Frequent Miler on the Air - Is manufactured spending dead? | Ep52

Episode Date: June 27, 2020

Like, subscribe, & comment! Links in timestamps below. 00:38 Reader Feedback: Facebook comments & changes to our group 8:31 Pandemic Vacation: How does Greg feel about it in hindsight? https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/pandemic-vacation-is-it-safe/ 21:57 IHG Points: Are they now worth more? Did Greg's methodology make sense? Is basing RRVs just on big city US redemptions a reliable way to determine the RRV? https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/what-are-ihg-points-worth-now-that-they-have-dynamic-pricing/ 38:18 Is manufactured spending dead? Gift Card Mall portal changes https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/giftcardmall-cap-reduced-from-60k-to-2k-for-cash-back/ 41:22 Plastiq becomes a bad play https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/another-hit-to-ms-plastiq-fees-increasing-to-2-85/ 47:44 MS time machine: a trip down memory lane. First up: US Mint coins 50:00 Vanilla Reloads 51:55 Visa Gift Cards Got PINs 52:42 Load Bluebird with VGCs 54:46 Golden Age of Redbird 1:00:19 Flipping the script: Easy purchase, but tough liquidation

Welcome to Frequent Miler on the air. This week we're going to be covering manufactured spend. Is it dead? So we'll be exploring that question. That's the main topic for today, but we've got more goodies for you than just that. And first we have Nick's favorite, feedback time. Reader feedback. I love to get the feedback and find out what the readers have to say. So do I. Or listeners or viewers as the case may be. Yeah, and, you know, I usually pull out the feedback a few minutes before we get together for this,

so I never know, you know, half an hour before this, what the feedback's going to be either. This week, the feedback comes from Twitter. On Twitter, we got a post that called us out. It said, it's kind of sad. FrequentMiler allows stuff like this to happen on his Facebook group. And the like this was a screen grab of a conversation on our FrequentMiler Insiders Facebook group where the conversation had devolved

into political name-calling, basically. Right? Right. So, you know, we always welcome feedback, but I want to take this opportunity to both mention procedurally what we would like to happen when people see this kind of stuff

and also to talk about what we've done to try to solve this kind of problem so we never intended to allow that sort of hate speech or really any political dialogue at all I mean that's not what we created that's not what we created the group for right I mean it wasn't right it wasn't to have political discussion or disagreement I mean really I wouldn't have envisioned. I mean, that's not what we created the group for, right? It wasn't to have political discussion or disagreement. I mean, really, I wouldn't have envisioned, I mean, maybe people disagree over whether a Hilton point is worth more than a Best Western point or whatever the case might be. But I guess I never really anticipated any disagreement in terms of talking about miles and points that would be serious. yeah but even if uh regardless of whether or not there's

disagreement we just don't want stuff unrelated to miles and points being debated in this group and um certainly not when it it heats up uh emotions the way politics does so um the proper way if you're a member of the Frequent Modeler Insiders group, there's a little like dots that if you hover over any of the comment and you can click it and it'll drop down a menu and one of the options is to report. That means you're reporting that comment to the moderators to us. Then we'll take a look and decide whether we want to delete it, ask the author to change it, whatever. Sometimes we just block comments altogether from that post.

We have various ways of tackling it. So that's what we want our group members to do. Let me talk a little bit about what we've done to try to reduce this kind of issue. And before you do, I'll say that's very helpful because, of course course we don't read every single comment in every single post every single day the particular post that came up there i think at that point had like 153 comments and i hadn't read all of them so right now the way to be able to let us know that like you said is to report it because it's just not always going to be possible that we will see every comment every day without reader help so we appreciate the help of of those folks who do report those things. And it happens. I mean, people report comments every day or two and all the time, you know, and so, and we take care of them as need be. So.

Right, right. But even with that, it's gotten to where, you know, our country's very divided. I don't think anyone, that'd be a shock to anyone. And so it's very common with various topics to lead to this kind of sort of shouting at each other that we don't really want already had rules in the group, like be nice and whatnot. We added a new rule. The new rule is to avoid political discussion at all. Okay, so we just made that explicit. The other thing we did is we have turned on post moderation. What that means is when someone creates a new post, so this isn't a comment, but a new post, it's not going to show up live immediately. The moderators will see that there's a new post waiting to be approved and we'll go in, take a quick look at it. Most of the time we'll just approve it right away. But some of the time we'll, you know, we'll take different various steps. You know, one step might be not to approve it at all because

it's not, it doesn't meet the rules of the group. Another step might be, you know what, this is good information, but we know it's going to lead to the kind of conversations we don't want. So what we'll do is we'll allow it, but turn off comments right away. And so we're kind of looking to do those two things to try to, you know, reduce the tensions that have been happening there. Right, right. And, you know, we certainly appreciate and respect that people have different opinions and that people feel passionate about what they feel passionate about. So certainly not trying to diminish the fact that, or diminish the value of people's opinions in that way. It's just that that's not relevant

to the reasons that we created the group. The reasons we created the group are for people to be able to share information, ask and answer questions, help each other, and generally have a nice environment. So there's a lot of room for that type of debate and discussion in the world, just in other places, it would be a better focus in other spots. So that's what we did. And I mean, I think so far, that's going okay. But like Greg

said, I think it's important to note here for those who are following along in our group that we turned on that post moderation, which means that we will have to manually approve a new post. But it still means that we'll need your help in reporting any comments on those posts if things, you know, kind of take an unexpected turn. And, and there is something that doesn't meet the rules of the group, which are pretty simple. I mean, it's like, be nice, don't advertise, no referrals, no politics, basically. That's it. That's it. Good job. That's it. That's it. Good job. That's it. So I got it memorized.

Pretty simple rules. Pretty simple rules. So if you see something that doesn't follow those rules, hit report so we know still, because we're not going to see every single comment still necessarily. But at least we have a little bit more control over knowing when the topics are posted that might lead to un you know, unproductive discussion, I guess. You know, some listeners might not have any idea what we're talking about. Just if you don't, and you are on Facebook, search for Frequent Miler Insiders and request to join. And all you have to do is answer a simple question and we'll let you in. So yeah, a lot of good content on there

that is shared by other group members and we're on there too. So yeah, lots of good stuff. If you're not already on there, get on there. Definitely, for sure. For sure, good stuff. So, all right, so that out of the way, the next question we have to ask ourselves is

what crazy thing did Citi do this week? So what did they do, Greg? This is a really weird week in that the crazy thing City did was that they don't seem to have done anything crazy. At least I'm not aware of anything. They didn't give us any material to work with. I thought they were our buddies. Right? I thought they were our buddies. Right? I thought they were listening.

After last week, when they listened to our previous week's podcast and then sent out emails as a result, I don't know. I thought they were paying attention. I thought we were in tighter than that city. I thought so, too. Maybe they feel like they can rest on their laurels. They were like, we helped these guys out, so we're done for a while. I don't know.

They can pick on somebody else this week, except nobody else does anything quite as crazy as cities. So it's kind of hard to find something comparable. Yeah. So anyway, no good crazy city thing this week. Sad. So I guess that brings us to the main topic, right? No, no, no.

I think you had some questions about my pandemic vacation. I did, I did. I did, you're right. I absolutely did. Yeah, so Greg wrote at the beginning of the week about pandemic vacation. I think the title was Pandemic Vacation, Is It Safe? Where he wrote about the vacation he took last week.

So how was vacation, Greg? Did you enjoy it? I mean, I read the post, but maybe not everybody listening has. So how was vacation? Where did you go? Just quick. Yeah, vacation was was awesome. We talked about this a little bit last week that that that I had a great vacation. I didn't talk last week on the podcast, though, about the COVID, you know, ramifications of the vacation. So in my post, I talked about, you know, what we did to try to stay safe, what it was like traveling in northern Michigan and the Petoskey, Michigan area,

and how good compliance was with the state rules. So things like that you have to wear masks inside in public places. Basically, I'll sort of boil things down to a couple things. One, the resort where we were staying at, the Inn at Bay Harbor, we really enjoyed our time there, but we really disliked the fact that even though they had signs everywhere saying you have to wear masks when inside, they did nothing to enforce it. So lots of people were walking around without masks. The other thing we didn't like, it's not really anyone's fault, but eating indoors anywhere, no matter how good they were with compliance, just didn't feel all that safe to us.

We did it a few times, but thought about it more and just realized that unless the restaurants have like an incredible filtration system in their restaurant, it, you know, the air is going to circulate in some way that that could potentially get you infected because all the diners are not wearing masks. And so if anyone's infected in there, I think, you know, the chance is reasonably good that you could get it. And so, so we just decided, you know, it's better to eat outdoors, basically, or get food to go and eat back in the hotel room, not in the hotel, you know, restaurant. Right, right. Yeah. So I caught a little bit of that in your

post. So I saw that you had done that, gotten some takeout and enjoyed a beautiful view with your takeout from the pizza place there. That was quite a sunset. So it looked terrific from those regards. So all right. So it sounds like you were slightly uncomfortable with the hotel end of things and the indoor restaurants pretty comfortable. Otherwise, would you go back to the same place? I know you love the Inn at Bay Harbor, and I'm sure that you'd love to go someplace else this summer, but would you feel comfortable now that you've kind of done it and had the experience going back there again, knowing that you have at least some slight discomfort with the hotel itself, would you go

back to that specific place? Yeah, I definitely would. So it's not really discomfort as much as I'm annoyed that they're not enforcing the rules. But you know, our way of handling it is just to avoid spending much time in the indoors around other people. So, and that's pretty easy because the whole hotel only has four stories. There are a number of stairwells. So you can, you can actually come into a stairwell from outdoors without going through the lobby at all and, you know, go right up to your, to your room. So, so and and then we were eating outdoors you know for any meals that we ate at the hotel after one initial indoor uh dining that we wouldn't do again so the main thing is what i would do is we were very lucky with weather and so what would i go back i'd

go i would i would reserve it with a cancelable rate, and I would watch the weather forecast like crazy, yeah, because I would not want to be there when the weather's bad. Now, that being said, I mean, you do always have the option. Most of the rooms do have balconies, and they're covered, so even if it's raining, you're probably okay to sit out on your balcony with food, but that would get old pretty quickly. And the other thing that could happen, though, is it could get cold and windy. And so, yes, it's summer, but it's also northern Michigan, and so you never know. We happen to have perfect weather, so being outside was great all the time.

But anyway, yeah, that's how i'd handle it i would look at weather forecasts right before going and cancel if it if it looks like it's gonna be bad and that makes a lot of sense it seems like a reasonable way to do it so now that you've done it i know that you got at least one trip theoretical booked this summer i think in august if i remember correctly from previous conversations here. Did this trip give you more confidence to take another type of a trip? Did it influence how you'll travel? I know this was a road trip. Are you more or less likely or the same likeliness to fly for your next vacation? And is it going to have some effect on the next property you choose and that sort of thing? there any way this influenced your your coming plans um i'm not sure that it really did so you know our our august vacation is is uh we're booked at the ventana big sir which you can't wait to do we

will have to fly to that one um so unfortunately so unfortunately, so we, we, last time we went out there, we flew Delta nonstop to San, um, San Jose's airport, which is, uh, it's still a couple hours away from, uh, Big Sur, but, um, that direct flight is no longer on the books. So, uh, so this time the best we could do is to San Francisco. So that makes the drive longer, but still think it's worth it to avoid extra connections, which is something that, you know, I've always disliked having extra connections,

but now it just seems like you're adding unnecessary interactions with a lot of people if you connect, if you don't have to. Sure. So no, still planning to do that um i would very happily you know we don't have plans to but i would very happily go uh traveling around michigan some more um and i feel particularly good about michigan because michigan as a whole has done a great job of locking things down and, you know, keeping the virus from spreading. Of course, if you let that out too much, then everybody from the other states nearby are all going to be driving in. I know.

I'm really worried about that. Those COVID monsters from other states really should stay away. I've been, you know, talking to the governor about setting up tanks at the border and just, but no, she's not, she's not for that. So no, I guess that would actually be against our constitution or something. Probably something like that. Well, so I know you read Lucky's reviews too. And so I know you linked to it in your post and I had read those before you published your post where he had talked about trip to Utah

and several different hotels. And I think if I remember correctly, he had said that at all of the hotels he had stayed at, he had seen at least two employees, if not more, that just weren't wearing masks. Now, I know you said that that kind of annoyed you. Are you concerned? Is there a different type of property that you feel like would be maybe safer than others? How can people go about this if they want to take a trip

and they're not sure where to stay or what to do about compliance with regulations? Is Airbnb something that makes more sense? I mean, I know I've heard a lot of people talking about vacation rentals and that sort of thing. Do you think that that's better? I mean, I know that you don't necessarily know the answer to this. Right. I mean, I would think it would be better because, you know, this seems to be an airborne spread, primarily virus. And I mean, yes, it can stand surfaces and everything. But I think my understanding is that the biggest danger is being near someone who's infected and with both of you indoors, you know, without masks on. And if you do an Airbnb where most of them are set up, so you can get in and out of the Airbnb without ever

having to talk to anyone in person. So that does sound like it would be a pretty safe way to go. Now the hotels, you know, like even this one, I didn't have to go to the front desk to get a key because they had refitted all their doors with the app thingy that lets you unlock the doors with the app. Interesting. So you unlock the doors with the app interesting which so i don't know how widespread that is but but i know they didn't have that until this year so i'm guessing that a lot of the chain hotels are moving that way so you know to the extent that you could get in and out to your room without interacting with others it seems to me reasonably safe i mean everybody has a different threshold though right of course

yeah yeah i mean i i you know i read your post and i read lucky's post and uh and to be honest i felt less interested in traveling i can get that so i you know i saw them both and i was like ah i don't know i'm not in that much of a hurry i guess i right anything i've been i've been looking at campers online saying, you know, maybe I should buy a camper and toss a trailer hitch on the back of my Highlander and do some trips like that. Because I am itching to get out a little bit.

And it seems like it might be an interesting idea. I'm not going to buy a camper today or tomorrow. Yeah. No, I do think I saw along those lines, I think I saw headlines somewhere about rvs being like extra popular right now which makes sense yeah yeah yeah it does it does so you know i'm kind of leaning more in that direction at the moment although although i'm getting out more here in upstate new york now because also new york has had a you know similar

kind of trajectory over the last several weeks anyway. So I am getting out and about a little bit more than I was. So it does does make me itch for travel a little bit more. But I think I'll hold off a bit yet. But all right, good. So so you got out there, got to experience it a little bit, you feel pretty comfortable with it. And you know, the fact of the matter is more and more people are getting out there. So I guess it's, you know, we're moving in that direction. And that probably feels good for a lot of people, the thought of being able to get out and check it out again. I'm still, I have some concern about all the people out there traveling, I guess, and the increase in transmission. But at the same time, you know,

I look forward to getting back to regular life at some point, too. So, so nice to see. I know, it's, it's tough uh decision everyone has to make separately um you know your case your wife is pregnant i i wouldn't be going out anywhere that where there's remotest chance in in your situation right you know you just don't want to even if the risk is tiny like why why at risk right risk? Right. Well, yeah. And that's the situation I guess I'm in. Although to be honest, you know, I've thought about that because people have said that too about my situation. I think even if my wife wasn't pregnant,

I would probably still be in this wait and see mode because I often look at it and I say, you know, I've traveled a lot over my lifetime, more than I ever anticipated I would have thanks to these miles and points. So if I set it out one year, oh, well, there'll be plenty of future years, I hope with lots and lots of travel. So I feel like my attitude on this has more been that I'm happy to collect some points for a while now, I know that I will eventually get back to it. And thankfully, since I'm able to collect these miles and points, I know there will be a lot of travel in my future eventually. So I'm, you know, I'm enjoying the chance to kick back and relax. I have not spent this much time

at home in years and years. Right, right. Well, and you know, I mean, being in upstate New York, the summertime is great there too, right? So it's a good time to be home. And it is, we were talking about that. You're sitting outside right now. Yeah, exactly. It's a good time to be home. It is. We were talking about that last week. So you're sitting outside right now? Yeah, I am, I am. And we were talking last week about how you said that, you know, the summertime is the time to be in Ann Arbor where you're from.

And yet, you know, you're always traveling during the summertime. So, you know, I think that that's one of the things I've appreciated about this a little bit. I've gotten to enjoy some of the time of year that I enjoy the most, but typically get away the most too. Right, right. One of the things I find interesting though, about you, you being more cautious about the virus than me is, am I imagining it? Or aren't you the one who

told me you never get sick? I don't, I never get sick. It's true. Yeah. I never, ever like, yeah. So why would this be different? I, yeah, I i have no idea but i guess i'm just being you know i i've known some people who've gotten it and uh and and been hospitalized so yeah you know i guess i'm more cautious because i feel like i know people in my age range that you know really kick their butts so um you know thankfully they they they recovered. So very fortunate for that. But I kind of feel like, eh, all I got to do is stay at home for a year. No biggie. You're okay with that.

Happy to avoid it. Yeah. So that out of the way, though, speaking of staying home and points and using them, you talked about IHG points this week. I did. You did a little look at the valuation of IHG points and determined, surprisingly, that IHG points are worth more now than they were before. Is that true? In COVID pandemic times, is it possible that IHG points became more valuable? Yeah, so a little background. Years ago, there was a search tool that let you search for hotels that were available for points.

And that tool provided data to us, summary data, that told us on average, this was I I think, exclusively US properties, on average, what the point values were across all the searches done on their website. So this was across programs, IHG, Marriott, everything. And so we use that data to say, okay, whatever their median point value was, meaning the cents per point that you would get by booking a hotel with points instead of the best price for cash, whatever that was, we would use that in our reasonable redemption values list. So we have a list for all the major hotel and airline programs.

We have a point value, a single value. We say the reasonable redemption value for this program per point is X. And so the idea is that there actually is no reasonable way to come up with a single value that represents what a point is worth because a point is, the value of a point varies tremendously by how you use it. I mean, drastically, right? A point can be worth almost nothing or it could be worth quite a lot, depending on how you use it.

So we've written a few times about that, that there's no reasonable way to really say that. At the same time, people need a number. There's sort of this conundrum where there's no possible way to have a number but you need a number you need a number because you make decisions all the time like you wrote about today do you use your hilton card or your marriott card for a certain type of spend if you don't have an idea what those points are worth to you how do you make how do you make that decision? How do you know whether 12x Hilton is worth more than 6x Marriott? You can't really know without some kind of valuation. More importantly, how do you avoid

making a bad decision, right? I mean, you know, because you don't want to be getting poor value for your spend every day. So, right, right. It's important so that you're not getting taken, so to speak. It is. It is. So this is a situation where we find ourselves in that we have to come up with a value to help our readers know what to do and help ourselves know what to do. At the same time, we know that there's no reasonable way to create a value. But we came up with this concept of reasonable redemption values. And the idea is we're going to come up with a point value that it doesn't tell you really what the point's worth.

It tells you the value at which it would be reasonably easy to get that much value or more. So we figured with hotels, that midpoint is, is that reasonable redemption value. If, if across a lot of different redemptions on average, you know, a point was worth one cent,

then it's reasonable to say you're going to get one cent or more value because half of the redemptions were that good or better. So that's how we originally generated those reasonable redemption values. That process years ago gave us IHG points being worth only, I think it was 0.57 cents each. So just a little bit over half a cent each. And now what I did, so we don't have that tool anymore. So I don't have that option. I would love to have a, you know, an automated system that would scrape like all different dates and all the different properties. But I was, and I do want to get to that, but I was kind of pressed for time in a way because I realized, well, I realized that IHG had just recently changed to dynamic award pricing. And so I realized that this number we've been using was no longer relevant. I mean, you know, I had no idea if it was even close.

So, you know, so I felt like, oh, I've got to come up with something right away. So, so what I did was I just, I kept with the U.S. market because that's what we had before. And that's what we've done. All of our RVs are based on the U.S. market, even our airline ones. And I identified, I think, seven major markets. So areas like basically city areas, New York, Miami, Houston, and so on. And what I did was I found the top three rated IHG properties in each of those areas based on TripAdvisor,

just sorting by TripAdvisor reviewer, scanned down until I found IHG properties, identified those. Then I looked up for three different set dates. What are the point values? And that's what I recorded. So it's probably not the best possible methodology, but at the same time. But quite a bit of data,

quite a bit of data collected. I mean, that's a good amount of data. And the reason I did that whole TripAdvisor thing, I knew going in, I'm not going to have as much data as like our original point values had. So what I'm going to do instead is, is look for the properties that people are likely to go to in those markets. Right. And I think a lot of people use TripAdvisor reviews. So, so they're more likely to go to those properties in my opinion than um than the others so anyway that's what i did and and uh and it was

kind of nice that to see that the new average that came up was about 0.1 higher so so we we have a new uh rv of 0.65 instead of the 0.57 and that about, I think it's like a 14% increase, something like that. So quite a nice little bump over the value it was before or the reasonable redemption value that it was before. And that's pretty surprising. I mean, looking at the fact that you looked at big city hotels in the time of pandemic when travel is way down and occupancy is way down and rates in many places are also way down. It was kind of surprising to me to see that he came up with a value that was higher than I would have expected. If anything, the value to have gone down just because cash rates, I expect. And I guess I haven't done a lot of searching because I haven't been looking to go to New York or Chicago or any of those types of cities right now, given the situation.

But I would expect that rates are lower in a lot of those places right now. So I was surprised. And I think it's a nice surprise because we often see IHG points go on sale for half a cent each. So looking at this new reasonable redemption value of 0.65, it makes it seem like quite a deal when you can pick up points at half a cent each at least potentially so compared to the paid rates so uh so that seems good but all that said i was not on board with your valuation of ihg you were just so complimentary a second ago i was i was there were some good there were good parts it was you know it's like a movie where you're like, there were a few good scenes, but overall, I didn't

But the overall direction side. The plot just didn't, you know, it didn't feel realistic enough to me. And that's my problem here. Okay. The plot didn't feel realistic enough. Yeah. I look at it now, IHG fans, call me out here. Let me know if I'm wrong. But in my mind, the average

IHG loyalist is somebody who is staying for work, most of the time, somebody else is paying for it, employers paying for it. And IHG properties fit comfortably within whatever the limits are in terms of how much they can spend on a hotel. So it fits the company budget in terms of where they can stay. There's always an IHG that's going to be like a Holiday Inn Express or Candlewood Suites or whatever that's going to be conveniently enough located so that it'll be near where you need to be. And if the employer is paying for it anyway, you may as well pick up as many points as you can so you can go on vacation with the family. I picture that IHG loyalist as a practical person that says, you know what,

I don't care that there's no hotel breakfast because my company is going to give me a per diem for breakfast anyway. And I can go to McDonald's and pick up a McMuffin and a coffee and I'm good to go and I'll pocket the rest of the per diem. So I look at the IHG loyalist as somebody who says, you know what? Wherever the family wants to go on vacation, Cancun, Jamaica, go see Mickey Mouse at Disney World, there's going to be a holiday inn with a water slide for the kids. And so I'm going to be able to use points for that. I picture IHG Lois as people who are traveling on business and then looking to take a family vacation. And maybe I'm wrong, but I'm thinking that they're more likely to be using their points towards resorts and particularly resorts in like summertime, popular, beachy type destinations, because I picture people who are mostly interested in going to larger cities

as probably looking for a loyalty program and a hotel style that offers more of the services that you would want if you're looking for glamorous trips to New York and whatever, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, I would picture you're going to want to probably stay at a place that's generally better located even perhaps than the IHG properties and is going to have more full service and benefits. So I could be totally wrong, but I would expect that IHG points are more often used towards

those resorts or at least equally as often as people are going to use their IHG points to stay in Denver. I mean, I don't know. When was the last time you used IHG points to stay at a hotel in Denver? You might stay at an IHG in Denver if that's where you're going for business, but you haven't been saving up your points for an IHG in Denver probably, right? I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Well, don't forget people love their Kemptons,

and you can use your points at Kemptons. That's true. And that was the top. Kemptons fans are another crowd. You guys are a whole other crowd. But it's relevant to this because that was the top. That was fans are another crowd. Well, but it's relevant to this because that was the top brand by far that showed up in my data set, you know? So in some cities like in,

in Chicago and Seattle, because the holiday inn is never going to be your nicest place to say, you know? Well, actually that's not true. There are, there were some cities where a holiday inn or a, uh, There were some cities where a Holiday Inn or a Cano Woods or whatever it was,

was like the highest rated IHG property in the city and even high rated overall. But you're right, that was unusual. So I should have added what? I think you should have had some resorts. I think the data you collected was good. It made sense to the different range of dates i just think i would have liked to have seen at least two or three or preferably four or five resort locations like yeah no i i you know a a cancun or a dominican republic or something like that i know that most of our reasonable redemption values

are focused on the u.s market and i think that makes sense. I just don't picture IHG points mostly being used in that way. And or IHG points perhaps are being used more so on road trips and that sort of thing, because there are often IHGs in places that are going to be between point A and point B. Maybe I'm wrong. IHG people tell me if I'm wrong. I just don't think that you guys are all redeeming your points in New York, Denver, Houston, Miami, and Los Angeles. So I feel like that isn't necessarily representative. Yeah. So in the past, part of the justification behind using U.S. data for our RVs across programs, not just talking about IHG, but was that we had read that most

award redemptions are domestic US-based award redemptions. And most of that we get from, or I got from Gary at View from the Wings. So Gary, if you're watching, give us a call and we'll put you on live, Even though the show isn't live. Let us know what you think about IHG in that regards. Cause I don't know. I'm curious. I'm curious. Yeah.

I don't know. I don't know what the data is on that. I'd be very curious with IHG, but I, like I said, I picture that being more of like the, a lot of family resort style properties in a way that's different than like, you know, Marriott has resorts of course, and Hilton has resorts, but I, I have the impression of IHG resorts as being the more family friendly kind and, you know, Hyatt is perhaps having more of the resorts that are, obviously they have the adults only brands, but, um, but being less.

Well, you know, I think if, if we added, uh, Orlando to the, to the, to the city list, I think we'd get some resorts in there probably. You would. And we'd be able to see whether the point values look very different. Because if they don't, then maybe we could just say, well, what we've got is good enough. Maybe they don't. Maybe they aren't any different. Maybe it is similar. I don't know. And I felt like that was a key piece that was missing for me on that. I feel like if you've done a Hyatt in big cities, I mean, that's where Hyatt is, right?

I mean, generally speaking, Hyatt's in big cities. So it makes sense to me that you would do big city locations with a Hyatt, even though of course there's the Ventana, Big Sur, and there are some properties. That's not Hyatt's focus. Hyatt's focus is being in those big cities. So I feel like, I feel like IHG's focus is different.

So I feel like I'd like to see that in the next iteration. I'd like to see at least Orlando added. I can give you that. Next iteration, we will add resorts. Just because I mean, I feel like vacation is a time when people want to use their points, right? And so I think that's a key component. Yeah. So there you go go there you have it although i i think that both of us last time we used our ihd points oh no that's not true last time i used it last time we use them in america

um was that a intercontinental in a city right the minneapolis i i mean i don't i'm trying to figure out whether or not that was the last time I used. I don't think that was the last. Cause I mean, I think last summer we went somewhere where I used them. All right. Whatever. I guess I did use them at an intercontinental in Minneapolis. It is absolutely true. It was a good, I think that, I think that that particular property was on the list too.

I think it made the list. Oh, was it? Yeah. I mean, I think so. If I'm not sure off the top of my head yeah my son loved watching the planes land and take off there so i would totally stay there again just for him to sit in front of the window and that place was good with upgrades too they give us these corner suites that you know just for having our platinum status it's just because we have credit cards sure was i mean sometimes you get it out of the park with ihg like sometimes you really do get very i don't mean to talk down on IHG in any way.

I just feel like their strengths in general aren't as often in that realm. Yeah. Although, you know, if we're going to talk down about them, give breakfast to high level elites and get rid of resort fees on awards days. Those two things I really want you to change. You're listening along. That would be nice, IH. I don't know if you have friends. Hey, Citibank, if you have friends at IHG, give them a call.

I know you probably don't because it's Chase that has friends at IHG. Maybe we'd like to make friends with IHG and woo them away from Chase, in which case give them a call. Tell them to listen to our podcast a little bit. Say two things. That's all we want. And I might actually stay forever after that. At an IHG.

Right. So IHG, there you go. So give you a hard time. All right. All right. So enough of that. So you wanted to talk about, you had a question, which is, is manufactured spend dead?

So we've had a couple things come up this week. Not really huge deals, but they're sort of straws on the back, right? Pretty big for some folks, that gift card mall thing. Gift card mall, you know, earning portal rewards on up to $60,000 a month and gift card spend. And now all of a sudden, starting the 29th of this month is going to portal rewards on up to 60,000 a month and gift card spend. And now all of a sudden starting the 29th of this month is going to be only on up to $2,000 in purchases a month. That's a big difference.

A remarkable difference. I mean, that's kind of like, let's play the funeral march. So just to step back a second for those who don't know what we're talking about. All right. Previously, we were able to buy $500 Visa gift cards from giftcardmall.com with very very low net fee on those gift cards because we would go through a cashback portal to buy the gift cards and so we'd get one percent back that way and that would cover a big portion of the fees and shipping costs and so the overall cost like wasn't much more than the 500 of the value of the gift card and so that was a great

way of using your credit card to turn your uh to to buy a gift card which is almost like cash because visa gift cards have pins and you can use them as debit cards and you can use them in certain circumstances to pay bills or to buy money orders. So that's the big picture and previously you were able to do up to $60,000 a month at gift card mall and get cash back for that $60,000. Now it's $2,000. You still have giftcards.com though, which as far as we know is still at 60,000, but it'd be kind of surprising if that doesn't lower as well, because they seem to be in cahoots in some way.

They do. They do. They seem to share ownership, and most of the time the things they do reflect each other. So yeah, I mean, and so, you know, this is going from an opportunity to manufacturers spend at quite high quantity and very low cost pretty easily from home. You know, a couple clicks of the mouse. So you're talking about spending $60,000 and getting back darn near $60,000 in gift cards. So, you know, a nice way to generate points for the people who are doing it.

And now all of a sudden, it won't be very attractive at all anymore. Because once you add in the activation fees and the shipping costs, it won't be nearly as attractive as it was. And certainly, you know, only being able to earn portal rewards on $2,000 per month, I guess that goes from being able to earn up to perhaps $600 a month in cash back down to now being able to earn about $20 a month in cash back. So that's a pretty remarkable change monthly. So that one hurt for the folks

who've been doing that monthly for a long time. The other one was that plastic, the bill payment service. It lets you pay most types of bills with a credit card for a 2.5% fee. But as of July 1st, it's going up to what is it? 2.85%. Yeah. 2.85%. Yeah. So that went up. I think that's a non-event. Is that a big issue? I mean, people said, oh no, this too. But I kind of looked at that and I was like, eh, I don't know.

Like at 2.5, it wasn't a good deal. It was just one of those things maybe you would do if you're having trouble meeting the minimum spending requirement for a new credit card, in which case it's well worth the 2.5%. If you have to spend $3,000 to get a big sign-up bonus and you pay 2.5% of $3,000, then it's probably still worth it for the sign-up bonus. And if it was worth it at 2.5%, it's probably gonna be worth it at 2.85 in terms of earning a sign up bonus and it's not worth it either way for everyday type situations so that wasn't a big deal to me right although you know there was at least one commenter who mentioned how what it does is it takes some cards out of play if you're using them to sort of buy points cheaply. So an example is the Citi Double Cash, which gets two thank you points per dollar everywhere indirectly.

You know, if you value, let's say you're willing to, well, if you use that card at 2.5 percent fee you're basically buying thank you points for 1.25 cents each right right and so now you're buying them for a little over uh one point four uh so so you know it just depends where your cutoff is so if if you're like well i would buy these points at at up to 1.3, but not higher, then it's cut you off from that avenue where it's suddenly like not a good deal to you, right? Right. But I agree with you that usually for most people, the best use for the plastic bill payment service is for meeting minimum spend requirements. And so like an example, you know,

you might look at a big, you know, big 100k offer that but it requires $15,000 spend. And so a lot of people that, you know, especially if you don't manufacture spend, $15,000 spend is just beyond what you're going to be doing, especially when it's a three month window. Sometimes it's a six month window to do it in. And so plastic is an easy way to like, you know, pay those big bills. If you have depending on what credit card you're using, you can pay rent or mortgage, but you could always pay things like if you, like I pay my son's college tuition you know i can pay it that way

so uh it's possible to get some big offers that you might not have been able to before amex too they're especially uh picky about not allowing manufactured spend or not wanting people to manufacture spend for the purpose of meeting signup bonus requirements. Right. They seem to be more attuned to that than manufacturing to spend like every day after you get your signup bonus. So for a lot of people, it might make sense to just pay a little extra with fees,

like with plastic to meet the minimum spend requirements, get the big payout, which more than overcomes the fee. Right. Right. And then, uh, you know,

put plastic aside until the next time you have something like that. Right. Right. And, and, you know, so when I look at it, like,

you know, the example you gave of a hundred thousand point bonus and you have to do 15,000 and spend. So even if the fee were 3% on that 15,000, you're talking about 450 bucks, right? So what did you say? What did I say? I just said that would be fine.

Fine, yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Because you're talking about a fee of like 450 bucks. But if you get 100,000 points that are worth 1,000 or $1,500, then the fee is reasonable. It makes sense. So the 2.85 will still make sense in that

scenario. Obviously, it's a bummer to pay a little bit more, but it will still likely make sense for the people that need it in order to fill the gap and meet the spending requirements for a new welcome bonus. So it's a bummer for it to go up a little bit, but it wasn't worth manufacturing spend if that was your total angle for most people. Like you said, the double cash, there are some situations where perhaps you're right. It's now priced people out. So bummer to see. So we've obviously been seeing stuff like that happen. So those two things happen. And we also saw this week that person to person payments on a number of platforms are now coding as cash advances. So for example, if you want to send money via PayPal or Venmo to

your spouse, your friend, your cousin, and you just do it as sending them money, not as buying goods or services, but rather just sending money to a friend, a number of banks are now coding that as cash advance. And the fact that a number of banks are coding it as cash advance would make me very wary to bother with any bank at this point, wondering when the other shoe will drop, so to speak. So I'd be not very enthusiastic about sending person-to-person payments anymore. Now, that said, if you're buying a good or service, then it won't code as a cash advance. And I don't see any rules in terms of what goods or services you can buy or can't buy, or there's no rule that says you can't overpay your friend for his baseball card from right so how do you go about doing that let's say you want to pay a friend

for a good or service um and it's probably for the same reason as we're talking about with plastic where you probably want to meet a minimum spend requirement right because you're going to pay the three percent fee or something like that to PayPal to do that. So how would you go about doing that? Do you know? You know, I have sent payments that way, not for manufacturing spend, but actually for buying stuff. But I don't remember what you have to click.

So there is a place in there. There's a box you have to check that says this is for a good or service. And then I think you do have to describe perhaps what good or service it's for, but there is a box to check for that. So you have to look at that when you're sending. Right. So check that box. Yeah. If you're sure to check that box. Running up spend, check that box. Okay, good. That's, that's a good tip.

What I thought this we should do for a minute. I think it would be kind of fun, is to take our DeLorean time machine back and go through the big history of manufactured spend, just like the big picture history. Big picture, yes. Yeah, I like it. A little trip down memory lane. Okay.

To go back before 2011 when I started into this hobby, the big deal was mint coins. Right. Well, back in the day. You know, I read about all this after it happened. Yeah. I was definitely not in the game yet. Were you in the game with the mint coins? No.

Well, I mean, the last bits of the mint coin deal were still sort of there. But by the time I would have done it, you know, once I'd learned enough to know what a great deal that was, it had completely gone. The deal was that the U.S. Mint was trying to get more of these dollar coins into circulation. And so they were letting people buy them online with a credit card and there were no fees, no shipping fees or anything. So people were buying, and I'm not exaggerating when I say millions of dollars of coins, and they were turning around and depositing them at their bank. Or in most cases, when people are doing that volume at many banks, because it takes a lot

of time to deposit that many coins and the banks don't love you when you do that. I mean, stop and think about that for a second. You were able to buy dollar coins for a dollar each with no shipping. So you just had dollar per dollar just cash money in the bank. You would just go deposit in the bank and then pay your credit card bill from your bank account. You know, I had a pickup truck back in the day and I had a UPS driver I knew. You missed out.

He would have just loaded it right in the truck for me if I told him, I tell you what, I made a mistake there. Well, there's a lot of people with lifetime American Airlines platinum status because American Airlines used to give you lifetime status based on miles earned, regardless of how you earn them. And so miles earned from the credit card counted. And so people would get high-level elite status just by doing that.

American Airlines stopped doing that. The Mint stopped doing what they were doing. So the next big thing was vanilla reload cards. We and I mean, frequent miler had found that that these things, these cards that you could buy at the time at Office Depot. And that's important, because you get five points per dollar, buying it with a certain chase ink cards, that they were sort of in some ways, almost like cash, I don't want to get into the details right now, but we were basically buying cash with a small fee. So every $500 card had a 395 fee, so tiny little fee.

And every credit card worth its salt, the rewards on it are worth way more than that point, almost 0.8 of a percent, right? Right. So even if you had a 1% cashback card, you'd profit by doing that, but most people had better than that. So that was a big deal for a while.

Then what happened was the company stopped allowing you to buy them with a credit card, right? So first it was Office Depot, and then CVS was the big national seller that allowed them. And for a while it was just completely open. You're allowed to do like $10,000 a day at CVS. And it was great. But then at some point they just cut it off you can't buy them with

cash anymore um mixed into that time period there was also PayPal had these my cash cards that were very similar same fees so lump that all together vanilla reloads and my cash cards um then the next the next big thing that happened and these overlap a little bit, the next big thing that happened, and these overlap a little bit, but the big, big thing that happened, if I remember right, it was in 2013, was all of a sudden Visa and MasterCard gift cards had pins. four digit pins and so they could be used as debit cards before that like there wasn't much point in buying visa or mastercard gift cards with a credit card because you just actually made it harder to to turn that into money somehow right because it was just now a card that had even more limitations than your credit card did but with a pin all of a sudden you could use it as a debit card and you could do all kinds of things with debit cards that make it more like money. Some places will let you pay bills,

even credit card bills with debit cards. And suddenly the gift cards were working for that. We were able to load the Bluebird card with these Visa and MasterCard debit cards, debit gift cards. And basically it opened up sort of a whole new era, I think, of manufactured spend where people, the particular techniques people use have changed over time. But one thing that's remained

constant, mostly, is the ability to buy money orders at certain locations with these debit gift cards. And that continues to this day. It continues to get harder and harder at various locations. So a lot of Walmarts don't allow it. If they see a gift card, they're going to stop you. A lot of places will do that, right? A lot of places, yeah. It's very regional. It varies from region to region,

and not even just region to region, but sometimes within one store. It varies from employee to employee, shift to shift in terms of what seems to be acceptable and what isn't. So yeah, I mean, there's a be acceptable and what isn't. So, so yeah, I mean, there's a lot of variants. And there's some areas where it's nearly impossible to do that, to buy a money order with a gift card. So and almost certainly in almost every instance, if you, you know, without your gift card and say, Hey, I'd like to buy a money order with this gift

card, the answer is probably going to be no in most places if you ask that way. So yeah, it's certainly become much more difficult and challenging. And again, it's regional. So in some places, it's actually not necessarily that hard, but in other places, it certainly can be. So yeah, the game has changed in that regard. There was definitely a time when you were hearing stories of people walking in with stacks of gift cards and walking out with stacks of money orders pretty easily in popular stores, and that seems to have changed, right? to that a little bit more but first just one more important piece of the history of ms manufactured spend is the brief golden age of redbird oh yeah yeah this one's always painful for me to hear about because i got in on this one like literally the day it shut down oh tell the story go ahead go ahead rub it in make me listen to it again how good it was. So Target had teamed up with Amex.

So Amex was the company behind Bluebird, which was a prepaid card that lets you, that I mentioned earlier, that you could load with gift cards and then you could actually, and there were no fees, and you could pay your credit card bills with it and things like that. So it was a very good instrument for manufacturing spend, but it required that complexity of like first you had to buy the Visa gift cards, then load them up at usually at Walmart and then pay your credit card bills. So there were a lot of steps involved and you did have fees on buying the Visa gift cards. So along comes Target, and they partner up with Amex and come up with a card that's just like Bluebird,

but it's the Target red card prepaid card. So it's different from the Target red card debit card or credit card, but it's their prepaid card. And it's just like Bluebird except with one. It had at the time one key huge difference which was you could go into target and load uh up to i think it was up to uh five thousand dollars maybe it was twenty five hundred i can't remember five five i recall and you could use a credit card to pay so so and there was no fee at all.

So you literally... This is like the mint coins, essentially, right? It was like the mint coins, but it weighed a lot less. It also... And it was much more limited. It was more limited, right. So with that $5,000 per month, I think, limit... Or maybe it was $10,000 per month, $ think, limit, or maybe it was 10,000 per month, 5,000 per day.

I don't know. But anyway, with that limit, like the way to grow more than that was to have additional family members have their cards. And you could go in and load each family member's cards. So I had like six different cards at one point I was loading up. And it was, it was a little complex for a while cause you couldn't sign up in every state. Right. Like,

so that was my problem. So I had to get it from somebody in Oklahoma or something on eBay and like re-register it and whatnot. And then by the time it was finally coming to my house, literally the day it came in the mail is the day that you posted that it was dead yeah yeah it was funny i mean an industry sprung up where people would buy these red cards for other people and ship them to them uh because they were only available in you know i don't remember how many let's say 12 select states or something like that so uh so you'd literally go to target use your credit card to to load up the target red card

go home log on to your target uh red card account and pay your credit card bill and none of that the whole cycle no fees no fees super easy um and that was great but that lasted about six months and then there were a few more months where you couldn't use a credit card, but you could use a debit card to load. And then they shut that down. And so then it became worthless. Yeah, unfortunately. And my excuse for those listening are saying, what do you mean you weren't doing that? My excuse is that Target for me is like a 70-mile drive each way.

So it's not a place that I was going to every day of the week. It's a place that maybe I'd going to every day of the week, you know, maybe, maybe I'd go to once a week at most. And so it didn't, to me seem worth it for a while. And clearly, clearly in hindsight, I realized that was a poor decision,

but at the time I thought, ah, you know, this is kind of inconvenient, silly me. So can I rub the salt in just a little bit more. But why don't you say the moral first? So what I was gonna say the moral of the story is that when you see an opportunity like that, don't wait until somebody reports that it's dead.

Go ahead and take advantage because it's not going to last forever. Enjoy it while you can. Don't wait until the last day like I did. Right. I remember some people actually saying, well, I'm not going to bother with this because I know it's going to die soon. Well, that's exactly the... That's exactly why you should bother with it. That's exactly why you should do it. Right.

All these things are going to die soon, so get on them while they're available, especially when it's this ridiculous of a deal. To rub salt in the wound a little bit, back then we were also able to, with a credit card, buy American Express gift cards $3,000 gift cards at less than face value because you were able to go through a cashback portal to buy them and that cashback more than covered any fees so we're

actually getting I don't remember how much net cash, but we were able to do this whole process and not only earn the credit card miles, but actually earn cash back as well because we then used the Amex gift cards to load up the red card at Target. Okay, so... So those those are target red card which we called which we called red bird because of its uh how much it was like bluebird um back to visa gift cards and money orders and that sort of thing um so so back in the day um it it wasn't that hard

to liquidate them so once the pins were available it was't that hard to liquidate them. So once the pins were available, it was actually very easy to liquidate them. There were a number of ways to do that. Not many things have been shut down yet. It was harder at that time to buy them at a cheap cost. Now that had flipped around completely in recent times with, you know, Simon Malls making gift cards available at very low cost in mall and now more recently online. And, and, and then the portals like, it didn't used to be that you were able to do like $60,000 of, you know, these gift cards each month and get cash back for them. So we've had sort of a, I think, a bit of a golden age of where it's been very, very easy to buy Visa gift cards at a very low cost with a credit card. much and much harder and um that's the part that you know when we talk about is manufactured spend

debt i don't i don't think that any of the things that happened this week are really relevant to the liquidation side am i missing anything there no i mean you skipped over when you're going through the you know the hall of shame so to speak of the things that have uh shut down i guess yeah what you jumped over is in the process of things becoming a little bit harder on the liquidation side there have been more and more limitations placed like company-wide for instance what walmart you can't buy more than now i guess what eight thousand dollars a day in money orders, only four swipes. And typically that means you're going to be limited to less than $8,000 in money orders. And even if you go to multiple stores, it's not going to make a difference because you're going to take your ID.

They started IDing people almost definitely for money orders over a thousand and in many places, even for money orders that are less than a thousand and then recording that information in MoneyGram and people from buying money orders so there's a number of different you know small wrinkles that have happened over time on the liquidation side um but all that said you're right this week's news only affected on the spending side and the spending side is you know still not dried up because there's still grocery stores that sell 500 gift cards and cards that earn nice bonuses at grocery stores. So that's still an avenue. And office supply stores, regular deals they're doing.

Right. Fee-free cards come out pretty regularly at Staples and OfficeMax. And depending on where you live, you might be able to buy larger quantities of those in stores. So I think the spending side is still there. It's the liquidation side that I think everybody's looking for that next great liquidation, right? Yeah, absolutely. And that's the part I'm not sure, you know, is it going to slowly over time just dry up completely? Or is it going to continue to kind of hobble along where everybody, I'd say the state of things right now are where in every area within the U.S., people who manufacture spend, you know, they kind of get to know from talking to each other what works, what doesn't. And when something stops working, they let each other know, and so on. And so it's, there's nothing we can do nationally to

say, here's what works. Because, I mean, one, I don't think there's anything that works uniformly everywhere. But two, if we publish it, it probably would stop working very soon after that. Right, right. Well, and, you know, on the one hand, it sounds like a lot of doom and gloom, but on the other hand, I feel like there are probably often opportunities that come around that people miss, you know, one that pops into my mind that I had totally missed until it was done and miles per day and posted the dead deal was, you know, for a while, the Alliant card was being able to send payments via like Google wallet or something with a guy who's registering as a debit card. And I think there was maybe no fee or very low fees.

So people were able to push that through and send direct person to person payments without a fee. And, you know, so I feel like that kind of opportunity probably will continue to come around in small spurts. But the fact is, you're going to have to know people in your area that are doing this to find out about those things as they happen so that they share those things that they find with you. Because those are going to be the unicorn things that last for a short period of time. And you're not going to probably hear about them published anywhere

until after they're gone. So that's your best bet, like you said. Right, right. And our advice used to be go to the travel conferences, get to know people and build up a network, right? That was not a 2020 piece of advice, was it? Didn't age well. Didn't age well.

Yeah, that would typically be the piece of advice. But obviously in a uh you know pandemic world not uh not so ideal someone was just asking us the other day if we'll be at the chicago seminars this year and greg said he probably would be assuming that you know it's going to be run in some sort of if it happens yeah if it happens and and it's going to be safe and i think that's a big a big big if. I think it's pretty unlikely, actually. Stefan from Rapid Travel Try is the organizer this year, and he asked me, you know, what would I need them to change to make me feel safe about being there? And short of there being a treatment or vaccine for the virus, you know, I told him I couldn't really imagine any, unless there was a way to have it outdoors, but that's.

So weather dependent. It's a weather dependent. He said that the venue is non-negotiable and that venue that it's at every year does not have much of any outdoor space. I couldn't see us. I can't imagine a situation where it feels like it would be safe under current conditions. Yeah, I mean, for me, it probably won't happen because like, you know, we have said that we are expecting a baby in my family in September. So trip in October to a conference school, people who travel a lot doesn't probably seem to me like a responsible thing for a parent to do with a newborn at home. So I probably won't be doing that. But at any rate, we'll see. And like you said, I think there's a chance that it might not happen. And those types of events in general are much less likely happening right now than they have in the past. So, you know, that's where it pays to get involved with Facebook groups

and stuff like that. And, you know, recognize who's in your area and those groups, the people who are vocal and to be active and active member of yourself and then potentially find your way into some of those circles of people who know. That's good advice. Yep, yep, yep. I don't think it's dead. It's not getting easier, but it's not quite dead yet. Right.

It seems like it's going to stumble around like a zombie for a long time yet. I think so. I think so. You just have to look harder for the opportunities. Nobody's probably going to shout them from the rooftops when you find them. So a lot of times learning what died

and what worked in the past is valuable though, because that will attune you to new opportunities. When something new comes around, you'll say, oh, that's kind of like that mint coin deal. You know, in fact, it's funny, just like a week or two ago in the Sunday paper, I was looking through the ads and there was this ad for a company that was selling $2 bills for $2 and they gave you a bonus quarter with your $2 bill. And I said, I laughed to myself and I was

like, oh my goodness, did we learn nothing from the mint? And I read through the fine print. Of course it said one per household. And I said, oh, said oh okay well i didn't get excited for a minute when i was like oh two dollars and 25 cents for two bucks we could do that all day long so you didn't sign up a thousand times with with your household like just slightly different in the i mean i thought about it but it seemed like a lot of work for the reward but what you do is is you sign up as you know nicholas a ray is nichyes, Nicholas B. Reyes, Nicholas C. Right. Add a letter at the end of my address for like, you know,

Department A, B, C. Department A, Department B. Which just happens to match the middle name, middle initial. You do that all day long. But no, I did. So that might work, who knows. So you never know. I mean, look at the Sunday paper, you may run into something like that so yeah so all right all that said i think that brings us

to the question of the week right question of the week time yeah what do you what do you have for me so i'm not sure whether or not you're going to be able to answer this question and if you can't then then i'll have a bonus standby question but i'll make up an answer one i thought this is a good one so somebody i'll be like i'll be like a a customer service agent and and adamantly adamantly you know state that i know the answer and this is what it is even though you know that's fitting because it's a marriott bonvoy answer and i feel like that's what a bonvoy agent would do so yeah i mean they all do it though right well okay go for it all right So this is going to sound like a strange question, Joanne says. Joanne, I believe is the person who asked the question.

Yeah. But when do elite nights at Marriott properties post? We're looking at making a 30-day reservation at a Marriott. The 30 days will straddle 2020 and 2021. So will the nights spent in 2020, let's say it's 17 nights in 2020 and 13 in 2021, will those 17 nights in 2020 count toward 2020 elite status, or will they not count until 2021 since the stay won't conclude until 2021? The 17 nights you spend in December will count towards this year's total. So when you say 4-20-20, I mean, the nights you're accumulating now are for your 2021 status. So that's why it's all confusing. But those 17 nights, even though it's all part of one stay, will count as if you had a separate 17 nights stay in December, and then you had

another, however long it was, stay in January. It would be fine. One thing that I want her to check, though, I'm not sure about this with Marriott, but I know in the past some chains, if you have a stay that's like 30 days or longer, they won't give you any points or lead or anything. Yeah, that's right. Steven Pepper's talked about that at some point. Has he? Yeah, he has. Yeah.

You're right. So, you know, so, so I don't know what, I don't know whether Bonvoy has that rule or not, but I mean, I'd be inclined to book two separate reservations back to back just so that that issue wouldn't be an issue. And then it would also be easier because I don't like if you're, if you're waiting to see your nights to post, I don't think they would post at all until you check out and then a few days after that. Whereas if you do two back to back, at least your 2020 nights should post earlier while you're still checked in for your second stay, I think.

I think that's a good piece of advice. I wouldn't have even thought of that when the question came up, but I think that's what I would probably want to do too, unless it's a situation where the property is offering a better rate for a long-term stay, because you do see that sometimes, though, like Greg says, if that's the case, it might be a rate that's not qualifying for points and all the rest of that.

So you definitely want to see if you can verify whether that rate is qualifying for elite status. And here's the tricky part. How do you verify that? Yeah, you'd call an agent who's going to make up an answer, right? Right. So instead, what you're going to do is Google it. And probably what I would do, honestly, is I would Google flyer talk Marriott 30 days stay or something along those lines and try to find a flyer talk thread because

goodness knows there's somebody on flyer talk who has stayed 30 days or more at a Marriott before and has asked that very question. So there's a good chance you're going to find somebody else who's answered. Or sign up for flyer talk and ask the question there because you're right. Oh boy, I'm blanking on her name, but there's a woman who maintains a lot of those Marriott threads and she would know definitely. And so he skis something or other. Yeah. I can't think of a doc or something.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's great advice. There you go. You're not going to get the right answer from an agent.

No way. Definitely not. So there you go, Joanne, there's the answer to your question. So Greg did know, you see, I wasn't sure how he would,

but he did know. And that's a, I thought a good one because answer to your question. So Greg did know. You see, I wasn't sure how he would, but he did know. And that's, I thought a good one because some people may find themselves in that scenario situation. It's a good question. It comes up a lot. I mean, in real life. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you guys very much for being with us this week. If you want to find out more about what we've been talking about, you want to get on the email list,

join our Facebook group, all that fun stuff, go to thefrequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's thefrequent miler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's the frequent miler.com slash subscribe and check out the links in the notes for this show for links to the various posts that we talked about today. If you want to read a little bit more about those specific topics,

we'll have all of those links in the notes. And don't forget if you're watching this on YouTube to like, and subscribe, please subscribe on our YouTube channel. If you're watching this on there. Thank you very much, Greg. Thank you, Nick. It's been fun. We'll do it again next week. See you guys then. See ya.