Frequent Miler on the Air - Is it time to give Marriott a break? (originally aired June 5 2019)

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

Greg and Nick debate: Amex Gold (great or not?) 25K Hawaii Marriott (transfer points from Chase? NO!!!) Marriott Bonvoy (Is it time to give Marriott a break?) Capital One's latest transfer bonus (good enough to transfer prospectively?) And we both love tap-to-pay. Listen now.

Okay, I see that now too. So you're on vacation. I am, I am. Yeah, so when I hired you, what, about a year and a half ago, I offered you, what was it? Three weeks of vacation time? That's right, yeah, that's true.

And then when you actually take vacation, then suddenly I have to do real work and I start regretting ever offering you any vacation time at all. But thank you for breaking- I can't negotiate for more next year? Is that what you're saying? Well, we'll reset the clock at zero, then you can do more. How about that?

Yeah, so here I am on vacation. It's true. Yeah, at the Domes of Alunda, the Marriott property that went up from 45K a night to 85K a night. So, yeah, I'm enjoying the chance to relax a little bit. And I see you've been busy this week. Yeah. So we're in northern Michigan. My son is working this summer at a at a family alumni camp for University of Michigan. And we drove up north to drop them off. And then we made a little vacation out of it too. So that's been pretty good.

But I have been, you know, working through the vacation a bit. Right, right, right. Well, I'm glad to be able to join you to take a few minutes of this beautiful Cretan afternoon or Cretan, I suppose is what they say, afternoon here at the Domes. It's quite pretty here in Crete, although I saw some of your pictures from northern Michigan, and little did I know northern Michigan is beautiful too, huh? Yeah, I actually think northern Michigan is one of the most underrated vacation spots that I know of anyway. Yeah. It doesn't get as crowded as,

as you know, the well-known vacation spots yet. A lot of places are, you know, definitely just as nice as anywhere you can go. So yeah, I highly recommend it. Right now I'm in Glen Arbor,

Michigan, which is near Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. And it's a fantastic park. It's like two miles away from the little town of Glen Arbor. So it makes a great little vacation. Nice. That's one of the reasons I still like IHG Point Breaks, even though people are upset are upset and I understand why that they're not as good as they used to be. They can be useful for sometimes discovering places like that. I know you're not in an IHG stay right now, but I find that those point break lists come up with places that I just wasn't familiar with that are in places I wouldn't have considered visiting. So sometimes you stumble on something in those sales and it turns out to be pretty good. That's true.

In this case, you would never find this place because there's not a single chain hotel in Glen Arbor. I mean, you could stay in Traverse City, which is a much bigger city and stay at a nice IHD or whatever. But that brings up a topic that has come up just this morning. So I posted about the Hyatt in Budapest being an incredible deal at 8k points or 13k to 16k if you want to stay in a

suite. And I actually posted this question on, on Facebook, on our frequent mile or insiders group is, is it worth, uh, actually going to a place just for a deal like that versus picking a place to go and then finding the best hotel deal or, you know, a way to stay. What are your thoughts on that? You know, my thoughts in this case are that it might be worth planning a trip around because Budapest looks like a cool place to visit. And the hotel is just an amazing value at 8k. I mean, you're talking about for a regular standard room, you're talking about the same price as a lot of airport Hyatt places to stay in a place that looks really luxurious and nice. And I have

to imagine between the cash rates and being so high and it being kind of off the beaten path in terms of where people typically think of first when they think of Europe, I have to imagine that probably there aren't all that many people with high levels of Hyatt status discovering it yet. So I think actually paying the 8K a night and trying to negotiate your way into a suite might be the better way to go. I don't know. Do you think that it's worth like, well, first of all, let's go back to your question. I had another thought there, but you said, is it worth planning a trip? I think so. Especially if you can catch the Air France KLM deals where you're paying 12.5 one-way in economy class, 25K round trip to get to Europe.

You can often find the better end of those deals going to cities like Budapest and Prague. Sometimes the pricing is even better than what it shows. It is. As you would expect. So Budapest is one of those cities. So worth checking that out. 44K one-way would get you to Vienna anyway. In business class on Royal Air Maroc,

using Etihad points, transfer partner of Amex membership rewards and city thank you points. I think it's worth a spontaneous trip. I don't know. What do you think? Is it worth the trip? And is it worth paying the premium for, you know, I was starting to argue no, but what do you think? Is it worth paying the premium to stay in a suite there? Yeah, well, first, just to answer the first question, I do think it's worth doing deals like this to visit places, as long as they're highly rated places, like places that you're likely to enjoy anyway. In my case, I mean, it's getting me to commit to go to a place I wanted to go for a long time, but it hasn't been that high in the list. It hasn't been high enough in the list to get me to actually plan it. But this little thing is just, you know, just enough to nudge me.

And I think that when we go, we're probably going to, you know, love the city just as most people who've been say they do. And I got to say on that note, it almost pushed me also. Earlier this week, I was fighting to try to find a way to get to Budapest for two nights because I had two nights to play with between, I was in Zurich last week, and then I'm in Domus of Alunda now. And so I had two nights to play with in the middle, and I was really trying to make Budapest work. Just the flight times weren't lining up the way I needed them to, but I almost did because I was already in Europe. And that's another nice thing about being in Europe. Flights are often

so cheap that if you're going to visit anywhere else in Europe, tacking on a couple of days to go to Blue Pass is really not going to be too difficult to do for most people. Right. Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. So is it worth the suite? Is it worth the suite? it worth the suite or 16 what do you think yeah i mean if you look at the uh paid prices even for a regular room there uh 16 you know even 16k a night is actually a good use of hyatt points um so is it worth it um it just depends. I mean, to me, I think in general, if you have the points and you can do something super awesome that you wouldn't normally do without points, you know, this is an opportunity to do that at a very low rate. The, you know, once this becomes a category, let's say five, the suite price is going to be very, very high. So, you know, this is the time to take advantage of it and get into

a suite, in my opinion. I can see where you'd say that, you know, and on one hand, it does kind of make sense. On the other hand, like I said, if you've got any kind of like smooth talking capability, I got to imagine that you've got any kind of smooth talking capability, I got to imagine that you could talk your way into a suite right now. I can't imagine that they're selling those suites out this early on. So I mean, if you're getting there anytime soon and you're a globalist or even an explorist, I would bet you might be able to work out a suite, even if you've paid the 8K a night. But maybe I'm wrong.

I could be wrong. And the 13 and 16, the interesting thing for me was actually when I messaged, uh, they told me they only have the 16 K suites available, even though it looked like a couple of the suites that you mentioned that should have been available for 13 K, uh, were available for booking. The, the Twitter rep told me just the premium suites for the dates I was looking at, um, which forK and more, I think if you're looking at spending more on a suite there, go with the premium suites. They look amazing.

Yeah, I agree. Although, as I pointed out in my post, I don't think the pictures are correct on at least some of the suites since they're like exactly the same. Some of them are, but that hexagon suite that's 100 square meters, I mean, that looks really neat. That's got to be the real deal. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Well, speaking of worldwide travel, going different places, the Amex Gold Card now offering four points per dollar on restaurants worldwide. Right. And you said it's still not a keeper for you. So, I mean, first of all, how is it not a keeper? And second of all, isn't it a keeper just for MS purposes?

OK, so this is actually kind of funny story because I wrote the majority of that post on Tuesday for publication on Wednesday. before Steven Pepper published the quick deal saying, oh, hey, on Thursday, the gold card is going to be available for Forex at restaurants worldwide. So the majority of that post where I said the gold card has lost its shine for me was written before I knew about the new enhancements that were coming.

So when Steven published that, I quickly updated a little bit to mention that new capability. But it didn't change my mind. The thing that's really, I think, hard for people to grasp is that when I say it's not right for me, I'm not saying it's not right for the majority of people. I actually do think that it's a fantastic card for a lot of people. If you just tend to spend a lot of grocery stores and dining, that combination, you're going to make out like a bandit with that card. And the fact that it now works with, you know, worldwide, if you could find restaurants

worldwide that'll accept Amex, that's a nice improvement. And even the ability to use the $10 per month credits at Boxed is a nice improvement. So I think it's actually a very good card for most people. But when you ask about MS, I don't see it. So walk me through this. How do you not see it? 4X at the grocery store. I mean, my goodness. So easy, breezy MS for most folks. I mean, at a grocery store, typically you can buy a Visa gift card quite easily. Many grocery stores sell $500 Visa gift cards. So, I mean, you're talking about up to $25,000 per year earning Forex. So your cost and gift card activation, what, $6 a gift card, so $12 for every $1,000. So we're talking, what, a little over $300 for $25,000 worth of gift cards, and then you get your liquidation fees. So maybe let's call it $350,000 without locking the numbers down for $25,000 worth of MS. So you're talking 100,000 membership rewards points for just over $300 in cost. And that's assuming you MS the entire $25,000, which most people aren't going to,

because most people are going to spend probably $10,000 a year on groceries alone. So maybe you're going to MS $15,000 to get the other $60,000. How is that not worth it? Yeah. Well, if you're a serious MSer, you should have set up your Ebates account to earn membership rewards points, and you should have signed up for the Ebates visa. And if you have that combination, you can earn that same 4x, not limited to 25k a year. And you earn it right from the comfort of your home just by clicking through Ebates to giftcards.com or giftcardmall.com. Once they fix their, however they got hacked yeah yeah i haven't heard of the card on that yeah and you're paying uh almost the identical fees that you'd be paying in the grocery store so um that's why i just can't see paying the annual fee on a gold card when you could get the same forex virtually uncapped. I say

virtually because the portals limit you to 60k per month. But, you know, and then you could do that both across giftcards.com and giftcardmall.com. So you're making two assumptions here. Number one, you're assuming that that Ebates visa is never going to get shut down for MS when you're doing that high volume, which if you're only doing the 25K a year, I'll go right ahead and say you probably won't get shut down. But when you say virtually unlimited, I don't think we've seen that get tested to its full limit yet. It's only been happening like this for a short period of time, so we don't know how MS tolerant that's going to be. Right now, it does look pretty good, but we don't know long term how MS tolerant that's going to be, first of all. Second of all, anybody who gets gas and goes grocery shopping someplace with fuel points promos is still going to come out well ahead, actually, by leveraging fuel points along with those gift cards, if you

have a grocery store that awards fuel points on Visa gift cards, which I don't have a grocery store nearby me that awards those. But Kroger will do the Forex fuel points on the fixed value ones now and then. So then you'd have to do the math on the activation fee. But I think you'd probably come out well ahead still MSing it at the grocery store if you're able to stack fuel points. I'll give it to you. You're right. If you're not stacking fuel points, then the, the Ebates way is probably the way to go. But I only say probably because we don't yet know what the tolerance is going to be for MS. And we do know that, uh, the grocery store MS so far has gone, I think, okay, for most people who are doing it. Right. Right. Okay. That's a good point. Um, so I, it sounds like we're mostly in agreement.

It looks like. I'll give you that. The difference comes down to can you earn fuel points when doing the cigar store on one hand and how long will the Ebates deal last? And that's a valid point. I agree. So let's move on. All right. Let's talk then, I guess, about this this new Hyatt and not Hyatt, rather the Marriott property in Kauai.

Not new, but it's what a courtyard now it's changing into a Sheraton or something. Yes. So so we have a courtyard in Kauai, a courtyard Marriott in Kau, that everybody who's been there recently agrees is a disaster. And it's a disaster because it's undergoing massive construction. They didn't even tell guests ahead of time that this was happening. They're not giving them any kind of break because of it. So it's absolutely terrible. But you can book now, I had said just dropped off. You can book now at 25k points per night, Marriott points, for the future. And so you can book when the construction will be all done and it'll be a Sheraton once it's sort of reopened as, as a new hotel. Um, so wait, suddenly the music coming through my headset, what's going on. I don't hear the music on my side, but this is weird. all right i am going to um change to maybe it's a

video or something playing in the background why don't you talk while i'm okay so all right so this place it sounds pretty good right because now it's a courtyard it's going to be a shard and the nice thing there is if you've got a Marriott status, platinum status or higher, then you would get free breakfast at Sheraton. Whereas right now at courtyards, you get $10 per guest per day. So $20 if you have two people in the room, and it's capped at two adults per room for that credit. And actually, I recently stayed at a courtyard for the first time in years, and certainly the first time since I had platinum status. And my wife was with the baby in the room, baby was still asleep, I went down to go grab breakfast, and they told me I could only have one $10 credit in the courtyard because the other person wasn't standing there with me. And I kind of argued back that I have

to go wake up my son or leave him alone in order to have people here to get the credit. But apparently, that's the way it works, at least at the courtyard I stayed at. So suffice it to say, the breakfast policy at Courtyard kind of stinks for Marriott elites. So it'll be nice to see the change to Sheraton where Marriott elites will be able to get free breakfast. So that's a good argument in favor of paying the $25,000, although I've got some reservations. But see what I did there with reservations. But we'll come back to that in a second. So great value.

I'll agree. 25K Marriott points in Hawaii to stay to Sheraton is probably pretty darn good, especially on Kauai, my favorite Hawaiian island. Should I transfer Ultima Rewards points in order to buy it? No way. Why not? Do not do it. Well, you know why because uh you can you can instead use those same 25k points at the uh the grand high kawaii which you stayed at recently and loved i did i did it was

fantastic i wouldn't in a million years consider transferring ultimately you would be absolutely insane to transfer your chase points uh i mean maybe maybe, I guess if you're short, like 2K. Right, right, right. I'd actually go so far to say, I think this is primarily a great opportunity if you're sitting on 25K certificates, like either the travel package five-night or seven-night ones or a bunch of those credit card 25k certificates that's where you're getting you know the best value by booking this this Sheridan in advance and and I think that the key also is to keep your plans flexible enough so that if it turns out the construction isn't done by the time you're ready to go, you have a backup plan.

Or if you read reviews before you go and the new Sheridan isn't any good, you know, then you'd want some sort of backup plan too. Well, right. And you also need the backup plan in case you just get Bonvoyed in some way and, you know, your reservation gets lost or your points disappear or whatever it might be. I mean, we keep hearing all these horror stories from bonvoy and i think that's that's my other reservation with booking this place so i i'll agree with you if you've got a seven night cert or a five night cert seems to me like a great way to use it love kawaii and uh and truly there's

so much to do and see and it's just a beautiful island that whatever room you end up sleeping in probably won't matter all that much. If you want a nice place, go to the Grand Hyatt Kauai because it is beautiful. It's very nice. But, you know, that said, I would say if I had a seven-night cert that was limited to 25K a night, I would definitely consider using it there, except for all the problems that Bonvoy keeps having. I mean, are you surprised that Bonvoy is still having these problems? Are you over it and ready to move on? Are you finding your experiences are better than others? Do you think people are just complaining because they're complainers?

Is it just noise around the edges as they say? Have they smoothed this out or is Bonvoy still a disaster in your opinion? Yeah, I'm going to say something controversial here, which is I think that it's time to give Bonvoy a break and, and, and maybe consider saying that, that Bonvoy isn't a dirty word anymore. I mean, give them a break. They've had a year to work out all the kinks

from this merger, and still we're getting stories each day from people on Twitter and comments on our posts that keep running into Bonvoy problems. Why is it time to give them a break? Well, so I've been a longtime Marriott elite. I started about seven or eight years ago. I did a challenge to get to platinum and then I've stayed platinum or the equivalent all that time. Usually by buying back status over the years. But anyway, I've had a lot of experience with Marriott program. And so the one thing, yes, they screwed up really, really bad with their technology and their customer service for the past seven months or however long it's been. I'm going to take issue with it being past tense, screwed up instead of are still screwing up, but let's find out why. But my personal experience, despite all that has been that they are better, considerably better

now in many ways than they were before the merger, before they became Bonvoy. The program is better. Like, so just to give just one little example, at resorts, it used to be as a 50-night elite or even a 75-night elite, you didn't get free breakfast. Or very few perks at resorts. Now you get full free breakfast as your welcome gift choice, which you'd be crazy not to take that, by the issues we hear about every day, including the stuff that you reported earlier in the week in your Almost Spawned Void post, are things that are not new and are not unique to Marriott. It's just that whenever anything goes wrong, Marriott's biggest problem is they gave a name.

They created a name that we could give to everything that goes wrong, and it makes it more salient. But the truth is, for a lot of people, I think the program is actually better than it was before. And so, yeah, it's time to give them a break. Well, okay. So breakfast at resorts. I agree. That's nice. That's a good benefit to have. And in some places, the recognition for elite status has been quite good.

I'm staying right now at the domes of Alunda and I didn't receive a room upgrade, but I did receive, and every platinum members apparently receive a vouch upgrade, but I did receive, and Platinum members apparently receive a voucher for a free meal at the restaurant, not including drinks. So there have been some nice perks like that along the way for Platinum members I've found. So there are some things that Bonvoy does well.

There's not, I'm not gonna argue that Bonvoy is a terrible program. It's not. However, I think that when you say the same kind of problems happen with everyone, that just doesn't seem true to me. I've never canceled with a free night certificate through IHG or Hyatt and not had the certificate pop back into my account. It's never happened to me. I've never heard about that happening to anybody else. Have you? Well, I could have sworn it was one of the reader comments on your post that said that it happened to them with Hyatt.

Maybe it was. Maybe I glossed over that or selectively forgot it. But I don't remember reading that kind of complaint before. And yet these days, it seems to be just kind of a common thing that's happening. And in my case, I was lucky. I was able to get it fixed right away. But Richard Kerr on Twitter there was like four later, and they still didn't have it fixed. He finally canceled his reservation. And then the next day, they supposedly had the certificates again. And at that point, you'd already changed plans. And I feel like we keep getting those stories. And I think my complaint with Marriott Bonvoy has been that there is no way for people to get those complaints addressed.

There's no central contact person or group or place because you contact the Twitter team and they often say they can't do anything or you need to call and you call and you escalate it and this and that. You still don't hear back for days. Whereas I feel like typically when I've had a customer service issue with Hyatt,

for instance, it's almost always fixed on the phone in one call or the Twitter concierge. That doesn't seem to be happening with Marriott. And at this point, they're big enough. They've got enough market share. My goodness, you'd think they could handle these customer service complaints, no? All right. I give it to you about the customer service, especially the contrast with Hyatt.

Hyatt does it right. And the fact that the Hyatt concierge on Twitter is able to do things for you, whereas you're right. My biggest frustration probably with Marriott is that they don't enable their reps, at least, you know, over Twitter to do anything as far as I can tell, other than to respond in unhelpful ways. But still, I think Hyatt's actually, it's sad, but I think Hyatt's actually the exception in the big chain world rather than Marriott being the exception. That's been my experience. I haven't had particularly good experiences with that sort of thing outside of Hyatt. That might be true. I think that there are two things that play with Marriott. I think first of all there's the fact that they took on all the Starwood elites who were

used to a program that was really good with customer service and used to something better. And you might say that Marriott has improved but it hasn't. I don't think you'd even argue that it's improved to the point where it's as good as Starwood was. Maybe you would argue with me on that but I don't think you would even argue that it's improved to the point where it's as good as Starwood was. Maybe you would argue with me on that, but I don't think so. It's at least equal to how it was before the merger. So, yeah, you know, maybe. Which is not saying much, I agree.

Right, right. So I think that that's a big part of the issue, too, that it hasn't improved. And at this point, taking on that huge market share, the amount of resources that Marriott has, I think people would expect it to have gotten more significantly better and more consistent. I think that people are finding that it's not consistent. And that's one of the things you look for if you're going to give a program your loyalty and stay 50 nights a year or 75 nights a year, you want consistency, right? And at this point, you can count on breakfast at most places, but you're not going to get it at five or six brands, and you're only going to get a $10 voucher at this other brand. So there's very little consistency. And you would think at this point, they could at least iron that out. And then, like we said,

the customer service issues, I just don't think there's a good excuse other than laziness at this point. Or I shouldn't say laziness, a lack of desire on corporate's behalf to fix that. Because you would think that enabling your people to make changes or to be able to be helpful should be a rather simple thing. Though I'll agree with you that in most of the world, I feel like customer service and most of the travel world is uh we find ourselves disappointed in it now and then um hyatt being a good exception i don't know i think that generally speaking i'm an easy to please customer but man i see the stories that people keep posting about different ways they've been bonvoid and i still sympathize with them even if

you don't lastly would you feel different if you were one of the people who got the fifty dollar or hundred dollar uh gift card that they were sending out? I didn't get one, by the way. That is good that they're making some sort of an effort. I will give them that. I feel like there are some efforts like that, but I would much rather have seen them invest that money in a call center full of reps that are empowered to do something than give out the $50 gift cards because that'll be nice for five minutes when it covers half of your room for a night

or a quarter of your room or whatever the case might be. But the times when you need help, being able to get ahold of someone who can help you are much more important to me. And in my case, luckily this week, I was able to get that. I thought I was going to be fun void on that one, but I was able to get somebody who fixed the problem

and that was a pleasant surprise. So I hope that there's more coming, Mary, if you're listening out there. I hope that there's more of those pleasant surprises coming. To love, Mary, you have to also love like call center roulette where you have a one in six chance of getting someone who can help you. And I really had very little faith that that was going to happen. And then I had even less faith when she told me that my certificate was restored and that it just might take a while for me to be able to see it online. I was thinking, oh, OK, yeah, sure. Right, it's back. But sure enough, it was. But I look at things like that also that, okay, IT issues happen to

everyone, and being able to fix it is what matters. So in the end, I guess Marriott got that one right. But on the flip side, I say, that's obviously not an issue that's unique to me. The rep understood how to find my certificate without me even mentioning which hotel it had been attached to and how to bring it back from the dead. So there's obviously an IT solution to that. You would think that it would be, I don't want to say easy because I'm not a computer programmer and I couldn't do it, but easy enough for Marriott to get that fixed so that it doesn't happen. Because right now I look at it and I see people with four or five, six Marriott cards are going to lose a certificate at some point because they're not going to realize it was attached to a canceled reservation. Yeah, yeah.

One last mention in favor of Marriott. You know, those sweet night awards that you can get at 50 nights elite status and again at 75. So people who used to get those under the old SPG program routinely complained about how they never worked. I've heard that over and over again. Right, right. I have to. I've now used them twice at legacy Marriott, not SPG properties. So that never was an option before. Both times it worked very well. So it seems like the legacy Marriott properties did not get the memo from the legacy SVG properties. They should be hard to use. Yeah, you know, I'm debating whether or not to pick those when I hit 50 nights, because I'm going to have 50 nights by the end of the month. And I'm debating whether to take five nights to

try to make my way to titanium or five elite qualifying nights. That is, that the end of the month. And I'm debating whether to take five nights to try to make my way to titanium or five elite qualifying nights. That is, that's one of the options. Once you've hit 50 nights to, to get five extra elite qualifying nights where the five sweet night upgrades, I'm really having trouble deciding between the two.

Should I go for titanium or should I, should I stick? Well, I mean, if, if, if you're close to titanium and five nights would put you over, then that's a no brainer because you would get to the 75 nights and then could pick sweet night awards at that level. Right.

But you're probably not. It's probably not that crystal clear, right? Like you might be like, well, I might make it anyway. Right. I mean, I'm going to be at 60, I want to say, or no, I'm sorry, 55 right now without anything else booked yet. And so if I took those five extra, I'd be at 60, one meeting and I'm at 70. And then I'm, you know, between now and the end of the year, I'm sure there'll be at least five nights that'll come up that'll put me at 75. That's assuming I take the extra five elite qualifying nights so that math is assuming i take the five elite qualifying

nights rather than the upgrade awards uh so it's a little tougher for me to decide otherwise i'd end up 65 nights and keep my sweet upgrades i haven't decided yet yeah yeah that's a tough one speaking of not being able to decide capital one we, we got the transfer bonus to Air France right now, KLM. Right, so just a little background. So this is nice. This is their first transfer bonus that puts them sort of above their normal transfer ratio. Just to explain what I mean by that is most Capital One transfer partners are two Capital One miles to one and a half airline miles. But they have a few of them where it's two to one. So it's really bad.

And the first two Capital One transfer bonuses that they offered brought those two to ones up to par at two to one and a half, if I'm remembering correct. So it just sort of brought them to reasonable is a way of thinking about it. Right. Now this month we have transfer bonus to Air France, which Air France was already a two to 1.5 ratio. And so now it gives you a two to 1 point eight or very close to one to one. So this is the first transfer bonus to get excited about. And obviously, I think you would agree if you see a good use for Air France miles that, you know, you're ready to book. You might as well take advantage of the transfer bonus while it's here. Right. Well, yeah, for sure. If you see a good use, it's definitely worthwhile.

Although, I don't know. Do you know what the transfer time is to Air France from Capital One? Is it instant? That's a good question. No, I don't know. I'm not sure that it is. I think all of the Capital One transfer times, at least when you go to transfer, it says it'll take a while,

which that's common. A lot of the different transferable currencies will say a transfer could take up to six weeks or something like that, even though most of them are instant for most currencies. But with Capital One, I'm just not sure yet whether or not it's instant. Assuming that it is instant, which we'll have to double check on that. But if it is, then I would say, yeah, if you see an opportunity, of course, you have to go for it. But the question then becomes, should you speculatively transfer your miles to Air France KLM right now to Flying Blue right now with the transfer bonus, figuring, well, I mean, this is as good as it gets, right? I mean, you're getting almost one to one on your transfers. So almost two miles per dollar spent on the Capital One Venture card. Is it worth transferring speculatively?

And then second question, is the Capital One Venture card a viable everyday card for people now? Is it relevant again in the sense that, you know, is this a card that people should be considering more? Yeah. So, yeah, to answer the should you prospectively transfer, I, you know, normally, I say no, almost all the time to all of these kind of things. In this case, I'm going to say, I think there are people where that might be the right answer. And so, first of all, if your home airport is an Air France destination, so Air France flies out of your home airport, and if you have a significant Delta presence from your home airport, I think it's worth considering. Let me, I did a little bit of math before, before, before we talk today. I did a little bit of math. That's, you know, when, when, when you say that, I think people

say, oh, okay, there's going to be some math there. All right. What's the little bit of math? Yeah. So, so what I did is, is Air France has some really good ore prices to Europe, especially, well, it's weird. So depending on where you're coming from, they have different prices to where you're going to. And usually it's cheaper to go past France, to go past Paris, than to stop in Paris. So I looked at, for example, Detroit to Budapest. You might be looking at that nowadays. Right. And if we look at a time when, well, I just picked a time in the fall, just randomly defined a word space. And if I looked at how many points it took for a round trip coach, how many air France miles plus add in the fuel surcharges and then say,

how many capital one miles would it take to book that given the, given the current, um, transfer bonus, right? Right. So so, you know, if the round trip was something like, I actually can't even remember off the top of my head, but let's just say it was it was like 30,000 miles round trip or something like that. 34, maybe um then uh you know then i said okay divide that by the 1.1 transfer bonus kind of thing to get how many or multiply by the 1.1 to get the um number of capital one miles needed to transfer to air france uh and then how many Capital One miles to pay for the fuel surcharges. So here's some numbers I came up with that for the dates,

for the random dates I was looking at in the fall. Let me just interrupt you to make sure that everybody that's listening understands what you're saying. So Greg's going to figure out the number of miles because of the transfer bonus. So however many miles you would need in Air France is going to figure out the number of miles because of the transfer bonus. So however many miles you would need in Air France, he's going to figure out how many miles you'd have to transfer. But then also, because you can redeem Capital One points at a value of one cent each,

he's also looking at the fuel surcharge price. You're going to figure out how many more miles that adds at one cent each so that you can cover the whole thing and not pay a dime out of pocket, right? That's right. That's right. And this way, I can compare the point prices to cash prices. Very straightforward. So in this case, round trip to Budapest and economy from Detroit, about $700 in Capital One points versus the best price I could find for the same dates, $900. So a little bit of savings, I mean, significant savings, but still not, you know, blow your mind savings. That's if you fly across the pond on Air France metal, as opposed to Delta. If you fly Delta, it's a bit more expensive. Air France charges more for the Delta flight, $810 total. So the fuel surcharges were a bit less, but the, because the miles were

more, came to $810. But still, it's a savings over paying cash. One of the overlooked things is if you pay cash you're stuck probably in something like economy um and with no changes allowed when you book with air france miles though they have approximately a 50 change fee uh you know cancel or redeposit fee so So you're getting almost a fully refundable ticket for, in those examples, $700 or $810. Now, what about business class? I looked at just one way. Business class, again, Detroit to Budapest, it would cost me $820 using the prospectively transferring points to Air France and then paying fuel surcharges about $200 and fuel surcharges all with Capital One Miles. $820 worth of points to do that. I didn't look at business class fares for that time because, I mean, one-way fares tend to be ridiculous anyway. But you know for business class, that's an incredible price yeah yeah absolutely one more one more number

that i found uh looking at the promo awards going on right now air france promo awards um houston to budapest so houston is one of the cities um You could go Houston to Budapest and economy 23,000 Air France miles round trip. You know, factoring in the transfer bonus and fuel surcharges and everything. We're talking about $460. That's it. That's that's that's a terrific value. I mean, that's hard to beat. Yeah. And that's versus the best price I could find at that time. And this was for travel in August, $11.38. So it's, yeah, a huge, huge discount when you can take advantage of Air France's monthly promo awards. Right. So you're talking like, like what, not even a little more than half of the welcome bonus on a venture card than getting your round trip from Houston to Manchester there, right? Houston to Budapest, only 23,000 round trips.

So it's, it's, it's, it's less than the, less than half. Yeah. So you can book two people with a 50K signup bonus. Right. Right. Yeah. That's, oh, well that was 23K. Sorry the before the bonus conversion so not considering yeah with the trip with the uh transfer bonus i think you're probably right that it's yeah yeah it's about um maybe yeah maybe 80 i guess of a of a welcome bonus but that that's that's still great being able to get round trip to Europe for not a penny

out of pocket using the bonus on that card. And then you look at spending 8,000 points a night at that new Hyatt in Budapest or 13 or 16, you can get a pretty terrific vacation on the cheap there. Yeah, yeah. Of course, if you're only doing Capital One, if the Venture Rewards is your only card, which I've argued separately, if you only want one card and you're really not willing to juggle more than one, Venture ought to be one of the ones you consider now that they have transfer partners. But if you did that, then the Hyatt thing is not really an option for you. Right, because the cash rates are exorbitantly expensive. Although you say other than buying the points, you shouldn't dismiss that because as a reader brought up, I think you'd be able to buy enough points to stay there with the most recent bonus anyway. I think that may have expired stay there with the most recent bonus anyway.

I think that may have expired already, but the most recent bonus on buying high at points was $140-ish a night, I think is what it came out to, that it would cost you to buy the points to stay there. Oh, is that right? Yeah. That's so cheap. It is. So again, we're talking a very limited number of points with Capital One to get yourself a pretty terrific vacation there. I don't know if I would transfer prospectively, though. I think that that's a great example, and it's a good example of using those venture points to great value. And part of the reason why,

honest to goodness, the venture card is the one literally at the top of my wallet right now. And I know that sounds crazy because it's a card that I never would have put at the top of my wallet right now. And I know that sounds crazy because it's a card that I never would have put at the top of my wallet, but it's the one I've been using for everyday spend lately, in part because I have this magical ability to get a better deal from my points with Marriott gift cards that for some reason, and we don't know why, some people have this extra special gift card redemption area in their account. So I'm able to get a $900 gift card for 64,000 and change Capital One points. The interesting thing is you can combine points with anybody too. So any of my family members could send their points my way in order to make a redemption like that too. So it's nice being able to combine the points with other folks. I do have family members that exclusively use the

Capital One Venture card. So that's something that, you know, might appeal to them. But anyway, what I was going to say, though, is I still don't think I would do it prospectively. You know, if you have a good use, great. If not, I would hold off because I'm encouraged by these transfer bonuses. I mean, we've seen a couple already. Now we're finally seeing one that's a little bit more attractive. I'd hold out. Maybe there'll be a partner that works out better for you with a transfer bonus next month or the month after or the month after that, because Capital One at this point really seems to have shown some commitment to doing these transfer bonuses. I was a little skeptical

in the beginning as to whether or not they'd be worthwhile, but if this is an indication of more to come, then that's encouraging. And when you look at the other major currencies that do these membership rewards and thank you points frequently do transfer bonuses. And Air France is one of the common partners that offers these transfer bonuses. But then also you've got Virgin Atlantic that commonly gives transfer bonuses, although I don't think Virgin Atlantic is a Capital One partner. But go through the list of Capital One partners, and you'll see there's a couple of others. LifeMiles in particular, I would probably hold out and see if I see a LifeMiles transfer bonus, because I've just been finding great value out

of Avianca LifeMiles lately. So I think if you've got a use for it now, great. But I don't think I would recommend prospectively transferring. I don't think you're crazy to do it. I think you made some good arguments as to why. So I'm not going to say that Greg's nuts on this one, but I don't think I would recommend it. I'd hold out because maybe something better will line up for you. Yeah, actually, I have to admit, I tried to convince myself so that I'd have a position to argue with you, but I wouldn't do it either, personally. I think that by locking yourself into Air France, you are locking yourself out of many other opportunities that might come along. So don't do it unless you're pretty sure you're actually going to use those Air France miles,

is my advice. Yeah, yeah, that's what I would say, too. And I'll say, by the way, I didn't realize, and contactless is the next thing that's coming i guess right with the credit cards to be able to just tap your credit card to the screen to the terminal and i haven't used that in the united states with any of my cards i'm sure there's probably places that accept it but i haven't actually tried um but since i've been here in europe the last couple of weeks at some point somebody just i went to pay with my venture card and somebody just grabbed it out of my hand and tapped it. And I was like, Oh, I don't think, Oh yeah, it does work. So apparently the, you know, that functionality is, is working on at least that card. I haven't actually, I tried to do it

with one other card in my wallet, but I wasn't sure why it would work. Yeah, no, that's a good point. And, and another, another point in favor of Marriott Bonvoy is the Bonvoy cards have that. My wife loves using that when she's in Europe as well. And it just, you know, even though you're not maybe getting the best return on your spend, it's a pleasure to use as opposed to the, oh, this is an American card, you're going to have to sign. And then she goes looking around for a pen because they don't usually have people have those kind of cards that's right it's a nice change absolutely yeah i ran into that problem in australia actually a couple of years ago now because everybody was using the tap to pay and i at that point a couple years ago now i don't think i'd even seen it or knew about it and so my card

had to get inserted and then i had to sign and. I was at an outdoor event. It was an outdoor movie theater in a park. And the guy didn't have a pen. Nobody around had a pen. He had to stop the whole like checkout process. There were people behind me waiting. So he could go look for a pen somewhere so I could sign this piece of paper that surely is going to get thrown out somewhere anyway. But so yeah, the contact list was kind of nice. Yeah. Well, good topic. All right.

Hey, it's been great talking to you. I need to get out there and go climb a dune in the sunshine. And I gotta go hit the beach still while I got some sunshine. Yeah, let you get back to your vacation. I can't wait to hear about it. I imagine I'll read about it in Frequent Miler pretty soon. Maybe a thing or two. Yeah. Great talking to you. Good talking to you too. Take care. Bye.