Frequent Miler on the Air - Loyalty Program Changing Fortunes | Ep198 | 4-15-23

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

Frequent Miler often focuses on determine value in the most objective ways possible, but this week Nick and Greg take a very subjective look at each of the major programs, sharing our thoughts about whether each is trending up or trending down.  Subscribe to our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ 00:00 Intro 01:05 Giant Mailbag 06:50 Card Talk: Chase Sapphire Preferred https://frequentmiler.com/chase-sapphire-preferred-complete-guide/ 19:17 What crazy thing....double header   19:32 What crazy thing....did Hyatt do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/hyatt-is-being-shady-with-terms-of-latest-promotion/ 22:30 Aeroplan 27:24 Award Talk: British Airways Business Class with AA miles 29:40 Free MSC Cruise https://frequentmiler.com/our-experience-booking-a-free-msc-cruise/ 34:35 Seats.Aero adds Emirates 36:08 Main Event: Loyalty program changing fortunes 36:31 American Airlines 40:26 Delta 41:46 Southwest 43:13 United 46:37 Virgin Atlantic 48:27 Alaska 50:50 IHG 54:57 Hyatt 56:06 Marriott 59:20 Hilton 1:00:25 Wyndham 1:02:34 Choice 1:02:58 Radisson Americas 1:04:46 Question of the Week: What's your strategy regarding speculative bookings? Music credit: Annie Yoder

let's get into the giant mailbag what crazy thing did city 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 loyalty program changing fortunes so i've been loving my american airlines miles lately more than ever before. And Nick has been like loving the IHG program more than before. basically changes in the programs, changes in award prices, changes in all kinds of things like travel, the inflation, how travel costs much more. Award trends. Yeah. Where are award seats more available? All those things play into loyalty program changing fortunes. So that's today's main event. First, of course, we have

the giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Melissa, who says she hit, she says, I hit my three-year anniversary of discovering Miles and your site in roughly the same day. My only interest started as wanting to find a discounted way to fly to Japan. Three years later and over 4 been domestic travel. I love the little things like status matching with car rental, Ventana Big Sur, airport lounges, Vacasa, Hilton Fifth Night Free. The little things are what excite me the most. Many thanks to your fantastic podcast and the way in which you both explain things so well and so detailed. I so look forward to Saturdays and always have a notebook and pen ready. I have 2.9 million points left to spend on domestic travel. And don't doubt your fantastic advice will keep me traveling for quite some time. Many thanks for a job well done. Well, that's awesome. That's great to hear. Thank you for

writing in with that, Melissa, because, hey, it's just nice to hear that when people are finding success with the hobby, right? I mean, it's exciting. I think it's almost as exciting for us as it is for the people who are new to the game and discovering it because it's fun sharing this with people, right? And 4 million. I mean, I love that, too, because that just shows that you can start from zero in this game and build up really quickly with some strategy. If you're new to this, it is not hard to build up the number of points you need for great redemptions.

You know, again, with some strategy and some planning and obviously you need some expenses and there are some ins and outs and what have you. But if you're willing to put in a little legwork, you can earn enough miles to really do just about anything. We had an email this week asking us about traveling to places that give you an incentive. We've seen a couple of things in the last couple of years where people have, or places rather, tourism boards have offered to reimburse plane tickets, for instance, if you come visit and that sort of a thing.

And when I first saw that, my first thought was, I've seen those things, but I haven't really paid attention to them because this game has made it so easy to continue to earn some points when you dive into it anyway, that I can normally book a flight to where it is I want to go. Not that I'm opposed to a free flight. I love my free flights, but I guess I always kind of feel like there's a world of possibility. And certainly for Melissa with 2.9 million to go, you could go just about anywhere you want in the world, right? Isn't that kind of cool? Yeah, you really can. And sort of reflecting back over time, when I started the Freak Mylar blog back in 2011, back then a 50,000 point signup offer, credit card signup offer was a big deal. That is what we got

excited about. Today, we get excited about 90,000 to 150,000, that kind of range. And so it's actually gotten... Well, some things have gotten harder for sure. That side of things, it's actually gotten, well, some things have gotten harder for sure. That side of things, it's kind of amazing how far things have come to make things better and better, especially for people starting out. Right. Right. Because if you're new, then you've got all of the possibility of the various signup offers, right? So all the different intro offers are yours for the taking. And yeah, I mean, you say that, and I haven't been in the game as long as you have, Greg. But I remember opening an Alaska Airlines credit card for 25,000 miles.

And that was it, because that's all they ever offered. And today, if they offered 25,000 miles on an Alaska card, who would open it? I mean, nobody would open it, right? Because you're like, no, I could open an Amex Gold card and get 90 000 points that i can transfer to like you know two dozen airlines or maybe not two dozen but but more than 12 anyway different airline programs so uh so yeah it is a great time to be getting into it um and another thing that's changed for the positive i just feel like i need to hit this is is category bonuses so you know back when i, Sapphire Preferred Card was the it thing. And it was the it thing

because it offered two points per dollar for travel and dining and one point per dollar everywhere else. And it allowed transfers to various hotel and airline programs. And back then, I mean, you didn't have anywhere you could get two X for dining and travel until Sapphire Preferred came out. That was huge.

Today, you know, it seems laughable because getting 3X, 4X, 5X in those categories and many other categories is just the norm. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. When we got married, we paid our catering bill because back then Sapphire Preferred offered three acts on dining for the first Friday of the month. So our catering bill installments got paid off on first Fridays of the month. And I had to like tell the caterer, listen, you need to charge the card today. I'm going to give you the information. Don't wait until tomorrow. I need it today so I can get my three points per dollar. And now, you know, you can get three points per dollar any day of the week. Right, right.

More than one card with a fee-free card, you know. Exactly. It's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a wonderful time. And, you know, I didn't bring up the Sapphire Preferred for just any old reason. That story, that story is absolutely true and it was on my mind, but it's also happens to be the subject of...

Card Talk. Card Talk. Chase, Sapphire Preferred card is our card talk topic for today. So as I said in the earlier segment, the Sapphire Preferred has uh a big deal since 2011 at least um and uh back then 2x travel and dining 1x everywhere else that was exciting back then that's no longer exciting but uh chase not too long ago uh refreshed it a bit to make it not exciting but it's still i'd say one of the better like starter

cards in the points and miles world uh it's it's kind of uh one that you you kind of need in order if you're getting started and to get into the chase ultimate rewards ecosystem so anyway um let's talk about the basic uh aspects of the sapphire preferred card um what you get now is not 2x for dining but you get 3x for dining um you also get 3x for streaming services and online grocery okay so i don't know. What is online grocery? Yeah. Instacart, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. Things like Instacart, I assume. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Some of the grocery delivery, I'd be like ShopRite delivers if you're in the Northeast. I bet that that works. Or I think Kroger will deliver some groceries that probably yeah yeah and then there's things like um gopuff and doordash that also deliver groceries and and you might wonder well am i getting 3x for those for online grocery well you know what like doordash at least you'll be getting 3x because of dining because you know

so so i think your your chance of getting 3x on those things is very good because it'll probably fall in one of those two categories. Anyway, so 3X for those things, 2X for all travel, 1X for most other things. But they do have some specific 5X categories. Like you could get 5X for travel book through Chase, and you could get 5X for Lyft rides through March of 2025. So a couple things there. So the bonus categories are okay. You know, so I'm going to give you a pop quiz that I don't know the answer to yet, but hopefully by the time you get to the answer, I'll be able to check your work.

What is the best category bonus or what are the two cards? I'm going to assume that there's two. What are two cards that offer a better category bonus on all travel than the Sapphire Preferred? Okay. Well, Sapphire Reserve is an easy one. Okay. That gets 3X on all travel. And the Amex Green card gives you 3X on all travel and the Amex green card gives you 3X on all travel. Are those the two you're thinking of? There's also the U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve gives you 3X on all travel. True. Actually, no, I hadn't thought of.

So I hadn't thought of the Altitude Reserve or the Sapphire Reserve because those aren't to me competitive or competitor cards to the Sapphire Preferred. I didn't qualify that. So I can see where you went with that. But but at four hundred and fifty dollars a year or whatever, those cards, Sapphire or the U.S. Bank ones a little less. Maybe I can't remember the annual fee on that one. But but at any rate, those aren't exactly comparable to me. So, yeah, I would have thought of the green card or the city premier card, which offers three acts on most travel stuff.

A lot of travel, but a lot of. Yeah, not all. Yeah, exactly. Not all. And the green card, like there's no reason to have it other than the travel. Right. So I bring that up because I also often feel the same way you did, where I'm like, ah, two X travel, not that exciting on the Sapphire preferred, but really truthfully when it's all travel, that's actually not bad. There are a lot of options that are going to be much better than that, especially when you consider that Chase Ultimate Rewards points are very useful. And so personally, I don't pay for a lot of travel. I'm usually using miles for the most part

to redeem for flights. Obviously, there's taxes, and I'm usually using points for hotels. But when I have a paid hotel stay, I have often used a card that earns 2x to pay for the hotel stay because I don't have a card usually in my wallet where I'm earning much more than that. So I think actually it gets sold a little short on the 2x travel because I think for most people, if you're not going to have 19 cards, that's not a bad return on travel. Right, right. And the reason I'm not super excited about 3X dining is mainly because Chase also has their fee-free Chase Ultimate Rewards cards like the Freedom and Freedom Unlimited offer 3X for dining as well. So you don't have to have this card, which is $95 per year, by the way, in order to get three extra dining. But that brings us to some other perks. You do need this card or another card

in the Ultimate Rewards ecosystem that has an annual fee in order to be able to transfer points to travel partners. So you need at least one premium card in your household in order to be able to transfer points, for example, to Hyatt, where you're going to get often fantastic value for your points. But you could also transfer to some airline programs and other hotels as well. So that's a very significant benefit to the Sapphire Preferred card, its ability to transfer points. Primary auto rental coverage is a nice perk. I mean, more and more cards have that, but it's still a very good thing, especially for what is basically a travel card.

And you're getting 2x valuable points when you rent a car, so a good deal there. It has this 10% annual point bonus, which is not as exciting as it might sound, I think, because basically it's not that you're getting 10% additional based on all the points you earned. It's an additional basically 0.1 or I guess, yeah, 0.1, you know, point per dollar spent over the year. So if you spent, you know, what is it? A thousand dollars, you're getting an extra. 100 points, right? Yeah. A hundred points, something like that. It's just not going to add up to a lot. So,

you know, I'm not very excited about that. They also have a $50 annual credit for hotel stays booked through Chase. So we don't usually like to book hotel stays through an online portal for a few reasons, but mainly if it's a chain hotel, you're not going to earn hotel points for that stay. You're not going to benefit from elite status for that stay usually. You're not going to earn elite credits for that stay. You're not going to benefit from elite status for that stay. Usually you're not going to earn elite credits for that stay. So there's a lot of downsides, but if you're booking an independent hotel, it, it totally can work. And, and especially if you're, you know, if once a year you you're booking a cheap hotel stay, it could totally be worth it to get that $50 back. I think. Yep. Yep. I mean, that says it in terms of all those things. So yeah,

I'll agree with all that. And I think that for somebody getting started, so there are times as a more advanced user where I've thought, why do people recommend the Sapphire Preferred? I feel like that's often recommended as a good starter card. And I've often looked at it and said, it's not the best welcome bonus out there. It doesn't have really compelling category bonuses. So I've often looked at this card and thought, you know, I feel like it's kind of overblown. But really, when I think about it a little bit more carefully from the perspective of a beginner, it makes a lot of sense. Because if you're relatively new to this, the whole transfer partner game is something

that you're going to want to learn so that you can maximize the value of your points. And if you're brand new, you're probably not going to sign up for the Chase Inc. Business Preferred because that's got a $15,000 spending requirement for the welcome bonus. And so this is the only card you're realistically going to get as a beginner that is going to give you the capability to transfer your ultimate rewards points to partners. So I think it makes a lot of sense to start with this card, even though I think those of us more advanced in the game would say, I think there are better options. Long-term, yes. But as a beginner, $95 card for this, and then you get a couple of fee-free cards

to go with it, to combine with it, with the Freedom card and the Freedom Unlimited. And then you're sitting in pretty good shape for somebody starting out. Yeah, no, exactly. Those are my thoughts, exactly. And even if you're more interested in the Sapphire Reserve card long-term, this could be a good one to get a bigger welcome bonus. It often has a bigger welcome bonus initially than the Sapphire Reserve. And then a year later, you can call Chase and see if they'll let you upgrade to the Sapphire Reserve. And right now, as we're recording this, there's an almost all-time high offer in branch. So you have to go into a Chase branch and you could get an offer for up to 90,000 points for the Sapphire Preferred. So that's a pretty darn exciting level. We've seen it go as high as 100,000 points

at times, but I don't expect the 100,000 point offer to come back. So if you're interested in this card, I would absolutely run into a Chase Branch and get in on that offer. A few other perks to mention before we're done discussing this card. It does have some food delivery benefits that are all sort of limited time. So DoorDash, you get free dash pass until the end of 2024. GoPuff, you get $10 monthly GoPuff credit. Actually, almost all Chase cards get that. You could use almost any of your Chase cards for that. It also has Instacart. You get $15 every quarter. So that means every three months through July 31st of 2024 and six months of free Instacart Plus as long as you redeem that by July

31st of 2024. So some nice food delivery benefits there. So those are all options where you live, I would assume. Although I guess I don't know about that. So how many times have you used GoPuff? You've got a wallet full of Chase cards, right? I used it once. I'm just curious. I'm just curious because it is a benefit.

Like you said, it's on basically all chase cards and that's about how many times i've used it too it doesn't exist where i live so that's part of the problem uh but even when i travel i find i'm really surprised sometimes that the places where i can't get a gopuff delivery uh it was in orlando recently and i thought oh it's orlando i gotta be able to use gopuff here right yeah we needed some diapers or wipes or something and i saw we don't need to go to the store. We can just get that from GoPuff and use one of these Chase credits

for once finally. But no, no GoPuff delivery in all of Orlando, I don't think. So, yeah. That's stunning. Yeah, yeah. So, I think you were doing something wrong, Nick.

I don't know. I don't know. But yeah, so those benefits are nice if you can use them, but don't overvalue them, I guess. Yeah, and just don't forget that that benefit is expected to go puff at the end of 2023. Right, right. Sort of like my credits have gone poof all along with that one.

But Instacart, if that were available where I live, I would use the Instacart one. So that would be, uh, that would be, yeah. So, so, so if you're using some of those benefits, especially Instacart that, you know, it can help actually, um, the total rebates on this card can actually totally pay the, the annual fee fairly easily if you actually use them. Um, so yeah, overall, I mean, I think we already talked about the overall big picture. It's, it's an excellent starter card. And Chase Ultima Rewards, if you're interested in getting in the Points and Miles game, you need to be into that program.

That's such a significant part of the Points and Miles world, prices and some amazing properties that you can redeem your points for. So you could get fantastic value transferring your chase points to Hyatt. So there you go. That's the Sapphire preferred. Very good. All right. So that brings us to what crazy thing. And this week we've got a,

what crazy thing, double header. Everybody loves a double header, right? So it's baseball time, baseball season. So we got our first double header everybody loves a double header right so it's baseball time baseball season so we got our first double header of the season perhaps uh so what crazy thing did hyatt do this week yeah so hyatt ah we've been loving our hyatt but but this is not lovable no not at all yeah so so So what happened is there a recent promo.

The terms and conditions originally said that if you check out by the 19th, I think it was March, then like that would be the first day that would count towards the promo. And so people, you know, did that. They made sure they were checking out on the 19th. And then a few weeks later, Hyatt actually changed the terms to say, no, the first checkout has to be on the 20th. That's crazy. That's absolutely crazy. I literally went back to the website and just quietly changed the terms. And then when people called in to say, why didn't I get credit? The reps are looking at the terms and saying, oh, because you checked out on the wrong day. And that's just inexcusable. That's so shady. That really bothers me because somebody took the initiative to change it and didn't take the initiative to let anybody know. So clearly they were hoping people wouldn't

notice, I guess, and thinking that they would just get away with changing it, not realizing that the internet keeps an archive of stuff. So it's not even like we just happen to remember it one way and now it says something different and we think they changed it. There's an archive on the internet so you can see what it said before and what it says now and come on hyatt how are you going to do that i like that just doesn't and it's not the fault of the agents on the phone because i'm sure the average agent on the phone doesn't know that they changed it they're just looking at the terms and seeing the terms now right i mean i'm sure they didn't tell the agents either that's exactly right it looks like most people who when they're

pushing back and or going through like a highatt concierge to get this resolved, are getting credit for that first day. But Hyatt really needs to go back and automatically credit everyone. It's inexcusable, the current situation as we're recording this. Hopefully by the time our podcast comes out, they'll have already fixed it. But we don't know that at the time of recording. Right, right, right, right. Hopefully. So, you know, make sure you look at the link because if they did fix that, I'll make sure that there's a link to that story.

There'll be a link to the original story and a link to the fixed it story, I hope, by the time this publishes. But yeah, that's, yeah, like I said, inexcusable. I think that was a great word to describe it. I can't believe they did that. Okay, so that's crazy. And I should say that that's a good reminder

to always take screenshots and copy things. I always take screenshots of stuff because you never know when something like that might come in handy later on. I wouldn't expect anybody to change terms like that after the fact, but it takes very little storage space for me to take a screenshot and hang

on to it until the promotion's done. So yeah, that's that. Okay. Other crazy thing this week is Aeroplan. Aeroplan has gotten crazy on us this week with cancellations. So a bunch of people in our Facebook group and our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group started reporting that they were receiving cancellation notices on Etihad first class reporting that they were receiving cancellation notices on Etihad first class awards that they booked through Aeroplan. Now, we'd reported a few weeks ago about widespread availability. There were a bunch of flights with four, six, eight, I think even maybe nine seats or something ridiculous like that in first class on Etihad. So like every seat in the cabin. And not just any first class. So a lot of these were

featuring the Airbus A380, which has their first class apartments, which are those fully enclosed suites that have both a long bench along one wall, a big captain's chair. The bench is laid down into a bed and made up. I mean, it's absolutely spectacular. By far, one of the best first-class products you can get in the sky. And it was widely available to book with points. I personally booked with American Airlines points. I'm very glad I did because this seems to be a widespread problem happening with people who booked with airplane points for some reason. Yeah. So they received a cancellation notice. And so it's all kind of weird. And hopefully, again, this hopefully will be an update by the time this publishes. But as it stands now,

what seems to have happened is Etihad has taken away first class altogether on at least one frequency between Abu Dhabi and London. And I don't know how many other frequencies this has been an issue on, but they're still selling tickets in economy and business class on those flights, but no longer selling tickets in first class, even though it's scheduled to be operated by an A380 and they canceled everybody's awards. So it seems to me like maybe they didn't intend to have so many first class awards available. But again, similar to Hyatt, it's an inexcusable situation because people transferred points to Aeroplan to book these awards and booked them. And Etihad is still operating those flights. They didn't cancel

the flights and they're still scheduling an A380 on them. So it would be crazy to me if those people don't get their tickets reinstated. It's crazier yet because they only fly this now on like one or two routes. So you couldn't even fly this between the United States and Abu Dhabi. You had to book this between Abu Dhabi and London. So we heard from a reader, for instance, who booked that and then spent like $800 in surcharges to get home from London on Virgin Atlantic because they were like, well, when am I ever going to get to fly the apartments again? So I'm going to hop on this. And now they've made other nonrefundable plans. And to me, that's just I can understand why somebody would have done that weeks after

they booked their first class flight. I can't understand Aeroplanin and Antahad not fixing this. Right, right. I guess I should back up and say we don't know for sure that it's not happening with American Airlines tickets as well. At least it didn't happen on my flight, but mine on mine, they're still selling first class for that flight. So that might be the difference. And I'll mention that for both of these, we have we have initiated conversations with, with Hyatt for the first issue, first crazy thing. And with, with Aeroplane for the second one,

to try to get to the bottom of these things, try to get these things resolved. So hopefully we'll hear back from both of them. But so far, at least as we're recording this, nothing yet. Yep. Okay. So we'll hope for better times, but yeah, crazy. It would blow my mind if you can book an award and that it just falls through the cracks like that. Although on the flip side, it's a good

reminder that equipment swaps can happen and maybe Etihad is going to take the A380 off on that one frequency. And that'll really stink because people that transferred points for this and made plans will miss out on the apartments. And that is always a risk you take because you're not guaranteed to get the aircraft that you booked. So that's- Yeah, yeah. It's also a good reminder of how valuable it is to book with a program that has like free changes, to book all of it, free or cheap changes.

So the Virgin Atlantic one, they only charge 50 bucks approximately or 50 euros or something, 50 pounds maybe to cancel. So she'd get all her points back. The Aeroplan, though, I mean, they better make her a little bit. Right, right, right. I mean, I'm sure you'd be able to get the points back. And if you're someone who uses Aeroplan points often enough, and that particular reader told me that she does use them often enough. So it's not the worst case

scenario for her specifically. But for a lot of people that would stink to have transferred over 90,000 points per passenger and then end up with airplane points that may or may not be useful to them for their other travels. So all right, anyway, we've drawn down on that one. That's the craziness this week. Let's talk about award talk. So did you book something cool this week, Greg? I did. So I have a trip to Europe planned in the summer and a hard, fast date for the return. A while ago, I booked business class award to get there for my wife and I, And I've just been waiting and looking for a good return option. And the problem is we just had the one day where we have to get back that one day. And that made it very hard. There was like nothing available and everywhere I checked

until I checked directly with American Airlines. And I found that I could fly basically British Airways back in business class. And part of the transatlantic part will be on their, I forget what they're called, world something suites. It's basically their club world suites. It's basically their Club World Suites. It's basically their nicer new business class that with doors. And so I'm pretty excited about that. And because I'm starting not from England, but from Europe, the fuel surcharges are half of what they would have been had we left from England. So I was able to book both of us for 57,500 American Airlines miles plus $343 each in fees. As I said, it would have been more like $700 in fees if we left from England. So that's pretty sweet. So pretty excited about

that. Yeah, that's a great one. I'm going to come back to that myself in a second. So yeah, that's a very good one and one that's often widely available because the fees are a little bit higher. So there's often a chance to get one or two seats at least anyway in British Airways business class with American Airlines miles. And like you said before, one of the advantages of that is that it's flexible. So if a fantastic, better award comes along, then you cancel it for no penalty and get your miles back. So, oh, totally. I actually have a expert flyer alert set up to let me know when Lufthansa first class opens up for that day. So we might fly first class instead. We'll see. Well, there you go. So, so, all right. So that'll tie into well to what I booked. So this week I

wrote about booking a cruise to one of the matching offers that we've talked a bunch about. So it matched at Rivers Casino in Philadelphia and it just so happened it worked out that I did not have a return flight similar to Greg. I had a flight booked to Europe and plans booked in Europe and I had not booked the return flight for my family yet. And it just so happened that the day I was scheduled to check out from the hotel that I'm staying at in Europe, there was a cruise leaving nearby with MSC, a 10-night cruise in the Mediterranean that I could book through this matching offer. And again, I had matched status around. I've written extensively about it, and I'll leave links in the description. So I was able to book a 10-night cruise in a balcony cabin that would have cost

$4,000 if I were to pay for it directly. And instead, I had to pay $59 and a $400 deposit that I'll get back as an onboard credit. Super easy to just go to the casino and load that into a slot machine, spend a couple times and cash it out. So that deposit really is like cash. And it'll cost $200 for two people in gratuities, basically. So $259 for one room. My wife booked a room also, so another $259 there. So for $518 total, we've got two rooms on this 10-night cruise that's going to all sorts of great places. So I'm super, super excited about that. I think that's going to be a lot of fun.

The ship may or may not be amazing, but the port stops are either way. So I can't wait to do that this summer. So that's going to be a lot of fun. But the reason I said this is going to tie into what you're saying is I still don't have a flight home. And so I have been looking at American Airlines every single day just in case there's more space that opens up because I really want a flight on the day we get back from that cruise because we want to get home for something. So I've been trying to find it. And I'm today before this publish is going to book a day later because there are four seats a day later. And then just like I said, look and see if I can improve upon it. Set an alert because I figured, yeah, Lufthansa first class may open up. Are four seats going to open up in Lufthansa first class?

Doubtful, but I know someone who got four seats this year in first class for their family of four. So I'll keep my eyes open. You'll have the entire cabin, I bet you. I mean, we'll see. Well, because I'm a little bit less excited than you are about the reduced British Airways fees, of course, because I have to pay them times four passengers. So I'm looking at $1,200 and $1,500 in fees or whatever. So that's not super exciting to me still. But anyway, I'm going to book that as a placeholder anyway, and it's nice to be able to

book that as a placeholder. And yeah, and the fact that there's no fees for canceling at all is fantastic. A couple other things I want to say about the American Airlines flight I booked. So first, normally I ignore the results that are flying British Airways because of the high fuel surcharges I expect. And it didn't occur to me until later. I was like, oh, wait a minute. They're actually less because of not originating in England. So I started looking at it. They're actually less because of not originating in England. So I started looking at it. But the other reason I usually ignore them is they usually fly, usually, not always,

for getting back to the Detroit airport, which is what I need. The itinerary is going through, flying from London to JFK, but then from LaGuardia to Detroit. And that's pretty inconvenient. Now we have a pretty long layover between the two. So it really won't be a problem to get an Uber or something over to LaGuardia. But the other part of what I'm going to be doing, and this is something I realized after booking this thing, is I'm going to be watching for JetBlue awards to open up. Well, that's a good point. Yeah, American Airlines lets you book JetBlue. And so if JetBlue opens up two seats on the JFK to Detroit flight, and actually the timing's perfect for that if it happens, then we'll be

able to just change it for free to that. And boom, we've got a nice itinerary. That'll be fantastic. The other thing, now that you mentioned that, that I've been keeping my eye on is for JetBlue to start selling their tickets between Paris and JFK, because I would position to Paris to fly JetBlue business class if I'm able to book that with American Airlines miles. So I'll keep my eye on that. I was checking out yesterday to see, and they're not selling the tickets yet, at least as we record this, but, but they're supposed to start just a couple of weeks before I would need to, to fly on them.

So, so we'll see, hopefully something will come there, but again, that's the value in using points in a program that's highly flexible as a, is making American Airlines miles more valuable for both of us. And we'll get back to that concept in just a minute here. So in fact, well, was there something else you wanted to add on award talk? Yeah, yeah.

So I've talked, I think, before about there's this geeky tool called Seats.Aero that is great for finding hard to find award flights if you know a lot about what's going on here. And they recently added support for finding Emirates awards. And that's exciting for two reasons.

Seats at Arrow is the only tool I know of that's good for finding award flights when you don't know your origin and destination airport. So most of the tools you have to put in your origin and destination. Preston Pyshko Who doesn't know their origin and destination, Craig? That's ridiculous. Craig Ross But this one will let you just say, basically, I'm simplifying things here, but show me all of the Emirates first-class awards that

are available kind of worldwide. And then you could start limiting it to the ones you're interested in. And that makes it, oh, so much easier to find things like you might not have thought to fly, you know, Athens to Newark, for example. So you would have never put in that combination as your origin and destination, but you might find first classes available on that route. So yeah, that's exciting to me anyway. And I think it'll be exciting to those seeking out the Emirates first class experience, which is pretty awesome. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well sought after. So that'll be a nice little tool for that. All right. Awesome. So I mentioned the whole American Airlines thing and how that was going to tie well into today's main event. So I think now it is time for today's main event.

Main event time, loyalty program, changing fortunes. We're going to go over some airline programs and hotel programs and just say, well, you know, which ones have been trending upwards, which one, which ones have been trending down. And this is, of course, our personal subjective opinions about these things. So since we've been talking about Let's Talk American Airlines, they're up, which is ironic given the recent news is that they finally, they abandoned award charts for their own flights. So now they're completely 100% dynamic. You know award charts. If you want to fly American Airlines itself, you basically just have to do an award search and see what price they want to charge you. So that's kind of the bad news.

But the good news and really good news is that they have not abandoned their partner award charts, which are actually excellent. I mean, they've long had great, especially business class award prices for their partners. Yeah. To be honest, I think the whole abandoning award charts on their own flights was sort of fake news, wasn't it? Didn't they abandon those years ago? I mean, come on, they've been charging whatever they want for a long time on those. So to me, that was a non-story. I know that it got some headlines, but I was like, come on. They've been in that forever ago.

It's just been web specials all the time, even that cost more than what they used to for standard awards. Yeah. I mean, they had a couple standard awards if you're in there, but usually it was all web specials. Totally agree. So now it's all what they used to call web specials, but now they just don't have a name for it. It's just the award price. Right. Yeah.

Right. So, yeah. And the other thing where I'm still high on is how much easier they've made it to earn elite status. So the more I'm using American Airlines miles to fly everywhere, thanks to, well, the free changes they have everywhere is actually the big thing that we mentioned earlier too um you know the the more valuable it can be to have a little bit of elite status for uh seat selections and and things like that yeah it definitely makes a difference in me

picking american airlines for domestic flights because i know that we'll be able to get good seat selection and and uh so that that certainly comes into play. But yeah, I think the flexibility is so big. And for me, I had almost completely ignored American Airlines for a couple of years, because I had young kids that were lap infants. And so lap infants with American Airlines, you're going to pay 10% of the revenue fare. And I wrote once before about how they kind of bring that pull that revenue fare out of the sky sometimes. And it doesn't always make any sense at all. And I wrote once before about how they kind of bring that pull that revenue fare out of the sky sometimes. And it doesn't always make any sense at all. I ran into a situation where it was way more expensive, the quote that they gave me than it should have been. So I had avoided them altogether while I had kids that could be lap infants.

Now that my kids are in seats of their own, I'm back on American Airlines because they offered good pricing on their partner awards and good flexibility. So I just keep booking speculative awards with American Airlines all the time. And sometimes just for two of us figuring, oh, well, if two more seats open up, then I can book that. And if not, then I can just cancel. So yeah, American Airlines has certainly become more valuable to me. And probably the most ironic piece of that is that we had written a couple of years ago about a short term great opportunity to buy miles really cheaply, basically. And we both bought what probably we thought was a fair amount of miles. And I don't know, I don't want to speak for you. Yeah, exactly. We both bought

over a million. And I don't want to speak for you, but I know in my shoes, I'm like, man, I wish I bought more because- Totally. I've thought that many times recently. You know, you think about it. So in, in recent times I've, I've bought not just flights for my own family, but for our team. We have the flight to Japan that that's you know, flying Japan airlines all bought with American airlines miles and and, and there's been more. So yeah, it's uh it's been it's been really good and actually when i flew eddie had first apartments both what i booked for uh upcoming next year but also when i previously flew it was both booked with american airlines miles and so yeah uh recent years uh they've been they've been great and so hopefully that'll continue let's get on to the

next programs. What do you think about Delta? I mean, I never think much about Delta. So I'm going to, I leave you to think about Delta. I don't really consider them much at all, usually. Yeah, I'm marking Delta down. The trending down mostly just because in today's inflationary prices. So, you know, sometimes you look at simple things

like flying from Detroit to somewhere in Florida, you know, used to be like 200 bucks. Now you're looking at like 800, a thousand, whatever, you know. It's not even hyperbole. It's like, yeah. No, no, it's not.

Prices are insane. And because Delta dynamically prices their awards, their award prices are also insane. You know, I mean, it goes up with the cash price. That's the main reason Delta's down. But I'll have to say that the companion certificates that come with the Delta Platinum card and the Delta Reserve card, I'd say the value of those have gone up for the same exact reason. I just booked a round trip with

my wife to North Carolina. And, you know, I think the price was something like $600 round trip each. And so we saved, you know, 600 bucks by using companion certificates. So that was pretty nice. Yeah. Yeah. You know, relatedly Southwest is, you know, pro. So you're kind of the Delta guy and I'm kind of the Southwest guy out of the two of us. And it's the same situation because inflation has gotten so crazy. The value of Southwest has really tanked for me lately. It's nuts. I thought I was going to have to go to El Paso, if you see the post that I hopefully have published by now about the passport whole situation that I faced there published by now about the passport whole situation that I face there. I thought I was going to have to book a last minute ticket to El Paso.

And I looked up cash tickets and cash tickets on the major carriers were 450, $500 one way. Now I was booking last minute. Okay. But still kind of high. I looked at Southwest and it was $700 a passenger one way. And I was like, for a domestic flight, like, come on, this is insane. I know it was last minute, but wow, I couldn't believe how expensive it was. And for a family of four, even if we only paid three of those,

$2,100 to fly like, you know, not even like just over halfway across the country, right? So, so yeah, I was, I've not been pleased with Southwest as of late because it's just not been great. The companion pass, yeah, I was I've not been pleased with Southwest as of late because it's just not been great. The companion pass, yes, can be valuable if everybody's prices are comparably high. But in a lot of situations lately, Southwest has been higher than everybody else for me. So I've certainly run into that problem where then awards are ridiculously priced also.

And that said, I'm going to fly Southwest today as this publishes. So it's not that I'm not flying them at all, but they definitely have not been my go-to program as of late. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'll talk about United now. I'd say they're up a little bit, maybe not as much as American Airlines, but they also introduced free award changes and cancellations back in November. So you might think it was longer ago than that. But when they first announced free award changes, there were like rules and regulations around it that made it not unlimited. So, for example, it was like for flights departing from North America.

And if you wanted to cancel, it had to be more than 30 days before, things like that. They eliminated all those terms and conditions basically in November of 2022. And so they are now just as freely changeable, cancelable as American. And even though they don't have award charts, even for partners, they do sort of. So the prices for booking partner awards are still predictable within a range. And so you still can get great value booking with United. So yeah, I'd say they're up a bit. My problem with United, though, is that I don't have any of the United cards. I'm probably not going to sign up for a new United card. And so then I'm faced with the prospect of transferring my Chase Ultimate

Rewards to United. And I just can't make myself do that because I've been using them all for Hyatt all the time. So I don't even look at United for award pricing, actually, usually, because I don't have enough miles right now to book anything. And I'm just not going to transfer over enough points for multiple passengers to fly in business class rather than use them for Hyatt. What about for backup flights? So like domestic, let's say you're booking a positioning flight and you need to get somewhere. So I love the free cancellations now. Now that'll be true with all the domestic main programs that you could use their points to book and not have to worry about canceling for free. Well, that's the thing. So I have enough American Airlines miles still and plenty of Southwest points that I can book those speculative positioning flights without having to worry about United.

United might be a better option in some cases, but I don't really want to transfer over points that could be used for Hyatt just so I can make speculative positioning bookings that doesn't seem valuable enough. Well, let me give you a real world example. So my outbound flight to Europe coming up this summer, I could have booked the, it's a business class flight, Star Alliance.

I could have booked with a number of programs. Um, I could have saved miles, um, for sure. Booking with, uh, uh, life miles. Um, but I booked with United. I spent more miles, but I did that because it's freely cancelable. So again, if something better comes up, I can, I can switch to it. So that's why I did that. So I'm happy with that. If I had a stockpile of United Miles, I would feel differently about it. If I had, it would be more valuable to me because I agree that that makes sense.

Which as an aside, I have thanks to the pandemic where I had booked quite a lot with United Miles before the pandemic and it all got canceled. So yeah. Yeah. I mean, if United had the 240X, you know, Conservation International deal that American did, I probably would have bought a lot of United Miles and then been doing this. Absolutely. So it's just, I just didn't have the stockpile.

So next up, Virgin Atlantic. Virgin Atlantic has been down for me for a number of reasons. One of the things that I really detest is when programs make changes, A, without any notice, and that's to say without letting people know in advance and giving them a chance to use whatever it is they can before it changes. And then B, without any notification, without saying that they changed it either and just leaving you to discover one day that they've changed something. And Virgin Atlantic has really shown that they are totally cool with making changes that way, like without telling anybody in advance or afterwards and just pretending that it's going to like sweep under the rug somewhere. So they did that recently with ANA

increasing the cost for first class awards on most routes to and from the U.S. with ANA. And so, of course, that was disappointing. So yeah, I'm just not happy that they changed these first class awards without any notice in advance and without telling people afterwards. And also there's just been no Delta award availability. It used to be that, yeah, there wasn't like every flight available, but you would stumble on enough Delta award availability to and from Europe here and there, you'd see a bunch of seeds. And I just haven't seen much of that. Have you? I've seen almost nothing. No, no. There was one weekend recently where a whole bunch of it opened up, but then it closed down really quickly. Yeah. And that's a great example where a program can be marked down, in our opinion, through no fault of their own.

They have no control over what the award space Delta opens up, but it's just true that one of the best uses of Virgin Atlantic points is to fly Delta One business class from between the US and Europe for 50,000 points. And if Delta doesn't release the space, then that sweet spot is useless. So yeah, so that's Virgin Atlantic down. I agree. Alaska, I'd say Alaska mileage plan is also down. For sure. They, they introduced their

one world award chart idea. That's more of an idea, right? Than a, than a chart. Right. That's a great way to describe awards for any given flight. Awards start at this price, and it could be anything. Which it says that, and we've already shown that sometimes the awards start even lower than what it says they start at. And of course, they often start higher than where it starts. So yeah, it's totally meaningless. It's just a chart that's written to give you something to look at, I guess. Yeah, yeah. And so I don't know that we could really say that the change to the Japan Airlines award pricing was a no-notice change. Because they did release this award chart idea before that happened.

But it was still disappointing. So Alaska down. happened but um but it was still disappointing so Alaska uh down um they they still have the awesome thing of of uh free stopovers on one-way Awards which is uh still keeps them in the running but yeah yeah trending down you know the funny thing is we didn't I didn't put life miles in here at all because I can't really say that they're up or down but my goodness I have redeemed lots of life miles this year and And so it's kind of funny that I don't have feelings about them being up because they still have high change fees. And so like you said, that's the big downside. If something better comes along, I can't get it.

But the upside, of course, is that they have good pricing on Star Alliance flights with no change fees. So and sometimes weird, unadvertised pricing on certain routes so that hasn't changed at all so they still kind of value them the same as before yeah i'll give them a big up trend if they either make changes free or cheap or update their website to make it easier to find more complicated routings. Right now it's, it's really difficult. And you even have to know tricks. Like you can't just, you know, look for star Alliance. Sometimes you have to look for the particular carrier and things like that, that make it, make it difficult. Although if you enjoy a treasure hunt, I guess it's a bit like that when you play with their

website. I guess that's it. That's it. Or at least part of it anyway. So yeah. So there we go. All right. So those are airline programs. What about hotel programs? Hotel. So the first one up that we had on the list is IHG. And IHG is up for me because, well, a number of factors. Number one, they improved their elite program. So now I actually am not opposed to staying at an IHG. Let's put it that way. It's not necessarily that I'm excited always, but I'm certainly more open to it because I know I'll get free breakfast since I signed up for that little IHG diamond thing last fall when it briefly became available to get IHG diamond status easily. And then I bought ambassador status and that extended my diamond status. So I'm getting free breakfast and I recently stayed at a Kempton and breakfast was pretty good.

So I was pretty happy with that. And I got a great sweet upgrade. So that was nice. And more importantly than those two things, IHG continues to sell their points for half a cent each. And I am more and more often finding good opportunities to get one cent or more out of IHG points for properties I want to stay at. And it's not that I don't want to stay at a Holiday Inn Express, but I don't get excited

usually about a Holiday Inn Express redemption. Whereas I do get excited when it's a cool looking Kempton or a nice looking Intercontinental maybe. And there've been plenty of opportunities to buy points cheaply and use them for more value for those types of things. So that's great. You still get the fourth night free. I mean, if you have the Premier card, so that's nice. I get 10% back when I use my points because I have the old $49 card that you can't get anymore. So there's enough to like there. I'm enjoying it.

I'm liking IHG. There is. It's a legit program these days. It has a legit elite program these days. Tim did a great post where he compared a whole bunch of stays and and you know while it wasn't all uh great it it showed that they were very solid and and had some real benefits to the Elite program um and as you said the frequent ability to buy points for half a cent each make the program interesting almost no matter what,

because as I found, I found an average of 0.67 cents redemption value when I've done recent research on IHE hotels. And that means you're getting a great discount just by stumbling upon almost any hotel and using points purchased at half a cent each. And then, of course, as you said, if you have a fourth night free, if you have the ability to get fourth night free, then that's an additional 25% discount or more. Because the way they do the fourth night free is if the, uh, it's whatever the prices of the fourth night is discounted. And because their prices are not consistent from night to night, you could actually set it up. So the fourth night is a lot more expensive than the other nights, uh, potentially. And, uh, then that when that fourth night is free, that's a huge discount. It sure can be. That's pretty cool. You know, there's one other thing

I should mention with this. The other reason that IHG points are sort of our, or the IHG program is on an uptrend for me is because there isn't really a reasonable way to collect Marriott points anymore, right? Cause you're not going to collect those from spend and you shouldn't be transferring them probably from chase or Amex because they're just not worth enough to make it a good transfer. So there's really no way I'm going to collect more Marriott points. And I'm not super excited about buying Marriott points at almost a penny a piece when they go on sale because it's, you know, maybe I'll do better, but it's not a slam dunk necessarily. And, you know, and so there's not really a great way to collect those points. There's not really there is I guess there's some good options for Hilton and Hyatt is just going to be transferred.

So I feel like it's in the mix now because I can use cash back to buy points at what feels like a reasonable acquisition cost. When I look at, OK, how many points per dollar can I earn cash back and then use that cash to buy points? It seems like I can reasonably acquire those points. And the same could be said for Hilton, but I can't as consistently get better value than the cost of buying the points out of Hilton points as I can with IHG. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Next up we have Hyatt. So Hyatt overall trend is still up. And I'm saying that in that way because their recent category... Perfect inflection. Perfect inflection. Well done. Their annual category reassignment of hotels had a lot of negative things going for it,

which we've discussed in depth previously. But the fact of the matter is they still have their reward charts uh hotel prices are still going up and up and up and because of that combination it continues to be more more so than ever before possible to get just incredible value from your hyatt points um so there is going to be a limit to how much you you are asked to pay for an award night. And that'll usually give you, these days, well over two cents per point value. So a lot to still like there. Yep.

Hotel price inflation is certainly making Hyatt look better and better, even though it was already good. Hotel price inflation makes them look even better with the current award chart. Exactly. Yep. All right. Marriott. Marriott, you have down is slightly up. And that's interesting because I just kind of slammed the fact that you don't really have a great way to acquire Marriott points. Now, of course, that said, if you're staying for work and your employer is paying for your stays and you're earning a lot of points based on those stays, well, then you do have a reasonable way to acquire the points. And if that's happening, why do you think the Marriott program is on an upswing? Yeah. Well, it has to do with, remember, these are our subjective opinions of where the programs are going. And we've known for quite a while that in March, well, we knew that this year,

Marriott was going to take off the caps on how high award prices could go on their individual hotels. They used to have caps on them. And so our opinion of the future of Marriott was way down in the gutter, at least as far as like, you know, we wouldn't want to invest in their points because who knew what would happen once that cap came off uh well the caps are off and uh both uh stephen and i did some independent research on how it looks afterwards and and uh my research showed on average things are about the same as they were before um that's average and what stephen found, yeah, while some hotels now are kind of priced ridiculous, there was actually more good news of prices dropping than bad news of prices increasing. So overall, the reason I'm saying it's trending up is more relief that it's not so bad. Is that not just a, it's not trending down as much as we thought?

I don't know. Is that the same thing as trending up? I'm not sure, but no, I mean, truthfully, I have to agree. So far, I haven't seen the doom and gloom that we predicted, but I think the reason why maybe I would be tempted to disagree with you on this is that now it's very easy for that doom and gloom to happen. And we're going to inevitably be a couple of steps behind as it does in determining, oh, wow, yeah, the doom and gloom happened because there's no way to know it's not going to be an email saying these hotels are changing category. It's just going to be changed overnight when nobody's looking. So so that makes it a little harder. I don't

like the unpredictability of it. My wife was talking about the, uh, the St. Regis Bora Bora the other day where we enjoyed a fantastic stay, uh, several years ago. And she was like, when are we going to go back? And I was like, never, never. What do you mean? I was like, not now, now awards are going to be like 150,000 points per night, at least before we could have used some of our 85 K certs. But now there's no way I'm going to collect enough points or use enough points to, uh, to spend 150,000 points. Have you looked though? I, I, I think there are nights that are reasonably priced. I only searched a couple of dates on that. So, uh, but yeah, so, yeah so so i i'm lukewarm

on it although like you said certainly points have not gone to to zero there's still pretty easy to get one cent per point or more out of marriott points so so not bad it is yeah yep okay um hilton uh you know i i'd say slightly up um but that, but that's going way back to when they made their free night certificates available any day of the week. We didn't really define when we say changing fortunes based on what time period, so I'm reaching back a bit. Yeah, that's a bit of a reach. So their free night certificates used to be available only.

You could only redeem them on weekends, but now they can redeem any day of the week. I know that changed during the beginning of the pandemic, but initially that was just a temporary thing. And at some point more recently than that, they made that change permanent. So that's good i'm personally excited about a hilton property that i found to use a soon expiring free night certificate just this morning so uh so we haven't booked it yet but will today and and hopefully there'll be something interesting about that in a couple of weeks so i'm i'm excited today about hilton but not uh not every day yeah yeah all right all right what do you think about wind up up down yeah even so so wind

them i i'd say up um so they have the same advantage of hyatt of sort of having award charts and i'm saying sort of because what they have is is um each hotel there's no chart actually but each hotel is like either 30 000 points 15 000 points or 75 100 points per night so it's kind of a it's a fixed point price so again as cash prices go up uh the value of the points goes up too um and uh and of course as we've talked about many times we love them further vacasa vacation rentals and again because prices are going up, that's going up too. And the match to, if you have Wyndham diamond status matching to Caesars diamond, and then launching a million free cruises as Nick has talked and written about, that's not necessarily

new, but our understanding of what and how much is possible is new. So Wyndham's up for me. Yeah, Wyndham's definitely up for me for all of those reasons, for the ability to transfer to Caesars and use them at one cent per point with Caesars in a variety of ways. That certainly, even though that's, again, something that's been around for a while, it's something that's become more interesting to me anyway in more recent times. So yeah, I think Wyndham has continued to be valuable in the hotel price inflation, or vacation rental inflation has certainly helped that along. And that 10% discount on booking awards when you have one of the cards, one of the earner cards only makes them even better. I mean, a two bedroom place for 27,500 points is

still I mean, we often talk about the one bedroom, the Casa rentals at 15,000 or 13,500 if you have the business car or you have one of the credit cards anyway. We often talk about that being a great deal, but even two bedrooms, two bedrooms at 27,000 points a night. I mean, that's still potentially a fantastic deal in a lot of. Oh, shoot. I booked a three bedroom in Hawaii.

That's fantastic value. You know, it's right. Yeah, it's it's a fantastic deal. a lot of oh shoot i i booked a three bedroom in hawaii that's fantastic value right you know it's right yeah right it's it's uh fantastic deal yep okay go ahead next oh no i was just going to move on to uh choice uh let's cover these real quickly i'd say choices is kind of slightly up but again same exact reason with inflation because they have kind of fixed prices for their hotels. You have to go into the hotel and view the details of how many points per night it is on weekdays and weekends and stuff. But it's kind of fixed. So that's up. Radisson Americas, I'm saying, is up only because you can get the points so cheaply if you start with a city.

If you have a city premier card, you can transfer one points so cheaply if you start with a city if you have a city premier card you can transfer one to two to choice and then one to two from choice to radisson so basically one choice at one city point becomes four radisson points so there's nothing really about the program that's up but the ability to book awards with them slightly more interesting if you didn't already have Radisson. You know, I almost got excited about Radisson last night because I'm going to Las Vegas this weekend. And I have a hotel booked for, of course, the Hyatt built promotion starts on Monday. And so I have an MGM property booked on Monday. But I didn't actually have a hotel booked for Saturday and Sunday yet.

And Saturday nights in Las Vegas are expensive everywhere. And I was just looking on Expedia or one of the travel portals just to see what other things are available. And I realized Treasure Island is now a Radisson. I don't know when that happened, but I was like, oh, well, that's neat. Maybe I could use some of these Radisson points finally. And I haven't been to Treasure Island in years and years, but I figured, oh, check it out. But of course, I couldn't been to Treasure Island in years and years, but I figured, oh, check it out. But of course, I couldn't find a single night, not only the Saturday night that I needed, but any nights where you could use Radisson points. So I'm sure they must exist. I just didn't find them on the trip. I think that's a good sum up of Radisson's program,

that it's a program that you can almost get excited about. Right, right, right. But then you're like, oh, no, never never mind i've been sitting on hundreds of thousands of radisson points for like well that's the thing i was like oh sweet i'm gonna finally burn some of these radisson points great you know get rid of some and no no it didn't happen so yeah you won't see me at treasure island this weekend so anyway uh that i think brings us to toward the end of the main event right i think we're all set there with the trends so that brings us to this week's question of the main event, right? I think we're all set there with the trends. So that brings us to this week's question of the week. And this week's question of the week, I mentioned last week, I was holding on to one, and I'm glad that I did because we didn't know what we were going to talk about when I held this,

but I think it really plays well into today's topic. So let's see, Jacob asked a question. And so to kind of summarize and paraphrase and pull the part out that matters here, says my question is about speculative bookings. I couldn't find much on the blog about how you guys handle this. Please point me in the right direction if I've missed it. Specifically, as someone who's active on the blogs and Reddit and Facebook, I will often see amazing award opportunities for specific dates. I'm tempted to grab a couple of seats for me in player two. With certain carriers, I can, of course, do that with no penalty, but many will charge me if I ultimately need to cancel.

Aeroplan's a great example, one of my favorite award programs. And you could, of course, book a refundable award for more miles. That's something we don't talk often about, but probably should. But it pains me not to get the best redemption. But the challenges with my day job, my partner's day job, I can't always align calendars before the awards get scooped up. I'm curious about how you handle this. You just leave yourself a bucket of money or points for cancellations as a part of the cost of doing business. I can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right? Do you wait to book awards until you know it's truly likely you'll be able to go? Do you try to only book with programs like United or American that offer free cancellation and that sort of thing. How do you handle it with your significant others? So with kids, do they get mad when you text and say, hi, honey, do you think you can clear your calendar for a trip to Japan in six weeks? So, I mean, how do you handle all of that stuff, Greg? I know we talked about it some, but I feel like this is a good question for this week. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm absolutely willing to pay a bit more to ensure refundability or very cheap cancellations.

So, you know, and it has to do with like how how likely do I think it is that I'll cancel the thing? So if I'm booking something where where, you 99% we're going to do this as long as there's not a new pandemic or something, then sure, I'm a great example I brought up earlier in the show was Etihad First Class was wide open between London and Abu Dhabi. I wanted to book for my wife and I. I'd say there's a 20% chance we'll actually fly it. So rather than booking with Air Canada Aeroplan, I booked with American Airlines. So I'll have free cancellation if it comes to that. That makes sense.

So now here's where I'm going to point out a little bit of the hypocrisy though and see what you think, because I'm going to put you in the spot here and say, so earlier you said you booked this flight using American Airlines miles for British Airways because the surcharges were only $350 a person departing Europe. And if you find something better, great, you'll change it. But if you don't find something better,

you're going to pay $350 in surcharges, but you wouldn't pay $200 in cancellation fees. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, I don't know. But I do the same thing. I mean, it came to my mind while you were talking. So I hadn't thought of that in advance. It just came to my mind while you were answering about your your idea. I think I was like, well, wait a second. But both of us are going to book stuff where we might end up paying more than the change fee.

Yeah. I mean, in that example, though. So I booked a flight that that. You know, I know we need to fly that day. I do love that it's freely cancelable. So if I see something better, I can take it. But had there been a flight bookable with LifeMiles, let's's say that would have a $200, um, uh, fee to cancel. Um, and you know, and it was better or equal to, to what I booked with American. Um, would I have booked that? I think I would, because I know we're flying that day. So there, you know, that's a little different. I I'd say that makes sense. No, I think that totally makes sense. Because I just mentioned a few minutes ago that I'm going to book British Airways for a day later than we really want to fly. But in that case, it's like, that's not the day I really want to fly.

So I wouldn't want to book something with a $200 change fee on the day when I don't actually want to fly. That's like a backup plan. So yeah, I think that's actually a great way of, of explaining why you might do one over the other. Uh, for me, you know, I book a lot with life miles, so I'm facing that high cancellation fee if I have to cancel one. And to some extent, I think it is true that to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs and I am certainly rolling the dice a little bit. And in all of my dice rolls so far, I haven't yet

paid the $200 cancellation fee on a life miles award that I've booked or wanted to for that matter. So if I do end up having to pay it at some point, if you kind of like divided that amongst all of the Life Miles awards that I've booked and not had to mess with that, then it maybe doesn't seem to sting quite as badly. Don't get me wrong, though. I prefer programs that are more easily cancelable. And like Greg said, I think what I prefer to do most is books with something like those American Airlines miles that's freely cancelable right from the get-go, and then just continue to hunt and continue to hunt and continue to hunt. And when I find that perfect award or we get close in, then I'll jump on it with one of those other currencies that perhaps would have a high change

fee. But I'm much more confident at that currencies that perhaps would have a high change fee. But I'm much more confident at that point that I'm actually going to fly it, right? Like, I mean, I booked this trip to Europe last year. And so I didn't know then whether I was going to fly it or not. So I booked flights with Virgin Atlantic miles to fly on Delta and things that were cancelable. Now, as it's getting closer and OK, I have this cruise book now, too, and everything else. Now I'm more confident.

So now I'm much more likely to lock in one of those things that I can't cancel. And the nice thing is that as you get closer, more availability often opens up, right? I mean, when you get really close to departure, so that's the value. Right. So that, that combination works out, works out really well. It's like, you can be willing to pay more, uh, when it's more uncertain if, but to get free changes and then you could lock in something even better as it gets closer if you want. So that's something that I think with Aeroplan, as you mentioned, often it'll give you the ability to pay more miles to get a cancelable ticket. And I think I would do that if the uncertainty in the flight booking was high and it was and I didn't have like a stash of like United miles, for example, to use instead to book it. Yeah, you know, that's a tough one. It's because I that makes sense. It

seems reasonable what you just said. On the flip side, if you fly it, then you've essentially paid the cancellation fee without canceling. You're right. So you're kind of paying it up front. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know how I feel about that. I'm not sure how I can't I can't seem to reconcile those two things. Well, right. Right. So but but put it this way. So so let's say that you're you think the chance of you actually flying is less than 50 percent. OK, then then you're going to win more often. You're winning. right? By by booking the refundable thing, because you are going to refund it. And you lose if you actually

fly it. There's Greg with some casino theory here. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that's true. That's true. So I might consider it I guess in the situation, like you said, where I'm less than 50% sure I'm booking really far in advance. What about in terms of like these last minute things you said, you know, you text your family and say, hey, can you clear the schedule in six weeks so we can go to Japan? Do you run into those kind of things? Do you do that at all? How do you handle that when you find a great award. Yeah. I mean, gosh, I have to go back to 2000, I think it was 13 when that last happened where there was a mistake business class fair to China on American Airlines for like $400 round trip for business class. And I ran to my wife is like, you know, told her what was happening. When are you available?

She basically wasn't. So I just booked it for myself. But now how about you? Do you have that come up much? No, not these days because I, you know, now we got young kids and a son in school and whatnot. So no, not not as much. I mean, and luckily for me, my wife also has a very flexible job. So if that did come up, we probably could make that happen in a way that most people probably

can't. So, uh, so we could do it. It wouldn't be as big of a deal, I guess, for me to do that. That's just for me, my, my, my wife loves the idea of it, but her job is such that she's not very flexible. Um, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So there you go. You just might not be able to do that. Whether or not you can is going to vary from person to person. So best of luck. Or again, book with a program that has free changes, and then you could ask your spouse afterwards.

And I have done that. In fact, we got an upcoming trip here in just a couple of days, and I just remembered actually yesterday to cancel the flights for my in-laws because there was enough availability that I had booked for them too and offered for them to come and they didn't want to. So I just remembered finally to cancel. I booked those tickets like probably eight or 10 months ago because it was available. And I was like, okay, well, I don't even need to ask them if they can or they want to. I have their birthdays. I'm just going to go ahead and book

that now because it's available and then we can talk about it later. Right. Right. I think you could always do that with any program and cancel within 24 hours. That's true. Also get the money back and everything. So also true. And a great point. Yeah. The 24 hour book first, ask questions later. That's when you see one of those great, great deals. Right. Hopefully that helps you a little bit, Jacob. And hopefully that helps everybody else. Now, if you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social media, join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. Wherever you're watching this or listening to it,

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