Frequent Miler on the Air - Is the Sapphire Reserve still a keeper?

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

Greg and Nick discuss the Chase Sapphire Reserve:  -Are the new benefits with Lyft and DoorDash exciting? -Is it worth the new $550 annual fee? -If we had to pick one ultra-premium card, would this be it? Why or why not? All that plus reader feedback, confessions of a points & miles sinner, and more.

Welcome to Frequent Miler on the air with Greg and Nick. This week we're going to be talking about whether the Sapphire Reserve is really worth the new $550 annual fee. But before we get into that, it's, you know what time it is, Nick? I do. It's my favorite segment of the week. I look forward to it all week long. It is reader feedback time. And this week, well, you know what? Last week we skipped reader feedback time in favor of confession time. Right, right, right. And we don't need any more of that. Well, that segment was wildly popular, though. Oh, it was.

Wildly popular, right. So I'm just going to give you, we are going to do reader feedback time, but first I'm going to give you, since I took, I did confession last week, I'm going to just give you a chance. If you have anything to confess, this is your opportunity. What could I possibly have to confess this week? the end of the year properly, something like that. Something like that might be something to add into the confession. So, forgive me, I have made a couple of major sins with my Amex annual credits, my annual airline credits. A couple of major sins, not just one. Well, it's the same sin. I just repeated it, but it compounded itself. So, it's worth explaining because not only did I make a big mistake, but I compounded

it by creating another mistake. So those of you who have Amex cards that are in the annual airline credits, that'd be like the Platinum cards, the Amex Gold card, the Aspire card, they all come with annual airline credits. And those credits are calendar year benefits. So January 1st to December 31st. And we maintain a resource with what still works in terms of using the credits. We maintain a resource about what works for triggering those credits. Of course, things like bag fees and

seat upgrades and stuff like that, or seat selection, all that stuff is supposed to count. But there are other things that count too sometimes that you might not expect. So we maintain a resource for that. And so I keep that updated. And I also published a checklist a few days before the end of the year. And I said, do these things before New Year's Eve, like get all this stuff out of the way. And of course, what did I do? But December 31st, last day of the year, here I am looking to use up my airline credits. And so I had a couple of cards that I had to use the credits on. Now, I had made a mistake earlier in the year, sort of, anyway. I was planning on flying United, and so I had changed my airline to United in order to be able to cover bags and to do an upgrade fee to Economy Plus seating.

Long story that I'm not going to get into. I wasn't able to use the cards to pay for the economy plus seating. So I had United chosen as an airline, but hadn't actually used up the credit. And in fact, I ended up getting the economy plus seating for free. So I kind of felt like, well, that's what the credit was supposed to go for. Sort of a wash anyway. So I hadn't been like laser focused on using it. Right. Okay. Ordinarily in years past, Southwest has been my airline of choice because as we've pointed out in posts before, award fees on Southwest trigger that credit. And I book a lot of Southwest awards, some of which I fly and some of which plans change. And I get those credits on Southwest awards every year.

But I switched mid-year to United this year because I was flying on United. So I had these credits left over to use on United. And so I went to our resource page to see what would trigger it. And with United, there just isn't very much that triggers it. They're like the worst, aren't they? For that particular credit, I mean. Absolute worst for that credit. And if you want to pay for your bag fees, and I did pay for a couple of bags, great.

If you want to pay for onboard purchases, which I did, I bought some snack boxes and those got reimbursed. If you want to pay for economy plus seating and you can, that should also trigger it. But unfortunately, at the last minute on December 31st, there's not very much you can use it on. One of the things is United Club Passes. So I said, well, you know what? I'm going to probably fly United a few times this year. I've got some vouchers and whatnot. So I'll get some club passes. That way the family can get into the lounge. Now, backing up the truck a little bit, because I was planning on using the airline credits

on several seats for Economy Plus seating, I had changed the airline to United on several different Amex cards. So and then, of course, I had made the compounded mistake by using each of those cards for some purchase on United. So they were all partially used for United, had to be used for United. I couldn't change the airline because I'd already used part of the credit. So I went ahead and I bought club passes on three different Amex cards to use up the remaining credits that I had for airline fee credits. I bought a lounge club pass club passes on December 31st. And I was like, okay, I'm great. I'm good to go. Like it's done on the 31st. As I've always told people, long as the charge is processed on

December 31st, you're good to go. As long as it says December 31st on your statement, you're going to get the credit for that calendar year, not the next calendar. Even if it doesn't post for a couple more days in terms of like the transaction being finalized, as long as it's got that 1231 date, then it counts for that calendar year. But of course, as you may guess, if you're getting this far in the story, there's more to it. While the charge processed immediately in the sense that I got my United Club passes right away, it didn't show up on the Amex statements until January 1st. And I don't mean that it didn't show up like I didn't see it online. I mean, like the charges dated January 1st, 2020. That sucks. It does. Because that means both I lost out on using up the credits for 2019, which really wouldn't have been such a big deal because I felt like it was a wash since I got the economy plus seating anyway.

So if I had it to do over again, I would be happy to just let those credits languish. Because now the problem is, I have partially used airline credits for United on three different Amex cards for 2020. And so now I can't change the airline on those anymore, because I've used the credits partially on all three cards. So is that a rule I thought you had until January something or other to make a change. Well, you know, that's a good question. You are supposed to have until January something or other to make a change. But as far as I know, once you've partially used the credit, that's it. They won't let you change. I don't think. I really think you should, one, try to change it. But two,

if you can't, call Amex and just tell them what happened. Yeah. You made those charges last year, and so you really wanted to switch to Southwest. Yeah. I bet they'll let you. I'm going to have to hope for that. I appreciate the forgiveness that's implied in that tone. Oh, no, I don't forgive it at all, no. So don't wait until December 31st. Never mind that I made a very similar mistake by ordering from Dell on December 29th, and Dell decided to not charge my card until January 5th or so. Whenever they ship.

But, you know, that's the way it goes. It is. All right. All right. Well, you know what? I'll absolve you, assuming I have that power. Thank you. Thank you.

I appreciate that. Since I made a similar sentence. Good. Good. Good. That's the way it works, I'm sure. That's exactly how it works. Moving on.

Reader feedback time. We have two readers. Two. Reader feedbacks. Yes. Double. A double episode. You get two for the price of one.

And you sort of get three for the price of one because the first reader feedback has two pieces of feedback in it. Oh, wow. So three reader feedbacks. Thank goodness I'm sitting down. All for one low fee. The same low fee. The same low fee. The same low fee. Speaking of fees, no, we'll get back to fees later on.

Go ahead. The same low fee. I was hoping we wouldn't bring up fees in this episode. I'm sure you were. First, we're going to introduce Kathy, who emailed. She said she has been away and hasn't been listening to our podcast for a while and has been catching up and so she uh wrote us a nice long email and had a bunch of feedback in and i picked out two pieces one she says in the november 22nd episode you were talking about the

product changing with capital one i recently product changed from the venture to the zero annual fee venture one, and my miles are still live and available to transfer to airline partners. So that was just something we brought up in an episode. We weren't really sure what the state of things were with product changing in Capital One's credit card lineup, and it turns out it's good. It works. It sounds like it works the same way Chase or Citi does, where if you product change, you keep your points. That's awesome. So that's awesome. Yeah. Separately, this is Kathy again. Kathy says,

separately, there was a more recent episode where you were talking about Greg stitching together award tickets on separate airlines. Another potential way to mitigate risk might have been to protect the legs you were concerned about with Freebird, though that would have only applied for domestic legs. So we were talking about how sometimes we can book, when we're booking awards with multiple different airlines airlines that sometimes there's a risk in that you might have a layover that you'd miss and the first airline or second airline isn't going to protect you because you booked with two different airlines. So there's this app or something called Freebird where you could pay $19 for a one-way flight to kind of protect you from delays and misconnections. And what happens is you, or what's supposed to happen, I haven't tested this out, is you get a text message from them when your flight is delayed

that says, assuming you've paid for this service, of course, that says your flight is delayed, click here to rebook. And they'll rebook you on any airline that's available. It doesn't have to be the one you were originally on to get you to your destination as soon as possible. And they'll do that for free. And there's supposedly people standing by to help you if there's any issues and all that kind of stuff. So I thought that sounded great. It is limited, though, to domestic flights. And Puerto Rico, I think, is one still US-based flight. So anyway, I thought that was a great suggestion and something that I kind of vaguely remember reading about Freebird when it came out, but I had forgotten all about.

Yeah, you know, I see it come up in my Twitter feed, honestly, because I've seen other people writing about it working. So I have reasonable confidence that it works because I've seen people mention it, people that I'm sure would not just say that it works if it didn't work. And friends have mentioned that it's been working for them. So I think that it is probably working well. I haven't used it either, but I thought that was a great suggestion when you were saying it, though.

It's a terrific way to protect yourself if you have to position for flights domestically. I mean, yeah, that's totally worthwhile. Yeah, yeah. Okay, then we have from Federal Orca. Federal Orca. Federal Orca. Greg, your 2020 predictions are off to another great start a smiley face here's here's the part i i wanted to talk about let's just hope you're wrong about the aspire

let's let's hope you're wrong about the aspires hierarchy too so i thought this was really great comment because we know now and we will momentarily talk more about it that one of my 2020 predictions was pathetically wrong let's not talk about yet what prediction that was but most of my other predictions have a chance at still being right well yes but let's let's hope that they're all wrong because most of them were pretty pessimistic so if i was if i was completely wrong then that means that amex won't raise the annual fee on the hilton aspire won't raise the annual fee on the Hilton Aspire, won't raise it on the Bonvoy Brilliant, and Hilton will add a significant new elite perk to their program. That's a good point. You may as well.

I mean, if you're going to be wrong, go harder. I want to go for 0%. That's what I'm going for this year. You're off to a slamming start then with that so far. Hopefully we'll all end up thankful for your trend on predictions last year. Exactly. All right. Now, before we move into the theme of the day, we have a couple of pieces that are...

I'm going to call this the in case you missed it section. These are things we posted about you might not have missed during the week that we think are important enough to bring up again and talk about briefly. So first of all, I wrote about how you can book Singapore Airlines Premium Cabin Awards with Alaska Miles. And the surprising thing here, there were two surprising things. One was a little bit surprising, which is that Alaska has far, far more access to Singapore's business class awards than does their other partners. So if you try booking with United, Avianca, you know, whoever, you're not going to get those awards, whereas Alaska seems to have quite a few available. And that was a surprise.

That's really notable that other Star Alliance partners can't book the space that Alaska can, because ordinarily a non-Alliance partner, if anything, would have access to less, right? Alaska has access to less Cathay Pacific premium cabin availability usually than One World Partners. I would have expected the same with Singapore. The fact that it's opposite is surprising. Yeah. So something interesting is happening here. Of course, they might fix it at some point, but for now, this seems to be true. And in fact, I booked one of these where you couldn't book it with other partners. Now, that's what I confessed last week that I spent too many miles, but nevertheless, it proves that it's bookable in those situations. Now, the next thing I found was even more surprising, which is that there are

times where Alaska has much more award space, or at least more access to business class award space than Singapore itself provides to its members. Crazy. Crazy, yeah. So in some cases, I found that Alaska had saver level access, and Singapore had standard level access. So they would charge more, but they did have access to it. But there were other cases where Singapore didn't make those flights available at all to its own members, and Alaska did. And so, you could take, for example, their flight from Newark to Singapore. I think that's the longest flight in the world right now, maybe? Right now, I think it is, yeah. And you can book that with Alaska miles, and it's much more available through Alaska

than Singapore. How crazy is that? It's unbelievable. I don't think anybody would have predicted that when the partnership kind of got off the ground, so to speak, in terms of being able to use miles to book. I don't think anybody would have predicted that being the outcome. So that's really notable. And I can't imagine that that will last forever. The fact that Alaska can book seats that Singapore doesn't even make available to their members. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense at all. So, if you're interested in booking Singapore Airlines premium cabin space, that's worth a look if you have Alaska miles because I don't think that one's going to last forever. Right, right. Now, I want

to point out something else because those who get our posts through email probably don't know that the first iteration of my post was wrong in some ways. And it was wrong in that I highlighted first-class cabin awards that were available through Alaska and not through Singapore. And it turns out that I got stuck in the trap of not noticing that Alaska was showing mixed cabin awards.

So Singapore doesn't show those awards at all. So Alaska has an edge there in that it shows them. But basically, what it was, was like my example in my post, in the original post, I've changed it. But the original post showed that you could book using Alaska Miles first class from JFK to Singapore via Frankfurt. And so the first leg to Frankfurt is on the plane that has Singapore suites. So I thought, wow, that's amazing. Singapore didn't show this availability at all. The second leg was on a different flight that doesn't have suites, but still first class is awesome i've heard

with singapore so you've flown it yeah so suites so that seemed incredibly awesome now finding out later that the first leg was actually an economy was a huge bummer on the other hand the second leg was in first class which is still not bookable with Singapore miles. So there's something potentially good there. So if you're willing to do that first leg in economy, unfortunately, that's an overnight leg. But still, it does seem to be a way to sometimes get Singapore first class, which is very, very hard to book with Miles in general. Yeah, with Miles in general, certainly with partner Miles. Partner Miles, we've only seen it when there have been glitches, which this, again, might be for a while.

Might be, yeah. Right. Yeah. All right. Yeah, I think that's worth mentioning for listeners who perhaps receive the email that that is true, that our post content goes out via email. But when there's an update or a change in something that we make later on in the day, you may not see that update. So not a bad suggestion if you are receiving the emails and reading our posts in email. If you see something that's particularly

of note to you to maybe click through and read it on the website because occasionally we do change things. And that happens also with quick deals, things like that. Things sometimes change. Portal payouts might change or perhaps there's a better deal even. And so we may update that post later on in the day. It's worth clicking through to the site, I think, sometimes in order to make sure you have the latest version. And I'd go a little further. If it's a quick deal, especially, you're about to do some deal, click through and see if anything's changed. But also skim through the comments. Sometimes readers have posted something that is very important, good or bad.

And so it's a great way to make sure you're getting the most out of these deals before you jump on them. So that was, I think, a good reminder anyway. Click through and check it out on the site for all of those reasons. Yeah. Now, the other thing particularly notable this week, hopefully you didn't miss it, is that many of us are getting bond void like crazy. Now, you say many of us. Did it happen to you?

Not that I'm aware of. But I haven't stayed. Believe it of, but I haven't stayed. You haven't checked, huh? Believe it or not, I haven't stayed at a Marriott property for a while now, so I would have to go back a while to look. Well, but do you have future award reservations with Marriott? I do, but none that I'm planning on keeping at this point. Yeah, but still, you may want to take a look. You're right. If things change, though, and you decide to keep it, you want to take a keeping at this point. So yeah, yeah. So but but still, you may want to take a look. You're right.

If things change, though, and you decide to keep it, you want to take a look at your account. So Greg's a great example here that he hasn't looked at his account, apparently, to check and see if he's been bond void by this yet. And you definitely want to check because why don't you explain what's going on? All right. So what's happening is that some properties have changed in category or some properties have gone to peak pricing. When Marriott introduced their peak pricing and off-peak pricing, they said that those prices would change every month. However, when you book,

you lock in your price. So if I book a property right now and it's off-peak and I pay my points for the property right now, and then next month it goes up to peak pricing, I still keep my off-peak price. At least that's the way it's supposed to work. But what's happening to a lot of people is that at some point in the middle of the night, overnight, on some random day, their reservations are getting rebooked at the higher rate. So what's happening is Marriott is refunding the original booking and then taking out more points for the peak pricing or for the category increase. And all you receive is an email confirmation as though you just made a new booking, which you might not think twice of if it's a property you know you already have booked,

and it's the same dates in the same room. You may not even notice that there have been more points taken out of your account. And so Marriott has been doing that not only in advance, sometimes months in advance and months after making a reservation. We've had comments from readers who made a reservation four months ago that's not for another six months that repriced last week and took more points out of their account. It's also happening during the stay. People have said that they have checked in and the next day after checking in, they've received an email, a new email confirmation for their stay, where more points were taken out of their account for a stay that is in progress. We've also had people who had free night certificates

in their account, and after check-in, their reservation again has gotten refunded, and the free night certificate has been used, even when it's not a property where they wanted to use that free night certificate. So moral of the story is keep a close eye on your Marriott account. This has to be an IT glitch. I hope that Marriott will get this figured out. But in the meantime, I can't imagine how many people are out there who probably have lost points and just not even known it. I know. It's absolutely terrible. And the way Marriott accounts for point reservations, at least how they show it in their activity log, it's so incredibly... That's always been a complaint I've had with Marriott

ever since I started staying at Marriott's at all, is that instead of showing, you know, this much was subtracted due to a change, it sort of like reverses out the entire thing and just shows the overall amount as if it was one transaction. And so you can't possibly follow what was going on. Especially if you have a lot of award reservations, it's really, really difficult to follow. There's not enough information about what's attached to what. So really, you got to keep a close eye. You need to read the post and take a look at it and read the comments from people and go to Flyer Talk. We had received a comment in our Frequent Miler

Insiders group, and that's what led me to this. Initially, when I read it, I was like, that can't be right. She must have had something wrong there or account got hacked or something. And then I started looking for more data points, and I was just amazed at how many data points I was seeing, because that has to represent such a tiny portion of the number of people it's happened to. I'm sure there's a lot of people that don't know. So yeah. So I know, I know that most people reported they've been able to get it corrected by calling it some people, it hasn't been easy, but some people it was. What about with those certs when a, let's say, 50K cert was used for a 15K property? What's been the resolution? Do they get 50K points back?

Do they get- I haven't seen a resolution at all on that. And in fact, all of the people that I've seen anyway that had this happen on a stay and didn't realize until afterwards are still waiting on points. And the crazy thing is that people are receiving an email after check-in. Pres until afterwards are still waiting on points. And the crazy thing is that people are receiving an email after check-in, presumably they're on vacation, they might not even be looking at their email that closely, that their stay has been rebooked. Now the people who've caught it right away have been able to get the points refunded, but the people who haven't caught

it until a week or two after checkout have gone through one call after another at some point. Oh, ouch. Marriott Rewards being promised that, yeah, you're going to get the points back, we're going to fix it. But been weeks in some cases and no resolution yet for those people. And with the free night certificate, it's really hard because that just disappears from your account. And again, it's tough after the fact. Let me back that up. Marriott seems to know there's a glitch and most agents seem to know that there's a glitch. However, not all agents know everything, and we know that is true, that agents are often wrong, and some agents have given misinformation and told people, no, it just reprices and they

can reprice at any time. So don't be amazed if you receive an agent that doesn't know. But let's put that aside for a second. How do you prove that you didn't rebook the reservation? Who else could rebook your reservation, right? So if you're an agent that doesn't know about this, you got to look at this and be like, well, clearly you did that. Computer system didn't do it. So and how do you prove that I didn't make that change? So it's really a terrible situation to be in.

I don't know what's going to happen to the people who had the free night certs. I would hope Marriott will just refund them in points. But and I would hope that Marriott would do more. I haven't heard of anybody. Or they'll re the free night certs. I would hope Marriott will just refund them in points. But, and I would hope that Marriott would do more. I haven't heard of anybody. Or they'll reissue the certs. I haven't heard of anybody receiving any kind of compensation over and above just getting their points back.

Right, for all the headache. Right. Yeah, all right. So we already have a entry for next year's naughty list. Right, right. We're getting a head start on a post for next December. I won't forget that one. That'll be there up at the top. My goodness. Yeah. So that'll be in our naughty and nice list. Now, in our post next year about predictions,

one of the things that I'm sure will be right at the top of that will probably be a link to our FM on the air this year, because hopefully... Yeah, so last week we talked through all of our predictions for the year. We sure did. And just quick flashback for the people who weren't here for it with us last week. I predicted that Chase will not increase the annual fee of the sapphire reserve so that's out there so uh so greg greg like a week ago right you said that chase was and you argued that chase was not going to increase the annual fee that prediction lasted like just a little bit over a week before yeah gone didn. Didn't I even sort of tease you and say that I was going to play the clip of you saying that they would raise it?

And I'm not going to be doing that now. No, you're not. You're not. Chase has just been waiting in the wings to burn me. So as soon as they heard last week's podcast, they were like, ooh, we can get them now. We're going to raise the price right now. Something must have happened because, yeah, I mean, that one, like that has to be a record for the one that became wrong the fastest. Right, right. Nobody gets them all right, but everybody likes to make their predictions for the year.

Most people don't get them wrong that quickly. Right. So, you know, I feel good. I'm number one. Right, number one. Number one fastest wrong prediction ever. But you know what? I'm interested to hear what you think about the change. So obviously, for those who somehow have been hiding under a rock

the last couple of days and haven't heard, Chase is indeed increasing the annual fee on the Sapphire Reserve, much to Greg's dismay, to $550 per year. And that's going to start with January 12th, I think is what we had said, January 12th. The fee for new applicants will go up and for existing cardholders, I think if your anniversary date is after April, right? Right. Sounds like it'll actually be January 13th as far as how things actually happen. So January 12th looks like it's the last full day to apply. Yep.

Yep. Thank you. Yeah. Good. Good point. So that's going up. And Chase is adding some benefits. They're adding a DoorDash pass.

They're adding more points per dollar on Lyft. Sapphire Reserve holders are going to get a Lyft Pink membership for a year. What do you think about all this, Greg? I mean, I know you didn't think it was going to happen. So now the future you didn't expect has come true. How does it feel? So my initial gut reaction at seeing this stuff was, oh, man, I'm probably not going to keep the card long term. That was just a gut reaction of the benefits that they said they were adding in exchange for the $100 extra annual fee on the surface didn't look to me like nearly equivalent um so but then i you know took a step back and and dived into them a bit and said well how good are these benefits and let's talk first about the door dash thing so door dash i didn't even know what door dash was before but it's a food delivery service like grubhub i'm i yes think and um i think the membership gives you basically free delivery does it give i don't know if it gives

you anything else no free delivery um and i think you still pay the service fees if there's a service fee but free delivery yeah yeah so you save a few bucks per delivery. It's good. But they also are giving us $60 credit or like an instant rebate each year for DoorDash purchases. And they're not, one of the things that I find really, really good is they're not splitting it up the way the Amex Gold does. Amex Gold, you get the $10 per month Grubhub

and other restaurants, but credit. credit but you know if you have a fifty dollar order you're only getting ten dollars off and and so you have to use those credits every single month to get the full 120 value in this case sixty dollars value one big order or two medium orders you're going to get back your money and so i like that a lot i you know uh being forced to use door dash instead of grubhub or whatever else i want to use once or twice a year does is not very difficult and in fact with the free delivery maybe it would be better than the other services i I don't know. I'm willing

to give it a try and see, make sure the prices are reasonably similar. And so I like that. So to me, the $60 credit plus the free delivery, I'm personally valuing that at about $50 per year. So meaning I'd be willing to pay fifty dollars a year for the combination, sixty dollars instant credit and the no delivery fees. See, I value it even more. And really, I know that I know that people are going to tell me all the time cost of money this and you're prepaying for that. And Greg is right to say that generally you should value those benefits. It's like,'s like, what would you pay for a subscription to those benefits? That totally makes sense.

I get that perspective. But with this amount of money, with the $60, I know I'm going to order more than $60 worth of food from a delivery service at least a couple of times a year. And I am not going to menu comparison shop and see, is it cheaper on Uber Eats or cheaper on Grubhub or cheaper on this or that? When I get to the hotel and it's late and I'm hungry and I've got a hungry toddler, I'm just going to order from the first one that I'm used to ordering from. And that's the way I live my life right now. Sure, I could probably buy Uber discounted gift cards and use Uber Eats or

something like that. I use Grubhub right now just because the Amex Gold has the $10 monthly credit. And so I don't think about it. I just use it. It's just automatic. Just as well to me to switch that to DoorDash. I don't really care. I'm not going to pay that close attention to it. I'm going to save a few bucks probably because of the no delivery fee. So even if it's a little bit overpriced, it's probably a wash. And yeah, I'm willing to pay the $60 for $60 in credit to have it be a no-brainer.

Simple. I just pull up DoorDash. I don't have to think about, oh, which app am I going to order from? No, I'm going to order from DoorDash because I get my $60. So that to me is worth it. Now you're going to say, why would you pay $60 in advance for $60 worth of food? I know that's what you're going to say. And what I'm going to say is there are thousands of listeners out there right now who have a Starbucks app on their phone, who reload their Starbucks balance with a credit card and use that phone at Starbucks to pay rather than pulling their credit card out of their pocket. You prepay $20 for $20 worth of coffee.

What's the difference between doing that and $60 worth of food? It's the same kind of thing. I do that with Starbucks already. Why wouldn't I do it with DoorDash? What difference? So I kind of get it with Starbucks because it's super easy. They make it so it's kind of like fractionally easier than using a credit card to pull up your app. I mean, fractionally. Fractionally. So, BirdDash makes it easier because I just pull up one app instead of trying to figure out which app. It makes about as much difference, right?

So, you're paying to get locked in. Yeah. You're actually... You're paying to get locked in. Yeah, but I'm going to get locked in yeah yeah but i'm gonna spend that 60 bucks no matter what but all right about 60 bucks same difference to me it's worth 60 bucks hold on let's just say your your argument made any shred of sense at all which it doesn't let's just say it does what about the amex gold so so now you've got this 10 a month

credit i know you love that my skull so you're not getting rid of it if you switch away from grubhub then now you've got to worry about are you eating at uh the the shake shack cheese cake factory or whatever every month whatever right what or not worry about doesn't this cause problems for you? I don't really worry about that particular benefit. I've been using it sometimes because that's the card that I have loaded in Grubhub. And so I do use it when I use Grubhub. But whether I use that or don't use that, don't get any use out of it, not really a big deal to me. So that to me is a very small benefit of the Amex Gold card. I don't use it every month. Oh, my God.

So you're paying $60 to get locked in and to avoid the chance of getting $120 a year from Amex. I'm never going to get $120 a year from Amex because I can't get Grubhub delivery at home. I only get it when I'm traveling somewhere. So I happen to be traveling and want to order Grubhub or whatever else, which is the same case with this credit, except I'm going to use this credit all at once. I'm going to use that $60 up in one order, whereas I'm going to get $10 a couple of times a year from Amex at best. I'll get this whole $60. It's easy, simple. Have you looked into – just as an aside, have you looked into Boxed?

I mean, can you order diapers or something at a reasonable price and you know every time that i want a subscription i probably could but i've every time i've looked at boxed they seem overpriced compared to what we've been paying for stuff right right that's why i haven't used it diapers specifically and wipes and things like that we looked at and they just weren't cheaper than what we were paying so yeah hasn't hasn't seemed worth it to me i could probably hunt around for something on box that would be worthwhile. Right. Whether it's worth the effort, I don't know. But maybe. Maybe.

But there you go. So you made my argument for me. I can use the $10 credit at Box. I'm not giving anything up. I'm going to spend $60 on dinner. I'm just trying to help you make less of a terrible decision. That's $60 that's going out of my pocket no matter what. I have a hard time.

So let's say this Chase thing had never happened. And a DoorDash salesperson shows up at your door and says, have we got a deal for you? For $60 a year, we're going to give you a Dash Derly membership. I forget what that's called. Right, right. Dash Pass. Dash Pass membership. Dot, dot, dash.

Whatever it is. Which will give you free delivery, and we're going to give you $60 worth of food. Are you going to buy that? If I'm working on a minimum spend, maybe. If I'm working on a category bonus, possibly. I'm going to probably spend that on something similar. No. Okay. So salespeople out there, I'm going to sell you Nick's address so you can show up and sell terrible subscriptions. The delivery fee alone probably well i mean the six dollars or five dollars or whatever it is i end up paying on grubhub every time i order i think it's like six bucks the delivery fee usually right so the six bucks each time over time i mean it has to make

up i don't think i thought it was just a couple bucks but i don't know um I got you. You know what? We're arguing over $10. We're arguing over $10. We are arguing over $10. Over $10 a year. So it's not a big deal that Nick is so terribly wrong. So, okay. I mean, the free delivery fee may end up saving you more. It may be worth more than $60.

It's true. It might. It might. Moving on. So Lyft. We're going to get 10 points per dollar by linking our Sapphire Reserve into the Lyft app. That seems pretty darn good to me. Now, I know in your post, you pointed out that for the moment, it's not very good because anyone with uh the sofi debit card can get 20 back i think it is right but that that deal ends at the end of february yes correct yes it ends february 19th yeah so so let's just set aside that you know let's just think of that as that's like a temporary separate deal um i don't

ever that i can recall see have seen lyft like gift cards available at discount or anything like that i recall we see uber gift cards on discount quite often right right maybe 15 every now and then 20 you can get on it whoops on an uber gift gift card, but not usually with Lyft. Right, right. So at least with Uber, you could get similar savings or rewards, if you want to think of it that way, by going the gift card route.

But this is just super easy, right? Just link your Sapphire Reserve, pay for your Lyft rides with it. You don't have to think about it. You're getting a great rebate. I can't argue with the value of that as long as you use Lyft rides with it. You don't have to think about it. You're getting a great rebate. I can't argue with the value of that as long as you use Lyft. Now, personally, I don't use Lyft very often. And the reason is that while there are some cities where Lyft seems to be the default go-to thing, that there's millions of Lyft cards. Like I remember seeing that last time I was in Chicago. Most places I go to, though, that's not the case.

You usually pull up the Lyft app and it says next drive will be in 15 minutes and the Uber app says three minutes. Now, they're both lying because... Right, right. It's just a matter of which one's lying more. But the point is it at least appears that Uber has a lot more cars and so I usually choose that. And plus sometimes Uber's cheaper, but sometimes Lyft is cheaper. It seems to be a little random as far as I can tell them. So I don't highly value that more because

I don't ride Lyft often than, you know, I actually think it's a great benefit. What about you? So I think that earning 10x is pretty much unheard of on one particular merchant. You don't see that very often. The Capital One Venture card is offered 10x at hotels.com, and that's going to end later on this month. Apart from that, I can't really think of a time when a card is offered 10x, and certainly not 10x that's as valuable as Ultimate Rewards points. At the same time, I could buy discounted Uber gift cards and probably save, I would say, a comparable amount as to what I'm going to earn in additional rewards by using Uber instead. Of course, there's a lot of complicated math there. Is Uber cheaper

than Lyft or Lyft cheaper than Uber, depending on where you're riding it? At the end of the day, what I'm saying here is that I don't think 10X is as amazing as it seems on the surface, but it's certainly better than not getting 10X. And to me, the difference between Uber and Lyft has been pretty minimal. I haven't noticed the issue of Lyft having many fewer cars on the road, but probably because I've mostly used it in like Chicago and Las Vegas and places where certainly it does have a pretty big presence. So I guess that really varies. And I'll be curious to see how that plays out over the course of the year. I'll definitely be using the Sapphire Reserve though and Lyft over Uber in the short term for sure. Yeah, for sure. I'll definitely also, you know, start with Lyft and

only switch to Uber if Lyft is not going well. So now let's talk about so they they have one other perk which is this lift pink membership and first just broadly what's weird about this is that they're not saying you get it every year what they're saying is you get one year of it and that's reminiscent of the we work benefit business platinum card used to have same deal they they said as a card member you get one year from starting whenever you sign up and they're doing it the same way whereas the other benefits the other perks they're saying we get them for this year and next year. And I'm pretty sure the idea is that they don't want to lock in with this particular partner forever. And so they're leaving open-ended. They might renew for the year after that.

They might switch to a different perk with a different partner. Who knows? But I don't have the impression that those are like intentionally limited as much as they just want to cover their bases that that's my guess that they probably have a contract with with these sponsors that lasts until the end of next year and so that's what they're guaranteeing that that's that's my take um and that copies what capital one did with hotels.com and before that they did an uber benefit they they always had them for a certain amount of time and and i'm sure that's because they had some kind of contract with those sponsors that was limited and so so then they

would they go try to find something else once that ends. And I assume it's limited on the partner end potentially as well, wanting to find out how this works out for them too, to see if it works out to be an official relationship for them. I think in the case of Lyft, I have to imagine Lyft is going to see a significant uptick in business because I imagine that anybody with a Sapphire Reserve is going to be looking to Lyft first, at least for the next year. Yeah, no, I think that's a huge coup for Lyft. I mean, because before this happened,

Uber was most people's default ride share app, I think. And now all the Sapphire Reserve card holders are going to be saying, well, gee, I might as well pull up Lyft. Why wouldn't I? Right, right. I mean, of course you would. And in my case, I've defaulted to Uber, not because of more cars on the road, just because that's been my habit for years now. Uber is the one that sits on my home screen. It's my habit to use Uber. And I have friends who prefer Lyft and said, oh, you should use it. I've used Lyft in, like I said, in Chicago and Las Vegas, a few places, but not very many places. And it's mostly just a matter of habit. And Lyft is about to totally change my habits for a solid year. And so their hope, I'm sure, is to make that a permanent change and have me just

using Lyft out of habit beyond that, whether or not they offer a partnership with Chase. So I wonder what Lyft's long-term plan is there too, if perhaps they didn't want to commit to more. I find it interesting that Chase is offering 10X on Lyft for two years, but the Lyft Pink membership for one year. I wonder if that's not part of the experiment too, for Lyft to see if the year A, encourages you to buy into the membership in the future, or B, makes your habit strong enough that it doesn't matter. They don't have to give you that particular benefit in order to keep your business. Yeah. I'm guessing it's the first one that they're betting that people will try LiftPink,

some percentage will like it and then pay the, what is it, like 19 bucks a month or something like that. Which is a really good point, actually, now that you mentioned that that brings me back to door dash for a second because when we were talking about it before you asked you know would i pay 60 for the 60 gift card and the the door dash dash dot dot whatever the dash membership is that gets you the free delivery and and what i thought of after we talked about it was well some, some people pay for that. Some people pay for that membership alone, right? And the same thing with Live Pink. Somebody out there is paying $19 a month for it. Now, that somebody is not necessarily me. I mean, it isn't me in either case. But if there was a deal that said, hey, buy a $60 DoorDash gift card,

get a free Dash membership, whatever, Dash Pass membership, would I buy that? I might, you know, yeah, you kind of suggested that with the salesperson coming to my house, but I might, cause I'd figure, you know, I got nothing to lose. I'm going to order it anyway. And I have a little bit to gain potentially. Why not? What, you know, so same thing with, with, with this, I think giving you the membership is giving you something that some people do pay for. Now I don't value it at whatever the $19 a month that they charge for it. Cause I'd never pay that. I don't take Lyft enough. However, it does have some decent benefits. Yeah. So what are the benefits now? So when I say some decent benefits, it has a decent benefit.

The decent benefit really is 15% off of all rides. Now, I'm not sure exactly how that's going to work. A reader brought up in the comments that Lyft often offers promotions of like 10% off or 15% off your next six rides, but it's up to $10 worth of the ride. It doesn't include the 10. Like really like pathetic. Like a dollar off, basically. Not really 10 or 15%. This is really 15% off the ride. Then I think it's useful. If it's 15% off the first $10, I mean, it's $1.50 each time. I'm not going to take in enough time for that to add up to be super worthwhile to me. But I think if it's 15% per ride, I'm going to be pretty interested in

that. And certainly people who ride here all the time, that can be huge. And I'd understand why they would subscribe to this. And so for those that would subscribe, then this is a huge one-time perk of getting 12 months of that subscription. So 12 times 19, whatever that is. Yeah, it certainly is. Like 200 and something. It excites me, especially if that 15% off does work the way that we intend, because as a non-Hyatt globalist, I sometimes stay at other properties, non-Hyatt properties, when I'm traveling in different places, and usually they don't include free parking. So the decision as to whether or not to rent a car often, especially in big cities, hinges

on how much it's going to cost me to park. Now, if I can do a guest of honor booking at a Hyatt somewhere and get free parking, then I may lean towards renting the car. But there are a number of times now where I haven't rented a car. So then I need a way to get from the airport into the city, and it's usually using Uber. So now it'll be Lyft instead. And those are fairly expensive rides. The only reason I'm doing it is because the parking is even more expensive than what it's going to cost me to get from the airport in and out. So I take airport rides a few times a year using a ride share,

and the 15% on those is going to add up to be a decent savings, I think. And then when you tack on 10X on top of that, then we're starting to talk pretty interesting. Yeah, yeah. Now, I think they have another really cool perk in there, which is the free bikes and scooters. Oh, yeah, that is interesting if you live somewhere with that have you seen that so yeah when i was last in austin i saw that that both uh lyft and uber let you rent certain scooters i didn't see about bikes but that's probably true with bikes too certain scooters even if they're not like from other certain scooters from other companies and i don't remember which ones they are whether they're spin or or you know bird or whatever but um the idea is you're just

using your regular app unlock the scooter and and ride off and so if you live in a city like that and are open to taking that kind of transportation i I mean, I think that'd be absolutely huge because you're probably doing that, you know, for many people are probably doing it a couple times a day. And so that's going to add up really quick. Yeah, no, you're right. And that is a cool benefit. Nice way to zip around a lot of cities. One tip I'll give you if you're going to do that is to bring a helmet.

Those things can fall over you. I have one of those little segues at home and I'm very good on it, but I also got a little crazy a couple of years ago. And I mean, I fell a couple of years ago and the scar remains. So, you know, you just got to be careful. I was glad I had a helmet that day because I would have really smacked my head hard on the pavement if I hadn't. And that was just me being silly and kind of doing some tricks and stuff that I shouldn't have been doing on it because I felt confident because I'd been using it for a while. Same thing I imagine can happen with those scooters, so be careful out there. That's a good point.

But I think that is a really awesome benefit to have, and especially with the bikes too. The bike can be a great way to get around a city that you haven't visited before. Without question, without question. And I just point out that it's especially valuable for those who live in cities like that because obviously they will have more frequent access to that. And then especially if you live in a place like Austin where you're more likely to be able to ride them year round than a place where, like where I live, where if they had them, I still wouldn't use them in the wintertime. Right, right. Yeah, I think that is a potentially interesting benefit anyway. So there's two. And then the other benefits are all kind of like soft priority pickup.

Right, right. We don't really have any idea how to value that. The thing about being able to cancel some rides, though. It says relax cancellation, but what does relaxed cancellation mean? Do you have any idea? I don't. I'm just sort of assuming that it means that they won't charge you for a ride when you cancel, when you make a request and cancel. That would be great.

It doesn't say that. There are times, I'm sure, where it's going to. It says relaxed cancellation policy. So perhaps you have a greater window to cancel, but they didn't define that at all. They didn't say what that's going to be. It would have been easy for them to say free cancellation, free ride cancellation, but they didn't. So I'm thinking that it's not totally free. It's just a matter of what you, maybe you have a bigger window or I'm not. I'm just, I'm just picturing that when you cancel you you get some some dude who's toking it out gone yeah man it's all good no problem don't worry oh yeah you'll be you'll be charged don't worry it'll be relaxed right exactly so uh so overall though i think that this this lift partnership is pretty interesting like you said a major coup for left yeah now but for me because i don't

ride lift very often and because i still have a mx platinum card that has the 15 a month uber credit i don't foresee myself using lift for for a while, as long as I have the platinum card beyond my first ride. Like I would do my first ride a month with Uber. And then if I remember that I'd done one, and if I have more than one in a month, then I would switch to Lyft. But I don't know how often that's going to happen. Yeah. I don't have a personal platinum, so I don't have that problem. Yeah, okay. So anyway, so the point is, so I decided I would pay $15 a year for this bundle of benefits.

What about you? Yeah, that's a good question. I would be willing to pay $15, but I haven't actually figured out what I would value that at. But here's my thought at it. I looked at the DoorDash benefit as being $60 worth to me. So I need to be able to get at least 40 out of Lyft for it to basically be a wash as to whether or not. I was already thinking of canceling, but if I was going to keep it at the 450, then I would keep it at the 550 as long as I get $100 out of those benefits. And I think it's pretty easy to get 40 bucks out of the combination of 10x. So what do you need

in order to get $40 worth of points, like $260 worth of Lyft rides or so at 10x, or I guess it's really an additional 7x. So the math changes a little bit on that. But between the 15% off and the pretty low threshold in terms of how much you have to spend to get enough value, I think that I'll pretty easily get the $40 out of that that I need to in order to break even. Well, I mean, if you did $300 worth of rides, if the 15% off works the way we think, then you're saving $45 right there. Right. But, you know, personally, there's just no chance that i would that i would do that again because of the circumstances but yeah but yeah if you you spend a lot of time in in chicago i know so maybe you you can do that i'm sure i spend more than 300 a year on on ride

chairs right now the issue with lyft is that of course they're not very international i don't know if they have any international destination well Well, not only that, the benefits don't apply internationally. Right. Right. Well, so I was thinking more so from the habit standpoint of if I get out of habit of using Lyft, but you're right, that too. So I don't know how that'll play out for me. But I'm sure that I spent more than $300 in ride shares in the United States last year. So it should be pretty easy for me to get enough out of that. Now, one thing I want to mention, a reader pointed out a really good short-term play, potentially. We'll see on Sunday how this works out because I intend to test it. But when that Lyft Pink membership goes live, which starting Sunday, you should be able to activate the Lyft

Pink membership as long as you have a Sapphire Reserve in your Lyft account and have that as your primary payment method. So that should trigger the 15% discount. Now, the reader said, well, okay, so once that triggers your Lyft Pink membership, can you change your payment method and pay with the SoFi money card and get the 15% off from Lyft Pink and 20% cash back from SoFi money? I intend to try to stack that. I mean, that's only going to last for about a month, but I think that would work. I'd be very surprised if that doesn't work.

Me too, me too. And the SoFi money, I just saw a flight deal posted actually on Twitter that that posted, the 20% back posted the same day on SoFi money as the Lyft. Yeah, yeah. So SoFi continues to be impressive with that kind of thing.

I talked recently about getting the ATM fee back by the time I had walked out of the store, it was back. Right. That's amazing. Now remind me the, with the Lyft deal, do you have to register for that deal or is it just automatic by using that automatic? You still find money debit card to pay. You get 20% cash back on Lyft rides. And again, that's until February 19th, I believe we have a quick deal on it, but, um, but I think you'll be able to probably stack that. And then that's a really nice savings. And I don't have many trips before February 19th where that's going to come in handy for me. But for people who do, that could be a nice savings on your ride share.

Yeah. Yeah. Almost makes me want to cancel my upcoming car rental. But then I'm sure I would spend more even with those discounts. It doesn't make sense. So what's your overall? You had written back in December, I think, that you were not likely to renew the Sapphire Reserve. That's before we knew that the annual fee was going up, although it had been rumored. So you did include a little bit of thinking about that. But what's your thinking now that we've got $60 worth of DoorDash benefits and some unknown amount of Lyft benefits. Well, you know, I'm thinking that I'm glad that I have like about nine months to figure this out and decide because I'm interested to see how much I use Lyft and how much I save with it. Because I think that there's a decent chance that I'll save enough that it may encourage me to keep the card.

The 15% off on each ride might add up. Now, this year, I tend to do less travel than most years. So, or at least not most years, less travel than last year, for sure. Last year, I traveled quite a bit. So this year, I intended to kind of stay at home a little bit more. So I don't know if I'll use ride share as much as I have in past years. But I do want to see how much I end up saving, whether or not the 15% works out the way that we intend for it to and how many points I earn at 10x. Because I think that's going to be a major factor. That $60, like I said, I consider to be a wash, so I don't really consider that in the calculations. So to me, it really comes down to how much I get out of the Lyft benefit.

Am I going to save enough or not? Although if you save a lot due to the Pink membership, that's still a one-time thing. Yeah, I mean, it may still cause me to keep it that one additional year, though, because I will have at least quite a few months left of the Lyft Pink membership. I'm really going to have to run the numbers. I don't know. The true answer to the story is I may end up keeping the Sapphire Reserve just because we write about this stuff and it's convenient to have it to talk about how these things work. But if I'm doing a mathematical, should I keep it, I guess, then I think I'd probably be leaning still towards no, but I'll be curious to see how much I save with Lyft. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting. So as I posted about yesterday or two days ago, if you're watching or listening to this on Saturday.

Anyway, I don't know when you're listening to this. You recently wrote about it. I wrote that. Kathy might be catching up on this like three months from now. I know, I know. Thank you, Kathy. We're glad you're catching up. I don't know what today's date is, so I can't figure it out. Anyway, I used my own spreadsheet that I've published to say, is the Sapphire Reserve worth it still

with the new annual fee? And I continue to see that for me, the ability to get 1.5 cents redemption value is really big. And I'm valuing that very highly, which is ironic because about a year ago, I wrote that I'd never been using that feature. But that I had millions of ultimate rewards points and, oh, I probably should start using that feature. And so, and that was right. Like there's no point in having all these points that you might someday transfer to get more than 1.5 value when I know realistically I wouldn't. And, and so I wouldn't do that many, you know, all those millions. So I started using it, especially for like reimbursable travel. You know, my wife's going to London or something. You book the flight, you get the receipt from the airline, she turns the receipt in, and

then it's basically like cashing out points at 1.5. And so I've liked that, and it doesn't take that many points redeemed that way for the annual fee to be almost irrelevant because it adds up very quickly, that extra quarter of a penny value per point. You're right about that. And in my case, I don't know if I barely use it. I did use it. I barely used that benefit this past year myself. I guess I need a little bit more reimbursable frequent miler travel, Greg. But no, in seriousness, I just didn't use it much last year, the year before, and the

year before that, I used it more than I anticipated. So it's hard for me to predict in the future. It is hard, yeah. Am I going to use it a bunch or not? Right. I don't know. It's very hard for me to say. I don't value it all that highly because I don't look to that as my first use of ultimate rewards points. That's like, you know, the third or fourth or eighth thing that I want to use.

But I'll tell you another thing, even without reimbursable travel what happens to me fairly regularly is i look at award flights and then i look at what would it take to book how many points you know would it take to book the same flight straight up or even a better flight straight up and i i see oh i could oh, I could actually, if points were equivalent, save points, book through UR, and, you know, and I actually earned miles on those flights. Yeah. And the URs are easier to replace in many instances than individual airline miles. So, that's a good analysis and a good way to think about it. I tend to, most of my award flights are flights that would be way more expensive than what it would be worth with ultimate rewards. But if you

are regularly traveling on routes where that's the case, then I totally think it makes sense to be using your ultimate rewards points that way. Earning miles, earning elite credit, credit towards elite status, if you fly enough or you spend enough on those Delta cards in order to earn elite status, then definitely it makes sense to think about using the ultimate rewards that way. And so for a lot of people, I think that the CSR will still be a keeper. If they think about it logically, I think it will still be a keeper. I don't think that these two benefits are bad. The problem is that they're short term. And that's the kicker like you said with um with lyft the pink membership only being a year and the door dash only being two years what's going to happen what's going to

happen in the future i don't know true so is it going to be worth keeping down the road i don't know right now i think so right right i hope i expect hope that they'll replace the lyft pink with something else when that goes away. But we really don't know. We haven't seen any replacement from Amex yet on that. On the WeWork? No, we haven't. Yeah, on the WeWork benefit.

We haven't seen anything from Citi regarding all the benefits that they stripped away from their card. So I don't know. Chase seems to be a follower at the moment. They are. Maybe they're going to follow that. I never expected that, but they sure are. Not add anything else. One more thing, the Sapphire Reserve.

I've been thinking about this. Should you apply right now before Monday in order to get in on the 450 annual fee for one year? And I've come up with an answer, an absolute answer. Well, I'm curious about your answer because it's not an easy one to answer because there's a lot of variables to consider. A lot of times when the annual fee is going to go up, it's a no-brainer. You apply now, right? And wait until – that way you lock in the fee now. But in this case, it might not be.

I'm sure you're going to explain why it might not be. But I think I know what your conclusion is. And if not, I think you're going to say, of course, apply now because Chase is known for matching bonuses later on down the road. So if there's a better bonus, perhaps they'll match it. Or at least I think maybe you were tempted to say that, but that wouldn't be right because the fee is going up. And when the fees change, when there's a difference in annual fee, Chase usually does not match the higher increased bonus. Usually, I think anyway, right? Isn't that the case with

the Sapphire Preferred and that sort of thing? When it goes back and forth between the fee being waived or the fee not being waived, those offers, I don't think they match. I'm not sure. And in fact, I had sort of forgotten the matching aspect of the question. So I'm glad you brought it up, though, because that's a really important detail that people might have been expecting that they'd be able to match to a new offer if there is one. And so have their cake and eat it, too. But we don't know that that's true. So that's why what my recommendation is is to wait. And the reason is that I think that there will be an increased offer.

Currently, the offer is 50K points. If the offer, if the increased, if I'm right about there being an increased offer, and if it's even only 60K, that's still 10,000 more points, which are worth $100 if you just cash them out for cash and worth much more if you use them in different, like for travel. So that seems like really easy. If you believe that they'll increase the offer at all, then wait. If you, for some reason, have reason to believe that they're not going to increase the offer a bit, then sure, go ahead and apply. But I think it's very likely they'll increase it. My pessimistic side says they'll just go to 60k to match the Sapphire preferred offer. My optimistic but not outrageously optimistic side says 80k to match the Inc. Business Preferred's standard offer. And then the most optimistic side,

but I wouldn't bet on it, would be that they would do another 100k offer as they did when they first introduced the Sapphire Reserve. But I actually think that's very unlikely. What about you? I think it's very unlikely too. I think it'd be a smart move for Chase because I think it's very unlikely, too. I think it'd be a smart move for Chase, because I think that that would bring in a huge amount of press on their newly increased fee card. Their retention numbers have been really good on the 450. I think that that would be a smart play on their end to increase it to 100K. However, this is what I think they should do if they're going to do that. Not what I want them to do, but what I think that they probably would be smart to do is to offer that 100K bonus, but make it tied to big spend. They've been doing this with the Southwest cards, seem to have been testing it over the last year with various structures in terms of making you spend more money over the first six months or 12 months in order to trigger the full bonus. It's already the way that the Avios cards work with the full bonus being triggered by spending $20,000 over the course of the year, I guess, is what it is for the full bonus. It's already the way that the obvious cards work with the full bonus being triggered by spending $20,000 over the course of the year, I guess is what it is for the highest

bonus on those cards. I'm surprised that they haven't done something like that to encourage people to spend on this card. So obviously, they would probably like people to be spending at one ultimate reward point per dollar if they can get it. And so if you can get people to pay an annual fee of $4.50 or $5.50 and encourage them to put this at the top of wallet, it's the same as Lyft. You're trying to build a habit in people to use this card. And in many ways, that happens to all of us. I'm sure that all of us have used a card sometimes. We've been like, oh, you know what? That wasn't the right card. It's just the card that I'm used to pulling out of my wallet. I should have used something else. I think that happens to a lot of us. So I think Chase should make it a $100K offer and make it something like $20,000 spend required to trigger the entire offer over

the course of the first 12 months. That would be really smart, I think, on their part. I don't think they're going to do that. I think they are going to tie the bonus to a bigger amount of spend over a longer period of time, though. So I see something like the 70, 75 or 80K, somewhere in the 70 to 80K range. That's my guess with a much bigger spend requirement. Right. Okay. Well, the good thing is we'll find out very soon. We will. We will. On Monday at the latest, if Dr. Credit doesn't break another rumor earlier than that, which he probably will. So let's all hope that Greg is wrong again. And it's not going to be 60K.

It's going to be 100K. Yeah, definitely. Let's keep that number going here, Greg. Let's keep your prediction success on the right path. All right. And then last thing to mention about signing up for that card is just don't forget that you have to be under 52424 meaning you have to have not signed up for five consumer cards in the past 24 months in order to are fewer than five in the past 24 months in order to be able to get approved for this card you also cannot have received a bonus

on this card or the sapphire preferred in the past 48 months so if it 48 months. So if it's been less than four years since you received a bonus, the welcome bonus for either one of those cards, then you're out of luck. One other thing, if you currently have the Sapphire Preferred or the Reserve, you also can't get this. You could cancel though, wait some amount of time, a week or so, and then apply and then you should be able to get as long as you meet the other two criteria. And it's also worth noting that I saw just last night and I didn't dig into it at all, but I did see and briefly skim the fact that apparently Chase is not allowing any product changes at the moment to the Sapphire Reserve. So I think if you

have a Sapphire, you were hoping to product change to the Sapphire Reserve. So I think if you have a Sapphire Preferred, you were hoping to product change to the Sapphire Reserve and lock in that $400 fee before the fee goes up. I think you're out of luck on that. They've already suspended that for now. That's right. Yeah. All right. Now, what I don't know though, actually,

and maybe you don't either, but that begs the question, are they still allowing Sapphire Preferred members or Sapphire members to product change to something else? I don't know why they wouldn't be. You mean to product change to the Freedom, for example, so that you can get the Sapphire Reserve? Yeah. I would expect that they are, and assuming they are, that's the right move rather than canceling it is to product change to a Freedom card. Even if you already have a Freedom card, you can product change to another so that you have more capacity for their quarterly 5X categories.

Or you could product change to the Freedom Unlimited if you don't have that. I recommend everyone who has the Sapphire Reserve has a Freedom Unlimited as a companion card to get 1.5X everywhere, assuming you don't have another great everywhere else card. Right. Right. And the combination is really the key. I was at the doctor last week, and then she was asking me about what's the best credit card for her to get. And I said,

there's not one best. If you really want the best, you need a combination. And so, that's certainly something to keep in mind. What's your combination with that Sapphire Reserve going to be? Very good. All right. That brings us to reader question time. answered the question, but I think it's a good question for everyone else out there, because I said just a little while ago that I may end up keeping the Sapphire Reserve mostly because it's convenient to be able to write about the benefits and to write about how, excuse me, when flights are available through the Ultimate Rewards Portal at one and a half cents each and whatnot. So I'm in a unique position. Most listeners and readers are not in that position, so they have to consider it more from the value they get. And so reader Steve H asked what I thought was a really interesting question.

He said, I'd be curious on your take if you were going to limit yourself to one premium card, which would it be? And don't say the Ritz because most people can't get it. So which ultra premium card would it be? So I already know Greg's answer, but I'm curious as to why. And obviously, most readers don't know Greg's answer. So if you can only have one ultra premium card, either the Platinum or the Sapphire Reserve or the Altitude Reserve or the City Prestige, or perhaps there might be another one out there that I just left off the list, which one would it be?

And why? Yeah. So... The Spire. yeah so inspire it's funny that that he he said don't say the ritz because it certainly popped into my mind as one of the one of the things i would have considered if i could only have one but i still think even if the ritz was in play i probably still would pick the sapphire reserve although there are reasons why i might pick the Red Sover. But anyway, why the Sapphire Reserve? So first of all, it has a decent Priority Pass membership. So unlike all of the Amex cards,

it does allow Priority Pass restaurants to be reimbursed so so that's good and it allows two guests so it's not as good as the ritz one but it's good um but more important than that it it has it has great travel insurance and more important than that, more than any other card, it fully unlocks the full value potential of Chase Ultimate Rewards points. So the question wasn't if you could only have one card overall. The question was if you could only have one of these ultra-premium cards. And so I'm assuming I can still have my Ink Cash, which gets 5X at office supply stores. No annual fee. And no annual fee, that I can still have my freedom card, which is 5X at rotating categories.

No annual fee. And so on and so on, right? So as long as I can have those other cards, I can still be earning at a great rate. Sapphire Reserve earns at a great rate for travel and dining. Not best overall you know there are 5x options but um still 3x is very good and so uh overall except for grocery stores i would be doing really well with my earning and then on the redemption side i have um you know, I can transfer to Hyatt and United. I can, and I can book flights and all these things at 1.5 cents value.

So I think it would be a very solid option that I'd be, I'd be, I don't think if I had the Sapphire Reserve, I don't think I would feel like I'm really missing out that much on what people with other ultra premium cards have. No, I think you hit the nail on the head with that. I think that the key difference is that the Amex Platinum isn't required in order to be able to pull your membership rewards points and get great value. You could still have the MX Gold and the Blue Business Plus and the other key membership rewards cards and transfer those to partners and unlock more or less the full value of those currencies. You don't need the Citi Prestige card to get anything special other than the 5X on dining.

Other than better earnings. Yeah, better earnings. And you can find your ways to do that within the chase ecosystem with no annual fee you can probably hit just about every bonus category there is with someone else pretty close with chase uh so if you pair that with a sapphire reserve so i agree actually and that's interesting because i've been talking about getting rid of the sapphire right right so it's interesting that I would agree with that. But if I were limited to one, I think that would have to be it.

The thing that I like about the Platinum card is fine hotels and resorts, for instance, except that Chase has their own program for that. So if I gave up the Platinum in favor of the Chase card, I would still have something more or less the same. I like getting 5X on my Prestige Dining, but if I only could pick one, that extra 2x thank you points is not enough, I don't think, to give up all the travel protections that Chase has. So I think head-to-head, Chase does pretty well when you're matching it up against one option from the other issuers. Now, I think the Ritz is the one I would keep if it were between the Sapphire Reserve and the Ritz, probably. But even that is a tight race. And that's more so because of the other cards I have, because I keep my ink plus. So I already have the ability to transfer to partners, and I don't use the 1.5x very much. So in my case, specifically, it's a little bit different, I guess. But I think if I could only have one ultra premium card, if I couldn't get any of those ultra premium benefits that I like from other cards, then it would have to be the Sapphire Reserve. Right, right. Now, the Ritz, the hardest thing for me to give up, if I had to give that up, is the ability to have free authorized users who get free priority pass memberships. So,

I've done that for a number of family members. I'd hate to tell them, oh, that's gone, right? Now, it also has that airfare benefit, the $100 discount on round trip. What about you? What's the main Ritz feature that you would hate to give up? Well, I mean, I think it's the combination. I don't think it's one.

I think if I had to point to one, that $100 discount seems like it'd be the one that I'd pick, except ironically, it's the one I've used the least, but I like having it there. Right, right. The ability to be able to use it when I want. But it's a combination of having that there as an option and also having a 50K start every year and the $300 airline incidental credits that I do end up using for legitimate airline incidental spend. That's where my legit airline incidental spend usually

goes. I don't usually monkey around with putting bags on United on my Amex Platinum. I hadn't already used that credit. Anyway, that's where typically all that legit I do spend $300 a year on things like bags or seat selection and that sort of thing. So I would I think the combination of those things makes it easily worth more than the points. And then when you add the travel protections on top, it's got most of the key benefits to me of the Sapphire Reserve, while also having a decent collection of benefits on its own between the free night, the $300 in incidental credits, and then the potential to save some money with the $100. And I have used the Priority Pass with multiple guests a number of times. We're traveling more and more with family and friends now than we did in the past. I think my wife and I have done a

lot of travel over the years, and most of it's been just the two of us. And I think we've found more and more value now in taking trips with other people, you know, because we enjoyed lots of those trips on our own. But I think it was my dad at some point said to me, you know, it's really interesting because you guys have so many really unique memories that only the two of you are ever going to totally understand or remember. And he's right. And it's special in some ways. And in other ways, it would be nice to have more of those memories that we've built with other people. And so we've been doing more and more family kind of trips in the last couple of years.

And so that unlimited gas is hugely important to me now, much more important to me now than it used to be. And then being able to give it to other people, I haven't done that. But having the ability to do that for somebody, I think is also worth it. I would keep the rest over the Sapphire Reserve if I had to pay. Yeah. Yeah. And just a reminder to listeners that you can't sign up for the Ritz new, but it is still theoretically possible to get a Chase Marriott consumer card and wait at least a year since you signed up for it and then call to see if you can product change to the Ritz and you might still be able to. Now, we are both fearfully waiting for the shoe to drop on that card, thinking that it's

likely to lose that airfare discount, that they might restrict priority pass, and that they might raise the annual fee. All those things are both possible and likely, I think. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to protect us. You're going to make a prediction, aren't you? I'm going to predict that those things are all going to happen, and they're all going to happen this year. They're all going to happen right away,

and I have no doubt whatsoever. So, Chase, you can burn me by not doing those things. In fact, I predict it will happen. No, not right away. I predict it will happen eventually. Eventually, okay. And so Chase has to never do those things in order to burn me. That's true.

You could burn me, Chase. If you're listening, you could burn me every year. So there's huge opportunity here with this prediction. Again and again. Again and again, forever and ever, burn me over and over. What punished me here? You know what would super burn me is if they actually made it better somehow, add some more benefits.

Oh, no, I'm getting too greedy. You know, I don't think that that's impossible either. I don't think it's likely, but I don't think it's impossible that some of these benefits end up being benefits that get slid over to the Ritz card. Also, I'd love to see the DoorDash or Lyft or something like that also extended to other ultra premium cards. So, Chase, if you're listening to me so far, I haven't gotten any predictions wrong yet this year. I predict you're going to add more benefits to the Ritz card, guys. Yeah, I you know, here's why I don't want them doing that. That means more benefits to the Ritz card, guys. Yeah. Here's why I don't want them doing that.

That means them looking at the Ritz card. I feel like most people at Chase have probably forgotten all about it. That's probably true. I think that's good. Let's not mention it again. Chase, if you're listening, we'll cut that part out of the podcast for you. Right, right. We'll apply our special technology that hides that whole part of the podcast from Chase listeners. Hopefully. Hopefully. Because I would like to keep that one in my part of the podcast from Chase listeners. Hopefully.

Hopefully. Because I would like to keep that one in my wallet for a while. All right. We'll get our technical team right on that. Yes, we can. All right. Now it's the saddest time of every show. We come to our goodbye song.

It sure is. A question for Greg that's not really a question for all the listeners, but have you set up our abbreviated goodbye song yet? No. format since this is available on Spotify and Apple iTunes and Google Play and all those good places. And you'd like to find out more about what we're talking about, go to thefrequentmiler.com. That's our website, thefrequentmiler.com. You can find us on Facebook, Frequent Miler on Twitter. You can join our Facebook group, the Frequent Miler Insiders, in order to connect with other people, ask and answer questions. And if you happen to be watching this online, you'll find us in all those podcast formats as well. You can find us on YouTube. You can find us all over the place.

So just Google Frequent Miler and figure out all the places you can find us. You'll see links to the podcast on our site. They're always in our week in review post, which posts every Saturday morning. So you can always find links. If you've forgotten where to find our podcast or what it's called, then that's where you can find it if you're watching this online and you're looking to find it. So thank you guys very much. Thank you, Greg.

Always great to have you here and be able to chat miles and points for a while. And thank you to all the listeners out there sending us your feedback and asking your questions. Next week, you never know, you might be on reader feedback or reader questions. So keep them coming. And we know from readers that it's super exciting to hear your name or your handle mentioned on the air. So yes, please do keep them coming. We enjoy reading and listening to them, whatever format they come in. I do really want to set up a call line so people

can leave recordings and we can play them. We need to do that. Anyway, thanks everyone. Bye-bye. Take care. Bye-bye.