I don't recommend that. They also have started to roll out Built Neighborhood Parking with a company called Metropolis, and so Built members will earn one point per dollar at Metropolis parking locations, and they'll be able to search for and eventually reserve parking right within the Built app. And so that should be pretty cool. The vision here is that the parking garage will automatically recognize your vehicle and charge you through the built app, like, all very seamlessly.

So you should be able to just, like, drive right in and leave without having to deal with, you know, the whole payment thing. So it's kind of a fun vision. I don't know how long it'll take to get that. You know, I was in Orlando recently, and they had a bunch of garages. I don't know if it was Metropolis or what the company was. But when you drove in, you just scanned a QR code on the wall and entered your plate number. And then it would automatically recognize when you enter and leave and charge you accordingly. So you didn't have to do that multiple times.

You could just do that once. And then the garage cameras picked up your plate when you came in and out. And so it's automatic. And with a rental car, you could mark that you were in a rental car. And then it wouldn't continue to charge you for somebody else parking in the future, essentially. So I think maybe this will work cool. If it works like that, I think maybe this could be cool. my one concern about this, and I brought this up, I haven't heard back from Bill yet about this, but I wondered if this is automatic like I just described, like it was, again, probably a totally different company in Orlando.

My one worry is what happens when I stay at a Hyatt hotel in New York City that gives me free parking on an awards day as a globalist member, but actually parks in a contracted garage because that does happen in some place. Like if you go to the end as Fifth Ave, they actually park your car in an icon garage. that's like blocks away. And they don't technically have to give you free parking when that's the case, but there are a number of places in New York that do as a globalist on an awards day. So I wonder, though, when the valet drives my car into that lot, if it recognizes it, oh, it charges my built account, am I going to get hit with a fee for parking when I shouldn't be getting hit with a fee?

Hopefully not. Hopefully it's all, that's all thought of and worked out. We'll see that. To be determined. All right. The next piece of news about built rewards is that they are doing away with their milestone rewards. And if you don't remember built milestone rewards,

you can be forgiven because they were snooze-worthy at best. They were things like, like, here's your reward. You get to earn, you know, an extra point per dollar at grocery stores on up to, you know, 12 points or something. It was very low, low maximums for those kind of things. So they're doing away with all that and replacing it with ways to earn something called built cash instead. And built cash will be, so instead of getting a milestone where you'll get a certain amount of built cash. And what built cash will be is it'll be like money that you can use to spend for,

You know, merchants that are part of Bilt's ecosystem. So, you know, Build has this whole, like, neighborhood rewards thing where they, where you get rewards at a lot of neighborhood restaurants, gyms, you have, like, Walmart, I mean, no, Walgreens and, and things like that. And so for some or all of these, that's a little unclear to me, you'll be able to use your built cash to pay for stuff at regular. cash rates for those things. Yep. Yep. So, I mean, 25,000 points to earn 50 bucks. That's a lot of points. It's probably not going to drive a decision to earn built points. But it's a nice little added extra if you're already earning those points. I mean, if you're paying for your rent every month, might as well take the extra 50 bucks you'll earn now and then with those points. And nice you should be able to use it at a variety of different merchants. I think that's the interesting thing

here. I mean, I think what built is doing behind the scenes. Personally, I think is fascinating. It's really interesting because they're integrating all of these various different merchants that were separate things and now putting it all under the built umbrella where you could go to a built dining restaurant and use your built cash to pay the bill there or you could order from GoPuff and use your built cash to pay for that and it all seems seamless under the covers so to speak or like when you're when you're in the app anyway it's all going to seem pretty seamless and that to me is really interesting but $50 for every 25,000 points is not really interesting So we'll see.

So that's all they've revealed so far about how you're going to earn built cash. But I assume that there's going to be more opportunities to earn built cash than just that. But we'll see. We'll see. Yeah. And they also made it very clear to us that this is very much like a first release that they're seeing it as like something that's going to evolve over time. And so who knows where this will go long term. Yeah.

Yeah. I could imagine this coming in lots of different forms and different places. could, I could see it being something that gets added, you know, landlords, perhaps adding it as incentives or various businesses or built themselves. So there's plenty of, plenty of ways they can use that. So hopefully that'll be interesting. All right. So that is the built news, all the built news that's fit to print. Finally, we're still under awards points and more here. Chase is offering a 25% transfer bonus to Southwest through November 6th. So this is a really short term transfer bonus. You got to hop on it if you want it. What do you think? Is it worth transferring your Chase points to

Southwest for a 25% bonus? I find this interesting. I don't think we've ever seen a transfer bonus to Southwest before, as far as I can remember. But, you know, Chase waited until Southwest thoroughly devalued their points before doing that. But, you know, as we've seen on, so Southwest has moved to a model where points aren't worth a fixed amount anymore towards your flights. Now the value depends on really how popular the flight is. So for less popular flights, you're going to see better value. And in some cases, it's better than we used to get with Southwest Point.

So if you're looking to book one of those flights where the points are really valuable, then the ability to transfer from Chase and get even more than one-to-one, it definitely could be. well worth it. But is it exciting? I'd say no. It's it's more of a transactional like if you're in that situation, then go for it. If you're just thinking, gee, I could use more Southwest points. Stop thinking that. Probably. Probably. Although I will say if you don't have any Southwest points now, it can be useful to have some to book backup flights. So like if you just need to have some on hand so that you can book a backup flight when you need one, you know, I think it's worth having some Southwest points on hand. So getting 25% bonus here is better than not for that purpose. And, and, you know,

the other thing that you said, it was funny was that, you know, Chase waited until Southwest went dynamic to offer this. But of course, I think anyway, the transfer bonuses are probably dictated on the airline end. So this is probably more, even though Chase offers that I would assume that it's the airline that actually funds the bonus, so to speak, and not the bank. The airline just wants to sell more miles to the bank and offers a better deal is my my assumption in terms of how transfer bonuses work. And so it doesn't surprise me very much, even though it's surprising because we haven't seen it before. We've obviously seen Southwest move towards a model where they're just trying to maximize revenue as much as possible. And so I don't find it hard to believe that

this Elliott management company is salivating at the thought of selling more miles to the bank. So really good point. That's definitely what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's get into this week's main event. Main event time. End of year elite planning with Hyatt. It's getting to that time to check how many nights you've earned if you care, if you care at all about World of Hyatt Elite status, which if you don't, that's totally acceptable and probably reasonable and smart. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you can just fast forward to the question of the week if you want. You can do that. Or you can keep listening to see why the heck we care because we do. Nick, why? Why? Why do we care? I mean, Hyatt Elite benefits are the best you're generally going to get from a hotel program. Now, does that mean every Hyatt is wonderful and every Hyatt has the same terrific benefits? Not necessarily, but overall, global status is the best executed. So, I mean, you get potentially the ability to upgrade to a suite. There's guest of honor awards that you can give to other people. Sweet upgrade awards you can use to confirm a suite at the time of booking. You can gift,

rewards. I mean, it's a pretty terrific set of benefit. It really is. You know, we don't see this level of super valuable benefits and and the ability to gift to others, which is a surprisingly powerful ability. We don't see that in any other program. And we didn't even mention that the points are super valuable too. And so that all sort of goes together because on the way to earning elite status, you're almost always earning points, and when you're earning points, you hope that they're valuable and they are. So it all works together really well. And once you get used to those elite perks, it's hard to, it's hard to think about giving

them up. So we keep going with them. Now, if you want to have an argument with us about like, hey, you would do so much better just forgetting about that and make sure to, you know. book, if you really care about a suite, just look for the, you know, most economical suite you can purchase up front and don't worry about whether it's a height or not. And, you know, if you care that much about breakfast, then maybe you should be going out to breakfast to a highly rated restaurant or to a local place to get local treats or whatever. You know, those are all good arguments. I can't, I can't, we could argue why we ourselves.

you know, make that decision. But we can't make that decision for you. And so if you've landed on on that side of be your own elite kind of thing, then great. I mean, I think that makes a ton of sense. But I know I am, and I think Nick is stuck on this elite treadmill. Yeah, well, I mean, because I think we enjoy the benefits, right? And we'll talk about the globalist benefits more in a minute here, but they become valuable to me. And like Greg said, that doesn't mean they need to be valuable to you, but there are definitely things that I think we have come to value. So let's talk about the different elite status levels and what you get at each of those. And we'll talk about all the other parts and pieces too. But let's start with elite status levels. Because the one thing

about Hyatt is that most of the benefit exists at the top level, whereas most other chains have sort of a great mid-tier level, Hyatt doesn't. The best tier is definitely the top tier, and there's not really another tier that compares well. But that's not to say there are zero benefits. So let's talk about them. Discover a status, which you can get just by having the World of Hyatt credit card or by spending 10 nights at Hyatt hotels or earning 10 elite nights, I should say. You get 2 p.m. late checkout. And that's not guaranteed at resorts, but 2 p.m. late checkout can certainly be worthwhile if I didn't have globalist status. I would be pretty happy to have a guaranteed 2 p.m. checkout at most high at hotels.

You know, this is a benefit that's in the program terms. And so if you get pushed back from a hotel, you should push back with them, too, as long as it's not a resort. I generally don't have any difficulty getting this honored. And there's plenty of times where that extra time to come back to the hotel before heading to the airport is really valuable. So that's nice. Yeah. And compared to Hilton or IHG, where there, their sort of late checkout is maybe.

I mean, they don't guarantee anything. And in my experience, I often don't get a late checkout for being like even top-tier elite elite with Hilton, for example. So having a guaranteed 2 p.m. late checkout is great. All right, Explorist, 30 nights? Yeah, so 30 elite nights will get you the 2 p.m. late checkout, plus room upgrades. but they exclude suites and club lounge access, so slightly better upgrades theoretically than discover a status. And anecdotally, I've heard readers say that the upgrades unsurprisingly tend to

be better overseas outside of the United States than within the United States. And I say unsurprisingly, because that's the case with a lot of American chains, you'll generally get better elite treatment anywhere other than the United States, probably because within the U.S., you're competing with so many other people that have status. So anyway, maybe a room upgrade, which might look like a view, like an ocean view or something like that, if you're lucky. And also the other key benefit of explorer status, I think, is you can redeem your points for the various American Airlines redemptions, like status for a day. So you could have American Airlines gold status for a day for 5,000 points or platinum for 8,000 points. Why would you do that, Greg? Well, you know, this would be great if you're,

If you have plans to fly American Airlines and you don't have status with AA and you want to, for example, check bags for free or pick preferred seats or things like that or have a chance even for a free upgrade to first class, these kind of things can give you all of that. I will warn you, before you redeem for this, check the detailed terms. I once had booked a American Airlines flight for my niece and her family, and I figured, oh, for 5K, they'll get free check bags and these other things I just mentioned. What I didn't realize is there's a significant lead time required to apply this status for a day benefit. it. So, for example, I was able to redeem for it and they sent it to her, but she wasn't able to apply it because it was too soon before her flight. You need to have like 10 days. I can't remember how many days before the flight you have to do it. So that was a wasted 5K and she didn't fly American in the next 12 months or whatever. Well, it was still. I hope she still redeemed it

to be gold for a day even if while at home or platinum or whatever. I don't think so. I don't think But it can be a really useful thing, I think. You know, 5K points to get a whole family, free check bags and things like that could be really valuable. Yeah, I'm good. Yeah. But the, so that's Explorer status. The real win with Hyatt, as far as elite status goes, is when you reach 60 nights. That's when you hit globalist status.

That's where you get a 30% point bonus on your. paid stays, but more importantly, you get waived resort fees on all stays. And I say that because all Hyatt members get waived resort fees on point stays, but here you're getting it on paid stays as well. Your room upgrades can include suites. You get 4 p.m. late checkout guaranteed at all except for suites. You get... Oh, except for resorts, you mean? Except for resorts. Did I say except for suites? You did, and you do still get 4 p.m. late checkout on the suite. You do. You also get club access or free breakfast if they don't have a club. You get free parking on awards days. That can be super valuable. And you can also redeem points for American Airlines Platinum Pro for a day status. That costs 12,000 points if you want to give yourself or a loved one Platinum Pro, American Airlines Platinum Pro status. So all right. So those are the elite levels. So, you know, basically if what you care about it is reaching a certain elite level, you probably just care about globalists is 60 nights. And we'll talk more about that. But interestingly, Hyatt also has milestone rewards. And some of them get pretty good well before 60 nights. Yeah. So, you know, the 20-night milestone rewards are not particularly interesting. But 30-night becomes interesting. So I

At 30, you earn, of course, Explorer status, which we already talked about. But you also earn a category one to four free night certificate and a benefit that you can pick. And the selections are 2,000 points on your next day at like a Hyatt Place or Hyatt House or Hyatt Cove or Hyatt Studios. You get two club access awards. So you can book a standard room and apply the Club Access Award and get club access for the room.

Or you could pick a $25 fine credit or two American Airlines preferred seat coupons. So if you're a Hyatt fan there, you're probably going to pick either the 2,000 points or maybe the Club Access Awards would be my bet for most people. Those would be the ones that are probably going to be most valuable. But that's not a bad combo. I mean, the category one to four certificate alone can be worth a fair amount of money in the right situation. Yeah. Yeah. So that's nice, but it's not, it's not exciting. It's not something that would motivate us to be like, we got to get there, right? It's it's more like if you're at like 27 nights for the year and you're saying, ooh, is it worth doing three more

nights in order to get that one through four cert and this other little thing, maybe? You know, that's where it gets like the maybe. But where things get really interesting is at 40 nights, right? Yeah, because at 40 nights, you get, first of all, one guest of honor award. And a guest of honor award, which I mentioned briefly earlier, is when you apply a guest of honor award to his stay, then the person staying gets globalist benefits. for that stay. So they get all those great benefits that we just talked about being excited about, like free parking and breakfast and the 4 p.m. late checkout. So that can be, again, really valuable in the right circumstances, the right situation. I use these often when we travel to New York City

because we drive, because we live a drivable distance. And parking at most of the Hyatt properties in New York is often like somewhere around $100 a night, maybe a little bit less than that, but close to $100 a night. And so applying a guest of honor award to a stake and save us a significant chunk of change just in those parking fees. And I could probably park somewhere else for cheaper. But it's nice to just pull up to the hotel and give the keys to the valet. So that can be really nice. You can apply that to your own stay. So if you only hit 40 nights and you're only going to, I mean, maybe if you're only going to stay one time at a fancy high at sometime next year, that can be a terrific benefit because you get all the benefits to somebody

who stayed 60 nights on that one stay. So that's great. And then you get another one you can pick. most of us would probably pick the suite upgrade award because as I said earlier, a Hyatt suite upgrade award can be applied to a stay of up to seven nights. That can be a paid stay or an award stay. So it doesn't matter whether you pay cash or you pay with points. You can apply a suite upgrade award to apply to a, or rather to upgrade to a standard suite. And every property defines a standard suite differently. So that's going to be better in some places than others.

There are some properties that'll say they're junior suite that just has a little extra space as a suite. So you do have to be a little select. with where you're going to use that. But in some cases, you can get some really nice standard suites with one of those Sweet Upgrade Awards. And that, to me, those are the things that I care most about when I'm going for an important stay. It's getting like all those globalist type benefits and getting a suite and being able to

have those types of things. And you can't apply both of those on the same stay. But being able to have one of each of those, I think is great. Yeah. So, you know, if you imagine this, like you're at 35. nights now and wondering, is it worth going for five more nights to get to that 40-night threshold? I'd be looking at, are you likely to have at least one, if not two, you know, really big Hyatt stays next year or even before next year? Once you've hit 40 nights, then it might be worth

mattress running or doing something to get to those 40 nights. We'll talk about what those some things are a bit later in this main event. It's probably worth doing something to get there because, you know, it could be that you have two long stays, one where you're getting all those globalist benefits that Nick was describing, another one where you're paying the price for a standard room, but staying in a really nice suite for the whole stay. And so, yeah, that can be, that is totally where. I think where things get to the point of where we are now,

you know, we're getting near the end of the year. We're looking at our account balances and saying this is where we're at. Should we go and try to get to the next level? This is the part where if you're in the 30s, you might want to be thinking about stretching to get to that next level of 40 nights. Yep, yep, because those benefits can be worth a stretch. Then beyond that, at 50 nights, you get the ability to pick two more. sweet upgrades. There's some other options as well, but if sweet upgrades matter to you,

that's probably the key benefit at 50. Then at 60 nights, like we said, you unlock globalist benefits. So that alone is highly valuable, but it also comes with a bunch of other highly valuable stuff. You get a category one to seven free night certificate. So that won't get you quite any height, but it'll get you a lot of really nice high. It's category six and seven. You get two suite upgrade awards and two guest of honor awards and a my hyatt concierge it's not like a pick one of the above it's you get all of those things along with the globalist benefits so if you are close to 60 you almost certainly want to find a way to get to 60 yeah yeah and uh what my hiate concierge is in case you don't know it's it's like somebody who you can uh talk to either through email or on the

phone who will take care of all your like Hyatt needs for you. So, for example, whenever I want to apply a guest of honor certificate, instead of, you know, calling Hyatt, I just forward, I make a reservation for myself, then I forward it to my concierge and say, hey, can you apply this for my niece and give her, you know, the guest of honor, apply the guest of honor to this. And then she takes care of it. Also, it's, in that case, it's more of a time savings than anything else. Theoretically, a really good one can go to bat for you about, like, upgrades and availability of award nights and things like that. But we don't see that a lot necessarily. It depends on the concierge you get. Theoretically, yes. Yeah. But an important question here,

I don't question just to question it. But have you done that recently? Have you done that, like, since and that's worked fine the booking the stay in your name and because I ask because I've had significant trouble with that with if I book it in my name and then want to apply the gift of honor and put it in somebody else's name. That's been a problem. And what I've realized is I really need to gift the guest of honor award to that person and get the points in that person's account to book it and apply it. I've had a trouble with booking them in my name and then applying the guest to honor. But if you've had success, that means. as possible.

I just did it for Malta. Yeah, that's great. That's great. I do it. Great to know. Yeah. So I guess having a good concierge is actually helpful. Yeah.

So, you know, as you get past 60 nights, every 10 nights, 70, 80, and 90, you get one more guest of honor certificate plus your choice of a number of things, 10,000 points, a sweet upgrade award. or a couple other things. I don't know, like, 60 is such a big get. Like, you're getting so much that it's kind of sloping off after that. Like, you know, every 10 after that is like, you get extra nice to halves, but they're not huge. And I think it's harder to justify, like, going from 60 to 70 than going from 50 to 60.

Right. And we got all excited about the Guest of Honor Award at 40 nights. So you may say, well, why aren't you as excited at 70 nights? Well, because at that point, you have access to all of the globalist benefits for yourself. So you don't need a guest of honor for yourself. So this is only applicable, really, if you need the guest of honor to give to other people. And, you know, so if you travel and you don't need multiple rooms a lot, then the guest of honor could be very useful for you.

But if not, then getting additional guest of honor awards might not matter that much. And the choice benefits are just not that big at 70, 80, and 90 comparatively. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's not go into all the details past that other than to say that there's a concept of an ultimate free night, which is good at category 1 through A, the all-inclusives, A through F, or whatever the letters are, whatever the letters go up to. And also the Miraval properties. So you can use your free night certificate at any of those, but you need 150 nights to get just one of these things, which is absurd. months, six months of living in a Hyatt hotel to get that. Yeah, that's, yeah, like you said, absurd. So it's a lot of spend on a credit card or a lot of nights spent in a hotel or both to get to that. So kind of crazy. But speaking of spend on the credit card, let's talk about the shortcuts.

So how can I get to 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 nights if I'm close to one of those and I want to get there or how can I mix my paid stays? What are my shortcuts? Yeah, yeah. So we're not going to go into every possible. thing, but the big, big ones are credit card spend. So if you get the World of Hyatt credit card, well, first of all, you get five elite nights every year automatically, just for having the card. So, you know, if you're five nights away and you don't have the card yet, sign up for the card, and you're done. You also get two nights per $5,000 spend. So again, when we're saying nights, we're not talking about, like, nights that you could redeem for free nights at Hyatt properties. We're talking about elite nights towards these.

milestone rewards or towards elite status thresholds so you know towards the 60 nights you need for globalists for example so that's what the consumer World of Hyatt card gives you the business card gives you doesn't give you any nights automatically but it gives you five nights five elite nights for every ten thousand dollars you spend so you know if you if you have no trouble spending a lot then either one of those can be a really good way to earn elite nights if you have have a business, and you get this automatically with the Hyatt Business Card, Hyatt leverage is a program where if your employees use your Hyatt leverage business code to book Hyatt Knights, and they'll get a

discount, you will earn, as the business owner, two elite nights for every $5,000 of eligible room rates spent up to a maximum of $6,000. per year that way. Obviously, I think, mattress running. So what mattress running is where you book a stay, you book a cheap stay just to get the nights, just get the elite nights in any points that you might earn as well, it can be a way of doing this. So you could look for like super cheap paid rates and check into those hotels in order to

get those nights. You could look for super cheap award. rates and book category one hotels off peak are only 3500 points per night so you can get additional nights by actually booking stays fairly cheaply with with points if you can find one of those category one off peaks people often ask if you actually have to go to the hotel if you're you know like can I book one that's far away from me and just like check in on my phone and not actually have to show up yeah um you you, it sometimes works to do that, but it often doesn't work to do that. So in general,

you should assume that you need to actually check in to make it happen. Yeah. So that's, that's number one, you know, and or you need to be willing to sacrifice and just basically have wasted the points for this day if it doesn't work. So that's a risk you're taking if you're going to try to do that. The other thing to know is if you leave a hotel early and you don't them that you want to keep the room, then they may check you out early. So, you know, if you book like a 10 nights day and you go to check in in person and then you leave and don't ever use the room, there's a chance that housekeeping is going to tell them, hey, there's nobody in the room on day two or three. And they might check you out early. So, so if you have, if you need a couple

extra nights, you're like, oh, I need three nights, but I don't actually need three nights in the hotel. Your best bet is probably to talk to somebody at the hotel and say, listen, I might be back in a couple of days or I just really need these elite nights and plans changed. I'm not going to be here the whole time. Please don't check me out. A lot of places will probably be okay with that. All right. So moving on from Matches running, there are promos that come and go all the time.

Now, status challenges are not really what we're talking about in that, you know, a status challenge isn't usually set up to give you incrementally. more nights than you already have. They're usually set up to be like, if you stay 20 nights in this period of time, then you'll get globalist status. And so that can be a really good way of getting to global status for a year, but it doesn't sort of fit with the theme of the rest of this. So sort of put that aside for a minute. But there are promotions. Every now and then we see promotions to get double elite nights. Sometimes it's for certain brands. Sometimes it's for everything, it really depends.

Right now, there is a double Elite Night promo, but it's tied to getting the Whirl of Hyatt credit card. So as we're recording this, the Hyatt's offering, in addition to the normal points bonus you get when you get the card and spend a certain amount, in addition to that, you also will get double elite nights. and here are the details.

You have to be approved for the card by November 20th of this year. And then after you're approved, every night you spend until the end of January of 2026, you'll get two qualifying nights with a maximum of 15 bonus elite nights altogether.

So this is kind of interesting because you have to, if you do this, you have to think through how you want to spend those nights, right? Can you elaborate on that, Nick? Well, it depends on when you want them to count. And so, you know, if you're a few nights short of this year, you want those double elite nights to post this year, then, I mean, it's probably pretty obvious that you need to stay this year, number one. But number two, also importantly, if you're traveling around New Year's Eve, is that Hyatt counts all of your elite nights based on your checkout date. And this is not intuitive for everyone. We should probably

republish a post about this as we approach the end of the year. So let's say you had a stay that starts on December 28th and you check out on January 2nd. So that's, I don't know, 12, 5, 6 days, whatever that is. Those are all going to apply in the new year. You're not going to get credit for December 28th and 29th and 30th of this year unless you check out by the 31st of this year. Then those nights count for this year, but if you check out in January, they're going to count for the new year. So that's piece number one. Piece number two is obviously it depends on whether you want those nights this year or next year, because this goes through January 31st. So if it would be more useful to you to have all of those elite nights next year, for instance, if you have a 15

nights day, you can book in January of 2026, then you'll have 30 elite nights in January, starting off the year with 30 essentially on that 15 nights day and you'll get those 30-night milestone benefits and explore status and a much faster path to globalist for the year. So it just depends which year they're going to be more beneficial for you in. But again, keep in mind that Hyatt counts all of the nights based on your checkout date has nothing to do with the actual calendar night you've spent. Yeah. Yep. And I will mention that whether your mattress running or getting this credit card. You can usually stack these deals with other promotions going on in order for the overall situation be more rewarding. So let me give an example. Right now there's a targeted

offer for earning three X Hyatt points, so three times the points, I think that's three times the base points, on stays of two nights or more. for 90 days after you accept after you register for the promotion if you're targeted for it so first of all if you're targeted um wait until you need it to start the clock on those 90 days i made the mistake i saw it in my account and it just had the button like register i was like yeah and then and then i read the details and and after clicking the button and and i read the the deal is like for 90 days oh wait a minute i don't have any i it stays actually like well no that's not right i have a few but not you know anyway so um yeah anyway so if you're doing like

uh you know paid mattress runs uh then they can be a little bit more valuable because you're earning points not just the nights when you stack with those kind of promotions absolutely absolutely and to back up for a second to what i was talking about about your checkout date on that previous one if you got the credit card also keep in mind you need to check out by january first to get the double elite nights if you're doing it in january don't check out on february second and think that the nights at the end of january you're going to count they're not because you're going to get credited based on february second so make sure you check out by january 31st for that previous promotion the other thing about 90 days you just brought up 90 days and so

we should also mention the fact that the milestone benefits that you earn when we talked about what you earn at 30 nights and 40 nights and 60 nights etc the one that you choose, you only have 90 days from the date that you reach that milestone to pick the milestone benefit. If more than 90 days pass, you can't go back and get it. So if you earn your 40 elite nights, you get your guest of honor award automatically, but you have to select if you want the sweet upgrade award, you have to select that within 90 days. If you wait, you won't get anything. So be sure to select within 90 days. Now that out of the way, you also want to be strategic about when you select because for the past few years, people who have selected benefits in January have had the

benefit valid for two years, essentially. So if you were to hit 40 nights right now, you have 90 days to select if you want that sweet upgrade. If you selected it today, as you listened to this in 2025, if you selected it right away, then that sweet upgrade award would be valid until the end of February 2027. If you wait until January to select the Sweet Upgrade Award at least based on past precedent, no guarantee it'll work the same way. But based on past precedent, you're going to get another year. It's going to expire probably at the end of February 28. And so that might make a difference in some of these milestones as to when you pick them, you know, do you have a use for it next year or do you want to get some extra time out of that benefit? That's going to be important

in something to know. Also the same with guest of honor awards, by the way. I've found that the ones that I've earned, like, based on activity right at the end of the year, then they don't come into my account until January, and they end up being valid for two years. So if you're at like 59 nights and you can finish that 60th night at the end of December instead of the beginning of December, you may end up getting more time out of your guest amount of award as well. That's really, really good advice. I forgot all about that. And I am going to be right in the mix with that, uh, that kind of thing. So it's good, good reminder. All right. So let's talk about, what we're going to do. So what are we going to do? What am I going to do? Well, right now, I am

already at 57 nights. I have a four-night stay coming up next month. So I will be at 61. So I'm going to re-qualify for Globalist and get all my 60-night milestones. So that was pretty simple. That's a mix of actual stays and credit card spend that got me there. My wife has had a lot of nights this year, too, because we've been traveling with other family members quite a bit. And so when we do that, I always book the additional room. If I need one additional room, it goes in my wife's name, no matter who's sleeping in the room. So she gets the elite credit for that room. So she's now earned her own way to, by the time we finish that coming four nights day where she has another room also,

I think she's going to be at 32 elite nights. And so she's going to get all the 30 night benefits. But then also I'm looking at, well, should she go for 40 nights? because that's eight more, and we just were talking about how great the 40-night benefits are, or would it make more sense for me to go for 70 nights? And when you compare the 40-and-70-night milestones, the 70-night milestones are better, but most people listening are probably not going to be in the situation I just described, where you have player one already at globalist and player two also earning a lot of nights. It's a pretty rare situation. If you were in my

situation, it would make more sense to go for 70 because the benefits you select at 40 and 7. are very similar. Seventy has some slightly better benefits, so very slightly. It's a close comparison. So anyway, I thought about going for 70, but the short version of the story is that as I did the math, I don't think it's worth it. And I should say, we have actually a few more nights that I haven't yet booked. We're going to have about four more nights. So I think I'm going to end at 65 or my wife is going to end at 35 or 36.

If we get a little bit closer yet, one of us might mattress run. I did just give my wife a guest of honor award for a booking. So I guess actually now I'm going to end at 62. If we do four more, I'll be at 66. Now we're starting to get to the point where maybe I'd consider mattress running. The problem is I have a lot of sweet upgrade awards already that don't expire until 27 because I waited to pick them until January of last year. And so I've got a bunch that are already valid.

for the next year and a half-ish. So the value of even more of those is somewhat slim, though, as I pointed out here, if I wait until January to pick them, I'll get another year. So I may yet put in a mattress run if I can get myself otherwise to a little bit closer. If I can get within three nights of 70, then I will probably mattress run, because as fate would have it, we are going to be staying at a category one Hyatt that has availability at 3,500 points a night for additional nights. So I went ahead and I booked a stay for a few extra nights just in case.

And then I can cancel it later, if not. Yeah, yeah. Do both of you already have the World of Hyatt credit card? We both have the consumer card, yes. So we are the five elite nights from that are already in there. And we've both done the 15K spend to earn a free night certificate. And we've earned a bunch of elite nights from spend. Neither of us has the business card, but both of us are still over 524.

I will be under relatively soon. but I say relatively soon, in December I'll be under. And so maybe I could get some spending on that, but it's probably not worth the extra complication at this point. We'll see whether I do the banter's run. Yeah, yeah. All right. That's really good.

So let me talk about my situation. I'm currently at 48 nights, and I have three nights planned by the end of the year. Of course, other things can come up, and I might get more. but that's where things stand right now. I earned quite a few from my four-night stay at the Hyatt-centric Malta. As you, some people remember, I booked not just for myself. I also booked for Kerry, who was staying same time as me, same number of nights, and also for Björna, the chef, who also stayed same nights and four nights.

And then also for Maisie, who she came in later. She came in, so only one day overlapped in our stays. And I booked her for four nights. And I gave her that stay as sort of a baby moon. She's about to have a baby. And so I'm really excited for her. And so I booked all those nights. And I thought about what's the best way to do all this?

And here's the issue. when you book multiple nights for yourself in one hotel at the same time multiple rooms you only get you only get credit elite night credit for one room so for example I booked two rooms for me and Kerry they're both they're both under my name and I only have four elite nights for those two rooms. Okay, I could have gotten another elite night by giving Kerry a guest of honor award for her room because when you give someone a guest of honor and they spend it, you get an elite knight as the gifter. I could have done that. I didn't because I have plans for all my guest of honor awards. I did use one though for Björna. So he had to check in before

we'd get there. So I wanted it, it'd be more convenient for it to be in his name. So I guessed have honored him and I earned one elite night from his stay, even though his day perfectly overlapped with mine. For Maisie's four nights, I kept it in my name. And I just told them at the desk, please let Maisie check in because I wasn't going to be at the hotel at the time she arrived. And that worked perfectly. And I, I, I, I knew that I would get some number of elite nights credit for this. Now, these were not the same nights, but there was one night overlapping. So I thought, worst case, I would get three elite nights from her booking, because it was three nights that didn't overlap.

And I thought best case, I'd get four, because maybe they would just look at the checkout dates alone, and then base the number of knights credited that way. They did it the way it's supposed to work. I got three elite nights from her booking. So I got a total of eight elite nights from the Hyatt-centric Malta, which is a category two. It was off-peaks. It was 6,500 points per night, so it wasn't bad at all. Anyway, so I'm at 51 nights. I want to get to 60. I want to re-up my globalist status. So I need nine more nights. My plan right now is to, I still have $10,000 more to spend on a World of Hyatt credit card to get to the $15,000 where you get a category 1 through 4 free night.

So I want to spend the 10K on that card, and that will give me four more nights because you get two nights per 5K spend. Then I'm going to need, I'm going to need, what, four more nights after that. I'll probably do that by spending $10,000 on my World of High Business card. That'll give me five nights. So I'll end up with 61 instead of 60. So one night wasted that way. But anyway, that's my tentative plan.

But I'm going to wait a little bit to see if other plans show up, you know, where I'll be, getting more nights naturally, then I won't have to do as much spend. Yeah, let me add to this. You mentioned guest of honor and that you already had plans for all of your guest of honor, so you didn't have an extra one to give to carry in that situation. And I find myself in the same situation with my guest of honor awards because we're frequently traveling with family. So mine are all earmarked and I haven't had enough to meet my needs.

But what I have found is that if you have other friends who are, globalists or trying to re-qualify for globalists. At this time of year, there are often folks that have some of these guest of honor awards and would like to get the elite night credit for someone using them. So keep your ear to the ground for friends and

family who have a guest of honor award and want to give them to someone so that they can get the elite night credit because that worked out in my favor at least once already where someone said, hey, I need the elite night credit this year. So if there's somebody who can use one this year, I'm happy to give it to you. And I'm like, yes,

me. I'll take that because I need that and I can guarantee you'll get the elite credit this year for it. So worth keeping your eye out for that if you don't have status and you need more guest of honor or you just need more guest of honors than what you get. Yeah, no, totally. That's exactly right. And about spending your way to the elite nights with the Hyatt credit cards, a lot of people have asked about this about like, do you have to finish the spend before your credit card statement comes due in December, no. The charges have to post before the end of December and then if you've hit the threshold of the 5,000 spend or the 10,000 spend by the end of December, then once they tallied up, you'll be retroactively. Those elite nights will

retroactively apply to this calendar year's elite status. So even though that that calculation might not happen until January. So you won't see it in your account. It will be applied to this calendar years for elite status purposes. I can confirm that sort of thing happens and it will retroactively, even if you don't see it for a while afterwards. Eventually, it does get fixed. And that's how I ended up realizing that getting the elite benefits in January extended them for another year because my status just that stuff didn't post until sometime in January. And then when it all came in, I realized, oh, that was kind of a neat benefit of it coming in that way, that it, you know, it all gave me extra time. So, yeah, that's definitely a good tip.

Now, one other question related to that, that unfortunately, I imagine you don't have a silver bullet solution for is, is there any way to track where you are? If you've had, like, the World of Hyatt credit card open for years, is there any way to know where you are and your 5K spent? Yeah, not that I know. The reason Nick is asking that is with the consumer card, the 5K spend that gives you the two elite nights is not bound by the calendar year. So if you spent, you know, if you just got the card last year and you spent, I'll make it really simple, you spent $2,000 last year on the card and then you spend $3,000 this year, that's when you'd get your first two elite nights. because that adds up to the first $5,000 of spend that would get you those two elite nights, and then it starts counting from there

towards the next 5,000 and so on. And I don't know how to check that. So that's a really good point, because I'm kind of guessing that, like, I might hit my, you know, get my two elite nights before spending what I think I need to spend to get to my category one through Forcer. Yeah, it's really annoying. I've recently did some spend on both of our world

high credit cards, not knowing how many elite nights were going to post, because I wasn't sure which level I was going to hit, is that going to be, you know, the next five or the next 10 or whatever. Yeah. So one of these days, I have to sit back and go through all the statements I can to, like, add up all the transactions and try and figure it out. But I haven't because that just seems so annoying to do. So I wish there were a counter for that. I doubt they'll ever one. Yeah. So for the business card, my understanding is they do it by calendar year. So the clock, the counter resets each January 1. So it's easier to figure out where you are with that card. You just look at your spend year to date. Don't include things like the credit cards annual fee

or any other kind of fees like that that you had to pay to the credit card company in your spend. That's a general rule even with like things like credit card welcome offers, retention offers, any of that kind of stuff, they never count the annual fees or, you know, late fees and things like that as part of your spend. Great point. Great point. All right. So both of us are going to requalify for globalists.

It sounds like and do whatever it takes to get there. And then, you know, we both have thought about how to bridge the gap to get there. And again, I mean, we both very highly value that. I think you are right to question whether or not it should be valuable. to you, though. As we said at the beginning, you do kind of want to run the numbers and see, am I going to save enough to make this worth a stretch? If it is a stretch, ask yourself that question. And for us, the answer is a pretty easy yes, but that may or may not be a yes for you. However, I do think the 40-night benefits, being able to apply a guest of honor award to one

stay and a sweet upgrade award to another, I think that those are very much worth considering. Even if you're only a stay twice a year at Hyatt type of a person, I think like, we'll looking at, okay, well, how far am I? You know, did I earn some nights this year? I didn't expect. How far am I from 40? And how could I get there that may be worth asking yourself? All right, I think that brings us to this week's question of the week.

This week's question of the week came in in our frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. And I thought this was a terrific question because if you book awards, if you book award tickets, specifically flights, you are almost guaranteed to run into this type of evaluation at some point. It won't be the same specifics, but it's going to be the same type of situation. And so I thought it was a great question to ask Greg. So Megan writes, how do you evaluate whether positioning is worth it? For example, British Airways just announced direct flights to London from my home airport, but business class award pricing is roughly 10,000 points on $100 more expensive per ticket

than if I drove five hours to fly out of a different airport. I could rent a car, it cost about $100 to get to another airport and save money, money, but it would cost me an extra vacation day because I got to get there a day early. So for me, I think it's a no-brainer to spend the extra 20,000 points. That's two passengers and $100 each for the extra vacation day. But am I missing something? Does the calculation change if we were retired or we had unlimited vacation days? And then she goes on to say, or we could position to Boston and fly to Madrid.

Apparently, eventually that's where they want to end up. and we'd save 61,000 points per ticket and $374. So that seems like it'd probably be much better. So, Greg, I ask you, how do you decide between positioning? Like how much of a difference is enough to mean that, well, I'll just pay more and fly nonstop? And how does that calculus change based on the situation? Oh, wow. Yeah, I can't give you a magical formula for that.

but it kind of just depends on how frugal you are with both your points and cash and everything. And for me, the advantage of a nonstop or reducing stops is like really high. I really don't like, you know, the added time, the added risk of delays. Like every time you add another flight into your itinerary, It can really endanger the overall trip. And worst of all, I really don't like adding a separately booked situation, like a positioning flight with another carrier because then if something goes wrong, you're not really protected all the way through.

So all those things mean I'm personally willing to spend. quite a bit more for a nonstop. Like in the example that Megan gave, I would just pay the extra obvious and be done. Yeah, that's interesting. It's interesting to me because that's such a risk-averse position. Like, you know, you're, the time thing, that's easy. I mean, yes, you save time. So there's no argument there.

But the rest of your answer was essentially, well, you know, if you book a separate positioning flight, there's a risk you might misconnect or you book a flight with a connection. You might miss the next flight, which that just recently. happened to me so it wasn't even a connect it was separate tickets just like greg was saying however like during the million mile madness challenge you flew 15 airlines in like nine days and didn't miss anything right and if that doesn't prove that worrying too much about like connections ruining your trip i don't know what does like i mean it can happen yes bad things happen sometimes but i don't know i don't worry as much about that of course like i said just just bit me recently so obviously

So, yeah. So, you know, Million Mile Manus, I did not include an American Airlines flight at all. So that makes a big difference. You wouldn't have made that kind of a risk, right? I mean, it's a bit much. You know, I've been loving the great deals you can get using Alaska Atmos miles to fly American Airlines, but I've been hating the delays that seem to hit every time I fly American. So, you know, flying out of Detroit, there's not a lot of options that don't include, like, you know, get to, got to get to Chicago, got to get to D.C., got to get somewhere else for that international flight. And often American Airlines is, like, the best deal for doing that. But I, you know, I do not want to use American as my positioning carrier. Let me put it that way. So anyway, so, yeah, I guess you could say it's risk aversion, but I also, even aside from all the risk parts of it, the nonstop part is, I think it just makes, it makes the scripts so much simpler and faster if you can just fly nonstop.

And so I really value that. I think a lot of people, I think a lot of people value that. So you're not, you're obviously not wrong. Here's what I said to Megan in response. So she said that it would cost her an additional $20,000 points and $100 or $200, I think, $100 is what she said. So $20,000 points and $100 to fly nonstop. And I said, well, I think the math on that part is pretty easy. Figure out what you value the points at.

Let's use one and a half cents because that's an easy valuation. That's where we value a lot of our transferable points. So it's $300 worth of points then and $100 in cash, $400. So if you value that, she brought up the fact that it would cost her an extra vacation day to position to Chicago or Boston. So if you could buy an extra vacation day for 400 bucks, would you do it? And if you would, then fly nonstop. And if you wouldn't, then consider positioning somewhere else. So I think that that was the first piece to look at, okay, well, is it worth paying this?

And think of the points in terms of cash to decide that. And actually, it gets a little more complicated because the rental. car would cost something and so you could subtract that. Right, right. But that's the essential, the idea that I said. That's a good way to do it. I like that. But then I said, the other thing that comes into play is your vacation situation. Because, you know, if you only get two weeks of vacation, let's say, then you might be more willing to pay for that extra day of vacation to keep it than if you have four or five or six weeks of vacation. So the amount of time that you have and how used up that is or not will also come into to play in terms of deciding how much.

And then the final thing that I told her was that if you're looking at a British Airways flight and so you're looking at the costs here, have you checked to see if it's available via Cathay Pacific Asia miles? Because if it is, then maybe you could save that 20,000 miles by booking through Cathay Pacific instead and also pay less in fees. And sure enough, she found that flight available some days, not the day that she was originally looking at, but she said she had some flexibility. And it was 23,000 points less. So she'd actually even less flying nonstop from home. So you've got to consider all those options. But we're all going to face that at some point, right? Where you're like, do I position, do I fly nonstop? Yeah. Yeah.

You know, and it occurs to me as you're talking about this, that if you are retired or have like, you know, so many vacation days, you don't care about it, you know, for me, then I would be looking at, oh, I have to fly out of, let's say it's Boston. Great. I'm going to get to Boston a day or maybe two days early and make that part of the trip. And then that takes away all of the risk part of it, you know, because it's not like a same-day positioning flight. It takes away all of that risk, and it makes it actually a pleasure to do that stop there. But if you're on a tight schedule, obviously, that wouldn't work for you. And again, it's not really, for me, it's not really about saving money or points.

it's about what makes the ideal experience. And I think that could be a great way of doing that. That's a great point. That's a great point. Yeah, well done. Okay, that brings us to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequent myler.com slash subscribe to join our

email list, follow us on all the various social media, join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where you can get a whole bunch of answers to a question just like Megan did on that one that we answered here. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this a like or a thumbs up. If you've got a question that you'd like to be considered for a question of the week or a piece of feedback for our giant mailbag, you can send that to. Send it to

mailbag at Frequentmiler.com. Bye everybody. Hi, I'm David Brody, co-host of the Travelin-10 podcast. Together, myself and my co-host, Tim Johnson, have traveled to over 150 countries around the world and all seven continents. Now we're sharing our favorite places, some of our best tips and experiences from all around the world in just 10 minutes on travel

and 10. Join us at voyescape.com. I'm Pauline Fromer. I've spent most of my life writing, talking, and thinking about travel, not just where to go, but how to go in a way that's meaningful. On the Frommers Travel Show, we explore the trends, people, and ideas shaping how we see the world. If you care about the why, as much as the where, I hope you'll join me. You can find new episodes weekly at voyescape.com.