Frequent Miler on the Air - Marriott Island, Amex War on Gaming, Mint Coins

Episode Date: November 16, 2019

Greg and Nick discuss: - The $8K per night private island that is now part of the Marriott chain - Amex's War on Gaming. How does that change Greg's Delta plans? - The Business Platinum devaluation. Is it a good thing in disguise?  -The Mint Coin deal. How Nick ramped it up. Good stuff to know for any deal that is limited by household.

Welcome to Frequent Miler on the Air with Greg and Nick. I'm Greg and today we're going to be talking about several topics. We have the Marriott North Island Seychelles, which is an $8,000 a night island that is now a Marriott property. So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the American Express war on gaming, where they've been shutting people down. And we'll transition from that to another American Express topic, which is the business platinum card devaluation. And finally... Or revaluation.

Maybe. And then finally, the mint coins. They're back uh let's talk about let's talk about the mint coins and and what's going on there um first uh reader uh comment or review time okay drum roll please this is a new regular topic on the blog uh first uh uh pop quiz for you nick okay what what is the answer to life the universe and everything 42 that's right that's right okay i've never even seen it i just had a friend who quoted it a lot so if there's anyone out there who doesn't know what we're talking about the um uh there's a there's a old book series uh also i think there was a movie and a tv series uh which all originally came from a uh a radio program um which uh uh is is is about the uh

it's it's about a alien uh race that that uh has uh decided decided to destroy the Earth to make way for an intergalactic highway. This is sounding like a very different type of podcast. You're right. I should get things back on track. the meaning of life, the universe, and everything because our comment comes from Arthur Dent Zafad Beeb, which is two of the names in that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

series. The second one is cut off, but anyway, it's Arthur Dent, if I remember right, he has to hitchhike to get off of Earth before it's destroyed for the intergalactic highway. And Zaphod, I think, has a couple heads. Anyway, it's a great series if you haven't read it. I highly recommend reading the books um arthur dent zafad bib says nick can you give more than a hint how to use that aspire

resort credit even if one doesn't have a stay planned at a resort so uh let me say so last time we talked a little bit about the uh hilton aspireire and that it's possible to get the $250 resort credit even if you don't have a stay. And you gave some hints, which I actually thought were pretty darn clear. I didn't think I left a lot of room for interpretation there, did I? I mean... there did i i mean yeah but this brings up this brings up a bigger point to me which is that this format gives us the opportunity to um say things more clearly perhaps than we would on the blog when when we're uh you know there's certain cases where we're worried about killing a deal or worried about, like in this case, we don't want the MX rat team to see what we're saying. And of course, they could be subscribers to our podcast as well. We don't know. But we certainly have a much

smaller audience here. So, there's less chance of that kind of thing happening. So, what do you think? Does it need more clarification than what you already said? I mean, between the post I wrote about it and what I said, I felt like it was pretty clear. But I mean, I guess it's just a matter of how clear you want to be. So what I said last week was that there are, well, there's a couple different options for using up your resort credit. Resort credit, remember, can be used paying for room rate, it can be used paying for things charged to your room, etc, etc. And now I should mention, I don't know if I mentioned it last week, that it's not really limited to resorts per se,

in the sense that there's a list. It's like, I think it's hiltonhonors.com slash resorts. The link is in our complete guide to the Hilton Aspire card. At any rate, your property has to be on the qualifying list, but not all the properties on the list have resort in the name. And of course, on the other side, not all properties with resort in the name are on the list. So keep that in mind. Make sure that the property you're looking to use it at is on the list. But then once you've looked at that, then there are lots of different places on that list where you could reserve. Well, for example, I wrote a post last year about how you could reserve a room and charge a deposit to your room.

Perhaps you want to prepay some of your expenses. You're going to stay in the Maldives and you want to prepay part of the seaplane. You can contact the hotel and fill out a credit card authorization form and pay $250 of it now. And since the fee charges to your card this year, you would presumably get this year's resort credit for a stay that may be in the future. So that's certainly one way that you might be able to take advantage of using it by prepaying in advance. And then, of course, there are a lot of hotels that'll take a deposit when you prepay for a reservation. So

that's a way that you can think to use it in advance and then you know of course obviously if you're booking a flexible booking then you know if plans change in the future then plans change in the future so um the the key is to lock in the credit now if you can yeah okay so i actually brought this up more more for the topic of how much are we willing to say well i don't know how much should i i i don't tell me I don't know. How much should I? You tell me. I don't know where the line is on that. I think that was plenty clear enough for this. Just in general, though, it's just sort of a,

I don't have a hard and fast answer to this of like how clear should we be on these podcasts and about the sequence. Well, and the other piece of hesitation there is that like some things we leave where you have to kind of read in between the lines a little bit, both partially for all of the reasons Greg just mentioned. And also because on the flip side, Amex has been getting pretty aggressive over the last year about going back clawed back even after they've closed the card. Months later, Amex is coming back and saying, oh, you bought a gift card with that credit, and they want their money back. So there's some risk involved in trying to lock in the discount even if you don't use it. And so there's part of me also that doesn't want to be too direct about stuff like that, I guess, because there's risk involved.

It's not necessarily as cut and dry as, you know, boom, it's done and it's over. And the next year you close the card and that's the end of it. Apparently, Amex is not looking at it that way. Right. That's actually a great point. So speaking of Amex, that transitions us nicely into the Amex war on gaming i called it uh on the blog um but basically what's been happening is um a set of people reported that they were abruptly shut down by amex um and uh this was mostly on reddit where where we saw a lot of data points and and one person on reddit collected data from lots of people

to see what was unique about the people who were shut down. And he or she, I don't know, found two things that seemed to be correlated, that people were shut down. Most of them had referred themselves to Amex cards so that they earned both the referral credit and the signup bonus. So that seems to be a trigger to get people looked at for shutdowns. That's probably not enough in itself. I'm guessing that they're looking for patterns of behavior, but that was

one thing. Another thing was having multiple of the same card, which that was a new one to me. I hadn't heard that before as something that Amex looks at as a trigger. But I could see why a number of people, especially with Amex Gold card might be, you know, for example, product changing other charge cards to the Amex Gold and running up the 25K of grocery spend. So that's certainly the type of thing that might be happening there. Another one is the Blue Business Plus, which is 2X everywhere up to 50K. So if you're doing a lot more than 50k, you might want to have multiples of these. I've even mentioned that to people. I think we've written about on the blog

that if you have multiple businesses, there's nothing wrong with having multiple of those cards, one for each business. But now you should know that that could be a trigger, especially if you're pushing things in other ways. And I think that that's a key point, because I don't think, at least from the data points I've read, that any of the shutdowns have been from people who are just legitimately spending a lot of money. I think it tends to be from people who probably know that they're gaming the system a little bit. But you know, it stinks still, because things have been pretty clear as far as what you can do and what you can't do, I feel like, for a long time. And it certainly seems like that line has changed pretty drastically.

So I can certainly understand the people who are upset with that. But I think if you legitimately have two or three businesses and you have a card across two or three, it's probably less of a risk. Like Greg said, I don't think it's like, you know, clear set in stone. But if you're pushing the limits in multiple different ways, it seems that Amex is going to push back. And so that that might change your strategy in terms of earning membership rewards points or earning points on your Amex cards, because obviously, they are making a statement that they are not interested in people just collecting points easily. And along with that, I would assume they are not interested in people just collecting points easily. And along with that, I would assume they're not interested in people collecting Delta Diamond status easily. And I know

Greg does that for more than one person each year. So, I mean, does this change your strategy? Does it make it not worth the risk? I mean, you could end up losing all of your Amex cards, all of your Amex points over Delta Diamond status. Is Delta Diamond status not only worth missing out on that Aspire no fee first year deal that you skipped last week, but also potentially jeopardizing all of your cards? You're going to continue MSing Diamond status? You're going to take up that kind of risk? What are you going to do? Is it going to affect you at all? Yeah. Well, it certainly makes me nervous. So, you know, I've been thinking about it. What, you know, what happens if my Amex cards get shut down? You know, now, luckily, they've allowed or it's a loophole, whatever, people have been able

who were shut down to call up membership rewards and redeem their points right away uh after being shut down so there's some amount of time where uh it might not even be a deliberate decision it might just be that the two systems aren't synced up well enough so the membership rewards are still alive while the cards are shut down i don't know but um that's good news but so the the the biggest so so if i was shut out of amex entirely i mean i would lose centurion lounge access uh for good um that's not a huge deal to me i mean most places that have centurion lounge have other lounges too that i can get into and you don't have one at your home airport so it's not correct right something you use there's there's none in the detroit airport um

the then i would lose the ability to um you know i could always instead of uh spending to manufacture delta diamond i could um actually mileage runs i could actually fly uh and there are some clever ways to fly on partner airlines and business class or premium economy that that earn uh enough uh miles and everything to to get there so i think there's a good chance i would i would at least try that and see see how uh how fun that is you know hopefully i could turn those into actual vacations not just running out and turn you would try that if you get shut down if i got shut down so that sounds to me like go ahead keep going yeah yeah i i don't see anything like if i get shut down by amex that that i would be like oh no the world's ending so So I think I have a backup plan for what to do if that happens.

So I'm going to keep going as is and hope for the best. I think they see me as a good customer because I'm not running up lots of spend within bonus categories. So it's spend within bonus categories where they lose out on the transaction fees right so when they when they get paid uh let's let's say optimistically as much as one and a half percent at a grocery store it's probably less than that that they actually go i don't know um they're losing money by giving us 4x, right? With the gold card. I mean, that's totally just...

The idea is just to get you to spend on it. So that card's in mine. So that's the card that you're using, right? Right. And also to get you to keep it. So they're banking on the idea that you're going to use it not just for that, but for lots of other things too.

Plus they've got the annual fee from you. But so all those things for most customers should add up to more profit for them than the loss leader, which is the Forex category. So anyway, so I'm not doing a lot of spend in those bonus categories with Amex. So hopefully they see me as a good customer and it won't be an issue. Well, I mean, that's an optimistic perspective. And I mean, there's some sense in that, especially if you're using the Delta cards, because like you said, you're not triggering category bonuses, but you are triggering MQMs

and status and spend to hit those caps. I don't know. Maybe that's a good thing. Yeah, it's unclear whether Amex has to pay for those bonus levels or not. I don't know. I don't know. And they probably aren't very expensive for Amex since they're, you know, buying in bulk. So that that might actually be a much better deal for Amex than if you're racking up membership rewards points, which are going to cost them probably something. Well, I don't know, I guess it's maybe it's the same in terms of miles, but they probably buy so many miles from Delta, one would think that they get a pretty good deal on that. So perhaps you are a profitable customer after all. I don't know. For me, it's not really going to change very much.

I don't go crazy on my Amex cards in terms of MS. Obviously, you can't use them at Simon Malls. But I'm still going to buy some gift cards at the grocery store. I'm not one of those people with four gold cards or something like that. So I'm not pushing the limits in that way. So hopefully, fingers crossed, we'll be okay with a relatively small Amex volume on those things. I love membership rewards points, but there's lots of other ways to get those points these days. So I'm less concerned.

I would think that since they set that 25K cap, they're okay with people running up to that. It's where people probably, again, get multiple of the gold cards in order to get around that cap that they're probably going to be more concerned. Right. Conventional wisdom is when the issuer issues a speed limit, then as long as you stay under that speed limit, you're probably going to be okay. Right. Most likely anyway, hopefully. But the one area that I think is probably a concern, and this is one actually for you, how about that Rakuten card?

Yeah, yeah. So, right, right. So, what Nick's referring to, we've talked about this a number of times, what was the Ebates visa, now Rakuten. I've been clicking through the Rakuten portal to giftcardmall.com. That gives me 1x membership rewards points from the portal. And then when I pay with my Rakuten Visa, I get an additional 3x for anything that tracks through the portal. So I'm getting 4x altogether buying $500 gift cards. It's a great deal. And the worry is, what if when they send the membership rewards to Amex, or when you get the membership rewards, which happens four times a year, it's a quarterly payout from the portal. Do they supply the detail information of who you are buying from to Amex?

I would guess they do. So I would guess that that's part of the reason why Amex was interested in this deal in the first place, that they wanted to see what people are shopping for. This is the portal, not the Rakuten Visa I'm talking about, but it's all tied together. So are they seeing that I'm spending a lot, that I'm getting lots of points from Gift Card Mall? And if so, are they going to care about that? And what I'm banking on is that Amex has tons and tons of data about their own systems that they're trying to learn from and set

up rules and machine learning algorithms and whatever. I'm betting that this data that they probably have is considered like something else that they'll get to eventually, and they probably never will. That's what I'm betting. I don't know. I mean, that sounds like a logical argument to me. Is it just a shared optimism or hope here?

Are we hoping to just believe this into existence? I don't know. But it does seem like, obviously, Rakuten is obviously buying the points from Amex. So Amex agreed to sell them. And one would think that part of that package, like you said, is data collection. I don't know. Are they going to not use the data that they paid to collect? But if they paid for it, it was not for the purpose of uh the rat team it

was the purpose was for marketing purposes right yeah they want to know what people are buying and then they want to um you know target those individuals like hey you could you know with this credit card you'll earn more points by buying things at wherever you're buying right right right um so that's so maybe i don't think i'm being that i don't think i'm being that naive and thinking that this is you know right it's clearly a marketing point for them and and um i'd i'd be kind of i'd be kind of surprised if if the rat team which is the uh rewards abuse team, by the way, if they see that as a priority, I'd be surprised. Yeah. Interesting. Well, speaking of Amex and their data collection and how they respond to

things, their marketing team, that brings me to the business platinum card, which has announced that it's going to lose a bunch of benefits starting in January. The WeWork benefit, I think we already knew was going away, but that's going away you can only enroll up to december 31st and then let's see what else are we losing we're using premium roadside assistance and and most that that well the um the other internet thing the boingo oh boingo that's right that's what i was trying to go wi-fi which you wrote and i thought so i thought it was already gone from mx cards i don't know yeah i thought that i thought that was gone like when the SPG card, before the SPG card went away, I thought. But I don't know.

At any rate, it's going and it's no big loss. But the big loss for probably most people, I would assume, is the 10 go-go Wi-Fi passes each year. Once those expire December 31st, those are going to be gone. You're not going to get any more. So that's probably a problem for some folks. What about you? I don't know. Does that matter to you? It does. So you know that my wife and I travel to Europe a lot. And she has a business platinum card. And we each year have

called about getting a retention offer. And they haven't been big retention offers, but they've been enough to justify keeping the card, which is what I want to do because we absolutely use those internet passes. So those 10 internet passes are good not just on domestic flights but international flights um because we usually fly delta um they're good on they're good on all delta flights i mean unless a delta flight doesn't have internet for some reason delta uses um gogo everywhere uh and exposes the gogo uh login to the to the passenger and and i'm pointing that out because some airlines um use multiple different uh internet providers and they have their own login like i think american does this maybe it's united i can't remember which maybe both um they have their own uh uh sort of web page for signing into the internet from your airplane and you have to pay them not

go go and so if you have that situation even if the plane is using go go you can't use those go go passes so uh but for me for for a regular delta flyer they've been they've been very valuable. And yeah, this means that starting in January, we'll have to pay for internet when we're flying internationally, which is something that I don't know. I'll probably do occasionally, but certainly won't plan on it as often as I have been doing. Well, you know, and so for me on the opposite end of that spectrum, I would tell you that it's not, uh, it's a total non-issue for me. And in fact, I'm kind of excited about, uh, the fact that these are going away. So first of all, I rarely ever take a flight that has go-go internet. I don't fly Delta often. And I, I just basically never get it on other flights once Once in a great while, and even then, like I said in something I wrote this week, I've often looked for passengers around me

that seem to want to use the internet. I've been like, you want to use it? I got you a free pass. I got a bunch of passes I'm not going to use. So I'm often looking to give them away. And additionally, my T-Mobile plan, the T-Mobile plan that I'm on, has unlimited go-go Wi-Fi. So on, has unlimited GoGo Wi-Fi.

So I get that GoGo Wi-Fi. When I flew on Delta from Honolulu to Tokyo, I was able to use my free T-Mobile access. I didn't even need my GoGo access. And that works on international? It does. I just went back to check my screenshots to make sure because I was 85% sure I did fly Delta, I think, one other time this year. So I wanted to make sure that it was a screenshot from that flight. And it sure was.

In fact, I have it right here. It shows me T-Mobile Wi-Fi and texting free for certain customers. And then I got my whole, oops, wrong map. But to the internet for free. So is that a special T-Mobile plan? It is. It is. So it's not the basic plan.

Is that something people can get? You know, I think my specific plan is no longer available and i'm not sure if there's a plan that still includes that i'll have to look into it because if that's true it's worth writing about for readers uh if there's still a t-mobile plan that offers that i was on an international plan that that they discontinued and i wrote about it when they discontinued it although i don't think i highlighted the gogo benefit because it didn't pop into mind for me that that was a big deal because i so rarely fly flights with GoGo Wi-Fi. But for those reasons, it's not a loss to me whatsoever, really. And on the flip side, I'm excited because I figure that Amex is going to introduce something

to replace the benefits that it's losing. And the good news there is that it might be something new. That marketing team has been hard at work. They've obviously been changing things up. The recent Amex green card refresh showed us that they were willing to partner with totally new companies, Away Travel, giving the Away Travel credit as part of the welcome bonus on that card, Clear, Lounge Buddy. They're obviously making new partnerships, and I can't imagine that they did that just to refresh the green card. So I would think that there's at least a decent chance that platinum cards end up picking up a benefit, whether it's just on the personal side, just on the business side or both. I don't know.

But with the business side being the one that's losing these benefits, I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of perhaps periodic away travel credit. The personal version has the SACS credit. Obviously, the business version has the Delta credit, but I could see them adding an away travel credit or clear credit or something like that. And I might actually use those things. So I'm kind of excited to see what it is they come up with. Maybe they've got some other partnership up their sleeve that we haven't heard of yet. So I'm interested because these benefits were totally useless to me. Yeah, what about the ability to get the 30% rebate on paid flights purchased with points

with the business platinum? Is that something that you value? Do you have the business platinum? I do, yeah. Do you use that feature? So I canceled mine. My wife still has the business platinum. But at any rate, have we used it?

We've used it like two times maybe. So it's not something that I use frequently. If I plan more trips to Europe, I would probably use it to fly back from Europe because paid business class is often pretty reasonable and it can turn out to be fewer points than buying an award ticket and you get to pick what you want. So I would probably use it if we traveled to Europe more often on, uh, on trips, but we don't have any plans to travel to Europe anytime soon. So I probably won't be using it soon. I wouldn't be devastated if that went away, but I think that it's a good value play. I think that it's probably good for most people.

You must use it flying Delta, right? Um, used it, but... Not much either, huh? Not much. And honestly, I think I forget about it because it's one of those things that, you know, I always have in my mind, like, what's the cheapest award option and what's the cheapest paid option? And it's kind of rare, actually, for me to go and see, well, you know, what is it through the Amex interface? And I mean, obviously,

anytime it's a paid option, I should be able to do that. But it's not particularly customer friendly, you know, the average person, I would think, you know, hear Greg saying he doesn't usually think of it, I don't use it much. And obviously, we write about this stuff for a living. So does the average person stop and think, okay, well, is a 35% rebate worth it? What is that worth compared to one and a half points with the Sapphire Reserve? It's probably more math and more difficult than it's worth. So I think simplifying that would be a smart move if I were Amex. Yeah. The other factor for me personally is I have a much bigger stash of ultimate rewards points and the Sapphire Reserve card. points at more than one and a half cents each, when I have millions of them, it's not realistic to value over about a million of them. It's not realistic to value the extra ones more than one

and a half cents each because I might never get around to redeeming them for higher value rewards. So, with that sort of realization in mind, I've been like, I need to spend these ultimate rewards. So, so with that, uh, sort of realization in mind, I've been like, I need to spend these ultimate rewards. Whereas, uh, and so, so I'm more likely to use points to book flights, uh, on the, uh, chase side than the Amex side. And I would feel the same way because I feel like Chase's transfer partners are much weaker in general. Hyatt is great, but the airline transfer partners I think are much weaker than the Amex partners. So I would rather keep the membership rewards points flexible to be able to transfer them to partners for higher value awards and use the chase points at one and a half cents each. And also, additionally, with that, most of the chase points I think that you and I are earning are probably in bonus categories, probably 3X, 5X.

So redeeming them at one and a half cents each doesn't feel like much of a loss in terms of getting it. No, no. It's still a great deal regardless. Yeah. Right. Right. Speaking of redeeming your points though, and loss plus minus this Marriott thing you mentioned at the outset is definitely a piece of news that I think Marriott was hopeful would, you know, kind of catch fire and pass around. Everybody be really excited that you might be able to redeem points at this $8,000 a night place. This is where like William and Kate honeymooned, I guess. This is like, you know, there's 11 villas. 10 of them are presidential villas and one is like a

super royal extra Superman special presidential villa. So, they're like 5,000 square feet each, $8,000 a night. It's joining Marriott Bonvoy. Should we all be excited about that? What do you think? Well, before I say, before I answer that, I want to ask you a question. So your last week, this came up in the Week in Review Around the Web, which you do every Saturday evening. You publish posts that caught your eye from around the web, and you write something about it. And I found your write-up about that strange.

So, we don't know anything at this point about what they're going to do with regards to making that island redeemable with points. We don't know anything about that. Yet, you called it a blow because of the assumption that they'll raise the standard rate quite a bit to allow redemptions on this island. Why are you blaming them before we even know what they're going to do? Oh, come on. It's Marriott. They're an easy target. They're predictable in many ways, but although they have defied our expectations now and then. So, my opinion, my perspective on this, and Greg's

going to tell you why he thinks I'm wrong, I'm sure, but is that this property can't possibly fit into the award chart as it is now. There's no way that you're going to be able to redeem 85,000 points for an $8,000 room. I don't see that happening for a number of reasons. One, because the property is not going to accept whatever compensation it is that they receive for 85,000 points a night. I'm sure that's already been negotiated. Two, the property is obviously looking to maintain an exclusive ambiance, the place where William and Kate honeymoon. They're not looking to pick up the folks like us that are collecting our points in other ways. And then number three, the problem with those two things is that then that means to me that if Marriott intends to make this available for awards, and I have to imagine that they want to be able to market, wow, you can use your points to stay here, then they're going to have to charge a lot more points for it. And the justification for it not being on the award chart, I have to

imagine, is going to be that this place is all huge suites. There's no way we can charge 85,000 points a night, so we're going to have to charge you a suite rate of like 10 times the regular price. And that sounds awfully familiar. That's what Starwood used to do with those all-suite properties like the St. Regis Bora Bora and St. Regis Maldives. And I feel like it's a slippery slope. If they start doing it once with this $8,000 a night place, how long is it going to be before whoever it is that owns those other properties wants to renegotiate their agreement with Marriott and say, listen, we're all suites too. And we want X amount of dollars as a bare minimum for our rooms. And Marriott has to then

make a decision to reimburse them at a higher rate, which, again, I imagine this Seychelles property is asking for a higher rate also. And then if they end up folding to that, buckling to that pressure, then I think that means that rooms will cost more points for all of us, and we'll go back to the system where those all-sweep properties don't fit on the award chart. So that's my prediction. I'd love to be wrong about that, but my prediction is it's a slippery slope you disagree with me though i think why uh i mean i don't disagree with your logic i i think i think blaming them before it's happened is is where is where yeah is what i'm objecting to. Uh-oh. I just don't get that. Is my post going to get pulled because I offended Arnie? Sorry, Arnie.

That won't happen. Okay. I'm not sorry, Arnie. I take that back. So you're reacting to an assumption, and you're mad about it, but it's just an assumption that you've made. So, like, if you saw me, let's say I was a kleptomaniac, right?

But I've been to therapy and I've promised never to steal again. I'm still going to lock up the jewelry when you come over to that. Then I tell you, I'm going out to the mall today. And then you'd be like, you'd be like, Greg, how dare you start stealing again? That's what you're, that's what you're doing. No, no, no, no, no. It's more like if you came over to the house, come on now, you wouldn't lock away the expensive stuff. You wouldn't put it away. Come on. The best prediction of future behavior is past

behavior right so that's that's that's the best tool we can use to predict the future so the most recent yeah that's behavior though you're right is what they did with saint regis and and they actually made them available for a standard top so the top now is all i have to do is not steal one time and then i can come over for dinner huh sure um anyway so the top now at peak is is 100k is that right or yes correct 100k 100k so uh so the question is will they make these available at a at 100k uh at all um and um I'm not saying that it's likely, but I do think there's a chance that under these circumstances, okay, that they will continue to allow,

they're kind of loose with the rule about no blackout dates with their hotels, right? Right. So if they allow this island to specify that awards are only available during what to them are um off peak so where they don't traditionally fill up the island um and then and then they only make they might charge you 1.2 million miles and force you to have virgin Atlantic status. No, no.

And then if they're not going to fill up the island anyway, then I could see them making one room available during those times. Because they're at least getting the 100,000 points, which I don't know what the compensation is for that, but it's probably pretty decent. I don't know. But the point is they're not losing bookings by making it available.

And what they're getting is incredible marketing because people are all excited. You know, the points guy is going to have a video of him on the island. He, he won't actually have been, he will actually have paid for it for his stay because, um, he's not going to wait until he can get that, you know, one award booking, but, um, but it'll be advertised up the wazoo about, about that. You can book it with points. And so people will be excited, incredible, uh, advertising, not just for the island, but for Marriott in general. So I am kind of, I wouldn't say optimistic. I think there's a reasonable chance that something like that will happen. Hopefully, I hope you're right. I'd love to be wrong on that. I feel like that seems like the type of optimistic perspective I would have had before the merger happened,

because I think that Marriott was talking a would have had before the merger happened. Because I think that Marriott was talking a pretty good game before the merger happened, and they were saying a lot of good stuff. And then the merger happened. And I feel like immediately there was a lot of noise around the edges, as they say. And things didn't go so smoothly for a while. And a lot of the promises they kind of made, they sort of went back on. There are some things that they came through with. Certainly, I enjoyed my stay at the St. Regis Bora Bora this year. It was great to be able to book that for 48,000 points a night while that lasted. So there are certainly ways that they have impressed us. So maybe they will. Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm going to be wowed. And in which case, great. I'd love to be wrong on that. I just feel like it's probably a bad sign for those top tier

Marriott properties. But I mean, eventually, they're all going to cost more points one way or another. That's the way these things work. Points devalue. Well, sure. Although, I mean, 100K is a very high top bar. I mean, that's crazy high. I mean, if you think about it, Hilton points, which we value significantly less than Marriott, they used to top out at 95.

They went up to 120 for that new one right um but um that's very similar to the 100k with Marriott and so you can think of it as as Marriott's you know top tier is is is much more expensive than than Hilton's if you factor in the difference in currency value then we're looking more more at maybe 160K Hilton points roughly as a comparison as their top tier. So they already go very high with this new system, which is not to say they will never raise it, but my point is I do think they have room to keep it for quite a while. Whereas Hiatt is looking like they might be moving to 40K as their new top tier, which is unfortunate. I knew that was a matter. I say I knew. I predicted also there, and one would say

I made an assumption, that they would eventually move in that direction too. I think that was pretty obvious when they added the 40K properties that eventually they're going to move their properties to that level. Although Hiatt's award chart's been so dependable for so long, for the most part, and very reasonable that I will be less upset when a property goes from 30K to 40K than when a suite that was 85K becomes 270K or something like that. Sure, sure, sure. One last thing about the island. One other thing I can imagine them doing, which would be unfortunate but reasonable, is to do something like a lot of hotels will let you,

a lot of Marriott hotels will let you book with a standard, book like a suite, let's say, for a standard number of points plus a copay. And so I can imagine it being, you know, it's the 85,000 points plus $1,000 or something like that. And it still might be a good deal relative to the cash price for those who have a lot of money to spend. But for those of us looking for a bargain, where we compare to other opportunities, you know, maybe it's not such a bargain, but anyway. You know, if there is anything at the standard rate,

I would love to try out the island, see if it's very special, compare it to Necker Island. Right. Which do I like more? So I'm hoping for that opportunity. I mean, if it is available at 100K a night, I mean, that would be quite a... I'm on it. Yeah.

Quite a good opportunity comparatively. Right, right, right, right. Or like it would compare i i guess anyway uh in terms of the opportunity at knacker perhaps exactly yeah awesome well i know that we're almost out of time uh so i don't know should we should we hit that last topic or save that for another week uh yeah let's let's cover that quickly okay um all right so so yesterday there was the opportunity to buy a coin from the U.S. Mint. We had written about it last week.

It was a pretty cool deal in that you could buy a coin that was $65 plus the cost of shipping. If you paid for overnight shipping, it was $86 for the coin. And there was a popular buyers club that was offering to buy the coin for $200. And then there were some other sites that were offering 150 over your costs, pay even more for that coin, or 160 over cost. And then some people say that you're able to sell it privately for an even larger profit. The issue, the difficulty was that the US Mint limited it to one per household. So that can be a nice way sometimes when the Mint does deals like this can be a nice way to one per household. So that can be a nice way sometimes when the mint does deals like

this can be a nice way to generate some spend. Oftentimes the coins are more expensive, so you can generate a more significant chunk of spend and a little bit of profit by agreeing to resell it to a buyer. And you can pay with your credit card. Exactly. You can pay with your credit card at the mint. And so you earn credit card rewards, never had a problem earning credit card rewards on a mint purchase. Although I think I heard somebody say something about a US bank card that had a problem. But at any rate, I've never had a problem with Amex or Chase or Citi or anything like that. So it can be a way to generate a little spend. In this case, it was a very small amount of spend. But the profit was pretty nice because it was over $100 a coin for spending like $85. That's

a nice little tidy little profit there. It sure is, yeah. Yeah, for a few minutes of work, potentially. The issue is that it's difficult to get an order through. The US Mint site always crashes when they do things like this. And like we said, limited to one per household. So a lot of people would have taken that as a hard limit because, of course, they're limiting that based on your shipping and billing address.

I scored four of those coins. And I was able to pick up four of those coins because I didn't ship them all to my house, first of all. And second of all- Right, because of the one per household limit. One per household, exactly. And so that becomes a barrier for a lot of people. If you can recruit some friends and family to play along, great. Everybody earns some points and a little bit of profit. I knew I wouldn't convince friends and family to order this thing. So I knew I had to figure out a way to do it without their help. So you bought three other houses and you... Exactly. Set up new billing addresses with all my various credit cards. No, and that's a problem. And I saw people online talking about that, how

my credit cards all have my billing information. How am I going to buy it and ship it to a family member if they don't give me their credit card. And so even if they're interested, but they maybe they just can't get online in order to order at the right time, or don't want to give you their credit card information, but you want to help them be able to get it. Technique you might use for the future is what I did. And that's I took some of those fee free gift cards that I've been buying at office supply stores. And with those gift cards, you can go online and register them to anybody's name and address. I could register them to Justin Bieber if I wanted to. Sorry, Justin, no coin coming your way. But I could... But okay, so you register it to Justin Bieber. Right. And that but then they ship it to Justin Bieber, right? They do. So you

want to make sure that you and Justin are pretty tight. Okay. All right. So that's not going to work after our last encounter. So yeah. So then you would send it to somebody else, like maybe to Greg, but Greg's a kleptomaniac, so not to Greg. But for example, I had a couple of family members who were working, couldn't do it at that time, registered a couple of those debit cards to their name and address and ordered and shipped to their name and address. And they'll just box it back up and ship it back out. So it made it pretty easy to get some other people involved with me. Now, getting multiples of them meant that we were using multiple devices, a Chromebook,

a PC, a tablet, two different internet connections, house internet, and using the phone as a hotspot. So definitely there was effort put into this. Because you didn't want them tracking that the IP So definitely there was because you didn't want them, you didn't want them tracking that the IP address was the same. You didn't want them, you know, what cookies I was at all the reason. No, the reason was because their site always crashes. And so I wanted to have different internet connections, just because I figured that maybe one would connect faster than another. So no, it wasn't IP addresses. And in fact, I used an incognito window and a regular window side by side on each device. In order to be able to log in, I had it all set up ahead of time with the login information

typed in. So I could just click sign in at the right time, put it in the bag and go. Of course, it involved a lot of refreshing 15 or 20 minutes of just sitting there and refreshing, refreshing. And yeah, my wife was helping me. She was right. You profited what about 600 bucks or more yeah over 500 anyway yeah over 500 bucks so man i spent i spent most of the week trying to figure out how to redeem my stupid cnb points for more than more than a penny each if i had just cashed them out at about 0.83 right and and spent and spent an hour buying coins right i i would have saved a tremendous amount of time and and made so much more money than the little bit of optimization i did so it's it's just it's a good it's i find it useful sometimes step back and say

like with with all this optimization i was trying to do with with cmb it's like sometimes it's just not worth it you know just just cash out what you can however it's easy um in situations where um where it's difficult i mean it just wasn't it wasn't worth my time to do that but it sounds like you found you found a great way to uh what you're talking about i need to go but what you're talking about with the gift cards registering different addresses that's not limited to um just the coin deal right right if you're talking about with the gift cards registering different addresses, that's not limited to just the coin deal. Right, right. If you have any deal that's a limited deal, limited to one per household, and you're looking to ship it to more than one place, looking to help other people get involved without

taking their credit card information, then that can be a good way to use up some of those gift cards to liquidate some of that on regular spend without having to buy money orders or do whatever funny business you're typically doing to liquidate some of that on regular spend without having to buy money orders or do whatever funny business you're typically doing to liquidate your card. So in this case, I was able to liquidate at least a piece of several different gift cards in a very quick and easy way that's going to be profitable. And in fairness, it took a little time to set all that up. So maybe it took me an hour, hour and a half of total work on this deal. But to profit a little over 500 bucks, it was worth that time to put in. So like you said, I feel like if you spend a lot of time analyzing those small things

and then you, you know, close your eyes and, and miss out on the low hanging fruit, then that was me in the forest for the trees. Exactly. Exactly. All right. That was great. Thanks, Nick. And thanks everyone for, uh, watching or listening. Um, where, where can they find us if they want to, uh, if they want to continue to follow, uh, information from frequent miler. If you want more of this, you go to the frequent miler.com. That's T H E frequent miler.com. The frequent miler.com. Or you can find us on Facebook.

We have a frequent miler Facebook page and the frequent miler insiders Facebook group. So you can type that into the search box, FrequentMiler Insiders, click to join our group and answer the question, the verification question. Join our Facebook group and connect with other readers and ask and answer questions. You can find us on Twitter at FrequentMiler. You can find me at Nick at FM on Twitter. And you can find our YouTube page, which again is FrequentMer. You can also find this if you're watching this in video form or on Facebook, and you'd rather listen to it in podcast format. You'll find it on all your favorite podcast formats, Apple, Spotify, Google Play, out there for the web. There are links for all of those in our weekend review post, which publishes

every Saturday morning. So you'll find that Saturday mornings on the frequent miler.com. If you're looking for specific links to those podcasts. Thank you guys very much for being here. Thanks, Greg. It's been a lot of fun. Always is. Take care and enjoy your weekend. Yeah.

Thanks, Nick. And before I say goodbye, just one more thing. If you have a podcast platform that you want us to be on that we're not, let us know. We'll get ourselves added there. All right. That's it for this week. Bye, everyone. Take care.

Thank you.