Frequent Miler on the Air - Luxury Perks for Free (After Rebate) | Ep166 | 9-3-22

Episode Date: September 3, 2022

Want ultra-luxury perks like lounge access and elite status at a bargain-basement price? This week, Greg and Nick discuss how to get the most bang for your buck by maximizing annual credits on your ultra-premium credit cards. 1:21 GIant Mailbag 5:47 3 Cards, 3 Continents, 3 Updates https://frequentmiler.com/frequent-milers-2022-team-challenge-3-cards-3-continents/ 15:22 Awards we booked this week 19:45 What crazy thing....did Amex do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/12-transfer-bonuses-from-amex-membership-rewards/ 30:00 Mattress Running the Numbers: Craftsy through SimplyMiles https://frequentmiler.com/stack-craftsy-offers-for-small-profit-4050-american-airlines-miles-loyalty-points/ 37:34 Luxury Perks for Free (After Rebate) 38:46 Capital One Venture X card 46:50 Amex Platinum Card 1:24:22 Amex Business Platinum 1:38:55 Amex Hilton Aspire card 1:46:44 Question of the Week: Is it worth transferring speculatively (given the transfer bonuses available) if you know which programs you often use? Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

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, luxury perks for free after rebate. Okay, so free after rebate.

So today we're going to talk about these credit cards. There are a number of different ultra premium cards out there that come with some terrific perks that are really nice, but the cards are really expensive. However, you can offset some of that expense by using some of the credits that those cards offer. And so today we'll talk about how to maximize that. Yeah, exactly. In a number of cases, you can literally get more back in credits than you pay for the annual fee. And it's not always obvious how to do that. And we're going to get into some of the tricks that we personally use to get the most out of those credits so that we can justify having these cards that we pay for year after year that cost $400, $500, $695. It sounds insane,

but when you're getting back, in some cases, over $1,000 per year in credits, it suddenly makes it worth it. And then you can enjoy all those perks that the cards come with. So yeah. All right. Let's first get into the giant mailbag. Rip it open. Today's... Sound effect. We've got our sound effect man making the mailbag sound. Back in action. The internationally recognized mailbag sound.

Today's giant mail comes from MFK via a blog comment. So in my post about elite status, shortcuts for Hyatt, how to how to get a high yet elite status. We you know, easier than than spending 60 full nights there is also the topic of our show last week. mfk says I was listening to your podcast last night on a plane and heard you both mention that earning status through points doesn't get you milestone bonuses. That sounded wrong to me, but there was no Wi-Fi. Remember, he's on a plane. So I couldn't check. I noticed this morning

that you say the same in this post. Again, this post is my post on that topic of shortcuts to Hyatt Elite status. And he quotes me, note though, that if you earn through points rather than nights, you will not earn milestone rewards. Now he says, but I'm looking at the Hyatt app graphic and hovering over each milestone shows the number of nights or points needed to achieve the benefit. For example, 30 nights or 50,000 points for a category one to four cert and two club upgrade awards, 50 nights or 80,000 points for two suite upgrade awards. Am I missing something here? No, MFK. Sounds like we were missing something there. We were missing something. And, you know, wow.

It's not unusual for us in the course of a podcast recording to get something wrong like that because we're going mostly off of our memory. It's very, very bad of me to put that in print, so to speak, in the blog post because I really should have double checked that. That's how sure I was of what I had said on the podcast. I put the same thing in the post and MFK is absolutely right. You can absolutely earn milestone rewards with Hyatt through points, which come from spend at Hyatt hotels and Hyatt partners. In our show, we talked about how the Lindblad expeditions, like those cruises to Antarctica and whatever, can earn you elite status through points because $20,000 Hyatt spend in a year will get you the 100,000 points needed

for Hyatt Globalist status, which is their top tier status. And believe me, you are not going on a Lynn Black expedition to South America, especially with a second person in the room, without spending $20,000. So if you're going to do it anyway, booking through Hyatt seems like a great option. You'll get instant global status. And unlike what we said last week, you will earn milestone benefits as well, including those up sweet upgrade awards. So it's time to start booking those cruises. Is that what you're saying here? Yeah. So yeah, yeah. Embarrassing.

Yeah. I mean, we're human, right? Newsflash, Greg the Frequent Miler and me both. We're both human. So we missed that one. I can't believe both of us missed it and continued to miss it. So thank you for writing in and catching that one on us. You know, I think that the thing is, the reason I think we probably assume that is just because it's so rare to earn that many points from spend at a Hyatt hotel. You basically have to be traveling on business with an employer covering it and probably covering your travel to fairly expensive donations or destinations and properties.

Right. I mean, you got to spend a lot of money at Hyatt in order to hit those milestones. Yeah. Well, I mean, actually, if you um about five nights at a miraval well maybe 10 nights true true 10 paid nights you're all set that's right that's all you gotta do that's all you gotta do just like the cruise so do the cruise do 10 paid nights at a miraval get all of your milestone benefits as well are bad on that but thank you very much for setting us straight so that everybody would know that you can earn those three points yes all right so i think that brings us next to three cards three continents three updates so if you're somehow new to the show and you're not familiar with what i'm talking about when i say that we have a coming trip here a challenge between greg and me and

stephen pepper another of our team members here at Frequent Miler. And the three of us are taking three credit card bonuses. Each one of us gets three credit card bonuses and $1,000 in order to plan the most incredible trip we can to at least three continents. So that's coming up here very shortly. And so we're going to share our updates for the week. So what's new this week? Yeah, I don't think we've heard anything from Steven this week. So no update from Steven. And what do you have, Nick? I have a couple. So what's new this week? Yeah, I don't think we've heard anything from Stephen this week. So no update from Stephen.

And what do you have, Nick? I have a couple. So first of all, I did finally get around to selecting seats for flights. And that was interesting to me for a couple of reasons. So number one, I had to select seats on a bunch of aeroplane flights. And I think I mentioned last week that I was kind of dreading having to call in and get all the confirmation numbers because I had known from the first award I booked with Aeroplan before I changed it, I had a free change. It was weeks and weeks ago. We talked about that, that there were different confirmation numbers for some of the airlines on my award.

And I didn't get those different confirmation numbers from the agents. So I tried using the Aeroplan confirmation number on the SAS website, and I was able to select seats for a couple of flights and, but not all of them. And then I tried using that on some of the other airline websites, and it wasn't playing up the itinerary. And so I actually sent a message on Twitter to the airplane team asking, Hey, can you get me the confirmation numbers for the other flights? So I don't have to wait on hold for somebody. And while I was waiting for that, I was like, you know what, I had to just bring up the confirmation number on the Air Canada site and see what happens there. And wouldn't you know it, the Air Canada site, unlike many

award programs, I feel like lists all of the confirmation numbers for the itinerary. So they were right there. So I was able to get them without having to wait on hold and talk to anybody and then go to the individual airline websites and select my seats. So that was nice. There was one that I still couldn't select. And I went back to Twitter and asked. And sure enough, the Twitter team was able to help me select exactly the seat that I asked for. I went to go check the seat map and see what was open.

And so that was really simple. And we'll talk more about that after the trip when we discuss what we did. But anyway, so got seats selected. So that was really simple. And we'll talk more about that after the trip when we discuss what we did. But anyway, so got seats selected. So that was pretty exciting. And then there was another piece that just popped right back out of my mind while I was talking about that. So that's my update for now. What's your update, Greg?

And then I'll come back if I have another one pops up. So as of last week, I still had two things outstanding with my bookings. One was in one city, me and my travel partner were booked in separate hotels and I was waiting for a room to open up at one of those two so that I could put us together in the same hotel. I found a room in actually the hotel that I prefer anyway of those two. And so we're now in the same hotel. So that's all set. I don't have to be checking Marriott every day anymore to see if anything opened up.

So that's great. The other thing that is outstanding and continues to be outstanding is there's one day where we are flying from one city to another city and we're currently booked at two different times on the same airline. And I've been watching for award space to open up, ideally on her flight so that I can join her because times work better for us. And what I found as it's getting closer, you know, to departure and everything, what I found was very interesting. Yesterday, I saw that this airline has word availability for that flight every single day for 10 days in a row, starting like yesterday and then nothing after that. And then this morning when I got up, I checked again and the same pattern. So in other

words, one more day in the future was available. So this tells me that it's very, very likely that I'll be able to move to her flight 10 days before our actual flight, right? Right. It turns out I'm going to be on, we're going to be on the road when this happens. Oh! And, you know, calling ANA and getting these things set is usually at least an hour process, if not longer than an hour to do. Anyway, it'll be possible. It'll just be inconvenient if it turns out like that. But I'm kind of excited because now I feel more confident than before that we can make plans based on the idea that I will be on her flight and it's just going to be a bit of a headache to do it.

One other thing that's worth mentioning is that ANA Around the World Awards allow these free changes like that. As long as you're staying on the same route and same carrier, you could change the time or date of your flight for free up to five days before departure of that flight. So this 10-day window actually works okay for that because I'll actually have about five days to get a hold of ANA and make this change, but boy, it's cutting it close. So let me ask you, do you know, and maybe we do know this and I've just forgotten whether or not we know it, but do you know that you can make changes after the first flight, you know, after you. Yeah. I specifically asked the ANA agents about that when I was on the phone with them and they've been pretty good about understanding what the rules are. So I feel confident that that is the case.

And it makes sense because some of these around the world awards could last for months. And so, you know, not being able to make changes after the first flight would be a real problem for a lot of people who are on much longer around the world. Absolutely. Especially in day and age when flights are getting canceled and things change, you need to have that flexibility these days. Well, that's good. You know, I've been kind of hawking something else similarly in that I have a flight booked and it's not currently scheduled on the equipment that I want it to be on. But I have noticed a similar pattern where a certain number of days in advance, things keep changing and the equipment changes. And so I'm keeping my eye out

because there's a couple of flight options. So I could switch to a different flight on the same day if what I want opens up. So I've been kind of watching that, but it's too far out still. So I know it's not going to show up yet. And yet I still keep checking each day just to see, okay, is the pattern still holding up?

Yes, it is. All right, I think we're going to be good. I think my flight's going to be what I want, but if not, this other flight will work. So there's been a lot of that going on. So I totally know what you mean there. Will you be able to make a change like that for free, though? Not on Aeroplan.

It's a different award. Ah, okay. Not on Aeroplan award. Different award. Good question, because Aeroplan charges $150 change fee nowadays. If you booked a flight before July 5th, you still get one free change. But once your one free change is gone, and mine is, then it'll cost you in order to make another change. So yes.

So I'm guessing you're talking American Airlines award. Seems like a very reasonable guess. Maybe you're looking for that Q Suites availability to open up. I don't know. Seems like a reasonable guess. We'll find out. Find out. So in other news, by the way, one other thing that did pop into my mind as you were talking finally that I wanted to mention is that I booked a tour. And so I haven't booked tours apart from the, I think we did that one

food tour in Dubai, you and I on the Guck trip. But apart from that, I haven't, well, and we did the hot air balloon, but I don't generally book tours. But this time around I did and I wanted one specifically. And I think I would have done this if this was a trip by myself either way. So I booked a tour and I was a little nervous about it because I wrote in the past about my bad experiences with Viator. I was not very happy with them at all after what went down with our whole hot air balloon thing. And you can look up a post I wrote about experience with Viator, but why I wouldn't probably book with them again. But of course, I booked with Viator again. So I booked a tour with Viator, aware that there could

end up being problems, but thinking I'd be able to save it if not. And so I booked this tour at the equivalent of about 11 o'clock at night, local time zone in the area where I was booking it. And I chose the tour operator that I did because they had fantastic reviews on Viator, Google, TripAdvisor, et cetera. And I saw one person in particular, it said that they work in the travel industry and they're really picky about service. And this particular outfit really exceeded her expectations. And it seemed like a legit review. So I thought, okay, this is good. And wouldn't you know it at 11 o'clock local time, their time within 10 minutes, they called

me to confirm the rest of the details, ask if I had any questions, I have everything set up and customized the way that I wanted it. So I was really impressed. You know, that kind of customer service is not something that we often see, at least not here, right? I mean, I would never expect somebody in the US to call me at 11 o'clock at night to confirm the details of the tour I just booked. So I'm excited.

I'm excited about that. I'm getting excited about the trip because it's coming very soon. It is. It is. I can't wait. All right. So that brings us, I think, to awards we booked this week. Sure. Yeah, we'll do it in that order. Sorry. Awards we booked this week. What did you book?

That's fine. Well, I already mentioned it. I booked the final hotel award for my trip. So I'm all done with hotels. And as I said, I'm still waiting to sort of rebook one flight. Okay, so this week, I booked spontaneous, spontaneous choice, a Marriott property, because the New York State Fair is going on this week. And so it's wrapping up this weekend. And so we decided to bring the kids to the fair, if we could find a suite. And of course, finding a suite near the New York State Fair, like on the weekend of the fair is tough because there's the big concerts. I'm not a big country music listener, so I don't know who it is this year, but I'm sure it's somebody big. And so most of the hotels are

very, very expensive for places that are very run of the mill. So we booked a courtyard in Syracuse that was 350 bucks a night. And I was able to book it as an award stay. And of course, because Marriott has gone to this dynamic pricing, but hotels still need to stay within a certain range of their historical prices or their category prices before at this point next year, all bets are off. But at this point, this category, whatever it used to be, Courtyard was 27,000 points a night, even though the standard room was 350 and they had a suite. They had a one bedroom suite available. So I said, OK, well, let me book this. I got a 25K certificate in my account because I have the old $85

card that I never upgraded. Yeah. So I used a 25K cert and 2000 points on top and booked a standard room one day before the cancellation deadline for the hotel. And I said, okay, you know what? I'm going to try to apply my suite upgrade. And if that suite upgrade clears the next calendar day before the cancellation deadline at 1159 PM, then we'll keep it and we'll bring the kids to the fair. If it's going to be a standard room, I don't know if it's worth trying to pack us all into the room. Well, wouldn't you know it in less than 24 hours, I got the pop-up on my phone that my suite upgrade cleared, got the one bedroom suite that would have been well over 400 bucks for my 25 K cert and 2000 points. Now

we wouldn't have spent 400 bucks on it, but it feels like a nice little win when it comes to Marriott, when a suite upgrade clears and we're able to go attend an event we probably wouldn't have otherwise. Cause it's too hard. No, no, that's great. I mean, you know, we complain about features of Marriott's program a lot, but there's plenty of occasions where you can get excellent value. And really, ironically, I feel like, you know, a few weeks ago on the show, we talked about how useless Marriott Sweet Upgrade Awards were. Since then, you've done nothing but talk about your successes with them. You know, the secret is one night stays at pretty run of the mill properties or properties

that are, I say that, but in St. Patrick's, of course, I got an incredible Sweet Upgrade this year, but one night stays seems to be a pattern. Those are the ones where they're at least somewhat likely to clear. Yeah. Yeah. Now that makes a lot of sense too. There's still, cause they, they, they, they, they kind of want to sell those, those suites cause they can get a lot of money, but there's less chance of them booking. So when they're available and you're just one night, they're not really giving up much chance of, of revenue there. And I think I got fortunate in both cases because they were really high demand periods. When I went to the St. Pancras, it was during Wimbledon. And so hotels were really

expensive in London. And of course, this is expensive because of the state fair. And the thing that I think I think is happening in these situations is a guess, but I think it's a decent guess is that most hotels do overbook by a certain percentage, right? They book more rooms than they have. And so I would bet that they probably sell more standard rooms than they actually have. And they keep the suites for sale too. And I think probably in both situations, I benefited from them realizing that they may still sell standard rooms, but they may not sell the suite this close in still. And they can continue to sell the standard rooms for a ridiculous amount. So might as well upgrade somebody to the suite this close in still, and they can continue to sell the standard rooms for

a ridiculous amount. So might as well upgrade somebody to the suite. So I think that's, I just benefited from the fact that they probably sold more standard rooms than they actually have. So somebody was going to get a suite, might as well be somebody that used an upgrade instrument. Might as well be you. Right. Might as well be me. All right. So- Well, I have a question for you, Nick. I have a question for you. What crazy thing did Amex do this week?

I mean, they did 12 crazy things this week. So Amex has been getting pretty extra crazy. They gave us a dozen. That's a dozen, folks. 12. A dozen transfer bonuses all at one time. So there are a whole bunch of different airlines. I say, let's see, there's three different hotel bonuses.

So that means different hotel bonuses. So that means eight airline bonuses, although British Airways and Aer Lingus, can we really count those separate? I guess there's like seven ish different airline and hotel programs and or eight ish. Let's not confuse people. It's eight airlines. There's nine airlines and three nine airlines. And there's 12 and three transfer bonuses. They're not. Nine airlines and three hotels. There's 12 transfer bonuses. They're not the best ever transfer bonuses, but they're good transfer bonuses.

And a transfer bonus that is useful when you're looking to book is the best kind of transfer bonus there is. So if you're thinking about 2023 travel plans, now is probably the time to think harder about it because you've got a lot of different transfer bonuses. You could put together a whole trip with transfer bonuses right now. Right, right, right. So there are some good ones in there. Tell me one of them that nobody should even consider. There's got to be a few of those in there. Just pick one.

There are. Marriott. I mean, I don't think the Marriott's worth considering at 20%. I don't think that's what you're looking for me to say. But 20%, I don't think there's enough value in Marriott to transfer 20% bonus yeah I mean truthfully I was trying to think more of like there are airlines on there probably where they just don't aren't aren't known to have good award charts I mean Qantas for the most part not going to be worthwhile because most their award prices are really high unless you really want to fly on Emirates and you don't have other ways to,

even then you're better off with Skyward. So yeah, I can't think of a good reason with Qantas these days. And Aeromexico, I wrote the post about how they sometimes have access to Delta awards that other partners don't. So I guess maybe there's a reason to do it, but only maybe.

And choice privileges, of course, if you have city thank you points, you're probably not going to bother transferring your Amex membership rewards points at 1 to 1.2. Right, correct. How about, what's your favorite, if you had to pick one? Well, Virgin Atlantic is 30%. And so, you know, being able to get one way to Europe in business class for $50,000 minus 30%, so you're what, being able to get one way to Europe in business class for 50,000 minus

30%. So you're what, like 35,000? I know because it's plus 30%. It's more than that. 37,500. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

There you go. So about 38,000 that you have to transfer over to get one way in business class on sometimes on Delta One suites. That's right. That's pretty sweet. It really is, especially if you have multiple passengers, because as we've talked about before, Delta will often, if they're going to release anything, they'll release like eight seats. And so you could fly the whole family for a really reasonable number of points. So that probably might be different out of them.

So just a reminder to our audience, I made a video showing how to find these Delta One flights to Europe to get Virgin Atlantic flights for 50,000, not to get Delta flights, Delta one flights using Virgin Atlantic miles for 50,000 points one way. And what we're saying is you could transfer 38,000 Amex points with this 30% transfer bonus to get just over the 50,000 you need for that. So that's a smoking hot deal. But it's definitely worth checking out that video to see how to do that, how to find it, because it's not easy. It's not like if you're set on a day, like I'm going to fly to Europe on May 12th,

you're not going to find it. Then it's not the situation for you. Probably you got to have some flexibility. And, you know, if you could book the A&A first class awards, that's another great sweet spot with Virgin Atlantic. And yeah, I mean, it's already amazing as it is. So you add this transfer bonus and it's just ridiculous. In fact, how low the price is.

However, you still have to A, find A&A availability in first class, which isn't always easy. And then B, you have to consult your crystal ball and find out when Japan is going to open to tourists that aren't on a package tour anyway. And I would think that they will be next year. It sounds like they're moving in that direction, but at the same time, what do I know? But I think that's my favorite out of the bunch. You know, one more thing I'm going to mention. I mean, this is a temporary thing, but Virgin Red. So there's Virgin Atlantic's reward program.

And then there's Virgin Red, which is like all the Virgin properties are sharing this one rewards currency. You can link your account so that the points magically are available to both of these things. And they're running right now a promotion where you can do a Virgin cruise, like Mediterranean, for something like 110,000 points. Something like that, yeah. Or like eight nights for two people. Everything's included. I mean, that's an incredible deal. And so with this transfer bonus, you know, it's that much more's an incredible deal. And so with this transfer bonus, it's that much more of an incredible deal. So that's worth looking at too. I do want to caution though that most things in the Virgin Red program, you're not going

to get good value from your points. It's just when they do these kind of special promotions, you might have opportunity to get that kind of deal. Yeah. And I saw that they're going to be doing some status matching in the Virgin Voyages program. So I saw that Your Mileage May Vary did a post on that this week. So it might be worth seeking that out if you have status either A, with other cruise lines or B, with Virgin Atlantic, because then you can do some sort of matching, get some extra benefits. So if you're interested in that specific redemption,

then it's worth checking that out as well so that you can get some extra perks on your booking there. But yeah, I mean, that, that could be really appealing. I mean, I think those cruises are adults only, so that's why I didn't look very hard at it, you know, since we travel with your kids, but if not, like if it weren't for the fact that we got two young kids, then I feel like I would try one of those. And I'm not particularly interested in cruising.

And I say that as somebody booked on a cruise coming up this fall. But the Virgin Cruises, I imagine, are probably really good, right? I mean, I would think. I would imagine so. And I'm also not interested in cruises, but it's something that if the timing and everything had worked out, I definitely would have considered this because I actually haven't personally spent much time in the Mediterranean area at all and I'd love to. And this seems like a fantastic way to do it on the cheap and in luxury. So that's, that's my pattern. Happy to get that combination going. Right, right. Very good. Okay. So let's see,

that brings us, I think too, actually, I was just going to say crazy thing. We just talked about that. So I think that brings us to the main event, right? Oh, you know what? Let's do mattress running the numbers first. You know what? Let me back up two steps. Hold on. Let me, let me stick on the crazy thing for a second, because there was a question that popped into my mind that I just wanted to hit, ask you real quick before we move on. And that is, we've got these 12 transfer bonuses going on at once right now. And we maintain like a database of transfer bonuses. So you can go back and see past transfer bonuses and the current ones. And I feel like the general pattern for most of these airlines

is that we usually see about one, at most, two per year from any individual airline program. So, like, are we done with Amex transfer bonuses for the rest of the year? Is this your shot at transferring with a transfer bonus to any of these programs? Like, are we not going to see it?

You're going to have to wait, like, until goodness knows when next year to see one of these programs? Are we not going to see it as good? You're going to have to wait until goodness knows when next year to see one of these bonuses? That's a really good question. It'd be worth diving into that data and seeing if we can find a pattern. I do wonder whether... What's Amex's motivation for doing this? And that might tell us whether or not it might happen again. And, um, you know,

part of it is like, did they pre buy all these miles and they're trying to get rid of, you know, the, the ones that haven't been sort of selling as well as they had hoped, or, you know, I don't know what the answer is,

but, you know, maybe if we had some, uh, inkling into that, we would, we would be able to guess. But yeah, I like that idea of checking out our expired transfer bonuses, which is on our current transfer bonuses page. And seeing whether we can detect a pattern like that. I think you're right, but I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know for sure. I didn't check. It just popped into my mind during the discussion. I thought, do you really need to move now? Because you might not see any of it. Because I mean, I usually feel like I don't feel much pressure to hop on a transfer bonus because there's always another one coming around, right? So, okay, maybe not this one.

I'll grab the next one. It might be to a different airline, but that's fine. I'll find a way to work that into my plans if i need to but now i feel like uh-oh are we gonna hit like a like just a total drought on transfer bonuses for a while after this i i don't know i i would i'd be willing to bet that we will see another uh transfer bonus to avios so whether it's's British Airways or Cutter or, you know, Aer Lingus, whatever. And that we'll see another one to Life Miles, just because those two things just seem to happen all the time

from various programs. And I don't mean necessarily from Amex specifically, but whether it's from Citi or Capital One or whoever. The others, like, you know like i mean air canada isn't that common i don't think um no virgin atlantic yeah yeah but i think more like twice a year yeah once or maybe twice in a year is what i i think i recall from looking at it before yeah and yeah yeah so i don't know i don't know but interesting nonetheless we may see better bonuses it's worth pointing out because we have seen better bonuses to some of those programs.

Like Avio specifically, we've seen better than 25% before. So it may not be the best. We had 40% from Citi not that long ago. And I think we've seen as high as 50% historically. I think you might be right about that. Yeah. All right. So we got some things to consider there.

But in the meantime, let's consider, like Greg said, mattress running the numbers. And this week's mattress running the numbers is an exciting one because we have potential to earn lots of American Airlines miles and loyalty points for not a lot of money. So what's going on with this? Yeah. So a website called Craftsy has appeared in multiple places where you could earn rewards. And they sell a membership to sort of classes to learn a craft, whether it's cooking or sewing or whatever. They have all kinds of crafts that you could learn how to do. And they have an annual membership for $89.99. Depending on where you live,

there may or may not be sales tax on top of that. And Citi, Citi Bank has Citi's merchant offers. Now, if you have a Citi Bank card, you go to their merchant offers and not everyone gets targeted for these. So if you are targeted for this Craftsy one, they're offering 97% back on the annual membership. How did they come up with that? 97% back?

It's such an odd number. What it comes to is you'll end up out of pocket less than $3 for the first year membership to Craftsy if that merchant offer works as advertised, which I don't have any reason to expect it wouldn't. Then if you start your shopping in a cashback portal, there's a portal right now called Max Rebates that's offering 20% back for Craftsy. So if that works, you're actually going to have a profit in your first year if you have both the Citi offer. And even just 5% back would get you into profit zone and 20% is a little bit more, obviously. So now it's, I wouldn't say it's worth doing, you know, just for those two because you're not making a lot of money and you have to remember to cancel and everything. But where the kicker comes in is Simply Miles.

So Simply Miles, you have to use a MasterCard to enroll with Simply Miles. And there's all kinds of offers in there, a lot like city merchant offers. The Craftsy offer, if you're targeted for it, is to get 45 miles per dollar, 45 miles per dollar at Craftsy, again, for an annual membership. So basically that comes out to 4,050 miles that if you can stack all of these things, you're getting for less than free or better than free. Better than free. Getting paid to take 4,000 American Airlines miles. And what maybe we should have mentioned is Simply Miles is an American Airlines card-linked program. So it's a

program where, like Greg said, you have to link up a MasterCard, but it's open to anybody. You don't need to have an American Airlines MasterCard. Any MasterCard will work. And so you can link that up with Simply Miles, and then you earn that on top of the shopping portal and the city merchant offer. So you want to use, obviously, a city card that's targeted for the merchant offer. So take a look and find that in your city account. Make sure you have activated that or whatever. And then you want to go to simply miles and make sure you activate the simply miles offer and then go through your portal. And yeah, I mean, you're making whatever, 15 bucks or so, $18 plus 4,000 miles for, you know, a few clicks of the mouse. That's, that's not a bad day's work. It it's, it's a good deal. So I don't think we have to really

discuss, is it worth doing this deal? I mean, as long as you remember to cancel it, it's worth it. It's a great deal. I do want to say, people have asked us, what's the secret to getting these city merchant offers? Because as I said, they don't appear for everybody and not all of them are available to everyone. using my city cards more often than before. And specifically my double cash has moved into my wallet as like my preferred everywhere else card where when I'm not getting a good category bonus for some other card, my double cash is getting used all the time. And that's the card. I mean, I have a lot of these offers on different city cards i have but the double cash always seems to have like more than the other ones so it might just be sort of related how much you

use the card and and uh as an aside i've seen the same pattern with chase offers that the cards i use the most definitely get a lot more there it's no question i definitely get a lot more offers on those absolutely true on the chase side on the, I'm going to offer the counterpoint on that because I finally recently got city merchant offers on my AT&T access more card. That's mostly been socked for the last couple of years. So, uh, yeah, total, total shot down. Sorry. And my wife's new premier card that, you know, she hit the spending requirement on day one for the welcome bonus on that card and then still doesn't have any city merchant offers yet. So of course it's only about a month old, so it hasn't been around that long yet. But yeah, so we'll see. I don't know. I mean, there could be something to that theory, generally speaking, though, in terms of getting more offers when you spend more money, because that does seem to be the case with the, uh, the chase offers for sure. A little, a little aside about city merchant offers. One thing that's interesting that I found is that a lot of local merchants are on there, uh, at least for me. And, um, so for example, so I make sure to enroll in all of

the ones I have the city prestige card which gives me 5x for dining so every local restaurant that shows up on there i'm gonna just activate the offer because why not and and i may just by accident you know not even realize or remember that there was an offer on there but if i dine there i'm gonna get you know let's say five percent back whatever the offer is so that's pretty nice now i have to give you a homework assignment. Now you have to find out, unless Steven Pepper already did, you have to find out,

will the city merchant offer stack with American Airlines dining? Can you find some place that's listed both on the- I'd expect so. I don't see why it wouldn't. Well, I don't see why not either. But then you'd be talking what, usually three American Airlines miles per dollar from American Airlines dining plus whatever the city merchant offer is plus five hacks. I mean, hey, time to go to dinner. Order some dessert. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Ann Arbor where I am is not good for those airline dining offers like that. Every time I've checked, like there's no place that I go to.

Yeah. That's on those. I mean, that's, that tends to be the case in most places I think, but it just happens. So happens that recently I went to one, but, uh, but yeah, I feel like I often have a hard time finding places that I want to go to on those. So I don't usually look, it's just, I have a card synced up that i use for dining every now and then i'll get something and say oh wow great look at that i earned some miles i didn't expect so yeah exactly nice surprise okay so i think now we are finally ready for the main events it's about time oh wait i'm out of time gotta go forget it yeah let's do the main event anyway i'll stick around luxury perks for free after rebate we're going to be talking about how some ultra premium cards the cards that are so expensive that you wouldn't normally want to carry them they have some great uh luxury perks like you get airline

airport lounge access and so on uh but, you know, that price tag is hard to swallow. Luckily, there's a number of cards where they have so many credits available that if you know how to how to take advantage of them all, it can at least feel like free. You know, technically, it's probably not really free because you're you're then like buying a bunch of stuff that you wouldn't have bought anyway, maybe, and getting rebates on those. But it feels like free and we're going to talk about how to make them free or free-ish in many cases. Very good. I like that. I like free. That's my favorite price. So I'm looking forward to hearing more about that. So where are we starting in terms of getting our free after rebate? Yeah. So I think the ideal, the poster card for free after rebate, luxury travel type of thing right now is the Venture X card from Capital One. Isn't it funny to say that? Because I mean, a couple of years ago, if you'd been like, what is the poster child for ultra premium cards?

Would you have ever expected you were going to say a capital one card? No, definitely not. Definitely not. But VentureX came out with a splash and at least for now, it costs $3.95 a year. And I said for now, because you'll remember the Sapphire Reserve

came out with great, great acclaim and a huge splash at $4.50 a year. It's since moved up. And so that might happen here. But at least for now, $3.95 per year. And it comes with 10,000 points every year upon renewal. Just 10,000 points straight up. If all you do is redeem those against travel spend at $0.01, that's a hundred bucks. So you're getting a400 back on travel spend for a $395 card.

Hello. Hello. You're coming out sort of ahead. I mean, I say sort of because you got to book through the Capital One Portal and you probably wouldn't prepay $300 for $300 worth of travel. And so, you know, math gets a little wishy-washy, but then of course you can use those 10,000 points for more than a hundred dollars in value. So as far as I'm concerned, this is a net win. It's something that I would pay for multiple times if they would let

me. Yeah. And, and, you know, so in exchange for the work of having to, you know, find deals through the travel portal that you might not have normally done. You will earn 10X booking through the travel portal on hotels or car rentals and 5X for flights. So it's not like it's not rewarding to go through the travel portal. It is rewarding. And then the luxury perks that come with having the card are airport lounge access, which includes a very good version of Priority Pass. Just having the card gives you access to Plaza Premium lounges around the world and Capital One lounges, which there's not very many of them yet. They're building them up and they're by all accounts very, very nice. Yeah, that's a great deal.

I have a friend who's visited the one in Dallas a couple of times and sends me pictures each time. And it looks terrific, the Capital One Lounge there. And it's worth mentioning that Priority Pass is more useful outside of the United States than inside the United States, unless you're in one of the airports that has a restaurant. Of course, you will get restaurant access with the Capital One version of Priority Pass. However, even still, some of the Priority Pass lounges are nice and some of the Priority Pass lounges are around the world. Plaza Premium lounges, on the other hand, are almost universally pretty nice. So that's a good side benefit in addition to it. I mean,

again, you can find some nice priority pass lounges. I think you'll have a hard time finding a Plaza Premium Lounge that isn't nice. Right? I mean, I don't know. Based on my experience. I think that's probably true. I haven't spent much time at Plaza Premium Lounge that I remember. And they're usually pretty nice.

In fact, I remember the one in Auckland, I think, won an award for Best in Asia Pacific. And I visited that one. It was very nice. And then I think that includes, what, the one in Auckland, I think won an award for best in Asia Pacific. And I visited that one. It was very nice. And then I think that includes what the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse is too. So that's one of the, you know, that is included with the Plaza Premium Lounges. Yeah. Yeah. And, but, you know, I feel like Priority Pass is getting more valuable in the U.S. than

it used to be, not just restaurants, but I guess more, it's just been expanding, I guess. That's true. So for example, I'd say as little as maybe a year ago, maybe two years ago in Detroit airport, priority pass was worth zero. There was nothing you could do with it. Today, there's a lounge at the Evans terminal that you can get into. It's the Lufthansa Lounge.

There's now a restaurant in the same terminal. And in both terminals, there are Be Relax spas where you can get a either 10-minute back rub or 30 minutes in their massage chair. My wife and I did the massage chair last time we were in the Delta terminal. And it was actually surprisingly good. Like it's been a while since I've done like one of those chairs, like somewhere out in public or whatever, but it had this, it had this great feature of like where your leg fits into sort of a slot and it's actually massaging your leg in a meaningful way, which is really nice. So yeah. So, you know, none of that, none that I mentioned is sort of like, yeah, oh, necessary, but you know, it's very nice to have.

Yeah, no, it is. And they have been expanding and there've been other things, you know, when you mentioned the Be Relaxed, I think that was a really good one to mention. There are other things like that, that aren't necessarily lounges, but are still maybe worth something. I saw one recently, and I can't remember which airport it's in. Somebody who has this as their home airport is going to tell me what it was. But there was a place with video games I saw in one of the airports. I think I was passing through where you could get like a little video game terminal for an hour where you could sit and play whatever. They had a whole bunch of different video games you could play. So I mean, you know,

if you're into that kind of thing, that could be fun for an hour. Why not? You know, so you're right. Priority Pass is improving and I've seen more and more places in different airports. And as I plan for Three Cards, Three Continents,

I've seen places that are not traditional lounges, but that are still beneficial for one reason or another. Some of the places where you can sleep, they have sleep pods or, you know, the Minute Suites, of course, which have been around for a long time that you can use and have a private room for a bit. So you're right. A good point. Priority pass is certainly good. So it comes with all that.

And then the VentureX also comes with Hertz president circle status. So that's a nice side benefit too, to get potentially better benefits when you're renting more points per dollar for sure. And theoretically, a guaranteed upgrade. I don't know how guaranteed those are these days. I'm not sure what the status is right now of the rental car crunch that we saw during the pandemic and whether or not everybody's back to regular capacity on that, but at least you got a shot at a better upgrade. Right, right. And all of the cards in this roundup, so I'm just going to mention this once, offer global entry or TSA pre-check reimbursement. So once every four or five years, you can pay for global entry and get it reimbursed.

So that's a nice perk as well. The one perk that the VentureX has that is not available on, I think, any of the others in this roundup that we're going to talk about, is that you can add authorized users for free, up to four authorized users, if I remember correctly, and they each get the priority pass, the lounge access. I can't remember if they also get Hertz or not, but those are terrific. Even if it was just priority pass, that would be terrific. But to also get into the Plaza Premium lounges and the Capital One lounge, even if they're traveling without you, that's really terrific. So wow, $395 and you get $400 back in travel credits basically, and you get all these perks. So that's why I call it the sort of

poster card for this topic. It is. It definitely is. I think it's a great one for that. And then of course the general Visa Infinite benefits, which have good travel protections and things of that nature. So you've got quite a bit more going on in the card. That's not all of it necessarily, but certainly a lot of the the better highlights so all right so that's a really really good one what do we have up next uh well we can't talk about this topic without talking about the coupon book of credit cards the the MX Platinum card, $695 a year, but it comes with so many credits of different kinds. Coupons was the word you were looking for. So many coupons.

Yeah, coupons. That it's possible to, even without talking about the very rarely used coupons, like certain, i don't know exercise yeah things and certain like software program you know tech software programs that you may or may not use without talking about any of those um you could get like a thousand over a thousand dollars worth of credits each year by doing sort of more mainstream things with your card right um so first though we get so many questions about 200 airline fee credit that you get each year with this card it's each calendar year um it's only it's intended for fees like you know you get charged a fee for maybe check bags, for example, and it will reimburse you for that up to $200 in a calendar year. That's not all we use our cards for though, is it?

No, no. I think between the two of us, we've got enough various airline statuses and then of course, we're traveling internationally. We're frequently traveling on premium cabin awards. So we don't really need to pay for bags very often, right? So no, that's not what we're doing. And so we have an entire post dedicated to what still works. So that's worth a mention first. And I'll get that updated because people often worry when they see the data points are old,

that it's out of date. And I've gotten a little complacent with it probably because my perspective on it is if something changes, I'll update it. But I should update it probably with some more recent data points just so people know that those things haven't changed. But that is the truth for future reference for you, that if something stops working, the moment it stops working, we will get that post updated. And if it doesn't, if it says that it works,

then I would be pretty confident it probably still does. Pretty safe. Yeah. Because people will be shouting from the rooftops when A or B stops working, that it's no longer working. So speaking of what works and what doesn't, I mean, how do you use your airline fee credits, Greg? Yeah. Well, personally, so I have tons and tons of Delta SkyMiles that are mostly sitting around a lot.

And so one way I use them is I pick Delta as my preferred airline with Amex so that any fees that show up on my platinum card from Delta will get reimbursed. And I book prospective awards. So domestic awards, the only fees on them are $5.60 each way. And those look to Amex like fees and get reimbursed. A little bit more if you fly, like, if you book a one-way from Canada to the U.S.,

you're looking more like about $50 in fees. That'll get reimbursed. You're doing something, you know, a European flight or whatever, it's probably going to be higher. If it gets much over $200, it might not look like a fee to Amex. And so it might not get reimbursed. But generally speaking, if those award fees are less than 200, they get reimbursed. And when you later, if you later cancel those awards and get both the miles and cash back for the fees, then I haven't had the situation of Amex clawing back the credits. people did, you know, was, was like book something like that. And then as soon as they get their credit, turn around and cancel the award and get the, the money back as well as the miles back. I could see why Amex would reverse that in that situation, but I do, you know, I book a lot of awards. Some of them I use and some of them I don't. And so it's not an obvious pattern, I don't think, to anyone.

And, you know, it works very nicely for me. But I know there are easier options for those who don't want to, who don't have a lot of Delta SkyMiles sitting around. Well, I mean, there are similar options. So we should start with, I think, the most similar option. I don't use Delta. I am a Southwest flyer. We've long had the Companion Pass in our household.

So we book lots and lots of Southwest awards. Actually, this is the first year we haven't had the Companion Pass in years. But we still book lots of Southwest awards because they have two free check bags per person. And we're traveling with a bunch with kids. So we tend to book a lot of Southwest awards. And very similarly, those fees that we pay when we book awards look like fees to Amex and they reimburse them. And like Craig, I book lots of speculative trips. Some of them we take and some of them we don't. And unfortunately, Southwest doesn't fly to Canada like Delta does, but viva Mexico.

There are some places with high taxes where you may book some reward tickets and those things can be reimbursed. So that's, I think, probably the easiest way is booking awards at either of those airlines. And like Greg said, it's possible that that could get clawed back when you're you know if you change plans and cancel a prospective trip but i mean i haven't had that happen and you know i booked yeah i i'd question your statement about the easiest way isn't the easiest way to pick united and oh just purchase uh united flight credits or whatever it's called yeah that, that is travel.

So travel. Yeah. Yeah. Because you need Southwest miles in order to pull off what I'm talking about. Or you need Delta miles to pull off what Greg's talking about. But yes, absolutely. Yeah. So if you pick United as your airline and you Google United travel bank, you can load

up your United travel bank. And that's what I've done with some of my cards in the last few years. And that also comes through looking like fees. Now, when I say load up your United travel bank you buy you're buying credit it's like sort of like buying a gift card you're buying like airline credit with united for future use the nice thing ish thing about the travel bank is that it's valid for five years so if when you buy that travel bank credit you get a long time to be able to use it though Keep in mind that you do need to use it within five years. So it will expire.

Otherwise, every now and then United runs a promo. Not lately. So I don't know. Maybe they were just doing it during the pandemic. But it's worth keeping your eye out because every now and then they have run a promo where you get some bonus credit when you load up. Now, usually the bonus credit expires a little bit sooner. But but that's certainly the easiest way. Cause it doesn't require any miles and you just load it to your travel bank and you're done. And you're done. And then as long as you use

that travel bank credit before it expires, it's sort of free money ish. Uh, yeah, money ish. I mean, you gotta, you have to want to fly United, I guess, you know, or, or if you don't want to fly United, then you have to fly United. So that's the downside. That's the downside. And that's why I don't do it. It's not that I dislike flying United. I just don't do it very often.

And so it would be a real risk of expiring in five years. So I don't want to build up those credits. Another approach is that in most cases, and again, I would check our page to see for the airline you're interested in. But in most cases, if you even outright buy a airline ticket and it costs less than $100, it looks like a fee and gets reimbursed. since changes are free with most domestic airlines now, I think, and again, I haven't tested this, but I think that one approach you could do, let's say you're going to buy $300 ticket. I think you could buy a $95 ticket and then change it to a, so you get that $95 reimbursed, then change it to, let's say, a $190 ticket. So now you get another $95 reimbursed and then like better travel protections if you wanted to, like the Sapphire Reserve and get your travel protections and eat your airline incidental fee credits too. for 300. So instead buy a flight you don't want for 95 and then change that using the 95. So you have the $95 credit from flight number one and use that towards flight number two that you don't

really want and pay the difference with that same MX card that you've chosen that airline with. So that's right. And so that'll get you. I think you have to wait at least with some airlines, they don't charge the, they'll, they'll put sort of a hold on your card for the cost, but they don't necessarily charge it right away until the flight's ticketed. So wait until the charge is real before you make the change. Because I think if you, with Delta, for example, again, I haven't tested this, but I think if you went in, booked that $95 flight and immediately went in and changed that to a $190 flight, I think Delta would be smart enough to just charge you once for

the $190. So this whole thing wouldn't work exactly as I was describing. So wait in between. A point to make there is, yeah, have some patience with any of this. Just have some patience, both A, in how you execute it, whether it's what Greg was just talking about there, or if you're speculatively booking awards, don't cancel them five days later. Give it some time to sink in. And then also, don't panic if you try something and you don't see the credit in three days,

because every year we end up getting some reports from people who say, oh my goodness, I've always gotten the credit on day three and now it's day four and it's no longer working. I think this is dead. And inevitably a few days later, they end up getting the credit. It's just a few times a year. Amex ends up being a little slower with some people or sometimes a lot slower, right? Like sometimes we can take weeks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so don't panic. I don't panic until I haven't seen a charge for like, you know, I, well, I haven't had it happen yet because it hasn't gone long enough, but I would probably start to be concerned after a month or two, maybe, but not before that, because sometimes things just end up

going a little bit slower with Amex. So, uh, but anyway, now, you know why we don't panic over airline fee credits and i don't look at it as jumping through a lot of hoops because all the things we've just talked about are pretty easy clicks of the mouse they're not really big hoops to jump through uh they're just little tiny hoops that don't take a lot of right time so all right so so 695 platinum card you just got 200 dollars back still not anywhere near free. No, we got some work to do, Greg. We got some work to do. So what's next? What credit do you want to highlight next?

I guess the next credit we should talk about is the Uber credit. So you got $200 a year on Uber credit. So each month that's $15 except December it's 35. So what do we do to use this, Craig? Yeah. So this one works differently from most Amex credits in that it's not that you have to pay for Uber with your Amex card. Instead, what you do is you load your Amex card number into your Uber wallet, and then these credits just appear each month. One thing that's really nice about that is let's say there's a few people in your household that have these Uber credits because they each have platinum cards or an Amex gold card is another one that has this type of credit. You can load all of those card numbers into one account and just accumulate all those credits in one place, which makes it much more convenient to use them. I was not a fan. And those who've been longtime listeners

know that when the gold card first added these $10 Uber credits, I was like, I don't really value that. I use Uber like five times a year. Maybe if I'm working at it, maybe I'll get to six. Now I use them almost every month because we've got a few platinum cards between my wife and I. My mother-in-law has a platinum card. We got a couple of gold cards. And so now they're all together in one account. And now it's to the point where, OK, that's covering a meal for the family. So that's easy to use.

I'm not going to go out of my way for 10. And you're saying meal because because it works. It works just as well with Uber Eats as with Uber Rides. So that's key. These credits only work in the US. Like if you take Uber anywhere outside of the US, it's not going to apply the credits, unfortunately. So make sure to use them up each year here.

I should put an addendum there because somebody is going to comment on that. While that is generally the rule and what I would count on, I think the word on the street is that they will trigger in other countries if the U.S. dollar is the currency they use there. So there are some places, and I don't know which of these places, but I know, for instance, Panama uses the U.S. dollar, I believe is their official currency. Ecuador does. So there may be a few places where the U.S. dollar is the official, as their official currency. Ecuador does. So there may be a few places where the U.S. dollar is the official currency, and maybe it'll work. And I say that because you look at the comments, I guarantee somebody's going to be like, it works here.

Oh, well, that's great to know. I'm glad that came up. So the Maldives is a place, right, where it takes U.S. currency. Right, right, right. So instead of paying like the $700 transport plane to get to your resort, just hail an Uber. Hail an Uber. Hail an Uber. No, and to be clear, not takes U.S. currency, but is the official like Ecuador doesn't have a currency.

It's the U.S. dollar is the currency. So I think you need one of those places where the U.S. dollar is the local currency. And then it may work, but don't count on it count on using it in the united states because that's yeah the rule is that it's supposed to be in the united states apparently right right um and um i guess i should mention for people who are don't like the fact that uber eats you know charges the delivery fee and various, various fees. Um, often it's, uh, much, much cheaper to just, um, order through Uber Eats for pickup and then just go pick up your meal and, and, uh, you're done. So, uh, I personally use Uber Eats enough that it's,

it's almost like money to me. It's gotten that way for me too, because we'll go out of our way now to use it. Now that we're traveling more, we're more frequently in it because you can't get it where I live. I live in a really rural area, unfortunately. So there's no Uber Eats where I live, but now that we're traveling more,

this is super easy and it's convenient. It's something I would do anyway, because when we get to a hotel late at night, I just want to get something delivered. I don't even want to go pick it up. I just want something delivered. And so I'm going to do that anyway. May as well do it with Uber. So yeah, I'm really happy with Uber credits because you can stack them if you have multiple players. If I only had one card and I was only getting $10 or $15 a month, maybe I'd be less excited about it. Except if I lived in a big city,

it's still so easy to use with pickup. So I think that's a pretty easy one to get quite a bit of value out of the way that it's currently working. Right, right. Another one, another credit is $200 back on a fine hotels and resorts or the hotel collection stay. So you book either one night at a fine, at least one night at a fine hotels and resort or a minimum of two nights at the hotel collection through Amex, and they'll just give you $200 back. Which is nice. And you know, these credits are going to be more useful for some people than others, because a lot of fine hotels and resorts properties are really expensive. And so if you're not in the habit of spending a lot per night, then this benefit might seem like it doesn't appeal as much. But if you're willing to kind of go out of your way a little bit

and look for the less expensive places, there certainly are some inexpensive places to be found in there. In fact, on the three cards trip, I'm doing one night at a fine hotels and resorts property, but that where the credit almost entirely covers the stay and it should be pretty nice. And in the same city, I could have done three nights at a hotel collection property and still had credit left over. So, yeah, yeah. So it can be useful in some places. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, I've used it for a night in a just slightly over $200 property in Arizona. And it was great because not only do you get the $200 back, but you get all the perks that

fine hotels and resorts normally offers, which is things like free breakfast every day, $100 resort credit, 4pm late checkout, oh, room upgrade. And so you get all those things and it was worth sometimes booking through fine hotels and resorts before, even before this credit existed because of all those perks. And now even more so, obviously, because you get $200 back. And it does have to be prepaid bookings. But as we've said before,

remember that prepaid doesn't mean inflexible necessarily. I just rebooked this week, my stay for three cards, three continents, my fine hotels and resorts booking because the rate dropped by 12 bucks. So I figured, hey, I'll free up $12 that I can use for other parts of the trip. So I went ahead and canceled and rebooked my, my stay. So you can do that very simple and easy to do with a few clicks of the mouse. So that's, I think that's a nice

benefit for a lot of people anyway. And even if you don't find a place that's less than $200 or about $200, you may well be happy using it on a place that's normally four hundred bucks and you're paying half price. So there's enough uses of that that I feel like that's a pretty cool benefit. If you're willing to put in a little bit of effort to use it, I think it can be pretty valuable. Sure. Right. So so we're up to what, six $600 in credits that we've talked about for the $695 card. The next is the digital entertainment credit. $20 a month back automatically. If you use your card to pay for, I wish I could say any digital entertainment, but I can't say that. I wish you could too because I haven't used this one because I don't use any of the included

services. So yeah, it's no, unfortunately, it's not any of them. It's what? Let's see. New York Times, Sirius, Audible. But they but they added recently the Disney bundle through Hulu. And I do use that. I just I already have the.

Oh, that's what it is. I think it's the three. You have to do it through Hulu. Right. So we wrote about a trick to be able to do that, to get yourself the Disney bundle through Hulu anyway. Yeah, yeah. So the Disney bundle includes Hulu, Disney Plus, and ESPN Plus, I think.

That's right. So that combination comes to just about $20 a month, and you get the $20 back. That seems like a great way to, you know, sort of maximize this benefit. If you're doing something like Audible, I can't remember how much Audible is, but let's say $12.95 a month, you're not getting the full $20 a month benefit, but you are getting at least that service for free. The Disney Plus bundle, I should say, even though I'm getting the full $20 back each month, I would have paid for Hulu by itself and I would have paid for Disney Plus by itself,

but I wouldn't have paid for ESPN Plus personally. So the actual value I'm getting is less than the $20 a month yeah i mean and you would probably pay for an annual subscription to those things to save a little bit more so they'd be a little cheaper yet so we definitely can't value it at full and i should say that i am a disney plus subscriber but i'm on the annual plan that's why i haven't used this yet when my subscription comes time to renew this winter, then I will switch over to putting it through Hulu via the tricks that we wrote about. So, so I think that can be useful for,

I didn't think Disney plus can be useful for a lot of people and Hulu. Obviously plenty of people like ESPN also, though I personally haven't found, I like sports and I haven't found the ESPN plus app to work particularly well on my phone. So I've been kind of annoyed and not been able to watch things when I wanted to. So I, cause I did get ESPN plus for a little bit separately. Anyway, there's some cool things there.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the New York times subscription, probably the first thing that comes to mind is a digital subscription that you would get with that. But keep in mind that you can also do a print subscription to just the Sunday edition if that's what you want. Or I think maybe even there's like a two day, maybe just the weekend, Saturday, Sunday. So if you just like to do like the New York Times crossword, for instance, or have the big paper on Sunday mornings, you can do that in a lot of areas, not everywhere, but in a lot of areas you can get just Sunday delivery. So something like that is worth looking at if the other ones don't appeal to you or if you've got more than one platinum card in your household, then that's something you can do.

Is there a way? I believe the answer is no. Is there any way to kind of convert the Audible credit into something more useful? I know there used to be a way to do that. I don't think so anymore. I don't think there is. Because it needs to be a subscription, right? Yeah, Yeah. Audible, the subscription gives you two Audible books for free each month and you keep them. So if you cancel your subscription, they're still there. So you could still listen to them and everything. So that's kind of nice. And the other nice thing that I didn't realize when I first signed up,

I thought you had to actually pick those two every month, but actually they accumulate. So I think for about six months. So I think you have to, you still need to, you know, get them before they're it's too late, but that's kind of nice.

Cause I'm not always like ready to figure out what, what book do I want to download? I'm also a very spotty audio, audio, uh, book listener. Like, so, you know, I want them when I'm about to go on a long road trip, for example, but most of the time I'm not listening to them. So, uh, having it is nice when I need it, but it's just not always, um, worth really anything to me when I, when I don't need it, but it's just not always worth really anything to me when I don't need it. Yeah, yeah.

OK, so those credits are something that's there. What other credits we got here to talk about? We got what Saks Fifth have. Yeah, so yeah, Saks $50 credit twice a year, once January to June

and once July to December. And there are some things to buy. Believe it or not, on the Saks website that costs 50 bucks or less. If you go into a store, forget about it. I mean, you're going to hunt

for three hours to try to find the one thing that's hidden behind something somewhere that costs less than $50 in a Saks store. But on their website, there's tons of stuff. I would hesitate a little bit,

but I'd say probably, I think thousands of items that cost less than $50. So the secret is just to go to any one of the departments, wherever it is you're interested in, whatever general category men's clothes or, you know, children's toys or whatever it is, and just sort them by price. And you can find lots and lots of things, kids clothes for sure. There's plenty of those. Lots of people in our Frequent Miler Insiders group have sung the praises of these socks, Bomba socks, I guess. I'm not fashionable enough to have been familiar with them. I did buy a pair though, finally, because there were so many people in Frequent Miler

Insiders that were like, oh my goodness, I use mine for Bomba socks all the time. Bomba socks. It's like, what's up with these socks? So I ordered a pair and they're comfortable. So those are like $12.50 a pair, $12.50. You get a few pairs each six months if you'd like. But I've bought lots of other things. I bought a fedora. I use this Jack Black shave stuff that I buy through Saks sometimes because it's the same price anywhere I get it. And it's less than $50. My wife's gotten some of the skincare things. I don't know if you've gotten anything fun through Saks, Greg. Yeah, I mean, sort of similar to you. I've gotten all kinds of like miscellaneous things.

I got some kind of like a plant for my wife's like birthday or anniversary or something. I got gotten her earrings in the past. And sometimes I just buy stuff for myself, get a shirt or or like you said, socks,, socks. There's all kinds of things on there. Luckily, they make it very easy. You could sort by price, you could limit it to just things between zero and 50 or 50 to 100. And you could actually get a little more money back by shopping through a portal before going to Saks. So I frequently look for those 10% back through Rakuten type of things and sometimes as high as 20% back. And that lets me feel like I'm getting it for free even if I go above 50. It still seems free because I'm getting getting like a $60 thing and getting 50 back from Amex and, you know, $6 to $12 back depending on the portal rate from a portal.

So it's just a very nice little nice to have. I think it is too. I think that if you're not looking, like if you haven't looked or you just looked at SAX once and you're like, oh, wow, shirts are $300, then you need to go back and take another look because I feel like there's something for everybody in there. I mean, there's like kids toys and books, there's clothes, there's like Greg said, socks. I mean, oh my goodness, there's just such a range glasses, glassware for your house. I mean, who doesn't break a glass now and then I need an extra couple of glasses. So

there's like tons of different things that are less than $50. I feel like I've got an infinite number of things I could buy and will buy eventually that are like, it's kind of nice. It's not something I necessarily would have spent 50 bucks on. But, you know, hey, it's a little shopping spree I get to take every now and then. So absolutely. And one tip I want to add on that is make sure you do that a few days before the end of the period, because sacks can be a little slow to ship things sometimes.

And if they don't ship until, you know, if you try to order something on the 31st of the last month, you got your credit right now, July to December. If you order something on December 30th or December 31st, it might not ship until January 1st or 2nd or 3rd. And then you're not going to get the credit for this six months. You're going to get the credit for the next six months. You're going to miss out. So make sure you order like a week to go before the end of your six-month period. Give yourself some time. Yeah, good tip.

All right. So another credit that the Platinum Card offers is the $12.95 plus tax Walmart Plus subscription. And we've made fun of this before because, you know, Platinum Card is supposed to be this like elite, you know, premium thing. And you just don't think those words when you're talking about Walmart. But Walmart, you know, plus subscription will give you the kind of free shipping, sort of similar to Amazon Prime. It also gives you other perks at Walmart. Like if you go to the gas station at a Walmart, you get a discount there.

You like their scan and go. Scan and go in the store. You don't have to scan everything again. When you get to check out, you scan it with your phone and then scan a QR code at checkout and you pay right through the app. It's all a couple of clicks and you're done. I like that a lot. And actually the free same day delivery from a store when you order $35 or more can be really useful too. We can't use it at home,

but we were recently visiting family of mine in Myrtle beach and they live not very far from a Walmart. So it's easy enough to go out. But in the morning when my wife said, Oh, you know, we need some more diapers or some more wipes or this or that. I was like, Oh, well, let's see if we can toss a few things together, place an order and somebody can just bring it to us. And we don't even have to go out to the store. And, you know, very easy. Thanks to the Walmart Plus. So I like that too, especially for those odds and ends like that, that you need and you're going to buy somewhere anyway. So what difference does it really make? Not much to me anyway. So I like that. And then now you also get the ad

version of Paramount Plus with Walmart Plus. So you get a little something else, some more streaming content. I mean, who doesn't want some more streaming content, right? You know, I like it. There are shows on Paramount Plus that I would like to see, and I haven't been watching because it's one of the few streaming services I don't subscribe to. And so I'm kind of excited about that. And I hope that there's a way to,

I would pay a few dollars to get rid of ads if that's an option on there. So I'm looking forward to, yeah, I haven't tried yet either. I'm looking forward to checking that out. So I think that's all good. You know, I wouldn't value it at the $12.95 plus tax times $12 for the annual value for one part. Because as Nick told me before the show, it only costs about $98 a year if you buy an annual subscription. So you definitely shouldn't value it more than that. The Walmart Plus, yeah. The Walmart Plus subscription.

And sometimes in the past, we've seen portal payouts on top of that. So you definitely wouldn't want to value it at more than a hundred bucks. And personally, the Paramount plus thing doesn't do anything for me because I have T-Mobile and they were offering a free year of Paramount plus not that long ago. So I've got a free year of Paramount plus anyway. So that part didn't excite me yet, but eventually it probably will be convenient. My mother-in-law loves to watch the Westerns, and there's that 1883 show or something that's a prequel to Yellowstone that's only on Paramount+. So like Greg said, there's some things there, Paw Patrol for my kids that are convenient. So I'll be happy when that comes around.

So all right, Walmart Plus, not bad. Is there something else? So, well, no. I mean, we're up to over $1,000 in credits. Over $1,000. As we said, you shouldn't value all of these or probably any of these at full face value. But if you really capitalize on all of them, I think it's totally reasonable to feel like the 695 annual fee is worth it because yes,

you're paying for things that you probably wouldn't have otherwise in order to get the full credits, but you're getting, you're also hopefully getting a lot of value out of those things. And so, uh, the combined, uh, you know, benefit of all that is, is, uh, probably worth more than 695 to a lot of people. Well, and let me add one more thing that we didn't discuss, and that's referrals, because the way MX multi referrals work, you've got the ability to refer somebody to almost any other MX card. And generally we see better bonuses for referring new people on the platinum cards than, for instance, on like the everyday or everyday preferred card.

Now, that's not always universally true, but certainly on the platinum cards in my household, I've frequently seen 20 or 25,000 points per referral when you refer somebody to the card. Now that's not always universally true, but certainly on the platinum cards in my household, I've frequently seen 20 or 25,000 points per referral. When you refer somebody to the card, of course, with a cap of 55,000 points per card per year. But the ability to earn a few extra points, if you do refer somebody may certainly be icing on the cake. If you feel like you're already getting enough value out of the card every year, and then you can also do that. It just kind of adds up to make the card worth keeping perhaps. Right, right. And in a second, we're going to talk about the luxury perks that having this card gives you. But there's one credit that I've decided to more lump into luxury perks than

talk about as a rebate. And that's $189 clear credit. So if you want to breeze through airports, you can get clear for free. And clear is where instead of having to show your driver's license to get past the first check before security, you instead, it looks at your eyes, for example, and knows who you are, and then you go in. Depending on the airport, I've found in some places it saves amazing amount of time. as a luxury perk um that you're getting clear for free and uh just like airport lounge access is for free by just by having this card um so airport lounge access it's one of the things if you have the platinum card you get into amex's centurion lounges you get into uh delta lounges when you're flying Delta. You do have the option to get priority pass from the Platinum card. It's not as good as the one from VentureX or really any other issuer besides Amex because it doesn't include getting dining credit.

So if a restaurant will reimburse you with the priority pass card, they won't do that with the version you get from Amex, but still, it'll get you into the lounges. You get emergency medical and transportation coverage. So just having the card, you don't have to pay for your travel with the card, but if you're in trouble and need emergency evac, it's good to call up Amex and get that taken care of. You get some elite statuses. You get gold status with both Hilton and Marriott. And a few car rental companies you get elite status, but national is the one I think is the more valuable of the two. National car executive status gets you when you rent a midsize car.

You can, you know, everybody who rents through national, if they belong to national, can pick from the Emerald aisle. But if you have executive status, you could pick from the executive aisle and that gives you access to better cars. And a greater variety often of cars anyway. Obviously, you got a few more different cars. And that's one of my favorite elite statuses because it's certainly one of my favorite. And I should say probably one of the best for the company to which I'm loyal in the sense that I never used to think about which car rental company I used. I would just pick whatever was the cheapest because it didn't really matter. It was a car, car is a car. I'm going from point A to point B. It doesn't matter. But I became a much more loyal

national renter because of this particular perk, because they often A, have nicer cars and B, I get access to such a range that I'll be able to get what it is that I want most of the time. Now that I'm traveling with a family, that's frequently a minivan. And between the Emerald Isle and the Executive Isle, I can usually count on there being a minivan in one of those sections. So I'll often just pay for the midsize car and get the minivan that would have been a lot more to reserve on its own. So I really like that elite status, though, of course, I think you get the same sort of access with Hertz. I don't have as much experience with Hertz and their executive choice sort of a thing

to be able to compare it very well. I think that's true. And same with you. I don't have as much experience as taking advantage of the national executive Emerald Isle. As you said, sometimes it can just straight up save you money. So you could get premium cars sometimes, sometimes some really nice cars and sometimes you're getting that minivan or big SUV for the same price you would have paid. One time I was traveling with a whole nother family. We had booked two cars, but a big minivan was available. The other, you know, if we have to, we'll get the two cars, but if there's a minivan on one of

those aisles, then we can cancel one of the two reservations. So I love that elite status. So that's, I think even though it's kind of small in the overall scheme of things, it's one of my favorite perks. Now I should mention, I think you get that also with, uh, at least the Sapphire reserve, maybe also, I'm not sure whether or not you get it with the Capital One Venture Card. They don't market it as being a benefit, but I feel like it's a Visa Infinite benefit. I could be wrong. I should have double checked that before the show. It's possible.

It is worth looking around. If you don't have a Platinum Card, there are definitely other ways of getting national executive status than with the Platinum Card. And it is worth the trouble, which is not much trouble. Usually you just have to register by putting in your card number and you're done. So go for that. All right. So that was the personal platinum card, but there's also a business platinum card that also costs $695. Is that worth getting as well? Well, you know, so it's got mostly the perks overlap. So if you're interested

in the perks, then not necessarily the perks that get added. I guess we should talk about those in a second. Cause there are a couple of small perks that get added, but so in terms of, is it worth getting also? Well, I don't know. You got the $200 airline fee credits. We already talked about that. I find those pretty easy to use. So if you do too, then that probably translates over beneficially. Now, the additional perk rather than an Uber Eats credit or Uber credit like the Platinum, personal Platinum has, Business Platinum doesn't have an Uber credit, doesn't have a Saks credit. Instead, there is a twice annual $200 credit to Dell. So you get $200 from January to June and $200 from July to December. And so that's $400 a year you can use at Dell.com. Dell, of course, sells computers, but they also sell some other stuff. What other

stuff has varied over time? They used to sell a lot of TVs. They don't seem to sell those anymore. Sometimes they sell like Roombas and headphones and other stuff that is occasionally way overpriced and occasionally decent price. You always want to look for a shopping portal promo because those rates really fluctuate on Dell. Just a couple of days ago, it was at 2%. And then a couple of days before this publishes, it was a 9.45%. The next day, 9%. It's always kind of going up and down. So you want to look for a good payout for Dell before you do it, if you want to buy stuff from Dell. But what if I don't want to buy anything from Dell? Yeah. So there's one other like really good option, which is they sell Xboxbox gift cards um you might say wait i not in the market for xbox um

that's fine because xbox gift cards uh actually are like microsoft store gift cards you can load them to your microsoft account and uh buy anything from microsoft store with that credit and that includes you know microsoft laptops and peripherals and not only Microsoft laptops, they have HP laptops, they have, you know, Lenovo laptops in the Microsoft store. It's not only Microsoft branded. So if you're thinking Microsoft surface and surface only, that's one option, but there are also other options in the Microsoft store. And, and, uh, as a, as a extra bonus, there's almost always a 10% off code on those gift cards. So you could get a $100 gift card for $90. And so you can actually get more than $200 twice a year in Xbox credits, Microsoft Store credits, with your $200 of Dell credits. And the reason that's sort of exciting is not really because you're switching from buying from Microsoft compared to buying from Dell, but because you're not under the six-month pressure anymore. You now can, you know, just build up these credits over time and

buy, for example, a laptop when you're ready to, um, do need a caution. You can only use up to a thousand dollars of Microsoft credits at a time. So, um, there is that limit. The other caution, and this is kind of a bigger one, is Dell frequently just cancels orders without explanation. Or notification. Or notification, yeah, when you buy these. So you think you've used your $200 credit because you went in and bought these Xbox gift cards. Now you're waiting for an email to say they're ready and maybe you forget about it. And eventually you remember and you log in a Dell, what happened to that order? And you see it says canceled. That's extremely frustrating. I've had some luck in the past of calling Dell and getting those cleared up and getting orders through. But then after a flurry of buying these gift cards

with multiple business platinum cards, I had success for a while, but then I haven't gotten any orders through since then. So it's hit or miss whether or not you'll be successful, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I got a few through the last round of Amex credits. And then since July 1st, I haven't been able to get another order in on either my wife's or mine. So they just keep getting canceled. So kind of annoying. That's a problem. But if you're able to buy them, then it could be great. Excuse me, because the Microsoft store sells, like we said, computers.

We mentioned laptops. They sell video games and video game systems, obviously Xbox and stuff like that, too. So you got a range of stuff, monitors, peripherals, et cetera, et cetera, that could be useful. The other thing is that you may just be able to resell the Xbox gift cards because those don't expire like your Dell credits do. But a lot of places where you could resell gift cards, you can resell Xbox gift cards. So you can get at least 80% value anyway out of that. So I would say that if you're able to get those orders through anyway, you want to value that credit at least 80% of the values, then you can get that potentially in cash. So $320 a year there. Another thing worth noting is that portals do work

when buying Xbox gift cards. So shop through a portal to Dell and get your extra cash back or points from the portal. In addition to getting a discount off those Xbox gift cards and getting it all rebated is very nice. And we've now and then seen an Amex offer for 10% back at Dell up to $1,500. We were seeing those for a while, every six months.

Haven't seen one yet since July 1st of this year, but it's worth keeping your eye out for those or any other Amex offers through Dell because, or for Dell rather, because those can stack. Now, the thing to keep in mind is if, let's say you get an offer, an Amex offer comes up for 10% back. And so you're like, okay, I'm going to go to Dell and spend $200 and I'll get my fee credits and 10% back. You'll end up

with a problem if you turn a profit on the Amex side. So what you need to do is spend more than like 220 something dollars. I don't have the math memorized, but more than enough as to where when you get your $200 in credits and your 10% back, it's still going to be a little bit more than that, that you own MX. So you want to spend a little bit more than what's going to get rebated ultimately in order to avoid getting those credits clawed back on the MX side. Yep. Yep.

So it's somewhere around the $225 range. That's the sort of place where you're safe. Yeah, exactly. And the last thing that's worth mentioning about that is you can split tender at Dell. So if you've got more than one business platinum in your household, you can, if you want to buy a Dell or buy something from Dell, you can split tender right in the online ordering system. You can use up to three credit cards. So if you've got three business platinum cards in your household, you can use $600 in credits all in a single order. So that could certainly make them more useful if you've got multiple cards. It sure does. Yep. All right.

And the benefit of having a business platinum then, right? Or is there additional credit? Well, there's a very nice, easy to use credit, which is $120 wireless. So this is like you pay for your cell phone service, you get $10 back a month. So if you just set up your business platinum card to auto pay your, your cell phone bill, for example, get an automatic $10 back per month. It also has good cell phone protection. So that's an advantage to paying with your business platinum. One disadvantage, you won't earn a category bonus the way you would with like a Chase Inc. cash card that earns 5x or the Inc. business preferred that earns 3x. But still, to get $10 back and good coverage, I think it's worth doing.

I think so too. It's a lower deductible, a $50 deductible through Amex versus $100 deductible on the cell phone insurance through Chase if you're using the Inc. Business Preferred. And of course, if you're using the Inc. Cash for 5X, you've got no cell phone insurance. So I think it works out to be a wash or slightly better. I'm happy using a business platinum card to pay the cell phone bill. So I think it works out to be a wash or slightly better. I'm happy using

a business platinum card to pay the cell phone bill. So. Yeah. Yeah. And I think most people would say they'd rather call Amex for it to file a claim than, than chase if that came up. So, so that's, that's a nice thing to sort of a hidden benefit of that. If you have Verizon, the math isn't as obvious because Verizon gives everyone a $10 discount to basically not use a credit card and to auto pay from, I think it's a debit card or your bank account, something like that. And in this case, I think I would still use my business platinum card because you're getting the $10 back from Amex and you're getting the cell phone protection. But I certainly wouldn't value it at $120 a year, this benefit, if I was using Verizon. But since I'm not on Verizon, I value it very close to face value.

One other tidbit to mention on this is that I'm on T-Mobile. And so in addition to having my card auto or my bill auto charged to a business platinum card every month where I get the $10 credit easy, no problem, I end up making an additional payment because between my wife and I, we have a few business platinum cards. So I make additional payments of $10 on a couple of other cards also. And that's been working fine until last month. Last month, they coded as an upgrade charge instead of a regular T-Mobile charge. And I'm not really sure why. So I didn't pursue that at all. And I think it's too early to say it's dead because I feel like it could very well have just been a glitchy thing, but I'll be curious to see how the next one turns out because I tried, I have a couple of phones on equipment installment plans. So I paid a couple

of those off just to see what would happen if that would change anything, or maybe it was just a glitch, but perhaps a caution for T-Mobile users that making an additional payment on the bill may not always code the way you expect. So if I had realized that early enough to be able to make an additional charge, I would have had another test charge to see if the code was the same way. Yeah. Well, conversely, I can say AT&T is working as of August. I did make additional $10 charges to various business platinums in our household and

they all credited right away. So yeah. Sorry to hear that about T-Mobile. Yeah. I mean, we'll see. We'll see. I'm not, like I said, I'm not ready to call it dead because sometimes you run into weird glitchy stuff every now and then. Right. Right. So, so yeah. So, so we're talking about $200 airline fee credit, $400 Dell, $120 wireless credit. You're at $720 in credits for the $695 annual fee. It's not as like a potential moneymaker the way the personal card is, you know, because I wouldn't value these at face value. But it's still it's very close to sort of a free after rebate type of thing. And you get a lot of the perks are in

common, as as Nick mentioned before, the the clear credit, the airport lounge access, the elite statuses that we talked about all in common with the personal platinum card. What's different? What other benefits do you get with the business platinum? Well, the big difference is a 35% rebate when you use points to pay for cash tickets, either on your chosen airline or on any airline in business and first class. So if you see a great cash fare and you want to book it using your membership rewards points, you'll get 35% of the points back as a rebate. And so that results in getting a little bit better than one and a half cents per point in value towards the paid fares. And that can certainly

be worth it. In fact, I booked one just earlier this year, I've flown half of, and I will eventually here later this month, fly the other half of. So I booked a business class fare round trip from Europe to the United States and back to Europe for what worked out to be, I think it was about 130 ish thousand points per passenger. So about the same cost as an award ticket, but we're earning a boatload of redeemable miles because it's a premium cabin fare and so there are times when that will work out even better than that. So if you have a lot of membership rewards points and you book enough cash tickets or think you might, then that benefit can be worthwhile. I know there are lots of people who leverage that

benefit frequently because it beats sometimes searching for an award flight. You pick the flight you want if it's on your chosen airline or on any airline in business or first and be able to pay for it with your points. Right. right. And Amex for Platinum Cardholders has this international airline program where they have discounts off of a lot of usually business or first-class flights. And it's sort of random whether you find them or not. But when you find them, you know,

saving 10% and getting this 35% rebate is a great combination. Sure can be. So if you're the type of person who likes to book premium cabin travel, and especially if you've got lots of Amex membership rewards points and you book a lot of paid premium cabin travel or are willing to hunt for those deals, then I think that benefit can certainly be worthwhile. I've used it quite a few times this year, actually. I booked one transatlantic, but I also booked some intra-European stuff. So I've used it a handful of times and it's worked out pretty well. And there've been a number of times where I've seen, hey, domestically, that could have worked out better than booking an award ticket too. So in fact, I used it once on Delta last year that way,

because it was a better deal than booking an award ticket. So that benefit can be really nice. It's one major benefit, really, that separates the business platinum, but it's potentially a significant one. Yeah, it sure is, especially people that have tons of Amex points and really want to feel like they're getting these flights for free. That's a way of doing it when, as you said, you don't have to search for award availability. It's just finding the dates and times that work for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's much easier. Okay. Last card in our lineup that is free after rebate, the Hilton Aspire card, right? Yeah. $450 card. But what does it come with in terms of rebates to make it free after rebate?

It's a great deal for $450 a year. So you get $250 a year in airline fee credits. Now, we've already talked about ways to trigger those airline fee credits. I find those really easy to use, like we talked about before. So whether you're banking that with United for the next five years and putting that $250 away for future flights, or you're booking prospective flights and award tickets and blah, blah, blah. That to me is super easy. So that's one of the things that it comes with. It also comes with a $250 a year annual

resort credit. Now the resort credit is only valid at properties classified in Hilton's list of resorts. So you have to actually seek out this list of resorts. And so there's a map tool and a search tool, and you can narrow down the locations and whatnot to find the places that are resorts because they're not all necessarily places you would consider resorts and not all places with resort in the name qualify as resorts in order to trigger this credit. They make it as hard to understand as possible. It really is. It really is. But A, if you can find one of those places that you would like to travel to, then very easy. Use that. You pay for your room charges or anything charged to your room. If you're booking an award stay

at one of those places, then you charge your meals and parking and things like that to your room. If you're booking an award stay at one of those places, then you charge your meals and parking and things like that to your room and the $250 will get credited back to you. So that's probably easy enough to use for people who like to stay at Hilton resorts, but that's not the only option. So if you're not going to stay at a Hilton resort each year, then one of the things that you could potentially do, I wrote about a couple of years ago, is making a booking for sometime in the future and offering to put down a deposit with the property. Call them up, send them an email. I gave an example of booking in the Maldives and contacting the property to say, hey, listen, I would like to put down a deposit now to go towards the seaplane or whatever else. And they were happy to send me an authorization form with the information I need to fill out so they could charge my card right away and theoretically trigger the credit right away.

And if I book something that's six or eight or nine or 10 months down the road from now, then just like all of those other trips we've talked about, maybe it'll happen. Maybe it won't. Probably won't get clawed back if I don't end up going. I don't know that for sure, but probably not. Right, right, right. That's one option. And I mean, I think some hotels will do the deposit automatically. Like you book a future stay and they take a certain amount as a deposit. And that's all refundable if you end up canceling, as long as you booked a refundable rate and you pay attention to the cancellation policy. Yeah, those things are all important. But Las Vegas is

a great go to for that kind of thing. Lots of hotels in Las Vegas charge a deposit. So you want to look at those types of places that will charge you a deposit on booking. Often it's a one night deposit. So if you look for one of the more expensive properties, it's more likely to be able to trigger that full 250 in one shot. Because again, that, that credit can be used for room charges. So it's not like the airline fee credit and that it's only for like incidentals charged to your room. That's one that that's a valid charge, any kind of a room charge. So, and like Greg said, pay attention to the cancellation policy. And you know, if your plans change, then change your plans.

And so that can be a pretty easy way. So, wow. So we pay $450 for this card. We're getting $500 back each year. It's a moneymaker. And we're getting what perks? Well, the main perk is the annual free night certificate. It's an annual free weekend night certificate that works at almost any Hilton property in the world. Now there's a very, very short list of exclusions, but vast majority. And the exclusions are like vacation club, condo type places. It's not

excluding places like the Waldorf Astoria Maldives. You can use your annual free night certificate there or the Conrad Maldives or you want to go to the Conrad Bora Bora or Tokyo or wherever it might be. Those major properties are all included. You can use your annual free weekend night certificate. And I believe the ones issued this year still can be used any night of the week. Am I right on that? So thanks. So that's right. Thanks for confirming that. So if you were to open the card new now, you'll get a free night certificate at approval, so to speak. It takes about 12 weeks.

It takes a while for that to come through. But if it's issued this year, if it's issued in 2022, then you can use that any night of the week, not only on the weekends. In a normal world, it has to be a weekend night, which is defined as Friday, Saturday, Sunday. In most of the world, Middle East, I think it's Saturday, Sunday, Monday, or maybe it's the other way around. I don't know.

You've got to look at it. You've got to look it up. But a free night at one of these nice places can easily be worth quite a bit. I mean, certainly more than the nothing you've paid for the card net if you valued those two $250 credits close to face. Right, right. And this card also gives you Hilton Diamond status. So that's top tier elite status with Hilton, which I think the one sort of guaranteed perk over gold status is that you're guaranteed lounge access if they have a lounge.

Absolutely. With Hilton Gold, sometimes you'll get that lounge access anyway, but that's definitely not guaranteed with gold. You also get priority pass, but it's like what we talked about with the Amex Platinum card. It's the lesser version of priority pass. Because I have a good version of priority pass, I don't ever request priority pass from cards like these that offer them from Amex. Because I don't want that lesser one. I don't want to get confused about which pretty pass card to take with.

Definitely not. Definitely not. So yeah, don't even bother requesting it if you've got a better one from someone else. So really the main benefits are those two, the free night certificate and the Hilton diamond status, you know,

theoretically, I guess you get better priority for an upgrade. And, and actually, I don't know if it's a conscious effort or I just got lucky once, but we did recently get a nice upgrade or a couple of nice upgrades. Well, one nice upgrade, I should say, using Hilton Diamond status at a Hilton property. But the nice thing was that the upgrade came through via email days in advance.

So that was pretty sweet that we got a confirmed upgrade. We didn't even ask for days in advance. We got an email and notification in the app that we had gotten upgraded to a nice suite. So. Right, right. And, you know, and Diamond members also earn a lot of points because you get bonus for your elite level and having this card and paying at a Hilton with this card gives you 14 points per dollar. That's before the points you get as a Hilton elite member. So all these things stack up, you get a lot of points for any paid stay

or paying for a portion of the stay. Yeah, and I think that's worth a mention because I feel like this can be a really good option for somebody who has a lot of reimbursed work stays because Hilton's got such a big footprint, it's easy to find a Hilton. And when they run their double and triple point promotions, which is basically like always,

then you can earn lots and lots of points. Yeah, you're talking like 40, 50 points a dollar or more sometimes on your Hilton stays. So at that point, you're getting a pretty decent rebate on those stays in the form of points. So, and I say 40 or 50, I mean, between whatever the promotion is and the elite earnings from being a diamond member and using a card for 14.

And paying with the card. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. It's a very nice deal for as long as you're staying at Hilton properties and that's, yeah. Yep. All right.

All right. I think that's our roundup of free after rebate luxury cards. It sure is. So I will move very quickly into the question of the week. Question of the week is going to be related to what we talked about earlier, because I know we've kind of gone long today. So there was a question that I saw that came in and frequent miler insiders were discussion anyway, they came up and I don't have the exact question in front of me. But the the gist of the question was, when there are transfer bonuses, like the ones we're currently

seeing from Amex, is it worth transferring speculatively? I know that we normally say no, but I saw a post from somebody in our group that said, basically, you know, I know lots of people say, don't do it speculatively, but I like to sprinkle my points around. I know which programs I tend to get a lot of value from. So when there's a transfer bonus, I pounce on it and get myself more points, you know, more value for my points. So, you know, if you're that kind of person that, you know, which programs you use most often, you know, often use obvious or you often use flying blue miles or whatever else. Is it worth jumping on this, especially from the perspective that I asked about earlier?

Like we're seeing all these transfer bonuses. Now we're not going to probably see a transfer bonus to the same programs next month or probably not the month after even. Right. So it might be a while before you get another transfer bonus. Should you jump on LifeMiles now? Yeah. I think so. I think if you're sort of, I think it's probably rare for people to book awards so often that they have a good feel for how often they're likely to use it

in the future. But if you're one of those people, so you're pretty confident that you're going to be using those life miles or avios or, uh, flying blue miles. Um, why not? I mean, I think that's a great way to do it. Um, you know, if you're not that person, I wouldn't do that. And I also would be very careful if you're unsure whether the points expire or not, like with a hard deadline, be very careful about that. So, for example, if you transfer to, I'm just going to name a couple. Well, Singapore Airlines, we now and then see transfer bonuses to Singapore. And that's risky because after three, you know, with most of the other programs, there's some way to keep them alive, but there's a few like ANA and Singapore.

And I can't remember. Well, you got to know the rules because many of them are like 18 months or so, but then Avianca Life Miles is 12 months of inactivity and they expire. That's shorter than anybody else. So if you're going to take advantage of that one,

you need to know that. You know, you don't want to mess that up and 14 months from now be like, oh, I probably got to move some points because my Avianca Miles are going to take advantage of that one, you need to know that, you know, you don't want to mess that up. And 14 months from now, I'll be like, oh, I probably got to move some points because my Avianca miles are going to explode. No, they expire. Oh, shoot. I just lost all of those points. So, I mean, that's certainly something you got to consider.

And of course, you have to consider the fact that you never know when these programs are going to devalue their award charts and change things up on you. So there's a lot of value in having flexible points that can move anywhere you need them. Once you pigeonhole them in a single award currency, they become significantly less valuable because you lose all of the flexibility that they used to have. So I'm very hesitant to move them speculatively. Like Greg said, I think if you really know that you have enough points sprinkled around in different programs and you know you have a one world and a star alliance and this that you prefer, you want to sprinkle around some so you can get more value when there's a transfer bonus.

I can see where that might make sense. I'm a little hesitant with all of the other parts and pieces here that we just discussed. Right, right, right. So, you know, I don't feel that confident with any airline programs personally. But if I think about how I feel about Hyatt and, you know, I book Hyatt awards all the time, I would transfer speculatively in a second to Hyatt. So, yeah, if if I was the same way with with airline programs, Avios, for example, I would do the same. Right. Right. Agreed. Agreed. And if you're booking it with that kind of frequency, like you're like, OK, well, I fly this all the time.

I fly to Europe and Star Alliance three times a year. I'm definitely going to use these life miles at some point. Then, okay, great. At some point, relatively soon at that, then I could see moving speculatively. And I have moved speculatively now and then when I've had a couple of different thoughts in mind as to how I'm going to use the points. So it's certainly not that I haven't done that. I could see that potentially being appealing, especially with so many transfer bonuses right now. Again, there's just kind of something for everybody. So I could see where you might do that despite all of the advice that you'll ever hear from us telling you not to do that. Right, right, right, right. You know,

a little just nugget of information I was just reminded of, a friend of ours told us how Qatar, however you prefer to pronounce it, when booking with their own miles, it has a lot more availability for their queue suites, for example, but you have to pay more. You have to pay more miles. But it's not that bad if you're looking at it from the point of view of, oh, I transferred with a 30% or 40% transfer bonus to Avios, then you do the math and say, oh, well, that's actually maybe a reasonable amount to pay for not quite any time flying, but much more availability than everyone else would get. So yeah, I could see why there's plenty of cases where it would make total sense to do that. Yeah, and Avios is a good example of one where you've got access to four different programs,

right? So you've got quite a few different sweet spots in terms of whether it's Iberia or the places where it's good to use British Airways Avios or now Qatar Avios. So you've got enough options that maybe it is worth it because there's more flexibility there than there are in a lot of other places. One of the reasons I recently, a couple of months ago, made a speculative transfer to British Airways Avios was because I have a subscription to Seats by. And so I have an alert set for upgrade space on the British Airways flight that I'm going to take, hoping that maybe seats will open up for upgrade. And I figured, hey, I could do even better by transferring some

over here if that comes through. And if not, I'll eventually move them over to Iberia probably and use them for business class between New York and Madrid. But, you know, so again, if you have a plan like that, then maybe. But make sure you know what you're doing. I'm reminded of a friend that reached out earlier this year and said, oh, I got an email from Amex that they're running a transfer bonus to Hawaiian miles. And maybe I'd like to go to Hawaii someday. Should I take advantage of that now? Well, I can't, you know, no, I mean, you got to know Hawaiian miles. And if you know Hawaiian miles, you wouldn't ask the question because you know that they're not particularly valuable for the most part. So unless you've got one of the very small niche, niche, niche redemptions that are, you know, advantageous in mind, then, you know, probably not the best

currency to have. So don't feel pressure because there's a deal. There's deals coming all the time. Although with so many at once, I could see some wisdom in moving now. Yes. All right. That brings us to the end. Long show today. So whoever it is that has a long commute, you're welcome. Thank you very much for listening to this for you today. If you enjoyed this and you'd like to get our posts in your inbox each week, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe again, that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe. You can follow us on all the various social medias and you're going to want to, because we've got this three cards, three continents trip coming up very, very soon. So if you're not yet following us on Instagram, you should be and seek us out on Facebook and

our frequent miler insiders Facebook group, because there's going to be a lot of stuff that gets posted, you know, in the moment as we're traveling around and going around and doing these things that you'll want to check out. So make sure you're checking us out on all those various platforms. If you've got a question, some feedback, something you want to talk more about, you can send that to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. And we'll see you next week. Bye, everybody.