Frequent Miler on the Air - Learning to Love LifeMiles | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep257 | 5-31-24

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

Nick has loved LifeMiles for a long time but Greg has traditionally been less convinced. Recent changes make Greg curious to hear more about Nick's long-time love of LifeMiles. Can Nick convince Greg to become a fan? (01:33) - On Ep 255: Strategizing Hilton cards, credits, and free nights, Greg’s podcasted plan left people with questions about family language for Hilton cards (Mailbag) Find episode 255 here. (05:12) - Hilton cards with new welcome bonuses (Mattress Running the Numbers) Learn more about the Hilton fee free card here. And learn about the Hilton Surpass card here. (12:27) - Southwest now on Google Flights (Award Talk) (16:09) - Finnair Avios now combinable (Award Talk) (18:20) - AA NOT eliminating mile & loyalty point earnings through OTAs (Award Talk) (19:22) - Cardless Avianca LifeMiles Cards (Card Talk) Read more about the Avianca LifeMiles American Express® Card Here. Read more about the Avianca LifeMiles American Express® Elite Card here. (28:33) - Easy miles to get (31:51) - LifeMiles+ subscriptions (49:30) - Using LifeMiles, standard pricing (53:43) - Hidden sweet-spots (59:30) - Mixed cabin pricing Read Greg's post "Aviance Miles - First Class for Less" here. (1:04:47) - How to search for complicated awards (1:11:14) - How to search for awards (less complicated) (1:22:10) - Downsides... (1:25:32) - Pop Quiz for Greg about quadruple dip opportunities for a Hilton Curio Collection hotel

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, learning to love life miles. Nick has long been a life miles lover, but I've been kind of lukewarm all this time. But some things have changed recently. So during today's main event, Nick is going to have an opportunity to convince me to love LifeMiles. And now if you're wondering, like, why should you care? It's because LifeMiles are really easy to get.

You can get them by transferring from Transferable Points. You can get them when points are on sale really cheaply and other ways that we'll talk about in today's main event. Welcome to the dark side, Craig. Come on, step over here into the loving life miles section. I'm looking forward to this because I've, like Greg said, I've long loved life miles. So I look forward to convincing Greg because lifeice has become easier to love as of late. We'll talk about that, like you said, later.

But don't forget that the show notes are always where you'll find the timestamps. So if you want to jump around and jump ahead to a specific segment or come back to one later on, you can find links to each section in the show notes and also links to more information on the blog about all the various topics that we cover. So check that out. And don't forget, wherever you're watching or listening, please like this, leave a comment, leave us some feedback, leave us a review. We always appreciate all of those things. So thank you for all of that. Now let's drag out this week's Giant Mailbag. Today's Giant Mail comes from responses to our show, episode 255, Strategizing Hilton cards, credits, and free nights.

During that show, I talked about a plan I had for getting Hilton cards that I didn't previously have Hilton cards for a long time. And my wife and I had each signed up for the Hilton business card. And my plan that I set at the time was that my next step would be for each of us to get Hilton Aspire cards, which is the pricey card, and that way to have multiple free nights each. And after a year, to get rid of that card and get the Surpass card for each of us as well. That was the plan I set at the time. In response to that, I'm not going to read the names because they're hard to read. One person said, can you get Surpass after Aspire? I thought Amex has family language to get the bonus. And another person said basically the same thing. Hey, Greg, isn't there family language with

the Hilton signup bonus? And a third person says, Amex is likely to add family language to Hilton cards, so the order of applications will matter. Okay, so stepping back, what is this family language stuff? Amex has lately added to their Marriott cards or Platinum cards, like a lot of their cards where there are several related cards, they've added family language. And this means that if you already have one, let's say Delta card, that's one where they added the family language. If you have like the pricier Delta card, you can't then apply for and get the bonus on a lower priced Delta card. And they did that with the Marriott cards. They did that with their golden platinum cards.

So that's what the family language is all about. They don't yet have that on the Hilton card, but as Albert D. Tom says, some people think it's likely it will get added. So far they haven't. So it is something worth considering though when going forward with any plans. Yeah. Yeah. So the ideal way to do it then, if you think that it might happen in the future is to start with lower cards and work your way up, because that restriction tends to prevent you from getting the bonus on a cheaper card. So if you get the most premium, the Aspire card, then you may not get the bonus on the Surpass or the no annual fee. Again, that's if Amex institutes family language on the Hilton cards, but they haven't yet. So right now it wouldn't lock you out of anything.

But the long term strategy, again, would be to start low and work your way up if you're concerned about that. I don't know whether planning for something that may or may not happen is necessarily the right strategy there. I think Greg's strategy was pretty sound. So I might still stick with his and gamble on that one because they haven't added the family language to the Hilton cards. They have added it to a bunch of others. I kind of feel like if they wanted to, they would have already, especially with the refresh of the business card and, you know, the increase in bonuses that we've seen recently. You would think if they cared, they would have instituted that family language already or if they wanted to. Now, what do you think you know yeah i mean it it seems likely to me that that

they would have already done it but you know it's possible that they that since they changed the cards recently they don't want to stop anyone from being able to get the welcome bonus on one of the cards you know and that they'll they'll do it later. I think that is possible, but I don't know. Time will tell. But other events have caused me to rethink the order of things. So we'll talk about that in the next segment. All right. So let's talk about mattress running the numbers then, because we've got Hilton cards to talk about. So what's new with the Hilton cards that is affecting your strategy?

Yeah. So both the fee-free Hilton card and the $150 annual fee Surpass card are out with new welcome bonuses, which are very attractive because in addition to points, you also get free night certificate once you meet the minimum spend requirement. So that's not normal for those cards and having that as an option through end of July

is very attractive for both of them. So real briefly, the no annual fee card, the offer is 70,000 points plus a free night certificate after a $2,000 spend in six months. You have six months to spend $2,000. That's really, really easy. Even students might be able to pull that off, right? I mean, that's not much. The surpass card, 130,000 points. So almost twice as many points plus the free night certificate after $3,000 spend in six months. Again, pretty easy spend requirement for that one as well. So yeah, those are pretty fantastic offers for low spend. I mean, you're talking even if you value the Hilton points, let's keep the math simple at half a cent a piece, then the surpass offers $650 amount of points plus a free night certificate that could easily be three, $400. Or if you use it for a really fancy property,

you could use it for a property that costs five, six, $8,000 a night on top of the $650 worth of points for pretty low spend. I mean, that's a great rebate. I mean, let's call it easily a $1,000 rebate on $3,000 spend basically in the form of points and certificates, of course. But assuming you use the points and certificates to decent value, not hard probably to get $1,000 worth of value or more out of that welcome bonus. Right. And there's other good news, which is that if you've had one of these cards before, in general, you're not eligible for the welcome bonus for getting the same exact card again. But some links to offers that don't have that language in it, that don't have the lifetime language in it, have surfaced. And so we posted

those links on the blog. So you have surfaced. And so we posted those links on the blog. So, you know, you have multiple ways of getting in on these offers, even if you've had the exact same cards before. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's pretty exciting. I mean, no annual fee card. I didn't mean to skip over that before. That's also excellent for a card with no annual fee. We don't normally see bonuses that value. I mean, just the free night certificate would be a pretty good bonus on a card with no annual fee. Also getting't normally see bonuses that value. I mean, just the free night certificate would be a pretty good bonus on a card with no annual fee. Also getting like, you know, $350-ish worth of points on top of that. I mean, that's pretty solid on a no annual fee card. And like you said,

with such low spend. So really, most people could probably find a way to do this. I mean, you're talking just over $300 a month in spend to trigger the no annual fee card or $500 a month on average for the surpass card. Those are pretty low bars that like Greg said, most people could meet. So what are you going to do then, Greg? I mean, I remember that you were in this situation where you have too many Amex cards, right? And you have to kind of trim the herd a little bit in order to make room. What are you going to do? Yeah. So I did. My wife and I should each have room for one more card. So as a reminder, with Amex, you can have up to five credit cards, and then you could have more pay over time cards as well. And to know which is

which in general, the pay over time cards, also known as charge cards, are the ones that are named after precious metals. Like the gold card, the platinum card, and so on. This isn't 100%. Which precious metal is the green card named after, Greg? Well, that's a good one. And the green card acts weird in that it sort of acts as a hybrid of a credit card and a pay over time card so that one's that one's bizarre probably because of its name the cards with blue in the name are generally credit cards and co-branded cards except for the platinum co-branding cards are generally credit

cards oh you're gonna confuse people now greg because they're gonna be like oh so my delta platinum you know like they're versus my yeah so So let's be easier. So Hilton cards, Delta cards and Marriott cards are all credit cards. The everyday card and the blue business plus and blue business cash. Those are all credit cards as well. Those all count towards your five card limit. Even if you have a mix of business and consumer cards, it doesn't matter. Those are credit cards and they count towards your limit. And what that means is that if you have a mix of business and consumer cards, it doesn't matter. Those are credit cards and they count towards your limit. And what that means is that if you try to apply for another credit card and you already have five or more, you won't be approved for that additional one.

And so that's why I dropped some cards I wasn't using and now have one slot. So I'm ready to pull the trigger on my plan, which was to get the Aspire. But now these new offers have me rethinking that. I'm thinking now that I should get one of either the no fee or the surpass and try to time meeting the minimum spend with meeting the 15K spend on the business cards we already got. So that will have a total of four free night certificates that are issued at about the same time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that would be a pretty good strategy. So would you do surpass or no annual fee then? I mean, which do you? That's the question. I'm looking for advice here, Nick. So I'm kind of leaning towards the no annual fee. And here's why. There's a few things. If they do add family language at some point, that would be the right path because then I would still theoretically be capable of getting a welcome bonus for the surpass and then they spire if i go in that order another reason is that the i'm not really sure if i don't need the points the extra points that

the surpass offers right now i'm not really sure having the surpass will really add anything material to what i need over the knowing a fee know fee one. Except for the ability to spend towards another free night certificate. Well. Because 15K spending, get another free night certificate and you're already going to be 3,000 of the way there. So what's another 12? That's true, we could do six.

Yeah. Or I can wait a year and get the surpasses and do a sort of a similar thing then. You could, but next year probably won't come with the additional free night certificate. So you'll end up having to spend 15K to get one. Whereas now if you spent 15K, you'd get two. So on top of the plus.

Okay, all right, all right, Nick. All right, you have me leaning towards the surpass. So let us know what Greg should do in the comments, however you want to let us know. And I'll decide based on whoever I like best that's written it. And, you know, and the surpass card comes with the quarterly Hilton credit also. So you have a little bit of value there maybe that helps to defray the cost of the annual fee, perhaps, depending on how you use it. True, true.

All right. Yeah. There you go. So there's that. All right. Yeah, there you go. So there's that. Let's talk about award talk. Let's switch gears here. We talked Hilton here. Let's talk about some other award talk pieces and little bits and pieces here.

First of all, Southwest Airlines flights are now showing up on Google Flights. That's awesome. I'm excited about this. I'm excited about this for a few reasons. Number one. So if you long used Google Flights, maybe you've noticed that Southwest flights have occasionally shown up, but they'll show up kind of at the bottom and it'll say no price available. At least that's what it used to say. So you could see that there was an existing Southwest option, but it had no pricing information or link to it, but that's changed. And now you can see the prices on Google F flights. That's a big improvement in my opinion, because it gives you the opportunity to compare a little

bit. And if you are relatively familiar with the value of Southwest points, you can probably do some mental math and figure about how many points that would cost if you want to compare that to other options you're looking at. So I love that. I also love it because it makes it really easy to see the connections and things. So you can tell where you're connecting and when and how long, whereas I find the Southwest website and app to be much more difficult for that. So yeah, I think this is an awesome change for people that are Southwest fans because it's going to make the process much simpler. I can search in one place instead of having to do a separate search in Southwest to compare. Yeah. Oh, no doubt. I mean, I don't book Southwest often, but, but when I do, I find it such a headache to be comparing prices, having to go

to Southwest website to check all the prices and the times like with Google flights, you could say, well, I don't want to, you know, travel before, I don't know, 8 AM or something. And then to have to like, you know, and that shows the options there. But then to have to switch over to Southwest and do similar kind of searches, it just makes it very difficult to do. So great, great news. Certainly annoying. So, yes, this is great news. The less great news about Southwest this week, of course, is that they increased fees in a number of areas. So early bird check-in now might cost up to, I think, $99.

That's insane. But that's crazy. Yeah. To check in a little bit earlier. That's nuts. And then the upgraded A1 to 15 boarding, the range on that now goes up to $149. So, I mean, that used to be $30 a passenger and then it was 30 or 40, depending on the length. So basically there were almost no flights that existed for the 30. So it was basically going to be 40 all the time, then started varying. And I know I paid 80 on one at some point and now $149 a person to upgrade to A1 to 15. If you're traveling with a family, wow. I mean, that's just, that gets insane. Right. But if you're traveling with a family, you get to board before B, is that right? Yes. So if you're traveling with a family, you get to board before B, is that right? Yes. So if you're traveling with children six years of age or under, then you board after the

A group and after military and A-list preferred before the B group. Yeah. Which is what we always do because my kids are under six. So that's great. I mean, we did same day switches on a couple of recent flights and we had literally the last four boarding positions in C group, but we boarded after I. So with these fees going up, is it worth renting a kid when you're traveling Southwest instead of paying these fees? You know, we kind of tried to do that because we were traveling with two

other family members. So they wanted to rent one of our kids and board with them and it didn't work out. I'll put it that way. It didn't work. No, no, no, no. They got stopped. Yeah. That didn't happen. So, but anyway, so that's, I just think it's kind of crazy. But on the flip side, if you get the Southwest priority card, you get four. And I think this is also true on the business performance card. You get four free upgraded boardings a year. So I guess the value of that just skyrocketed because, you know, you can pay $149 times four and get that rebated.

Crazy though. Anyway, that's my Southwest talk. Good and bad news there. Yeah, that's right. Next up, Finnair Avios is finally a full-fledged Avios participant because now you can move points around. You can move points from Finnair to British Airways and from there to anywhere, anywhere within the Avios ecosystems.

And so that's great news, especially for me. Especially for you? Why do you say that? Especially for Greg. Because I had over 200,000 Finnair Avios that were stuck in the Avios program. And coming up soon is our challenge, our team challenge, where we're going to be flying to where we don't know where. And I may need Avios, but the chance of me needing them in Finnair seems to be very small, but I might need them in Qatar's program or in BA's program or in Aer Lingus or Iberia's

program. And so now I can move them to where I need in time for the challenge. So that's great news. And of course, for anyone with Avios, the other good news is that sometimes Finnair will be the cheapest option for booking flights with Avios. And so now the ability to move points there is really good. Yeah. And I found this actually really easy to do. It's updated and republished our post about combining accounts and moving them around, but you didn't find it quite as easy, right? It was kind of a disaster for me. I don't know how much might have been

caused by the fact that I was doing it from overseas with a VPN on and sometimes websites act weird under those circumstances. But it took me about six or seven tries to link my accounts. And I didn't do anything different. I just, I kept, I would click and get an error and try again and so on. And then once I successfully linked the accounts, then I tried to move all my Vineravios to British Airways at one time. I kept getting an error. Then I finally thought, well, what if I just move a few thousand and that worked? And then I was able to move all the rest at once and and now i can freely move them around so it's it's like whatever was stuck in the in the system got got greased and unstuck yeah good good good well it was important to grease those wheels then so that's nice that's

a very good change where we've been waiting to see that so we're glad to see that that did come through next up american airlines is backtracking on their threats not to award miles and loyalty points when you're booking through online travel agencies. Right. I actually didn't get all of this. I saw the headline, but I haven't read all the news on this one. So you're going to have to fill me in, Greg. What happened here? I'm not surprised by the headline, but tell me some details I need to know. I mean, that's basically it. AA had a while ago sort of declared war on online travel agencies saying that you're not going to earn miles when booking through them, except under various circumstances. And then they delayed it. It was supposed to happen already. And then they delayed it. And now, now they're saying, you know, it's not going to happen at all. We decided it was a bad idea by the outgoing guy. I mean, well, we could have told you that, but I'm glad that they figured out that it was a bad

idea. Right. Well done ish on that one in America. Right. Just glad it didn't happen. So that's good news. Right. Right. All right. Let's move on to this week's card talk. So for card talk, we're kind of easing our way into talking about Avianca Life Miles. This is my first attempt to warm Greg up to the idea of Avianca Life Miles. Right. Yeah. You're going to tell me about their incredible, awesome Avianca Life Miles cards issued by Cardless, right? Well, they're incredible.

Awesome. Those are your adjectives, not mine. But I'll tell you about their cards. LifeMiles cards issued by Cardless, right? Well, incredible, awesome. Those are your adjectives, not mine. But I'll tell you about their cards. Okay, let's hear about them. The Cardless Avianca cards are out. They're available. So we have the Avianca LifeMiles American Express card, the sort of base level card.

It has a $99 annual fee, no foreign transaction fees, of course. It's kind of ho-hum at best. It gives you 2X on Avianca, 2X dining, 2X grocery, and 1X everywhere else. So that's not notable since you could just get a card with no annual fee that gives you two points per dollar spent like the Blue Business Plus and transfer those to Avianca and not have to deal with this card. So that's not particularly interesting. business plus and transfer those to avianca and right you know not have to deal with this card so

that's not particularly interesting perks one minor perk that might make sense to you is the complimentary avianca silver elite status so you'll get silver status with avianca if you're flying avianca that'll be nice because you'll get i don't know you know priority boarding and seat selection type stuff and you get a few passes to their lounges although somebody pointed out that i think a bunch of their lounges. Although somebody pointed out that I think a bunch of their lounges are on priority pass. So if you have priority pass, that part might not matter much to you. But one nice perk of elite status is the ability to pull points with family members. So it's pretty cool because you can include one other adult in your pool that

does not have elite status and then up to five kids. And so you're able to, as the pool manager with elite status, to move points around from one account to the next to redeem awards without, well, I shouldn't say without, without any fees. It's free to do. So should be pretty simple and easy. It seems a lot more intuitive than the United pooling system. So again, if you're flying with a family, even if you're not flying Avianca, if you're flying other Starlines carriers like United and you want to credit to Avianca LifeMiles, well, it'll be nice because you could at least put together the points from your kids and move them into your account later for redemption.

So that's a nice little benefit for that card to have for only $99. If you're flying a lot of paid flights where you would be able to take advantage of that. More interesting, though, is the Avianca Life Miles American Express Elite card. This is really where the party starts, because this card has some benefits that are going to be of interest, I think, for a lot of people, although you may not need the card in order to enjoy the key benefits. So here are the details. $249 annual fee, no foreign transaction fees, of course. $249 a year seems a little pricey, but it comes with some decent benefits. One of those benefits is not good return on spend because it only offers three points per dollar on Avianca purchases, which is not exciting. 2X dining and other travel,

which is not competitive, And 1x everywhere else, which is not a good deal. So you really just shouldn't be very interested in this card for spend. Although I'm going to get a few people arguing with me in a second because of the price. I think there's a few people that they're going to argue with me a little bit on that. And I'm going to say I don't agree. This one comes with the silver status also, of course, but even better, it comes with a life miles plus subscription. Let me get to that in a second. You're going to earn double miles on the first up to a thousand miles per month. And that's because of the Avianca life miles plus light subscription that it comes with. And so that's where I say, some people will argue with me a

little bit because while this card earns the 1x on most purchases, 2x dining and other travel and 3x Avianca, it really earns an extra point per dollar up to a thousand points per month because of that subscription. So while you earn 2x on dining and other travel, you're going to double that and actually end up with 4x on up to $250 spend, I guess. So, you know, or is it more spend? Is it 4x? You know what, to tell you the truth, I don't know how the doubling works now that I think about it, whether it will double the 2x or just doubles the base purchases. Either way, you can earn some extra. So it's a little bit more than the 2x potentially, but that's not what makes the

subscription. It's a little bit better than a terrible earning rate and so it's like terrible plus exactly it's not it's not something that couldn't easily be beaten with another card so that's why it's not particularly interesting to me but this avianca life miles plus subscription is pretty interesting the light version that it comes with ordinarily costs 20 a. So if you didn't get the credit card, you could get the Lite subscription for $20 a month instead. So over the course of the year, it's going to be $240, which is pretty close to the $249 annual fee of this card. That's why I say if you like the Avianca Life Miles Plus subscription, then the card becomes nearly, you know, a net zero if you would have already paid for the LifeMiles Plus

Elite anyway, you know, or depending on how you want to value that, I guess it becomes cheap enough, cheaper, in my opinion, in some ways than the $99 card. So anyway, the LifeMiles Plus, why do you care about that? It comes with some bonus miles every month. So you'll get some, you're essentially buying some miles, not very many at the base level. So it's not particularly exciting. It does give you that up to a thousand mile bonus on your monthly purchases on the credit card. But more interestingly, the $20 light version gives you 10% back on award redemptions. And that's all award redemptions out of your LifeMiles account.

So that's not just Flying Avianca. That's all of their Star Alliance partners, all of their non-Alliance partners. It doesn't matter if it's a ticket for you or your family member or your friend or whoever. You're going to get 10% back on all of your award redemptions with LifeMiles. And we'll talk in depth about the LifeMiles Plus subscription in the main event coming up.

Yeah. But it seems to me, so basically there's multiple levels of these Life Miles Plus subscriptions. This either gives you the $20 a month one for free or $20 off a higher level one, right? So basically for $249, you're saving $240 a year. So the way I think about this and tell me if i'm wrong the way i'm thinking about it the way i'm thinking about it is is this that if you were gonna get a life miles plus subscription anyway and keep it long term then then getting this card is like paying

nine nine dollars a year for silver status yep yep that's yeah that's that's that's the way to look at it and i think if you if you're not interested in silver status. Yep. Yep. That's yeah, that's that's that's the way to look at it. And I think if you're if you're not interested in silver status and points pooling, then I don't see any reason to get this card at all.

Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're not willing to subscribe long term to the Life Miles Plus subscriptions, because that's like Greg said, I mean, I think that's a key point here

is that it's a good deal if you would pay for those Life Miles Plus subscriptions and keep them forever and ever versus getting one and using it while you need it, when you need it, dropping it and getting it again when you need it again. So, yeah, you know, there's there's some ifs there. Yeah, but I don't think the card is worth it for spend at all. They didn't really make it worthwhile for spend and there aren't really any other notable perks.

So, yeah, it really comes down to whether or not you value the silver status. And I think the best benefit of the silver status is the points pulling. I think if you're going to take good advantage of that, then great. I mean, I guess if you fly Avianca enough, it'll matter. You get Star Alliance silver, too, but that gives you like priority wait list or something. And, you know, there's very few benefits for Star Alliance silver and it doesn't reduce your your progress to gold. So it's not particularly exciting, I think, except for the points pulling or maybe if

you fly Avianca a lot, but not enough to earn silver status already, you know, then OK. But yeah, that's why I say I think the points pulling is really where it's at. So, yeah, if nine dollars a year, you know, is good for points pulling and you would pay the $20 a month for the LifeMiles Plus, then have at it, get your Avianca LifeMiles cardless card. Right. Right. So, okay. Did I sell you on LifeMiles yet, Craig? Anyway, two thumbs down for me. I have zero, zero interest in these cards. The Life Miles Plus subscription, which you can do separately without the cards, though, you may be able to convince me that's worth doing. But I have some concerns there as well. I think I'm going to convince you.

I think I'm going to convince you. I think the cards, to me, honestly, are interesting because I'm glad to see card lists continue to expand with airlines. I'm glad to see Avianca have an option. I mean, we didn't talk about welcome bonuses at all. The welcome bonuses are also kind of ho-hum, I think. But I think that having another option to pick up more easy life miles, I think will be appealing to people who really like the life miles program. Maybe if you don't care about 524, you're way over already, then why not? It may not hurt you. It's not a great deal still on these particular ones, but I want to continue to see that happen. So I'm excited for that aspect

of it. Yeah. Sounds good. All right. Let's talk about today's main event and see if I can convince Greg that there's more to see beyond just the cardless cards. All right. Today's main event, learning to love LifeMiles. Nick is going to try to teach me to love Avianca LifeMiles. And I'm actually going to kick off a part that I do love, which is that miles are really easy to get. I mean, frequently they have sales. If you just want to buy them outright, you can often buy them for around like 1.3 cents each, somewhere in that range. And since they're usable on Star Alliance flights, you can fly to just about anywhere in the world. Star Alliance is the biggest alliance there is.

So there's a lot you could do with the miles purchased. There's the cardless cards we talked about earlier on the show. You could get miles that way. Don't, but you could. But the easiest way is- But don't because, because. The easiest way is by transferring from anyone except for Chase. So Amex, Citi, Capital One, Built, Wells Fargo, which is the new player in this game, all let you transfer one-to-one to

Avianca Life miles. And even better, there are frequently transfer bonuses. So you can often get more than, better than a one-to-one transfer. In fact, I look back at our current transfer bonuses page, which includes a section on expired offers. So you can see the history of all of the transfer bonuses. And I saw that there were 13 in 2023 alone, 13 transfer bonuses to Avianca Life Miles, with Citi being the number one source of those transfer bonuses. They had five. Five out of 13 were from Citi alone. And overall, the transfer bonuses ranged from 10 percent to 25 percent. So they weren't spectacular, but they were good. Yeah, you know, I think all of those are reasons to love them because you can amass these so easily because you can, Greg said, basically you can transfer from everybody except Chase. But, you know, I think it's worth maybe mentioning it's, you know, so we're talking Amex and Citi and Capital One.

So all of those various cards that offer points, you know, like, wow, that's a there's a lot of potential life miles when you look at the welcome bonuses on all of the cards that that encompasses. So really easy to get them. And I think the frequent sales is one that I overlook often because I'm not usually considering buying miles in the quantity to buy tickets, but I think it's one that is really relevant for a lot of people. In fact, when I went to the travel summit a few weeks ago, I met a couple of people that were there from a guy who was there from Argentina and a guy who was there from Brazil. And they talked about how they follow these programs and the things that people like us write about. They don't have as many credit card opportunities as we do, but they buy the miles when they're on sale. And it totally makes sense that if you

lived somewhere abroad, man, buying life miles would probably be a really good deal a lot of the time. And even if you live domestically and you just you have enough money that you'd like to fly business class, but you'd like to not pay the business class price. I mean, buying life miles, I feel like could make a lot of sense. So so anyway, yeah, there's a lot of easy ways to get them and pretty reasonable in order to do that. So that's nice. They have the family pooling now for elite members, Greg. Like I said, that's also a nice thing, right? But of course, the Life Miles Plus subscriptions is really where I think I'm going to hook you in here.

All right. Tell me about it. Well, at least I'm going to try to hook you in. And I think between this and the rest of the show, we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. So you get some miles every month with these subscriptions. There's a few different levels.

There's the light, basic, pro, and what is it? Max. So there's one, two, three, four different levels that cost different prices. And so let's say you don't have a credit card. You are just a regular person buying. That's safe to say because I am not getting a credit card. Yeah, well, so there you go. So if you're Greg, then you're going to pay $20 a month for the light, $50 a month for the basic, $100 a month for the pro, or $200 a month for the max. Now,

let me make this really simple for you. The only two you really ought to be considering for most people is either the light or the basic, the $20 a month or the $50 a month. The other two, forget about it. There's going to be three people out there that argue why they think they should do the pro or the max. It's not going to apply to the vast majority of you. And I will probably argue with at least two out of those three people that think they should do pro or max. No, that's great. That's great to simplify it. So lighter basic, got it. Yeah. Lighter basics. Those are the two you're really going to consider. So at each level, you're going to get 10% award rebates. So if that's the thing that matters most to you, you only need the light. $20 a month is all you need if the perk that we

mentioned that matters most to you is 10% rebates on your award bookings. And I think the value of that, the potential value of that is absolutely massive, especially for people that travel as a family. If I fly my family of four to Europe, I'm talking about around a quarter of a million points one way. So that's around 25,000 mile rebate each way. And if we go to Europe a couple of times in a year, which we have before some years, then that really, really will add up pretty quickly. So that's a nice rebate. You also get up to a 25% discount on Avianca award flights. So, you know, you're going to get some discount, how much it is, is going to vary whether or not that's worthwhile. It depends on whether you're going to fly Avianca and what the discount happens to be that day. But I'll believe that they might

have a decent discount. There was originally also, there was talk of a discount on cash tickets. And I saw a view from the wing reported that that is supposedly going to be coming later this year. I don't know exactly what the details are there, just that they didn't do it. So you're not getting that yet, but we'll see. Maybe you'll get a discount on Avianca flights someday. But the other key benefit to consider now, if you want something more, if $20 a month for the 10% rebate wasn't enough to convince you, here's the thing that I think will convince people like Greg, the frequent miler at the $50 level, the basic level, you're going to get free changes and cancellations as long as you do them at least 72 hours in advance. So if you pay $50 a month for the base level, the basic subscription, not the light, but the basic subscription, then not only

do you get your award rebate, you also get free changes and cancellations. I think that's pretty awesome because without it, changes and cancellations are expensive. This is one of the most common arguments against Avianca LifeMiles that it costs a bundle to change or cancel an award. Change fees now, we have them written down as change being $150 and cancellation varying. It could be $50 within a single region or $200 between regions. I've typically seen $200 on international awards. So if you want to cancel and redeposit, $200 a person is not cheap to cancel your awards, not at all, especially I've traveled with a family of four. So I'm looking at $800 to cancel an award ticket. That stinks. Paying $50 a month for one of these basic subscriptions, then one cancellation a year,

and I would be ahead of the game if I were paying for it all 12 months out of the year. So that gives you tons of flexibility. That's awesome. Yeah. Okay. So- Come on, fight me, Greg. I'm leaving the door open for you. So I'm paying $50 a month for the chance that I might need to change or cancel an award. And that's $30. Let's pretend, I'm not convinced, but let's pretend that the $20 a month for the 10% rebate is a good deal to me.

In that case, so I'm paying $30 more for the chance of changing for free or canceling for free. So that's what, $360? $360. $360, right? $360, yeah. I thought you said $260. Oh, no.

$360. $360. That's like close to canceling two tickets right there. But that's a savings over canceling two tickets. It's a small savings. Yeah. Now, the other thing you didn't really mention, I would also get some miles each month. So I'd be getting a couple thousand miles each month with that basic subscription. So maybe my net cost isn't really so bad, but it still seems kind of high for just the chance that I might cancel. And then when I go into the details of these things, here's where it really bugs me.

Because what I would love to do is say, you know, ooh, I need to cancel this flight that I already booked. So I'm going to sign up now for the Life Miles Plus subscription, but not so fast. The terms say that these free changes and cancellations are not applicable for redemptions made before signing up for the subscription. And you have to keep your subscription for six months. So you can't just do like, you know, just for a few months kind of thing. And then when you're ready to cancel or change, you can't just do it online. You've got to call and hope that the person you talk to has heard about this benefit, which we've had at least one reader say that's not the case so far.

But it is a new benefit, so it's understandable, I guess, at this point. And then to me, one of the worst parts overall, changes must be made 72 hours in advance. 72 hours in advance. 72 hours. So if what you want to do is use LifeMiles as a way to book a flight that you'll take unless you find Lufthansa First Class available, and then you cancel that LifeMiles booking. Well, you can't do that because these days the Lufthansa first class awards are only showing up 72 hours in advance. So it'd be too late by then. So yeah, there's a lot of- That hampers it. That hampers it. Yeah. I mean, the 72 hours, that's unfortunate. I wish that they didn't have the 72 hour rule. And if I'm going to have to cancel a flight,

it's often going to be pretty close to departure because something came up, something happened, or like you said, maybe a better booking came along. So I hear you on that. I think for the average person, though, I think the ability to change or cancel for free up to 72 hours in advance is probably pretty good. I think, you know, few people are, there are some of us out there, but few of us are looking to change to just a better itinerary. More of us probably want the flexibility. I would think that if I can, if I see a great award now, I want to be able to book it. And then if later on I decide, oh no, I can't take that trip or I'm going to do a different trip altogether. I don't want to be penalized. So I'm not able to right now jump on great availability. Like if I see, for instance, we'll talk about

one of the unwritten sweet spots or I won't even list it now, but we'll talk about some unwritten sweet spots later on. If I see one of those available for four people, I might say, oh man, I'd love to book that, but I don't know for sure whether or not we're going to take the trip. I just don't want to miss the chance to book four seats at that price. Right now I can't do that because it'll cost me $800 if I change my mind. Whereas if I had one of these subscriptions, well, then I could make that kind of a gamble. And you and I do make those kinds of gambles all the time when we see good award availability.

So that's the type of thing that you and I do a lot of, not just with the hope to book Lufthansa first within the last 72 hours, but also to take advantage of rare availability that we're not sure which day we want to fly. We got enough points to be able to book more than one day, that sort of thing. So I think this could appeal to people who are able to strike while the iron is hot, but not able to commit at that moment. And so I think that's appealing for that reason. And I think that it's important to note what Greg said, that you do commit yourself to six months of this, which is the bummer. That's the unfortunate part. You can't

just join and then cancel it. On the flip side, I think that's probably good for most people. I think a lot of people are booking travel within six months of departure. And so if I were going to book a flight now for sometime within the next six months, I would probably sign up for the $50 a month plan because you would, over the course of six months, get 12,000 miles for $300 plus the ability to change or cancel that trip for free plus a 10% rebate on the miles you used for that trip. That's not bad. Yeah, it's not bad, but it's not great. It's not bad, but it's not great. It's not great. Well, and here's the reason it's not great. It's because there's alternatives. So Air Canada Aeroplan is a good alternative. Now, their prices sometimes are going to be roughly similar. Sometimes they're going to be more, but they're not terrible prices. So you could go with

Air Canada. And if you want to protect yourself, you could book the higher award price. Well, but then the reward price is way higher than Avianca LifeMile. So if you look at a trip to Europe, for instance, Avianca LifeMile standard price is 63K business class one way to Europe. And we'll talk about exceptions to that, the price even better, how to get that even better in a minute. But at 63 K standard one way to Europe, if you were to try to book an Air Canada flexible award to Europe from the East Coast to Europe, most of Europe prices at 70,000 one way. So a flexible award is 85,000 or 84,000 one way, I think is what it comes out to. So we're talking about a difference of 20,000, 21,000 one way, I think is what it comes out to. So we're talking about a difference of 20,000, 21,000 miles per passenger in a lot of cases or more depending on some routes. So

yeah, okay. In this case, instead you're paying, with Air Canada, you're overpaying by 20,000 points a person to get the flexibility. With Life Miles, you're overpaying by $300 to get the flexibility with life miles, you're overpaying by $300 to get the flexibility. Yeah. But, but with, with Air Canada, you can sometimes later on when, when you're a hundred percent sure you're going to be taking the flight, do some hijinks to convert it to a, to a non-flexible award. And, and then you get, you get your miles back for the, for the difference. True. And in that case, your net cost of, with my example would be 70,000 miles. Whereas with Avianca, if you booked the same flight for 63, you would have gotten the 10% rebate and actually paid a net 57. So you're still a difference of 15,000 miles or so per person. though, bring it pretty close. And if you are going to book with Avianca LifeMiles more than once a year, then I think they start to become even more appealing. And I would be more likely to book with them more often if I didn't have to pay the change in cancellation fees every time.

So that's where I is. I don't know. Is it the tail wagging the dog? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So my other concerns are around flights that LifeMiles can't book. So, you know, so, so I, I just recently flew Detroit to Istanbul business class and both United and Air Canada could see that flight, that Star Alliance award flight LifeMiles couldn't. So maybe I could have booked it manually, but this was within 48 hours of the flight and, you know, I wouldn't have risked that. No time for all that. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. That's fair. And you made the point before about customer service and not knowing whether or not they're going to know about this benefit for the free change or cancellation. I will say on that

note that my recent experiences with customer service, not around these LifeMiles Plus subscriptions, because I don't subscribe yet, but my recent experiences with customer service, not around these LifeMiles Plus subscriptions because I don't subscribe yet, but my recent interactions with customer service have been surprisingly good. I've heard that from other readers in general also. And then I read the View from the Wing. So funny enough, View from the Wing wrote a post about the improvements that Avianca LifeMiles has made. And funny enough, I was at the cardless Avianca credit card launch speaking with the CEO of LifeMiles. And he specifically mentioned the conversation he had with Gary from View from the Wing about a year prior and what they had done in response to that to improve things. And then Gary wrote about it a few days later and said, hey, look, this is what they've done.

So sure enough, they're listening and paying attention. And so now there's a supervisor on 24 hours a day that should be able to handle more complex things if the agent you're speaking with can't. So that wasn't always the case, interestingly enough. Yeah, that's great. I mean, that's awesome news. And so I love to hear that. And I'm not against through LifeMiles and then I would do the math and say, ooh, how much am I going to get back with this rebate? Is it worth signing up now and then booking?

Totally. It could make sense for sure. I think that's probably the way it'll make sense for most people. So when we talk about these subscriptions, I think for most people, even though I think the benefits are pretty good, and we didn't really talk about the monthly miles that you're getting, because I don't think that should move the needle in terms of making you decide whether it's worth it or not. It can be kind of a, oh, well, this is kind of nice too.

But it's not, or at least I shouldn't say move the needle. It's not going to be the primary concern, the number of miles you're getting with the subscriptions, because it's not a particularly good price. They sell miles for cheaper than the price that you're paying for a mile, essentially. Although, if you think of it, here's a way, I think, of making it convenient to think about it. Let's just say that the miles you get are worth a penny each, just to make the math really easy. So the $20 per month light version gives you 500 miles. So it gives you $5 worth of miles. So that makes your cost in a way for this subscription $15 a

month instead of 20, you know, just as a simple way to reprice these. So then the basic one, which includes the free cancellations and changes, this is a $50 a month option, gives you 2000 miles a month. Let's call that $20 back a month. So the net cost to you is $30 a month. So that's a way of thinking about that. Yeah, it is. And so if you, if you subscribe to that train of thought, then a 10% rebate on your award, you know, and an award one or two times could, I think, make these, these subscriptions particularly attractive. And then if you also make a couple of free changes or cancellations, I think they could outweigh the cost of subscribing pretty quickly. But I think most people, it would make sense to sign up, intend to keep it for the six-month minimum, and only renew it if you continue to have trips where you think you're going to use it.

If you continue to book things and you say, oh, well, you know what? The subscription is going to continue to come in handy. Well, then keep it. But I think a lot of people probably won't need to keep it 12 months out of the year. I might, but I think a lot of people won't. And I say I might because I haven't subscribed yet because I haven't yet needed to book an Avianca Life Miles award. But we don't know where we're going on our challenge next week.

And if there comes a situation where I want to use Avianca Life Miles, you better believe I'm going to be subscribing right beforehand so that I will get that 10% rebate, which is a rebate, unfortunately, not a discount. So you do need to have the miles in advance, but the terms anyway, say that you'll get the rebate 15 days after or within 15 days after your redemption. So I'm curious to see how that works in practice, whether that means within 15 days of the day you booked or 15 days of the day you traveled, because the way it's worded would sound to me like 15 days of the day you booked, but I don't know, the person in me that would write terms if I were a term writer would make it 15 days after you actually fly.

I don't know which is the case actually so far, so we'll see. Right, right. So another thing to consider, and tell me if I'm wrong about this, but my understanding with life miles, they usually expire after 12 months of inactivity. Using miles does not extend them, but getting more miles into your account extends that lifetime that gives you another 12 months every time you get miles in your account. So I'm assuming with these subscriptions, since you're getting miles in your account every month, that basically you can forget about worrying about if you have an ongoing subscription, your miles aren't going to expire because they're getting reset every month with more miles.

I don't, you know what, that, that seems reasonable to me. I don't know that that's true because as I was at that event, someone else asked the CEO of LifeMiles, well, just having the card, keep your, your miles active. And he said, no, using the card would keep your miles active because you'd be earning. So he was clear that you would have to use your card, you know, make a purchase essentially, even if it was just one purchase in order to keep the miles active. Now, was he just forgetting the fact that the Life Miles Plus subscription came with the monthly miles? I don't know. Cause that didn't come to my mind in the moment when the question was asked, but, but he seemed to understand the question and, and not, you know,

and thinking. I feel pretty confident what I said is right. Of course, once you cancel your subscription, then you're back to the 12 month thing. Right, right. And the 12 month thing is certainly a big drawback of Avianca Life Miles, the 12 month expiration. So, I mean, it's not a big deal to transfer in a thousand miles every. It's just a big deal to remember and make sure you don't forget. Exactly.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. All right. So, all right. So we talked about getting a rebate. We talked about getting free changes and cancellations. But would you even want to book a LifeMiles award in the first place?

Let's talk about what they cost so we can decide, okay, yes, this is worth considering because it's a great deal. Or no, the pricing is kind of average or not that good and we shouldn't do it. We'll see which way we end up on this one. So within the United States, Avianca has split the United States into three different regions, roughly East Coast, most of the middle of the country, and West Coast. And so within a single region, it starts at 7,500 miles each way. Across regions, it could cost as much as 12,500 miles each way in economy class. Business class ranges from 15K within a single region up to 25K if you're traveling between certain regions.

So again, economy, 7,500 to 12,500. Business, 15K to 25k in some cases you're going to find turkish is going to be a better use of your miles than avianca life miles especially if you're looking at one of the longer flights between different regions but if you're within a single region or crossing between regions one and two which is roughly the east coast and the entire center of the country then avianca life miles can certainly be your better bet and certainly your easier bet than dealing with Turkish. Do you know, does it just consider the start and end point? So, for example, if you flew from L.A. to Seattle via Chicago, would it count that as being within one region, even though you're crossing a second region?

Yes. Yes, exactly. It counts from your origin to your destination. So it should, anyway, price based on being entirely within region. Though, of course, the other thing to know about Avianca Life Miles is that things just don't always price the way you expect them to. Sometimes you'll find things that price even less. We said economy class within a region starts at about 7,500 miles one way. That's like the standard-ish price. But every now and then we find routes that price even less than that. I remember at some point there was one that priced at like 3,500 miles one way, and there was no rhyme or reason or explanation as to why. So the answer to that is probably it'll price this as one region, but who knows because LifeMiles will do as LifeMiles does. But it's worth checking anyway. The other thing here that makes this sort of less of an interesting

discussion point is that United is releasing such little award space to partners these days that it's very much luck of the draw as to whether or not this is going to be useful. I used to use Avonca LifeMiles quite a bit for United flights, but these days it's just hard to find United flights that are available to partners. So that's so unfortunate. So unfortunate. Yeah. Yeah. But LifeMiles are useful for a bunch of other things. So for instance, you know, if you want to fly to Europe, they can be a great option for flying to Europe, South America, maybe some of the other regions. It depends. The nice thing is that there are a bunch of different pricing anomalies that we'll talk about, but Europe being a popular destination, let's mention that.

So you'd pay usually 20 or 30,000 miles one way in economy class. 20,000 would be to the Nordic countries, Finland, Stockholm, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, I believe, should price at 20K each way in economy, 30K each way in economy to most of the rest of Europe, or 60k, 63k in business. So 60k again to those same Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark countries, or 63k to the rest of Europe in business class, or 87,000 miles one way in first class to Europe. So those are pretty good prices, especially when you consider the fact that Avianca LifeMiles adds no surcharges. So there's no annoying carrier imposed surchargesges except for their $25 partner booking fee. So you will pay $25 to book a partner award, but there's no fuel surcharges, so to speak.

Yeah. Added on. I love that their standard first class award price, 87K, is less than United charges for business class. Business class. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. Business class. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding.

No kidding. And much cheaper. I mean, all those prices are pretty significantly cheaper. Certainly the business class prices and first class prices significantly cheaper than what United would charge. So, and that's something that is true pretty much across the board. Life miles is going to be significantly cheaper than United for most awards. So that's nice, but that's not it.

There are lots of hidden sweet spots. And so we should discuss those. And then also we'll talk about some mixed cabin pricing anomalies in a moment, too. So within the United States, again, we said prices vary. I mentioned before briefly that there were some pricing like 3,500 miles one way. But that starts to get more interesting when you're talking about international routes. The one that lots of people have talked about for years now is New York JFK to Lisbon, Portugal prices at 35,000 miles one way in business class, business class, 35,000 miles one

way. And you can fly nonstop on tap air Portugal, or you can connect in Brussels on Brussels Airlines, and it still costs 35,000 miles one way. That's just a fantastic deal for business. It's only 5,000 miles more than what an economy class award costs. Yeah. That's such a ridiculously good deal. The problem is your 10% rebate, if you have the LifeMiles Plus subscription, you're only getting back 3.5K. That's like nothing. Right. Right. Right. Very small. You need to book a first class flight to get a significant. Come on, Greg, look at it the other way around and say, you're going to only pay,

what is it? 31,500 mile net for a business class award to Europe. It's nuts. It is nuts. That's fantastic. And the nice thing is there's often quite a bit of availability. If you book far enough in advance, anyway, next winter, I know just as of a few days ago, anyway, there was tons of availability for this. So you can find it. I'm not going to say easily, but relatively easily compared to a lot of other hot sweet spots. I guess the biggest problem I think in my opinion is that it's a really short flight to Lisbon. So New York to Lisbon, you're talking about like a six, six and a half hour flight. I think it's scheduled for seven maybe, but it really takes more like six hours. So if you're going to try to eat and get some sleep on the flight, it's not really enough time for all that, but you know, it's more comfortable than flying

economy. Yeah. And it doesn't work in reverse. Is that true? Yeah, that's true. It's only JFK to Lisbon. Exactly. The other direction prices at 63,000 miles one way that it should. We don't know why this particular direction costs 35,000 miles one way, but it's the mark of what continues to be true with other Avianca unwritten sweet spots. And that is that there's no rhyme or reason and it doesn't apply in both directions. So that's going to be the common theme that you'll see. And in fact, the other common theme that you'll see is when you find an airport like New York JFK that has a pricing anomaly to Lisbon, it probably has other pricing anomalies too. And sure enough, it does. New York JFK to Geneva or Zurich on Swiss or on TAP Air Portugal, that comes out a little bit cheaper. Or rather,

I'm sorry, I was misreading a bullet point there, wasn't I? Direct to JFK in business is 56,000 miles one way. So again, 7,000 miles less than it should be. If you got the 10% rebate, you'd be looking at 51,000 miles or so, a little less than that one way in business class. Nice deal there. And there's a bunch of other ones. I mean, there's tons of other ones. In economy class, there's a whole bunch. Denver to Europe costs from $21,000 to London and $22,000, $23,000 to a bunch of other cities. Denver is one that's got a whole bunch. And so I mentioned Zurich before. Zurich and Denver and JFK are all airports that have multiple of these pricing anomalies. So if you search around different airport combinations, you'll find a whole bunch of them.

So those are all pretty nice. France has a few. So if you're interested in traveling to Europe, you should really search from a variety of different starting points in the United States because you're going to see a variety of different prices, whereas they should be $30,000 one way in economy or $63,000 one way in business. You will find plenty of surprises. So it's worth doing a bunch of searches in order to find some of those surprises. Now, maybe that appeals to you. Maybe it doesn't. If you're, you know, the puzzle kind of person, if you like to do a puzzle, this is fun because you get to hunt around and see, oh, where can I find an even better price? And then if you're also getting a

10% rebate, it's kind of like, you know, winning a little sweepstakes, Greg. Yeah. Isn't this fun? It's fun. And if you want to have to position to Denver when you're in Detroit and flying east. Okay. All right. Well, you would just position to JFK because there's a couple from JFK too, but you know, and there aren't any that I found from some airports. So it's not something you'll find all the time, but there are quite a few. So those will be useful for people that are located in those cities or who would be positioning to those cities. Obviously, Detroit, you wouldn't be positioning to Denver, but if you live somewhere where Denver would be the logical positioning start point for your international awards, then Denver's got a bunch of these. Right, right.

And it could make sense, even people on the West Coast, since they'd be heading east anyway to stop in Denver or JFK or something, it might not be too bad. Right, right. Exactly. So there's a bunch of those to and from Europe, and it's not only to and from Europe. You crack the secret codes with LifeMiles where I've tried to figure out the rhyme or reason behind the various pricing anomalies. And I haven't been able to crack it. So I've taken a number of swings at it thinking, oh, maybe it's this. Oh, maybe it's that. And I haven't figured out what the thing is yet. But I did find that there were other interregional things like between Europe and Asia, where flights on certain carriers price less than flights on other carriers for the same routes. So it's all sorts of weirdness there. And what the answer is, I don't know, but it's fun because you can hunt around if you like that kind of thing, hunt around for the slightly better prices. But even if you're paying the

full price, getting 10% back with a LifeMiles Plus subscription, Greg, am I going to sell you on that idea yet or what? 10% back, come on. As I said earlier, I'm going to wait and see what I'm booking and see if it makes sense. All right. So if that doesn't convince you, Greg, what about the mixed cabin pricing? Because you wrote long ago about Avianca LifeMiles, first class for less. The mixed cabin pricing can make all of this stuff even better or some of it anyway. Yeah. All right. Let me explain this. So when you fly an itinerary, when you book an itinerary with life miles, that includes multiple cabins, meaning maybe one leg has, is an economy and other legs in business class. What they do is, is they take the, the percentage of the flight of the overall flight that's an

economy and, and apply that percentage to the economy award price. Like if you're flying the whole way in economy, it's applying that percentage to the economy price. And then the business percentage of the overall trip, it's applying that percentage to the business class price. So let me make it a little bit easier. Let's say you're flying, I'm going to use easy numbers too. I'm going to make up numbers. So whatever you're flying to Asia somewhere, let's pretend the economy price to Asia is 50,000 points and the business class price is 100,000 points. And let's pretend, this is very unlikely, but let's pretend that the economy that you're

flying, the economy segment is exactly 50% of the distance of the overall thing. So that makes the business class segment also 50%. In that case, you'll pay 25,000 for the economy portion of the overall thing, because that's half of the 50,000. And you'll pay 50,000 points for the 100,000 business class price because it's 50% of the business class price. So you'd pay a total of 75,000 points for this flight to Asia that would have cost, again, 100,000 points if you're flying entirely in business class. To make it more realistic, what you'll frequently see is like you'll have a, let's say, a long distance premium cabin award. You're flying to Europe or Asia or whatever in business or first class. And by tacking on a economy leg, either the beginning or the end, to go further, you'll bring down the price as long as you stay within the same region.

And so there are some opportunities to get great deals. And before recording the show, I looked up what could we do right now if we're ready to fly tomorrow. When we're recording this, fly tomorrow because I found Lufthansa first class available tomorrow. The price, let's say we're in Europe already and we're flying back Frankfurt to Newark. The price to fly just that leg, 87,000 points and $171 in fees. Okay, that's good. I mean, that's very good. That's better than you're going to find with any other program, but still, that's what it is. Now, let's start somewhere else in Europe.

Let's start in Naples and fly Naples business class. I mean, Lufthansa business class from Naples to Frankfurt, and then first class onward, that extra leg in business class is going to reduce your price a little bit. So instead of paying 87,000 points, you're paying 83,360 points for the whole thing, plus $98. So it also brought down the taxes and fees from 171 to 98 by adding that leg. So what if instead you add an economy leg first? So I found Malta to Frankfurt in economy, then the first class flight onward to Newark, that brought the overall price down to 75,000 points. So remember, we started at 87,000, we drop it down to 75,000.

And- Because you're still flying first class from Frankfurt to Newark. Exactly. That flight would have cost 87,000 by itself because you now have an economy class like from Malta. Now, instead of paying the 87, you're paying 12,000 miles less because you added an extra flight. Exactly. Exactly. And by the way, I've talked about before the ground services in Frankfurt for first-class flyers is phenomenal. And you'll get all that. You'll be in the first

class lounge and get all the ground services by start, even when you start an economy, as long as your onward flight is first class. So that's great. And also here in this example from Malta, the cash part even came down a little bit more. It's now $96. Again, we started at $171 and moved down to 96. So by starting in Malta instead of Frankfurt, we lowered the points price by 12,000 points and lowered the cash price. We dropped off about $85 or so. Then let's see, flying from Lisbon in economy to Frankfurt, another example where it drops the price down to 75,000 points and $399 in taxes. And if you'd rather fly business class from Lisbon to Frankfurt, then it's 81,430 points. So in all these examples, you're getting extra flying in and reducing the price

of that onward Frankfurt to Newark. Now, if you can add on, let's say Newark isn't your final destination, but you're flying to, let's say, LA, and you could do that in economy, I would expect the overall price to be a lot less because you're adding a pretty significant long economy leg to the overall thing. That's where things get difficult, though. So in order to find these flights on the LifeMiles website, you have the option of selecting, do you want to do a smart search? Do you want to do a Star Alliance search? Or you could pick a particular carrier. For me to find these examples I was just giving, I had to pick Lufthansa as a particular carrier. For me to find these examples I was just giving,

I had to pick Lufthansa as a particular carrier. I wasn't finding these otherwise. And so by picking Lufthansa as a particular carrier, I can't tack on Newark to LA to see how that would price because they don't fly that route. So Lufthansa doesn't. So it just makes it really difficult. So you could, I think, Nick has written about how to do manual bookings. Newark to LA as available and then do a manual booking to go, let's say, from Malta to Frankfurt to Newark to LA as an example. And I think that should bring down the price quite a bit. Yeah. So on manual bookings note, I should say that readers were reporting that they weren't working anymore for quite a while, that they were no longer doing that. But based on the recent view from the wing post, my impression is that they probably are again, because the support at lifemiles.com email now has like gets routed, I think to the cost, the best customer service agents, the ones that have

the most seniority. So I think that that probably has been fixed and you should be able to make a manual booking again, but I don't know that for sure. So the other thing to note there, of course, is that you also have to find that Newark to Los Angeles flight available to partners with United, which is going to be a particularly pain point. It's going to be tricky. Yeah. Yeah.

Lucky enough to find that. But maybe it's not impossible. Maybe you could find something like that. You might also be able to find something like Newark to Vancouver on Air Canada, and that might do the same. So true. Yeah. All right.

But let me back up and ask you a question that I can guess the answer to. At least I think I can. That's going to lead me into one other pain point that we need to discuss. And that is, did you have the miles to book these in your account? Did you go all the way through to the final checkout? Are you sure about the taxes and fees? I did not. I did not. So yeah, the taxes and fees I mentioned before are what was displayed on the search results, which are not the final answer. Yeah. And maybe I should have interrupted you and said that those probably aren't right. So when Greg mentioned the fact that the taxes and fees reduced,

I should have probably said they might not because he's still transiting Germany. And so I think what's going to happen is that the LifeMiles website is not adding the Germany departure taxes. And so I think it will end up being closer to the 171. So when you click through, if you have enough miles, it'll show you the real price. Yeah, so let me explain what happens here. So the LifeMiles website shows you estimated taxes and fees on the search results, but you won't see the actual full taxes and fees until you get to the final checkout page.

And you can't get to that page unless you have at least 40% of the miles in your account to book the award that you're looking at. This is a pain point problem that I brought up with LifeMiles very recently. So it's something that I expect they're going to be looking into and hopefully fixing. But as of now, anyway, you can't see the full taxes and fees without at least 40% of the miles in your account. So what I tell people to do is go to aircanada.com and check the taxes and fees there, because it's going to be roughly the same with Avianca. Air Canada has a $39 Canadian dollars partner booking fee. Avianca has a $25 US dollar partner booking fee. So they're pretty close. Air Canada's fee is a little bit higher in US dollars than Avianca's,

but otherwise the taxes should basically be the same. They charge the same taxes and things. So I think Air Canada adds a small tax recovery fee that Avianca doesn't have, but they're going to be roughly similar. So I would double check these tax numbers against whatever Air Canada shows to not be surprised at the end. And it's not that Avianca is adding a surcharge. They're just taxes that Avianca has to charge. Their search engine is just not built well enough to display them in total in the initial search results, which is really frustrating and something that I hope they fix and that I think they were receptive to. So hopefully that- Now in that specific example though, you said like German departure taxes, would you really have to pay those when you're just transiting through?

When you're connecting? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you look at an award from anywhere in Europe that you verify this on United or Air Canada, if you book an award, let's say from Warsaw to the United States, if you fly a lot of Air Polish, the taxes and fees on that are different than if you fly on Lufthansa and you connect in Frankfurt, you're going to pay more in taxes because you're transiting through Germany. Same thing if you leave from, for instance, Finland. When I was looking at awards back from Finland for my trip last year, anything transiting Germany, taxes were significantly higher than if I did not touch Germany on the way back home.

So yes, it's not going to be the same exact taxes, but you do pay more for transiting. Yeah. Okay. Good to know. And that's about the right amount. The difference in the fees that you saw there, about a hundred bucks or so more is what it costs when you transit through Germany. So I don't know that there's somebody else out there that's more attuned to aviation laws and rules can probably explain why that's

the case. I don't know why, but I know that is the case. So anyway, key point though, is the mixed cabin pricing makes things more interesting. If you can add a long economy class lag one way or another, or even a short economy class lag, it's still, it's going to cost you less or a business class lag, which might be your only option. If you're booking a first class award and you're connecting, then there's a high chance that whatever your connecting flight is, it's going to be in a lower cabin than first class probably. So you're going to pay even less than a first class award. I think that's really something that makes it a potentially great deal. And of course, all those prices Greg was quoting, imagine getting 10% back on them. It gets even better. You know, if you look at one of those 75K awards that he talked about with the examples from Lisbon

or Malta and economy class to Frankfurt and then on to Newark. So 75K with a first-class award, get 10% back. You're talking about 67.5, essentially net for a first-class award. I mean, that's- That's a good price for business class. Yeah, and-

Right, right, right. Come on, Greg. Come on. You could be paying $67.5 net for first class here. I mean, my goodness, how does that not appeal to you, Greg? It's got to appeal to you. But how do you find these? I mean, there's all sorts of these different things. One of the things I love is that many of the search tools are looking at these awards and finding the prices as LifeMiles would find them. So you don't have to search each individual route necessarily on your own on the LifeMiles website and deal with the broken LifeMiles website. Rather, instead, you can use an award search tool that will handle the heavy lifting for you. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of award search

tools cover LifeMiles explicitly, like Points Yeah and AwardTool both do. One caveat there is sometimes if you run the same search twice or three times, you might get different LifeMiles answers. And I discovered this morning when I was playing around that that's true even directly on the LifeMiles website. That's kind of unfortunate. So the Frankfurt to Newark nonstop, I didn't find the first time I did the search. But then when I was looking at connecting itineraries, I found it and then I went back to the nonstop and it was there. So it's a little flaky. That's too bad. That's disappointing that it has a slot machine aspect to it that you have to hope that you see something that is available or search more than once to find that it is available. That's annoying. And the smart search thing that Greg mentioned, I meant to mention before that if you're not particularly familiar with LifeMiles, then you may not have even noticed that there's a dropdown. When you go to search, there's a little dropdown right above the city pairs that is on smart Search by default. But if you can't find what you're looking for that way, then you can click that dropdown

and choose to search a Star Alliance award or choose to search with a specific airline partner. And the odd thing is that I've searched specific airline partner and still gotten flights that were on more than just that specific partner. True, yeah. It's not necessarily limited to the specific part.

So it's very weird. You need to use each one, though. If you're searching something that you expect to be available for one reason or another because you found it on United or Air Canada or something else, you're going to want to use more than one of those options to search for it if you don't see it with the smart search. Yeah, yeah, it's true. And if you do find a Star Alliance Award available, bookable using a tool or another website that's bookable with

United or with Air Canada, it's worth then checking on LifeMile's website with these different options and maybe cross your fingers and your toes and try it a few times and see what happens. See if you can get it to recreate those results. It's true. That's frustrating. That's too bad. Although I will say in LifeMiles defense for like my basic general trips to Europe, I find it very easy. Most of the stuff shows up. I mean, your Lufthansa first classes, that's potentially going to be difficult to find. I mean, obviously it's difficult to find because they only released to partners within three days of departure in the first place. But,

but the vast majority of awards that I'm looking for, I do find on the Life Miles website, and I have booked quite a few of them. I have also used the manual booking process, so it's not always simple and easy, but I have found a lot of them available. It depends on how complicated you want to get with it and how specific you want to be about which airlines and which products, et cetera, et cetera. So there's definitely some potential for a headache there. Not every award is as complicated to book as we're making it sound though. I think there's a lot of easy to book awards. Yeah, maybe. I haven't had as good a luck as you maybe, but a few times when I've wanted to use LifeMiles, I've been wanting to book a route that's fairly new or different. So for example, just before the pandemic, I'd booked flights to Europe that

flew from Detroit through Munich on Lufthansa, which is an unusual route. They always fly Detroit to Frankfurt, but at that time they were also flying through Munich. And again, it's like the other sites could see that and LifeMiles couldn't. So I booked it with United Miles, which is the reason why I have a lot of UnitedMiles in my account is because of course that whole trip got canceled and I got my miles back. But I booked the return on LifeMiles then because it was cheaper than booking on United. And the return was a different route. And so it was able to see that. And I mentioned earlier in the show that the Detroit to Istanbul route, it couldn't see any awards there. So yeah, so I haven't had great luck from that point of view. And that's where, that's why I wouldn't

prospectively sign up for, you know, the Life Miles Plus subscription because it's been, it's been hit or miss for me. But again, if I, if I saw one, if a big award with multiple people flying business first class, you know, that 10% could add up and it could make it worth a six month investment in the subscription. But I'd have to see, I'd have to do the math at that time and see what is worth it. Well, so let's see. So I have a family of four, Greg, let me ask you if I should. So I have a family of four. If I were going to book a one-way business class award to Europe, 63,000 miles a person, right? So that's what, 252,000 miles. Is it worth signing up for either the light or the basic for six months? If I was going to book that trip and we're going to travel within the next six months, let's say, should I sign up just with that one redemption

of about 250,000 miles? What do you think? Yeah, so you'd get back 25,000 miles. And with the light subscription, you would also earn 3,000 miles over the six months, I guess. So 28,000 miles for the price of 20 times six. $120. $120 to get, yeah. I mean, that's, so that one's easy, right? You're, cause you're getting, you're getting a great deal. Yeah. You're getting a great deal. You're paying less than half a cent a mile. Exactly. Exactly. So how about, how about the basic one?

So with a basic subscription, $50 a month, you're paying what, $300 for the six months. You're getting 2,000 miles a month. So that's, what, 6,000 miles. So you're getting a little over- 12,000 miles, right? Six months times 2,000. Oh, right. 12,000 miles. 12,000 miles. So you're getting 37-ish thousand miles back in a way for $300. So you're still paying less than a penny each. And so the price to buy the miles is not as good with a subscription, but you're adding the ability to change or cancel.

So yeah, so it's a little, so yeah, you definitely should be getting a subscription. Which one you get kind of done. And yes, yes, yes, it does. It kind of depends on how much you value that. Let's back up. Now let's say that redemption isn't within the next six months. Should I subscribe for a year?

The light version, we'd be talking now $240 for the year to get back the 25,000 miles. Plus now we'd be looking at 6,000 miles over the course of the year with the subscription, right? So we'd be getting 31,000 total miles if I did the math right in my head there and paying $240 for it. Again, no brainer.

If I'm going to make one a year, we're ahead of the game, so to speak, or at least I feel pretty good about paying less than a penny a point to keep those miles or have those miles. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. So the subscription thing definitely can make sense. How about do that same math with the basic? Is it worth it with the basic for a year? Yeah. So now we're talking about paying $600 over the course of the year. And so we're

going to get now 12 months, so 24,000 miles from the subscription plus the 25 rebates. So 49,000 miles total for essentially $600. I mean, that's not bad still, right? I mean, that's better than buying. Yeah. So you're paying a little more than a penny per point, but you're getting free cancellations and changes. Yeah. You're paying about 1.2 cents a point and getting the free changes and cancellations. I think it gets a little murky because really the math we should be doing. And I mentioned this not to get deep into it, but necessarily, but rather to tell people how you should be looking at it as saying, okay, well the $20 a month, I think is a no brainer if you're going to make that type of

a redemption. So now is it worth paying an additional $30 a month really is what you should be looking at now and forget about the 10% rebate. Cause you've already got that for $20. So really you're talking about paying an extra 30 a month for the additional subscription miles and the ability to get free changes cancellations and then that changes things i think because then you're talking about over six months paying 180 for an additional what 9 000 miles if i did the math quickly in my head right you know so now it's now you're paying like more like two cents a mile extra and getting free

changes and cancellations. Just depends how much you value those free changes and cancellations up to 72 hours in advance. Yep. Yep. So that's the way to think about it. But yeah, I think that the light is a pretty easy sell for people that use LifeMiles at least once a year. And if you're somebody that uses LifeMiles multiple times per year, then I think that $20 a month is a no brainer. It's just whether or not you care about the free changes and cancellations. Yeah. Yeah. To upgrade. And boy, if they would just, if they would get rid of that 72 hour rule and, and, you know, maybe throw in a few more miles a month, I w I would be very, I would, I think I would be tempted even, you know, just cause it would be like, boy, it would

make booking, as you said earlier, it would make booking these like prospectively, like you see, you see an award flight that's available, it would make it more attractive. And so maybe I would consider doing that subscription. Yeah, you see, I'm on the other side of that where I say, you know, I look and it's a difference in situation because I'm usually traveling with four people. What are the chances I'm going to find four Lufthansa first class seats, even if I do find availability? They're pretty slim.

So I'm not counting on switching the Lufthansa first. I'm more so like jumping because it's, oh, wow, there's four seats. Let me jump now and change or cancel later on. And so there's lots of stuff that I'm changing or canceling more than 72 hours in advance. Sure. And I would love to be able to do that. So that's why that's more appealing to me and less appealing to Greg. Because if you're traveling with one or two people, then yeah, I mean, you might be looking

to tweak just those small things like, oh, maybe I can get a better routing at the last minute or a better cabin or a better carrier. And those are the things that I'm less looking at at this stage of my life than Greg would be. Right, right. I mean, the 72 hour thing hit me just this last week when I changed my existing booking to fly Turkish in about 48 hours before the flight approximately is when the Turkish opened up. And so this subscription would not have helped me in that situation. Yeah. Well, and I don't mean to say that I like the 72 hour thing.

I don't. I mean, we were just in Las Vegas for a few days. And at some point we passed the exit where my wife was like, oh, that's where our son got sick last year when we were on our way to the airport to go to Fiji and we had to cancel it. So I know that that kind of thing can happen. And we'll just get sick at the last minute within that 72 hours and then it doesn't help you. But that does kind of stink.

I wish they would get rid of the 72 hour too. Let me be clear. I don't like it. It's just less of a barrier to me. Right. Right. Makes sense. All right. All right. So there are some downsides. I don't, it doesn't sound like I got you convinced yet, Greg. I don't think so. I mean, you've got, you've got me like intrigued about the possibility of, you know, signing up for this thing when I need it, but it hasn't made me, it has made me love life miles. It's made me more open to doing a big life miles booking because I have some options for either getting miles back or even making it freely cancel ball up to that 72 hour limit, which under certain circumstances would certainly be attractive to me, but I'd have to see that

happen. And so, yeah. So now I'm just gonna have to write a few posts when I finally do. Maybe you'll see it happen next week, Greg. So that's it. I might. Stay tuned to the blog. I might, I might.

You'll see it happen next week and you'll be like, wow, Nick paid 10% less because he subscribed to LifeMiles. I might do that myself next week. We'll see. You might, you might. There's time to make a LifeMiles lover out of you. So we'll see how that transpires.

And of course, what we're referring to when we say next week, we mentioned, I think earlier briefly, we have our flying by the seat of our pants challenge starting on Monday, June 3rd. So this podcast is publishing just before that. And we probably should have led with the fact that flying by the seat of our points is coming up in just a couple of days. So you're going to want to stay tuned to the blog if you're listening to this when it first publishes.

And if you're listening to this a few days after that, you still want to stay tuned to the blog because we're going to really be kicking it off on June 3rd to find out where Greg and Tim and I are going to have to meet up in the United States on June 5th. And then on June 5th, we're going to find out where we're going from there. And we're going to have more live streams over the ensuing days as we travel around the world to different destinations and then all come together somewhere overseas again. And we don't know where it's all going to be booked to last minute. Carrie and Steven have decided where we're going and are going to surprise us with destinations and challenges to meet at those destinations. So if that all sounds exciting and interesting to you, you're going to want to make sure that you're on the blog and also

following us on Instagram. Really, Instagram lends itself nicely to telling the story as you're traveling in the moment. So you can follow our stories on Instagram, follow frequent miler on Instagram. I think that's, that's going to make it a lot more fun to follow along. How excited are you about this neck? You know, like it's so weird. We were, so I was flying home just yesterday before we recorded this from Las Vegas. And my wife said, you know, it's so strange to me to think that your challenge is next week. And I said, yeah, it's weird for me too. And I think it's because I have no idea where I'm going. You know, like there's, there's zero knowledge about what's going to happen. So it almost doesn't feel real yet because I haven't done any planning for it. So to speak, I say that,

of course we wrote posts about what we're doing to prepare, but, but not plan exactly. Right. Right. Yeah, no, totally. Yeah. To me, it seems incredible that it's starting on Monday night. And so it's hard to get excited from the point of view of imagining where you're going to be because I have no idea. Same time, I'm really pumped about, I I'm about to kind of step through like a portal to some adventure and I have no idea what to expect. And I find that really exciting. I can't wait. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun.

I can't wait to see what we end up doing and how we end up doing it. And I know that we're going to fly some exciting flights and to some good destinations and stay at some nice hotels. So I look forward to all of that and we'll see what happens. So check that out on the blog and on Instagram. But all right. I think that brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week, it's going to be a pop quiz of sorts for you, Greg. And I'm not going to lie. I'm not real confident that you're going to know the answer. You're going to have a good guess. Opening for an easy one this week. It's not sounding like it's going to happen the answer. You're going to have a good guess. Opening for an easy one this week.

It's not sounding like it's going to happen. Well, it's not necessarily that it's a complicated question. You'll see what I mean. You'll understand why in a minute. Here we go. So this comes in from Ash. Ash says, I'm planning to book three nights at a Hilton Curio Collection hotel in Montreal, and I was curious about a potential double, triple, or quadruple dip opportunity.

If I booked one night through the Chase Edit program, one night through Hilton Points, and one night through the American Express Fine Hotels and Resorts program, would I still get the $200 property credits, one from using the Chase Edit program and one from using the Amex FHR program? That would be on top of the two free breakfasts from the Edit and FHR programs for one day each and the dining credits for having gold status on the day he books directly through Hilton. And of course, the platinum card rebate because he's got the FHR rebate and he could use his Chase Ultimate Rewards points from his Sapphire Reserve to pay for the room booked through Chase Edit. And on top of that, he'd earn Hilton points on a couple

of the nights, though at least the ones booked through the edit and FHR programs, he thinks. That seems like a lot, or he or she, I'm not sure, Ash, that seems like a lot of value for one vacation. So what do you think, Greg, if you booked a night through Chase edit a night on points and then a night through FHR, let's start there. Would you get the hundred dollar credit on both the edit and FHR bookings? So the hundred dollar credit is a benefit that's apparently provided on each of those platforms, right? Yes. And that's exactly why I wasn't totally confident that you were going to say that,

because exactly how you said it. Because when I saw this question come in, I was like, wait, the Chase edit? It didn't ring a bell to me initially. And so if it didn't ring a bell to you, Greg, that's probably because- Oh, no, no. I know Chase edit. It's their new thing that's like, Chase's new thing that's like Fine Hotels and Resorts. I have not spent any time investigating it to know what the rules are, whether like Fine Hotels and Resorts, it's possible to apply your hotel membership number and get the usual membership benefits of during that stay because that doesn't apply with

most online travel agencies but it does usually apply with fine hotels and resorts but not always so does that work with the edit i i don't know let's say it does the other question then is do the benefits like so amex fine hotels and res, if you book back-to-back stays, you're not supposed to get that property credit each night of the stay, even if you book them separately, even with different credit cards. Some hotels provide it anyway. A lot don't. Will they do it when you're switching programs like this? I don't know. I guess there's better than a 50% chance of it

working, but that's for getting that credit multiple times. I would actually guess less than 50% chance of getting the Hilton points on that edit stay. But again, I don't really have any reason to know one way or another. That's actually, Greg did pretty well with that. I think you're pretty close anyway. So there's a few things I'm going to add to it because I was not familiar with the edit. It's basically they rebranded the luxury hotel collection and now they call it the edit. Rebranded it and changed it a little bit. So the edit is something that you have access to if you've got a Sapphire Reserve or a JP Morgan Reserve, then you can book through the edit. I don't know for sure whether or not you can with a Ritz card. I didn't double check that. And I say that because Ritz card gets access

to a number of benefits that the Sapphire Reserve and JP Morgan Reserve do, even when it's not explicitly listed. So it may have access. I'm not sure. But yes, it's like FHR in that you get free breakfast for $200 property credit. Unlike FHR, early check-in and late checkout is based on availability rather than guaranteed. So it's smart to do the FHR as the last day of the stay. Good job, Ash. Yes, well done. Well done on that for the guaranteed 4 p.m. late checkout, of course. Early check-in is based on availability even with FHR, but late checkout is guaranteed with FHR, which is nice. I've taken advantage of that numerous times before. So, yeah, I don't know either.

I don't think it's possible to know without trying it whether you're going to end up getting the $100 credit on both. And I think even if you do, that's not an indication that it's going to work all the time. I think that's probably going to be case by case, hotel by hotel. Don't make the booking unless you can live with not getting it on both because they may not honor it on both. I think they probably should, but I don't know that they will. So anyway, so that's a gamble whether or not you're going to get the $100 credit both times. We don't know for sure. The other piece of this, getting the points, I think Greg was getting warm anyway with what he said. So what I found interesting was when I went to read about the edit and I looked at some posts from other sites, I saw, for instance, that Award Wallet had noted in their post that you would still get hotel points, like loyalty points with your

bookings through the edit. So that led me to believe that it works just like FHR and that you would get the points. But when I started doing some searches on the edit, I found something interesting. I noticed when I searched in one city that there were these NH hotels. I stayed in an NH hotel last year. I think, I don't know if they're a European chain. I stayed at them in Europe, but they have them in some other places too. It noted in search results on the NH hotels that this stay would qualify for hotel loyalty points. Let's see if I have the exact wording. It said hotel loyalty program eligible. There was a little that said that in the search results. And if you clicked it for more,

it explained you can now receive hotel loyalty awards when you book this day using your card or your points or both. And if you use your card, you'll earn Chase Ultimate Rewards points too, blah, blah, blah. Just add your loyalty information to checkout and you'll receive the rewards and benefits. I saw that on NH Hotels. I did not see that on any Marriott's or Hilton's or IHG's anywhere that I searched. So I'm betting, I don't know this for sure, but I'm betting that it's only some programs where you're going to get that and probably not the major US programs is my bet. If I were a betting man.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems really unlikely that they wouldn't show that if they thought it would work. Unless, here's a possibility that there's some, you know, variance in the individual hotels as to whether or not it will work. And so Chase doesn't want to promise it, even though it might usually work. And in fact, in practice, fine hotels and resorts is like that, right? Like where people report, you know, it usually works, but sometimes it doesn't. And so I could, I can imagine that being a reason why it doesn't show up.

So we don't know. We don't know. We don't know is the final solution there. Yeah. But I found it interesting nonetheless. I had't know is the final solution there. Yeah. But I found it interesting. Nonetheless, I had not looked at the edit at all. I found it interesting looking at the edit a little bit and not necessarily in a good way. I was a little bit surprised. I shouldn't say that there were some positives and some negatives. What stood out to me right away was that the edit had

fewer properties in all of the locations that I searched than Amex Fine Hotels and Resorts. I started out with Vegas because I just came from Vegas and I had a couple of FHR stays there. Chase Edit had three total properties in Las Vegas, whereas Fine Hotels and Resorts had six. The difference was much starker in Dubai. I searched that because I know it's a market with lots of luxury hotels on other platforms. Fine Hotels and Resorts had 26 properties in Dubai.

The Chase Edit had five. So it was a pretty significant difference. You didn't happen to compare to Capital One's version of this when you were doing that? I did not. That would have been a good comparison point, although Capital One tends to be pretty thin comparatively in general. So I wouldn't expect them to be particularly competitive. But that was a trend that kept up in other cities that I searched also.

So there were fewer. It looked like the Chase edit was a little bit more expensive than find hotels and resorts on a number of searches I did it. I did rather. But then at some point, I realized when I looked at Las Vegas again, after looking at other cities too, I came back. I realized that the edit is including the resort fee in the price in the search results. And so that made it look a little bit more expensive,

but it wasn't. So, and I think that's a positive thing to be showing it, but yeah, good on them for that. What about the taxes and fees though? Because Amex doesn't show that in the search results. No, you have to click all the way through. It looked like it was the same, but I didn't do enough comparisons to know for absolute certain. I wouldn't feel confident in that. But one thing that I thought was awesome was that with Chase, you could pay the full taxes and fees at one and a half cents per point with your points, including the resort fee actually is what it showed anyway. And I didn't actually click through to book it. So I don't know for sure that you could do that. Usually you pay the resort fee directly at the hotel. So maybe that's not true, but at any rate,

it looked like you could use points at one and a half cents per point and get these benefits. So if you were able to find a relatively inexpensive one, that could be a good use of points. Yeah, it really could, especially if you can also earn and we'll see. But if you can earn your hotel points as well for that stay, then yeah, I am going to take a look at that next time I have an open reservation. And maybe I'll do a test to see what happens with earning points. But if anyone out there who does this, please let us know if you earn points or an elite nights for your stays. But through the edit, we were eagerly awaiting to hearing what happens there.

Yeah, yeah. And so I will see. My main disappointment, I think, was that the edit only seemed to feature properties that I would consider more expensive. Whereas at FHR, you do find some properties that are really well-priced sometimes. Those didn't seem to be available through the edit in general. In that case, the chance of me booking it is probably pretty low. Yeah, they tended to be more expensive. But who knows?

There's exceptions to every rule. And it could still end up looking attractive. Let's say you're booking a Park Hyatt or something. You know, it might be that with that one and a half cent markup, you might be doing as well as transferring to Hyatt and booking with points, depending on the situation. And then you're also getting those other benefits of the stay. Right, right, right. And there's some situations where there were overlap. There were obviously properties that were available through both.

But then there were some where there wasn't. And that may end up making the Chase edit more attractive if they have a property that you wanted to book at one that popped into my mind right away because I was looking at things that were fresh in mind was that Bellagio is on the Chase edit in Las Vegas. It used to be on FHR, but it isn't anymore. It's hotel collection now. So you need a minimum two nights to book be on FHR, but it isn't anymore. It's hotel collection now. So you need a minimum two nights to book that through FHR, whereas you can book it for one night

through the Chase Edit if you wanted to and found the right situation. So there may be times like that where the property you want is available via the Chase Edit and not via FHR. Anyway, Ash, thank you for getting me to look into that a little bit because I am intrigued now

and interested in looking for other opportunities and where they do say you can earn points explicitly and where they do not. So I haven't dug deeply into that yet, just a little bit before the show. So we'll take a closer look at that and hopefully write about it soon. If you'd like to read about that when I write about it and read about all the other stuff we've been talking about, you should go to frequent miler dot com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequent miler dotcom slash subscribe to join our email list, follow us on all the various social media. You can join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, where you can ask questions like this one

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