Frequent Miler on the Air - Is the Maldives worth it? | Ask Us Anything Ep70 | 10-2-24

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

In addition to our regular weekly podcast, we also host an Ask Us Anything Live on YouTube once a month where the Frequent Miler team answers listener questions about points, miles, rewards cards, and whatever else comes to mind. This episode originally aired on October 2, 2024. Greg was busy vacationing, but the rest of the gang answered a broad range of listener questions about points, miles, and rewards cards. (00:35) - Is the Maldives worth it? (06:25) - Nick, how painful will the virgin dynamic pricing be? (08:03) - Is anyone finding it harder to use debit cards for money orders? (10:45) -Why is award availability to Asia so bad right now, and is there any relief in sight? (15:13) - Which US airport hub do you like to transit through (ie ease of traveling through terminal, number of connecting destinations, lounge access, etc) (18:40) - Miles and Earn Burn is saying that the recently AMEX Biz Gold to Plat upgrade offer links may not be "safe" to use. What is your take? (20:44) - When do you think the strata elite or wells beyond will come out? (24:37) - In general, what services do you rec for big or ongoing purchases that don’t usually take credit cards? Other than the % fee, should we be careful using these services? (29:40) - Delta Amex companion certificates terms are very restrictive. Any best practices to find eligible fare class for non-holiday weekends far in advance? Read Greg's post about companion certificates here: https://frequentmiler.com/travel-companion-tickets/ Watch our How To video about using Delta Companion Certificates here: https://frequentmiler.com/how-to-use-delta-companion-certificates-video/ (31:42) - What has been the most outstanding deal so far in 2024 and will you do a coffee break if an outstanding deal happens? (36:33) - Hi FM Team, what was your most difficult / challenging travel experience and what did you learn from it? (49:25) - What do you guys think about Aero plan card in the context of them extending the PYB for travel at 1.25 Cpp especially with possible transfer bonus from Chase. Good way to cash Chase UR Points ? (51:32) - Does Amex allow stacking of offers? Specifically, looking to stack a $100 credit with a 15k MR point bonus for a Leading Hotels resort in Rome. The hotel is listed on both Amex offers. Thanks (52:47) - ​​If the Barclays Aviator red converts to Citi Strata, can I product change to a Custom cash and immediately apply for Citi Strata for the SUB? (54:10) - Is there any airline proram where if i buy my ticket with miles I can still earn miles? TY 4 all you do! Subscribe and Follow

This is not your usual Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is our Ask Us Anything live session, recorded and brought to you in podcast format. Once a month, the Frequent Miler team gets together live on YouTube to answer your questions. Ask us questions about points, miles, credit cards, airline and hotel loyalty programs. We don't know what's coming next and neither do you. Enjoy. I like it. This is our monthly live brought to you not live i see us live okay so i think i think tim didn't you have a question to uh lead us off right

our first question oh yeah i think i did um so our uh the our friend the sultan of savings the guru of gift cards steven pepper just took a anniversary this is your 20th anniversary this was our 20th yes yeah he took a 20th anniversary trip worthy of two decades of pepperish decadence where he tried he traipsed his wife all over the world as they celebrated each other in 20 years of being together actually more than 20 years really because you dated for what like at least six months before you started before you got engaged yeah so yeah we um we'd known each other about a year before we got married so 21 years we'll call it that but so anyway part of that was you uh stopped in the maldives yes at the con Maldives, and wrote a and just wrote a lovely and authoritative, in my opinion, review on the Conrad Maldives.

So but but my question for you, because everybody always asks this is now that you've been there, is the Maldives worth it? Was it was the Maldives worth it for you? And you don't have to make a grand pronouncement for you. Yeah. Was the maldives worth it was it was the maldives worth it for you and you don't have to make a grand pronouncement for you yeah was the maldives worth it for us it absolutely was um so like my overall answer will be yes but so yes it absolutely was um worth it for us because um we um our honeymoon was over to ireland because that that was what my kind of like wife's dream honeymoon destination was at the time. But then like two or three years into our marriage, she learned about the Maldives and she was like, got to go there. And that we should celebrate like an anniversary there. And so what we do every 10 years, we've decided to renew our vows.

So 10 years we decided to do in Australia, 20 years we decided to do in australia 20 years we decided we do in um the maldives and we're trying to decide whether to do the world of astoria or the conrad and the world of astoria would be fantastic like their vill overwater villas are absolutely amazing looking there i want to say like two or three thousand square foot or something crazy like that um and so it looks incredible but we wanted to do the conrad moldy's because we also wanted to eat at um the underwater restaurant that they have there for our anniversary dinner and so we got to do that we had a fantastic time there i'd seen people mentioned before that going to the moldy's like they think that they'll get

bored after two or three days and i honestly thought that that was going to be the case for me we did eight days there and I didn't get bored. Like it almost felt like it would have been nice to have had another couple of days there. Like even though we were just kind of like glazing around and things like that, the days went by super quickly. So absolutely worth it for a special occasion like that. Just for a general vacation, it's a long way to fly and an expensive place to go to both in terms of getting to the resort and being like captive audience for their restaurants and so having to um spend a lot on food and drink there so it's not somewhere i would necessarily go just for

your everyday kind of vacation unless you're really wanting to live it up but to celebrate something special like a honeymoon or an anniversary or a baby moon or something like that then um yeah it's a beautiful location so i can't say that it's not worth going it's just a long and expensive vacation when you could do like a beautiful beach resort or something like that or like go to fiji or something like that where it's much closer by so it just depends on your preference but it was worth it for us based on the my follow-up question for you so based on based on based on that what you just said did the maldives offer you something or did you did your experience in the maldives offer you something that other beach places that you have been to did not was there something different for you about being there um i mean one of the reasons we we chose the Conrad was that you couldn't be in an overwater villa

like straight with points. And that's not really possible in many other places around the world. Now Hilton has, I think like five or six different properties where you can book straight into an overwater villa now that they've added the SLH properties. But I think like Nick's probably more has a much better idea about this but from what i'm aware bora bora i don't think you can or like in like tahiti and stuff i don't think you can book straight into an overwater villa and that was just something we wanted to experience so um that was one of the reasons why it felt kind of worthwhile for us because it was an experience we wouldn't have been able to have otherwise especially because we had so many hilton three night certificates to use and was the underwater restaurant uh instagram and pinterest

makes it out to be it was yeah thankfully um my wife's not like like she is on instagram but she's not an instagrammer kind of like doing this kind of thing i'm wearing the long flowy dresses and taking 1700 photos and things like that thankfully yeah and so like we got some nice photos there and we got like incredibly fortunate because we were the only ones eating there that night and so we had the oh wow we had the restaurant so they only fit 14 people in there so it's going to be intimate no one oh okay yeah but yeah just having it be the two of us the service was fantastic the food was excellent um so yeah that was a worthwhile experience but um it's also an expensive experience and so if you'd like to um have a chance to do

that they do offer a um drinks hour um that costs i think it's 125 bucks or you can redeem 25 000 hilton points um for the experience where you go down you get a glass of champagne and some canapes. And then you get to be there and take your photos and things like that too. Nice. Did you etch pepper peppers were here in the glass? I think you're probably not allowed to bring your sandblaster. Always the British that do that. All right. I have a question to roll us along here. Nick, I'm going to start with you.

How painful will the Virgin Dynamic pricing be? This person wants to know. On a scale of 1 to 10, probably 15. Hey, Mark, please. Yeah. I mean, I don't have a crystal ball, so it's impossible to say. But you know what? Let me take that back.

I think it's probably going to be not good. But at the same time, the program already isn't that exciting for the most part because of the really high surcharges. So is it going to be I guess, actually, when I think about it is going to be painful in the sense that is going to be way, way worse than it is right now. I mean, I guess, but it's already pretty bad. So I don't know how much that how much does that hurt? I'm not sure. But at any rate, we don't know. But it certainly seems like Delta is putting their thumbprint on it. So most likely, it'll be pretty bad for Virgin's own flights. But you know, their partner award charts are remaining intact. So at least for now, anyway, it seems you'll still be able to redeem the same number of points for partner flights. So that'll continue to be a decent deal. And at least those handful of cases where they have good partner deals. And, you know, I don't know, maybe we'll get lucky. And I think maybe at the beginning, we'll see a bunch of that saver stuff so that they can make it look like they've got more saver stuff than they probably

will long term. So maybe at the very beginning, it'll be worth looking stuff up. Keep in mind, by the way, that surcharges tend to be high on Virgin Atlantic, but there's some markets you can begin in where the surcharges are not so high. Like departing South Africa, for instance, is far less than departing the UK. You know,

it's still a lot, but it's far less anyway. So anyway, yep. That's my best crystal ball. It's probably not going to be good. We do our best with these predictions. All right,

Tim, is anyone finding it harder to use debit cards for money orders no nobody not you or anyone you've heard of never heard of that before um no well i mean yeah undoubtedly i think that um especially if you compare it to the golden age of like the golden age of yesteryear like five years ago or six years ago yeah i mean it's gotten a lot more limited um and um and probably because there's a money laundering uh element to there where there are some bad characters that actually are trying to do bad things using debit cards or or um and by and by debit cards i guess i'm assuming that the person here doesn't mean debit cards but they mean visa card uh gift cards is what i'm assuming. And that said, I know places that,

I know one guy who lived in a rural area that he could buy gift cards or credit cards for a long time. I know some people that they can pretty much do whatever they want. And it tends to be more rural areas, I think. I think the more rural you are, the more, uh, the less restrictions there are and the more urban you are, the more people are on the lookout for scams, the more restrictions there are on what you can do where, but even just like, you know, the, um, I know a lot of people have a tremendously hard time, what we call liquidating. So turning them into money orders of those $200 gift cards, those Pathword, formerly known as MetaBank gift cards that they sell at Office Depot and Staples, used to be very easy to liquidate in a lot of different areas. And you could take a stack of

10 in or more and knock them out in one sitting. And, certain places you're limited to $99 swipes. And so you have to swipe it repeatedly over and over again. You can only do so many within before that register gets locked out with certain retailers. So it really, I mean, and I still say, I mean, I think it's debit cards, Visa, MasterCard, gift cards for money orders have always been location dependent. And I think they're much more so. And I would say wherever you are, there's still stuff that can be done at the standards like Walmart and Kroger and things like that. And there are still safe cards to use in a lot of places, but not everywhere. But tends to be where the people, the people that have the best arrangements,

it tends to be like a local grocery store that actually sells many orders. And usually there can be a little more freedom there. But some of the restrictions are being placed on the issuers by the issuers of the cards in terms of how you use the card. And so all that to say, yeah, it's trickier than it used to be for sure. Bad news. And the cynicism continues with this question, Stephen. Why is award availability to Asia so bad right now? And is there any relief in sight? I haven't been doing any award searches to Asia recently, so I haven't experienced this personally.

But it's hard to know because I guess part of it would be when you're searching for like, you looking a year out are you looking um for close in are you looking for um like next spring or something like that because that could potentially affect it um whether or not um you're searching for holiday kind of time when other people might be looking to um use their miles at the same time um is there any relief in sight there's never any way of knowing whether or not award availability is going to improve unfortunately. So I'd say just keep searching and keep using tools like points.year and things like that and set up alerts where you can and also just see if you can have any kind of flexibility. So rather than just searching from your airport to a specific airport that you're wanting to go to, maybe search from your airport to another

airport in Asia where you might be able to get a cheap connecting flight or look from other cities around the country, especially on the West Coast, but even somewhere like maybe Dallas or Chicago or something like that, where you might be able to get some decent enough routings if that's easy enough for you to be able to get there and then see if that gives you any more luck and i'm going to ask that actually that this is and this is not this is not a um like a this is a somewhat niche but one of the reasons why i love city thank you points is that they're the only currency that transfer is one-to-one to eva air orA Air, depending on who you are and what you're saying. And marvelous airline to get to Europe. Terrible airline to get to Europe on. A really good airline to get to Asia.

All these constant flights to Taipei. And they're a Star Alliance partner, and those flights do show up on Star Alliance programs, but they make a massive, massive amount more available to people that hold their own, to members of their own rewards program. For the Seattle to Taipei flight the other day, I was looking over spring break, couldn't find anything. I looked on EVA slash EVA and found that the entire spring break, there were four plus seats open for every single flight. And so to me, that's one of the big attractions of City Thank You Points as a transfer partner is that in terms of that specific program to get from the US to Asia, there can be marvelous availability. So just throwing that out there in case you have access

to some Thank You Points. I'm sorry, I'll tag into. So just throwing that out there in case you have access to some thank you points. I'm sorry, I'll tag into. So Stephen mentioned points. Yeah, dot com is one of the tools you could use. Also, seats that arrow could be useful because then you can look at a much wider range of both departure and arrival airports. And so that might, you know, if you're running into that kind of problem where you're like, wow, there's no availability at all.

A tool like that can help you search just such a wide range of stuff all at once. You may need to be willing to position to a different place. Also, keep in mind, sometimes connecting itineraries have more availability than itineraries that don't have connections. On my way back from our most recent challenge, I was finding Japan Airlines first class available as long as I was connecting it with an American Airlines flight afterwards. The nonstop itself wouldn't show up alone. But as long as I was going somewhere beyond Chicago, on the Tokyo to Chicago, then all of a sudden it was available and I was able to book a seat on it. So so tool like seats are there will probably help you find some gems like that now and then too. And I just realized that booking.com advertising has clearly worked well on me because I said points.yex i had in my book yeah that's right it happens i mean there's so many

because there's point.me there's points yeah there's a word tool i mean we have of course if you don't know it just google frequent miler which award search tool is best so you can see a comparison of all the various ones that are out there that might be useful for you yeah i'm going to drop our how-to video for finding the possible awards with rooms.arrow in the youtube chat right now so look for that that will be for hotel awards the rooms.arrow one right true true true true um yeah i don't have time to go find the post on tools i'll do that later okay um is now that was steven nick um which u.s airport hub do you like to transit through in ease of traveling through terminal number of connecting destinations and lounge access you know no because well i live in the northeast so the new york city airports are

drivable for me and so is boston so the place where i find an available award is really where i prefer to travel through uh i mean for some reason i i kind of like dulles but i think i like dulles because i find flights from dulles often there's a decent range of flights there and perhaps there's less competition than there is for the New York airports. I don't know though. I mean, really, I like to go wherever it is I find availability. I don't usually pick based on connecting airport. Tim might be a better person to answer that because I feel like Tim, you fly around the US more too than I do. Yeah, but actually I was just, I was was thinking that very thing kind of what you were saying is that the thing is, being in Seattle and being an Alaska flyer, like I have a nonstop to

effectively any major area that I want to go to in the US. And so I rarely ever connect in the US unless I'm going international. And so I mean, taking it to that yeah i mean it's it's hard to even say um you know i mean for me on the west coast and this is just my part i i would tend to look at it less in terms of which hub do i like and which itinerary is best and i really hate connecting now on the east coast or to europe um i i pretty much i want to be leaving from seattle san francisco vancouver or um la um maybe phoenix or something like that but i just don't i just don't it's so many times connecting just adds so much time especially to europe like i get to europe and you know eight hours eight and a half. Like I get to Europe and, you know, eight hours, eight and a

half hours. Well, I get to New York in five and then I have to have a layover and then I have to borrow another six and a half hour flight. And it's just a pain in the butt. But in terms of just like which airport do I like? I don't know. Most of them are international. I think that the international area, like there's some nice lounges in San Francisco. There's a lot of connections out of San Francisco and LA. I don't know that for me personally that there's one hub. In general, and this is just in general my impression, a lot of people are going to probably send me mean messages after this. I find the East Coast airports that are older to be a little more grungy a little harder

to connect in um you have to walk more you have to uh you won't hear me argue and whereas lax is like the one west coast airport that's really old like that you're from seattle you should like grungy i'm sorry right you're from seattle you should like grungy well that's right right right right, so that's why I... Right, right, right. Otherwise, I'd be like, there's mold at that airport. I love it. I love LGA. Yeah, I was going to say, which is why I love LaGuardia.

Well, you know, the newer part of LaGuardia, though, is very nice. The renovated part of LaGuardia is quite nice. Of course it is, Nick. of course it is of course it is no i mean like i've flown out of la guardia like three times in the last 20 years probably so i don't have much frame of reference as to how bad bad parts were but i do have a frame of reference because i flew relatively recently how nice the nice part is pretty nice all right

um i'm gonna shuffle things along ste Steven, I think. Um, Miles and Earnburn? Miles, um, Miles Earnburn. Earn and Burn? Okay. Miles Earn and Burn is saying that the recently Amex Biz Gold to Plat upgrade offer, Blinks, may not be safe to use. What is your take?

And have we heard that? We have heard that. I think, like, maybe Nick might be a better one not be safe to use what is your take and have we heard that we have heard that i think like maybe nick might be a better one because he's been like doing a little bit of like yeah let me ask oh i interrupt greg's vacation i gotta call the bat phone i mean we looked at it and we said you gotta log in and so if you gotta log in you know amex has you log in to show that you're you're eligible for it we figured that's probably safe i mean that was our our uh our consensus anyway so yeah i saw the miles earn and burn thing today and so then i started digging into a little

bit more to try and understand where that was all coming from and and i i don't know i dug enough that i have more of an idea now than I did before. But I'm not sure like, when you asked me how dangerous is it? I don't know. I mean, I haven't heard of anybody having a problem because of it. That doesn't mean tomorrow, they might not shut down half the known world, but I doubt it. So and I think I think with something like that, it's unlikely to be an issue, but I guess I don't know. I don't have a good crystal ball there. We thought it was okay.

We talked about it ahead of time and said we think this is probably going to be fine. So that was our best estimation. Well, and I do want to call out in terms of, and one of the things that, and nothing against, this is nothing. I read Miles and Ern and Bern. I think it's a great source for stuff, but he used the link. So, and he said that he used the Lincoln's. So, I mean, it's safe enough for him to use it. So probably not going to see a lot of, you know, I mean,

just take, take it with a grain of salt, take it with a grain of salt in terms of what safety means here. Makes sense. Nick? You want me to do the next one, seeing as Nick did? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll just do a swap. When do you think the Strata Elite or Wells Beyond will come out? The Magic 8 ball is packed away, so I can't say for sure what that would be, but this is a tough one because there have been rumors about the new city strata cards for i don't know was it two or three years before they simply rebranded the city

premier to the strata premier or actually do you say premier or do you say premier over here because we say that sounded the same to me it was close enough you're getting an american accent whether you like it or not steven pepper i just realized i've probably been pronouncing it the entire like incorrectly the entire time but yeah we it there had been these rumors and all this trademarking going on for quite some time um but yeah it took several years for it to come out i would have thought that an elite card will come out sooner than like three or four years away, but it's City and so there's simply no way of knowing. Basically, it wouldn't

surprise me if it came out next year or in 2026, but it also wouldn't surprise me if we get to 2027 or 2028 and we're like, ooh, rumours! It's imminent that it's going to be coming out. So as for the Wells Fargo Beyond card, no idea about that either either i haven't

heard any rumors like about that recently have you guys i mean wells fargo seems to be there i expected them to be much much more active in terms of how they've been developing this whole program that they're doing so if you would ask me that back in january i would have said oh you're probably quick because they're gonna want to get in on this. Now it's like, well, I don't know. Whenever they get around to it, I suppose. Well, we're sucking at telling the future as usual. But we'll keep doing it as long as you guys keep watching. Let's say this. I'm going to say Stephen has not sucked at telling the future.

Stephen is. Right. Fortunately, he packed his magic eight ball away because back in January, that thing was working. I mean, the problem with a lot of my predictions, though, I'm normally like two or three years ahead of time. And so that's been one of the more frustrating things, like looking back to past years. I've gotten a lot of my predictions correct,

but they've just never been for the year that I've actually predicted it for. So I'm basically, if you take my predictions, just assume they'll happen a year or two after and then you should be good to go be a year or two down the road. There you go. There you go. You know what?

Before we hop to the next question, I've sat here thinking about how I answered that previous question about whether the Amex link was safe. And I feel like I didn't explain enough and I don't want to get too deep into it and go back to it for too long. But I realize, I mean, if you're listening to this, you should probably get a better answer to your question. So backing up with the Miles Earn and Burn thing, they said that the link probably wasn't okay because they thought some funny business was going on with the link. And so if you look at the details of the link, there was like a little code in there that sounded like it wasn't necessarily for an upgrade offer, that it was for maybe some other type of offer.

And then the new link today has a little piece of code that says BPUG, like business platinum upgrade. And so that seems like it was more supposed to be a link for the business platinum upgrade. So I think people have been messing around with what's in the link a little bit. And I dug a little bit into the Chinese language forums at US Credit Card Guide, because people had commented on our post previously, asking, if you speak mandarin and you go to the us credit card guide forums and you can find some more info so you know play around with google translate and dig into those forms a little bit you can find some more info there but anyway that's where that was coming from so i felt like i when i thought

about it i was like ah but those comments are on our blog and so you can find that stuff and if you came to this ask us anything then there you go that. That's as much as I'll get into that. On with the show. All right. Appreciate it. Actually, let's continue to pause for a moment so everyone can like this video and subscribe to our YouTube. Tim, I think it's your turn for a question. In general, what services do you recommend for big or ongoing purchases that don't usually take credit cards?

Other than the percent fee for paying with a credit card, should we be careful using these services? So I'm not 100% sure what this question refers to. I'm assuming it's for things like Melio or Plastique, which are effectively services that allow you to, you can pay with a credit card through them. And even a place that like only takes a check, for instance, you can actually have a check sent from your credit card or not from your credit card. It's from them, but you pay them to send the check. There's

several different fees or services that do this. Melio and Plastique are probably the most well-known. And I don't think there's necessarily much to, I mean, I think both those are the same fee structure now. I think it's 2.9% plus a 99 cent per transaction fee, if I remember correctly. And it may be different for debit cards. Let's just say in general, it tends to be around three or a little over three percent um and i would say the the things to be careful of when using them um is a if you're using it to pay something like rent first of all you shouldn't be you should just sign up for a built card and or go even through but no built doesn't yet let the alliance go for free it's that just sign up for a bill card and or go even through. No, Bill doesn't yet let the alliance go for free. It's that. But sign up for a bill card and earn points on your rent without actually having to pay any fee whatsoever.

That's the best thing for renters. But anything else that is like time that's time consumed or that uh time sensitive i've found in the past when i used to use plastic to pay rent that when you first set it up it can take a while for that check to get there so don't like think oh it's the 28th and my rent's due on the first i'm just going to go ahead and enter this payment in and it'll probably be there on time it won't you'll mean your rent will be late so when you're first setting up a payee that can be an issue The other thing is just make sure that the juice is worth the squeeze for whatever you're doing. You know, if you're burning through new card welcome offers, to pay 3% in order to create that spend isn't necessarily a bad deal if you're getting, you know, 10, 15% back on it. If on the other hand, you're on, you're using it on your, you know, Alaska mileage card or your AA mile up or something, and you're getting one mile per dollar on it, you're effectively paying three cents per mile, and that's not worth doing. So I would say to me, that's the biggest issue

is just make sure that whatever you're using it for, that whatever you're paying for it, I need to say 3% that the fees justify the rewards that you're getting from it. Back in the day, it used to be there were some issues with Amex and Plastique. I think those have all been rectified now. And so I think pretty much if the, if either of those services take your cards, you're not going to have to worry about cash advance or anything like that.

Like, I think that's all been, all been sorted through. But yeah, there's different types of cards though, that could be used for different types of payments right so you can't yeah yeah you know you can use an mx for like your taxes or tuition but you can't use it for i don't know some other things right but i mean if for most part if they take the card yes they they they will reject the card on the front end through plastic or familial as opposed to like finding having the charge go through and then you have a cash advance fee or something like that. It's a nasty surprise. The other thing worth mentioning in terms of you're asking what to be careful about, if you're paying a new payee, it will give you the option sometimes to upload the bill to make sure that you know to increase the or to process it quicker but at least in my my account it's often optional whether or not i upload a copy of the

bill if you don't though sometimes it'll get rejected and so keep an eye on your account make sure that the payment goes through because there was one time when i thought it had gone through and then i realized later on they had emailed asking for a copy of the bill for the particular thing. And I had missed that email. And so the payment didn't go. And so just keep an eye on it. But when I pay something and I pick the soonest possible day for delivery, it usually charges my card that day and is mailed out either that day or the next day. I use it quite a bit still.

Because in my case, I still have a lot of fee-free dollars from referrals way back then. So I've been using it. I paid a bunch of property taxes over the last couple of weeks for family members and things like that. So the other thing is that some payees you can expedite a payment to and others you just can't. That surprised me. And when I went to pay property taxes, I just assumed that I'd be able to expedite a payment to anybody. And as it turned out, some of the payees couldn't be expedited, but that's stuff you'll learn

as you get using the platform. But I've never had like a check not show up in my case and I've sent a lot of them. So there's that. All right, that's helpful. Yeah, that's a lot of info. All right, Steven, Delta Amex Companion Cert companion certificates terms are very restrictive.

Any best practices to find eligible fair class for non-holiday weekends far in advance? We do have a couple of resources on the website that might be helpful. So Greg, about six months ago, wrote a guide about how to, about all the different companion certificates and their limitations and um things like that plus there's a how-to video um that's been created as well about how to use those and how to look for eligible flights even if you don't currently have any certificates so um i'll drop a couple of links to that in the comments on youtube so that way you can take a look because i think that will be much more helpful

because I've never actually had to, never had a Delta Companion certificate to have to use. And so I don't have a ton of recommendations there unless Tim or Nick do, but I don't think that they do either. Because yeah, this is definitely Greg's area of expertise. Yeah, cool, cool. It's possible we don't remember off the tops of our heads

and you're going to have to look at our stuff. There's this great site for myler.com. Check it out. Between the four of us, we do not make a Greg thing. Well, yeah, because Greg is so familiar with these, I don't

use a lot of brain power towards learning about the Delta Companion certificates for instance, because I know he forgets more every day about those than i will probably ever know uh so i have not uh wasted brain capacity on that because that's something he knows frontwards and backwards so that's why the video would be a good place to start yes you were going to add something to him uh no i'm just going to say that uh just from my gleanings from what Greg has said in the past is what you're thinking of in terms of non-holiday weekends far in advance is the key.

That the further in advance you're doing the stuff, the more easily you can find those fair classes. That's it. Just affirm it. All right. Helpful. Helpful, helpful. All right.

Next question for Nick. What has actually let's make this an everyone, but we'll start with Nick. What has been the most outstanding deal so far in 2024, in your opinion, and then as an aside, this person would like a coffee break episode about anything we find outstanding like that. But first, what do you think the most outstanding deal of 2024 has been so far? You know, that's a really good question. I'm not sure. Somebody here is going to pop in. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have a... Go ahead. I see Steven.

Well, we keep a record for like some possible candidates for deal of the year and so i was just having a look at those so back in on january 1st built had the transfer bonus of up to 150 percent to flying blue virgin and ihg so that's one of them um amex had the plus 10x or plus 10 restaurants referral offer um which was that on up to 25 000 spend i feel like yeah so you could potentially earn 250 000 membership rewards off of that which was a potentially great off because i think that was available on amex gold cards as well so you'd be earning 14 x on restaurant spend which is absolutely superb there was the 100 transfer bonus to alaska from built um There was the 120K in business preferred offer

where you could also get 40,000 ultimate rewards as a referral. So that was 160,000 between you if you referred your partner. And that's kind of like the main like proper deals. It seems certainly in terms

of what we've made notes of so far that seem like proper candidates for deal. Yeah, i guess the like the 250 000 point mx business platinum offer that we've seen kind of come and go is probably also worth a mention there because i'm a quarter of a million points with one of them requires a lot of spend i know but quarter of a million points with one card uh is pretty, yeah. So I feel like that should probably be up there. I'm pretty jazzed up that I was able to get that recently. So, Tim, you have any other thoughts about that or other deals? You know, I don't know if it's, I don't know.

I think it's not as blingy as all this other stuff. But honestly, I think the fact that within this year so quickly, the one-to-one transfers from hawaiian to alaska came through and amex membership reports transfers to hawaiian are still going through which means that effectively for at least some undetermined amount of time alaska is now a membership rewards partner um at a one-to-one ratio um and that's pretty i mean it's, it's hard to, like, it doesn't seem that crazy,

but given that for all these years, everybody's been trying to get Alaska miles and saying, oh, but you can't earn them, you can't earn them, you can't earn them. And now, and then it became a built partner, but the problem is you can't earn built points. So I would say that's something that this year has been pretty,

and there was a lot of debate about whether the Amex transfer bonus would still remain in effect once that one-to-one transfer happened, if the transfer would be one-to-one, all those sorts of things. So that's the only other one I would probably add to that. As for the coffee break answer, that's something we've discussed. It's more logistically difficult than it seems though, because, you know, we're obviously, we're not in like in an office together every day. So when something happens, we've got to coordinate schedules and times to get online and record it and then edit it and get it out. So it's not logistically as simple to get it out and published as quickly as we might like to. But certainly we've had it in mind that if there's some

amazing deal that people need to know about that yes we would perhaps publish something you know out of the blue about it but i but i don't think we've necessarily seen that type of like okay this is only going to last a very short period of time so we need to publish this right now uh oh you know what yes we did have that didn't we or was that last year the when did the uh guitar booking jet blue and business class when did that come out that was last year the when did the uh guitar booking jet blue and business class when did that come out that was last year that was november of last year yeah so that's not a 2024 but but that's the kind of thing that like okay you can book at that point you could book jet blue mint to europe for like 38 000 afios and we saw that again we might try to get something out quickly but the chances that

we're able to record it and publish it before it dies in a situation like that are just more slim than you might imagine however that will be published on frequentmiler.com so yes true email notifications yes don't forget we have a blog as well yeah right right right and the instant emails like that you know if you want to if you want to know about those things when those things happen then you, you want to sign up for the instant email alerts so that you'll get an email right away when that kind of thing breaks. Yeah. All right. So this is another everybody question.

Story time. We're going to start with Tim. What was your most difficult or challenging travel experience and what did you learn from it? I don't, you know, I mean, there's been some snafus over the years. I would say that so on my honeymoon, my honeymoon was a, we went around the world in 100 days, but it was all a surprise for my wife so my uh at that point newlywed wife where she didn't know how long we were going to be gone and where we're going it was all um hidden from her and she didn't know until we actually started to go there like she actually boarded planes without knowing where she was going to end up that's cool um something

that's trickier to do these days i will say that when you say don't tell the person where they're going and they're like well wait a minute is there somebody being trafficked here uh but all that to say so and these are back this was back in the time before um really online booking had taken hold across the so i mean i was spending a lot of time i didn't you know be up at three o'clock in the morning like calling somebody in south africa making reservations stuff like that and And I had done medical research to pay for this. So I had put my body under the microscope, so to speak, and had it but I was not did not have a lot of money by any stretch of the imagination, I had just saved up for this trip. So I would and then that was that summer that we got married, there was a thes dollar took a big plunge right before we left

so all of a sudden i'm looking at all these bookings that i made in foreign currencies and like oh no are we gonna get home so and within that context um we were in south africa and kruger national park driving down a dirt road my wife was driving and way further i mean it was a fine road a lot of the roads in kruger dirt they grade them regularly it's really easy it's a great place to go but um there was probably i don't know maybe three or four hundred yards in front a of us a rock that was sticking out of the middle of the road that looks sort of like a shark's tooth and i thought oh she's gonna see that and we got closer to it and i didn't want to be the nagging guy that's like, how's that wife?

I'm like, oh, she's going to see that. And then at the last second, I'm like, just see the rock. And she wanted to save the tires. So unfortunately drove the car directly over the center. And we heard this. I looked behind and I could see this black trail falling yeah so bad and so long story short i did not react well um i was worried about getting eaten you know i didn't want to right right nobody wants time we were off the road right right who knows when you're

going to see somebody right so i'm like well we got back up to the main road and so we drove and i'm like this is a bummer because there's a chance that we could like crap out the engine because there's not a lot of oil in this engine now drove up to the main road it was literally a 12 13 hour day we had we got had to get a ride to a guard station from these folks and then call the tow truck or call the folks to tow it across to the other end of the park and then call the rental car company. And they had to tow another car to us. It was this whole thing. And we got the car all the way to the garage on the other side of Kruger. And then right when the guy was pulling it off of the flatbed truck that they had towed it over on he like revved it up to try

to get it going and the engine quit so i knew at that point that we would be not only on the hook for the oil pan and everything you have to do you're gonna actually have to pay for an engine overhaul for this vehicle and i think what i have learned since then um is it's just money and something that at that point seemed so incredibly like oh my lord and i was i mean when that first happened i was terrible to my wife i had to we had to talk about in the car i had to apologize to her later i mean i was really bad you know i was like 23 at the time and didn't didn't but you know i mean there's so many things that we stress out about and there's so and i there's a phrase that i love that is in business called the cost of doing business that i love in just a general thing like people die in this world there are really bad

things that happen a few hundred bucks here and there or whatever in the grand scheme of things 10 years later you're not even going to think about it um and so i think there's a to me that that developed a we're looking at like there's a cost of living there's a cost of traveling and sometimes crap happens so yeah that's my work that's my uh you're here solving problems yeah that's what are you carrying this is an all play mine is is kind of standard. I'm sure it's happened to so many people. We had a rental car that got broken into. All our stuff got stolen, including our passports.

This was in Spain. And at the time I was nomadic. And so I literally carried all my credit cards and we were doing this hobby. So there were like 30 of them or something. And so all of those were stolen. i had my grandma's journal with me because i was typing it up for her uh or well for the family she had just passed away and so i was that was stolen but actually the worst part of that so we were able to kind of like you know

uh figure out a way to get borrow cash from the friend we were traveling with who happened to have his debit card still on him that kind of stuff but the the dumbest part of the whole thing was when we blew so we went to the embassy got these temporary passports uh we had like everything we needed to get back to the states and then we landed in lax super late super exhausted we literally have our things in like trash bags like we we bought just like an outfit to wear and we just had like the shopping bags that they came in so we looked like homeless people and we try to check into a hotel we had booked on points and we used my sister's free night cert because she owed us one um and they

wouldn't let us check in uh unless we could put 250 cash down because we didn't have any card for them to hold usually they want a card to hold and we were like well we don't even have debit cards to get cash so we're trying to figure out how to get cash we're going all all over la trying to find money grams that are open and it did not work and then our phones die and then it didn't work and we were begging the guy like he, he was like, well, unless your sister can come down here and verify your identity. And she lives in Ohio and we're in L.A. This guy had no sympathy for us. And actually, Tashir, who some folks in this hobby know, he came through for us.

We kind of posted an SOS on Twitter or something. And Tashir happens to live by there and swung by and was like these guys exist and they're who they say they are and we got as an apology we got like a two free drink vouchers to the bar that had closed five minutes before we got there

so anyway it was really stupid rough wow how about you Nick and Stephen? Oh I can't compete forget about it like my travels have been So anyway, it was really stupid. Rough. Wow. How about you, Nick and Stephen? Oh, I can't compete. Forget about it. My travels have been all roses and sunshine comparatively. You had to catch barf in a hat recently.

Well, I mean, I did. I've had some things here and there, but I can't compete. I'm going to wave the flag there. I'm set. Stephen mean what do you think i mean we've most of our um issues with traveling have related to flights so um years ago my wife and i had gone to um spain and we'd rented like an airbnb type style vacation rental place and the instructions were to leave the keys inside close the door and then leave only problem was that in order to get out of the kind of like gated ward complex you have to have a key in order to

get through the gate and so those were inside what we had realized was that we were supposed to open that gate first and then go back drop the keys off and then close that door so we were basically stuck in this courtyard for like an hour and a half or something like that because it was about six o'clock in the morning and so no one was getting up in any of these other apartments and so we couldn't get out and we had our um flight leaving and it was like a Ryanair or EasyJet flight or something like that so you know they're not going to be flexible we'd already had issues getting away and so um thankfully someone came out we got to um our flight with like 20 minutes to spare another time we were flying

for Norfolk Virginia to Bali for our 15th anniversary the connecting flight from Norfolk to New York got cancelled and so this was like super last minute we like it didn't look like we had any options but I think Greg actually I put like an SOS ad on our slack and like Greg came up with the idea of trying to get to DC and flying out of there because there was a Cathay Pacific flight from DC to I guess Narita and then on to, not Narita, to Hong Kong, sorry, and then on to Bali from there. And so because we're in Norfolk, we rented a one-way rental car, drove up three hours and got there again, just with a little bit to spare um during covid times

in 2021 we were flying to dubai for my wife's birthday and we'd gotten our covid tests in what we thought was enough times it was supposed to be within 72 hours of when your flight leaves to dubai because we had a connecting itinerary through new york we were perfectly fine based on when we were leaving from chicago but unfortunately the flight leave, we were perfectly fine based on when we were leaving from Chicago. But unfortunately, the flight leave, or we were fine, like for the flight leaving from somewhere, basically, but then the later flight going from somewhere on to Dubai was going to be just, it was something like 72 hours and 45 minutes or something like that. And so they wouldn't accept our COVID tests. And so we couldn't actually take those flights

um thankfully that meant that we were able to get last minute Emirates first class award availability for both of us and so that one worked out pretty well and then less of a horror story yeah and then the other more recent one was we were going to Australia I completely forgot to sort out our visas ahead of time we were at at the airport, seemed like it was fine. My wife, when filling out hers, accidentally put down that she was a criminal rather than not a criminal. And so those guys texted.

That has to be a heart sinking in your chest moment to realize. So yeah, that was really painful because it was too late to be able to get that fixed. And so we had to cancel those Australia plans. We had to fucking wish us insteadia plans we had fucking wishes instead um but i think what i learned from that was if possible book in an in a refundable way because um other than the i think we might have booked a cash flight to bali before but um because back then we were actually flying economy like now it's like what was i thinking um but for all of

these other ones we were flying actually in the spain one because that was back in the day and right now and that that was a miles but the trip to dubai and the trip to australia were both booked in business class for miles we were able to cancel literally at the last minute get all of our miles back and then um rejig our plans and um so yeah um so yeah that's my big takeaway pretty crucial yourself as much flexibility because you don't know either when you're going to do something stupid or you'll just be super unfortunate so oh yeah i forgot to do a like what did i learn from my way more cash on hand than you learned that when it rains it pours yeah yeah and that's not even

the that's not even the only thing that went wrong with that trip. You've never been back to Spain since, right? No, I have not been back to Spain since. You never got to go to Spain. I would go back, but I feel a little burned. A little bit burned. I'll probably get

hate in the comments for that, but I did have some sympathy for people who just like my sister didn't get a credit card for years and they wouldn't have even taken a debit card uh at this particular hotel like i i realized like what do people do to check into a hotel if you're the kind of person who just decides not to have a credit card because that's what they want to hold your enemy. So I learned cynicism. That's what I learned.

You're clearly not British because otherwise you would have had that embed in you. Right, right. I've actually never been back to LA. No, I have. I've been back to LA since. Okay. We're going to do a few more real questions also. What do you guys or you uh think about aeroplane card in the context of them extending the pyb pay yourself back for travel at 1.25

cents per point especially with possible transfer bonus from chase good way to cash chase ultimate rewards point maybe uh you know it's maybe you know i i don't get super excited about 1.25 cents per point with chase points that's not how i would generally prefer to use my chase points at the same time it's not a bad redemption especially if you're able to you know because you can book travel however it is you want rather than being stuck booking through their portal you could book travel some other way and uh you know and so you could book travel some other way. And so you could book directly with Hyatt, for instance, and earn your Hyatt points and late night credit and all the rest of that and pay yourself back at 1.25 cents per point. When you mentioned transfer

bonus from Chase, my biggest hesitation with that is that they were pretty clear that it's not unlimited. And although I guess maybe after this year, it's going to go back to the regular limit of 50,000 points per year, I think, or was it just through the end of last year that it was unlimited? I can't remember now. It was quote unquote unlimited, but not really unlimited. Some people got shut down for doing too much in terms of transferring in and then using pay yourself back. And so that made me a little uncomfortable with it. But for the 50,000 points per year that you can do that with, I mean, I can see where that could be appealing for somebody who just doesn't want to use cash. Personally, I use my ultimate rewards points usually for Hyatt, usually for significantly more than 1.25 cents per point. So I wouldn't get

super excited about using Chase points that way. Now, airplane points, if you just earn a lot of aeroplane points from flying aeroplane, or you get the credit card and get the welcome bonus, and you're like, I'm not going to use aeroplane for one reason or another. It doesn't fit my travel patterns.

And so I'd rather redeem those points this way. Then I can see the value in doing that. It might be fun to redeem for some kind of unorthodox travel. But so there you go. I'm lukewarm. All right. I think I have enough questions lined up

that we could maybe try to do fast speed. We'll see. Tim. Yes. Does Amex allow stacking of offers, specifically looking to stack $100 credit with a 15K membership rewards point bonus for a leading hotels resort in Rome.

The hotel is listed on both Amex offers. If you have two Amex offers on the same card that can both be redeemed, usually they will both credit. Now, I'll put an asterisk on that and say that sometimes if it's for the same provider,

I've experienced it where you click on one and then it actually removes the other one if you have two for the same provider when you i've experienced it where you click on one and then it actually removes the other one if you have two for the same brand um but i've also had before where i've actually had two for the same brand on the same card and um it worked now the one thing you could do as well um that i've done before even if they're not on the same card is you could put have it on two separate cards each am offer, and then split the bill at the hotel. So long as the total sum qualifies, you'd be able to trigger those. But if it's, if, if you need the same amount to trigger both of those IMAX offers, my experience in the past has been that yes, if they're both on the

same card, they'll both be triggered. Anybody else have any conflicting data points to that? Nope. Alright, speed round on to Steven. If Barclay's Aviator Red converts to City Strata, can a product change to a custom cache and immediately apply for City Strata for the sign-up bonus? I mean, has there been any

indication it would get converted to a City Strata? I wouldn't have thought if the Bar, like, Aviator cards go over, if anything, it would go over to a Platinum Select Advantage card. I can't imagine it would go to a Strada, so I don't think that would be an issue. If that is something you're concerned about, it would make more sense, I guess, to apply for the City Strada beforehand rather than waiting for any kind of conversion, I think, because then you would then be able to downgrade one of them to a custom cache anyway. And just in case downgrading to a custom cache would mean you couldn't then get the sign-up.

But you can have the Strata. I don't think this is going to be an issue whatsoever just because it's not going to convert to a Strata. And even if it did, that wouldn't prevent you from getting the welcome bonus on a new Strata. City's rule isn't that you can't have the card it's that you can't have earned the bonus within the next amount of time so you would not have earned the bonus on a strata so it doesn't matter i mean it's not i don't think like steven said it's not going to convert into a strata it'll convert to an advantage card if it converts um so that's this really not uh not going to happen the way you think it is but But even if it did, that wouldn't prevent you from going ahead and applying for another strata, I don't think. All right.

Last question for Nick. Is there any airline program where if I buy my ticket with miles, I can still earn miles? No, not officially. You're not supposed to earn miles when you're redeeming miles. Now, you can earn elite credit with Delta when you're redeeming Delta SkyMiles on Delta flights. And same is true with Virgin Atlantic. But in terms of redeemable miles, no, there's no program where you're officially going to earn miles. Not to my knowledge, anyway, when you're redeeming miles.

However, there are times when it might happen as a happy accident. And if somebody has found one that consistently works every single time, they're probably not going to tell us about it, or you, they're going to keep it to themselves. So, you know, if you get lucky in that kind of a situation, then, you know, be happy. I always put in a frequent flyer number and I don't put in, so I always change the frequent flyer number just in case maybe that happens that I earned some miles, because I know I'm not going to earn miles with the program that I used the miles to redeem with. So for instance, what I'm saying here is, if I use my American Airlines miles to book a flight on Iberia to Spain, I would change the frequent flyer number and not use my American Airlines one. Maybe I'd use my Finnair frequent flyer number and figure, well, maybe that'll work,

although they use obvious. So I don't know, maybe Qantas or something. I might switch to a different partner or a non-alliance partner. And every now and then you're going to get lucky. I talked about it recently because I had booked JetBlue Mint with Qatar Obvious and I got tiles and redeemable miles. Not a lot, but I got some anyway for that JetBlue flight. So and again, I put in my JetBlue TrueBlue number. I switched it to my JetBlue TrueBlue number, not expecting that. Actually, in that case, I did it just because I wanted to be able to see the flight in the JetBlue app easily.

That's why I did it. That was a lucky accident, I guess, that I earned a few miles. It wasn't a lot though. Nice. All right. As an asterisk on that, the one thing I do want to just point out real quickly is that if you buy

tickets through the transferable currency portals, for instance, your Amex travel will count as a cash ticket. And so you will earn all of the points and miles and elite miles or elite qualifying

miles or credits, however they do it, that you would, that you would expect to do on a cash ticket. And especially with both chase and Amex business platinum, where you can redeem them for 1.54 cents towards cash tickets and then earn miles and redeem and elite qualifying miles that can sometimes be a sneakily terrific option so that's kind of the one way that you can i love all things sneakily terrific all right um that brings us to the end of our ask us anything thanks so much for joining everybody