Frequent Miler on the Air - Mastering Marriott’s Madness | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep247 | 3-22-24

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

In some ways Marriott can be the Frankenstein’s monster of rewards programs. There's lots of good stuff about the program...and lots of bad stuff too, all sloppily sewn together. (01:36) - More advice about how to pronounce "Qatar"! (Mailbag) Read our post on how to pronounce "Qatar": https://frequentmiler.com/how-to-pronounce-qatar/ (08:46) - Ritz Carlton Card (Card Talk) Read more about the Ritz Carlton card here: https://frequentmiler.com/yes-the-ritz-card-is-now-the-best-value-marriott-card/ (21:41) - Alaska wants you to pay to see ads (Crazy Thing) (25:00) - Buy Choice points with 50% bonus (0.69c per point) (Mattress Running the Numbers) Read more about the Choice points discount here: https://frequentmiler.com/buy-choice-points-with-30-discount-0-69cpp/  (33:20) - United to offer family mileage pooling (Award Talk) (37:45) - Chilean airline JetSmart to adopt American’s AAdvantage loyalty program later this year (Award Talk) (40:47) - Finnair points are now Avios (but there doesn’t yet appear to be a way to move them to BA, Iberia, etc.) (Award Talk) (43:59) - JetBlue is cancelling routes (Award Talk) (46:56) - Wells Fargo autograph journey now live 1 to 2 choice (Award Talk) Main Event: Mastering Marriott’s Madness (48:39) - Huge number of hotels worldwide (nearly 9,000) This post can help you find out if you're eligible for the various Marriott cards: https://frequentmiler.com/marriott-card-eligible/ (52:36) - Bonvoy Basics Read our complete guide to Marriott Bonvoy here: https://frequentmiler.com/marriott-bonvoy-complete-guide/ (1:04:25) - Earning points See the best credit card offers here: https://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-sign-up-offers/ (01:09:42) - Earning free night certificates (01:10:30) - Earning elite status Listen to our Easy Marriott elite status episode here: https://frequentmiler.com/easy-marriott-elite-status/ Read: Shortcuts to Marriott Elite status https://frequentmiler.com/shortcuts-to-marriott-platinum-elite-status/  (01:14:57) - Questions about paying for rent with the Alaska card via Bilt... with high rent of $3600/mo, which card should I use...Alaska with the fee or Bilt without the fee? (Question of the Week)  to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don't forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit - "Ocean Deep" by 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, Mastering Marriott's Madness. Marriott Bonvoy. It's kind of the Frankenstein monster of rewards programs. There's lots of good stuff. There's lots of bad stuff. And it's all like sewn together sloppily. It's alive. They have hotels literally all over the world. And sometimes you're going to be in places where Marriott is the right place for you to stay. And so knowing about the program is a good thing. We're going to get into all the basics and some tips and tricks around how to get the most out of the program. And it truly is madness, right?

There's some craziness because it's such a big program. There's some craziness that makes it challenging. I think even for people like us that write about these things all the time, I still have to go back and reference some of our resources. We'll talk more about that later on today. You'll find out why you're going to have to reference those too. But before we get into all that, remember, we have the timestamps in the show notes. So if you want to jump around, jump ahead to a segment, return to something later on, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes and wherever you're watching this show or listening to it. Don't forget to like it. Give us a thumbs up, leave some feedback, leave a comment.

We appreciate all of those things. Right now, though, let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Mitsu, and I'm almost certainly mispronouncing that name. And that's ironic given the contents of Mitsu's mail. So Mitsu says, love your podcast. And then goes on to say lots of complimentary things about the podcast, the blog. I'm not going to read any of that because that's not the meat of it. It's not that we don't appreciate it. Thank you, Mitsu. The summary of the first paragraph is, love your

podcast, but. But. There's got to be a but. All right. Now let's get into the meat of it. I know Greg is set in his ways. We're not starting off so good, Mitsu. Old Greg, set in his ways i know i'm an old cranky old man he's the cranky elderly guy at the show i'm setting my ways

mitsu i don't care if your name isn't pronounced that way i'm setting my ways all right getting back to the email but this email is for nick because i feel like i may have a potential solution to the cutter guitar cutter pronunciation conundrum smiley face at least for him so meaning nick at least for nick since he still seems to be open to pronouncing it slightly more clearly yeah haha mitsu aha that's what's said in my ways as the elderly guy it's lucky nick hasn't said in his ways right um mitsu says i've watched a native speaker explain how qatar is pronounced and I agree that the real authentic pronunciation is pretty difficult for us English speakers. And as an aside, I want to say that we have a blog post and a video on YouTube about how to pronounce this country, this airline. And the short answer

is for English speakers, we do. We can't really say the name correctly, or most of us can't. It can't say it the way- Speak for yourself, Greg. I'm not so set in my ways. That's right. That's right. So people have a lot of different ways of saying it. And the most common ways are Qatar, Qatar, and cutter. That's my summary of the most common ways are Qatar, Qatar, and cutter. That's my summary of the most common ways to say it. All right. So back to the giant male. Mitsu says, but it occurs to me, also inspired by one of these videos, and Mitsu's not talking about Frequent miler videos, but some other video, that simply saying cutter rather than cutter is pretty darn close to the right pronunciation.

The guy who made the video I'm thinking of said specifically that Qatari don't really care how people pronounce it, except cutter, rhyming with gutter, isn't their favorite. I don't think it's so much about how native Qataris think of it, since in English, most of our country names don't sound anything like the real pronunciation of their countries. But I do think it's confusing, since I think even in English, most people don't pronounce Qatar, Qatar, cutter as cutter. And so lots of people, including me, had no idea what Greg was talking about for a long time until I at least finally realized he must be referring to Qatar. Ironically, the pronunciation I hear the most often is Qatar, which isn't right either.

But Qatar at least sounds a bit closer to the correct pronunciation, while at the same time is pretty easy to say. I'm just going to start calling them QR. QR. QR. They're like a QR code. That's right. That's right. It's code for Qatar, Qatar, QR. Okay. All right. I'm going to quit my jokes right there. Yeah. So nobody

really knows how to say this the right way. They do. I'm sure somebody that lives there does, but, but yeah, we've had the videos and stuff and ask lots of different people and everybody seems to say it like just a little bit differently than everybody else. And yeah, I wish there was just a, a universally accepted English pronunciation, like Germany. Can we just turn it into like Germany and create a new name? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, totally. You know, my reaction is I think it has a point that utter might be confusing to a lot of people. I'm sure. Yeah. My guess, though, is that even though we know it's completely wrong, that Qatar is going to be clearer to English listeners about what we're saying than any other pronunciation. I don't think, I'm old and set in my ways, but I don't think Qatar is going to solve the problem.

I don't think people would know what we're talking about if we say Qatar either. It'd be exactly Mitsu's problem, right? That like, it'll take somebody forever to figure out what cat-er, when did the, were we talking about the Hello Kitty plane? Is this like, you know, like what's going on here? So yeah, I think that that is going to lead to even more confusion. You're right. Probably just calling it Qatar, even though we know it's wrong, is probably the way to go because then everybody will know what we're talking about, even if it's wrong.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It occurred to me another reason to do that is when speaking about the people of that country, you wouldn't say Qatari, but you would say Qatari, you know, and that's closer to Qatar. So anyway, so yeah, I think I'll try to say Qatar going forward, even though I know it's not right in any sense of thing. But it's, I think, an understandable way to pronounce it. And I'll try, despite being set in my ways. All right, moving on from that. Wait, wait, wait.

Under over on four days before we get somebody from that region of the world that corrects our pronunciation on Qatar. Oh, well, you don't have to limit it to that region of the world. Well, okay. That's true. Someone who flew that airline recently and heard them saying the name, they know 100% that it's pronounced this way or that way or the other way. Just read the comments of our video or our blog post on this topic. And it's kind of hilarious because you'll have, especially in the blog post, you have dozens of people saying with a thousand percent assurity that it's pronounced this way or that way. And they don't agree with each other, the different comments. I was giving more credibility

to the person who says, well, I'm from there and this is not right kind of a thing. But you know, you're absolutely right that we will get lots of comments about how we're saying Qatar wrong. But, you know, that's just we'll take one for the team. We've already given Qatar so much airspace on this show, how to pronounce it, that I think I'm done with it. So let's move forward to this week's card talk

for the card talk segment. What do we have up, Greg? Today's card talk is brought to you by Ritz-Carlton. No, it's not. No, it's not. But that is the topic of today's card talk is the Ritz- Carlton credit card, which is, I believe, the only Marriott Bonvoy card whose name does not start with a B. Thank goodness for that. It's not a bodaciously bountiful, beautiful Bonvoy card. It's the Ritz-Carlton card. So we appreciate it for that.

Yes, thank you for that. I'm glad I finally have cleared my wallet of letter B. No, you know what? I haven't even because we still have the business one. All right. So the Ritz card, this is not available for new applicants. So you can't get you can't go out and apply for this card. You need to have another Chase Marriott card and upgrade to the Ritz card. And we'll talk more about that, I think, in a second or two. But the basics of the card, $450 annual fee. So it's kind of pricey, but you get quite a bit for your $450. So we'll talk about that too. No foreign transaction fee, of course. Like we said, you have to upgrade from another Chase card and it has to be a Chase consumer card. And your card

has to have been open for at least a year in order to upgrade to the Ritz card. There's something to do with the Card Act and not increasing your fees in the first year, or at least how they interpreted it. I think that they won't let you upgrade until your card has been open for at least a year in order to get the Ritz card. Is it worth it? Yeah. Well, let's talk more about the details of the card. So it earns six points per dollar at Ritz and Marriott properties. It earns three points per dollar for airline tickets, car rentals, restaurants, and two points per dollar everywhere else. That's a snoozer. And saying that two points per dollar everywhere else, oh, that sounds good. But these points are not as valuable as some other points where you could earn two points per dollar everywhere and get

transferable points like with Capital One has a bunch of cards that offer that. Amex has a card that offers that. Citi. So you can do much better with your spend than with a Marriott card, especially because points aren't worth as much as transfer roll points would be worth okay um the the card does have a big spend bonus if you spend seventy five thousand dollars per calendar year you get platinum elite status i i don't recommend that for basically because of how i said that it's not that valuable to put spend on the card in general. But it has some really nice perks that you don't have to do any spend in order to get.

First off, every year upon renewal, you get a 85K free night certificate. So it's a certificate that's good for any hotel that costs up to 85,000 Marriott points for the night. And you can add up to 15,000 points on top of that. So you could book up to 100,000 point hotel night with that certificate. It also gives you $300 annual credit for airline incidental fees. So you just use your card to pay for things like a seat upgrade or luggage or a whole host of things. And then you just contact Chase or secure message them and say, hey, can you reimburse that?

And they will. And so right there. So before I go on to the other perks, I mean, right there, you've got a very valuable free night certificate, easily worth $500 or more as far as not the certificate, but the stay you can book. You could book a $500 or more stay with that easily. And then $300 in airline incidental credit. So you're at at least $800 of value for this $450 annual fee. You get free authorized users, which is especially valuable because of the next thing. You get, and any of your authorized users get, a priority pass select membership, which gives you a priority pass with unlimited guests.

So most cards, even the Sapphire Reserve card, which is chase's very similar but but you know ultimate rewards card but ultra premium card uh the the ritz cards version uh well sorry the chase uh sapphire reserve card is limited to two guests this one is not so you could bring in your whole family into a priority pass lounge um and it's not restricted the way all Amex priority passes are and some Capital One priority passes are in that you can use this for priority pass restaurants to get free meals. You could use it at priority pass, like other miscellaneous priority pass things like- Yeah, my wife used to get a massage. It'd be a relaxed spot. Just not recently on a trip. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um, so, so that's great. And, and pretty pass has been, it used to be, I used to say, well,

pretty passive, mostly valuable outside of this country, but they've been expanding quite a bit, I think in, in, in this country. So more and more, I'm seeing Priority Pass opportunities domestically. So that alone, you're getting, I think, the most valuable version of Priority Pass that I'm aware of as an automatic perk of this card. And you can give that perk to all your friends and family if you want to, because you can add them as free authorized users. You don't have to give them the credit card. You just add them as a free authorized user and then request from Chase that they get their Priority Pass card and then you give them that. The card also gives you automatic gold status, which isn't worth a lot, and

three club level upgrades at Ritz Properties, which is sort of worth negative amounts in my book. Yeah, they aren't very valuable because you have to book a specific rate in order to be able to use those. And so that specific rate is not usually the cheapest rate available. So you're overpaying a little bit to begin with. And then obviously you have to value getting the lounge access, which admittedly lounge access at Ritz Properties is usually pretty good and it's something that you can't get for free. So you don't get lounge access with

elite status at Ritz Properties. And ordinarily you don't get upgraded to a club level room at Ritz Properties either. I don't think I've heard of any data points of that anyway. You have to pay if you want access to that. So mean it's not necessarily negative value but i've i've used i've had the card for years and years and i've used one of these once yeah no exactly um the thing is even even when you find an opportunity to use that you should check other like discount rates for just booking a club room straight up and it you might be able to find for example like a triple a rate or something that's cheaper than the rate that's required in order to use one of these club level upgrades and that's where it's sort of negative value plus the it's a hassle to use you can't just

you can't just apply it to a reservation you already made and um uh and then the reason i find it negative is because i i just i i don't want to even think about these things but they show up in my marietta when i'm trying to see my my free night certificates that come from other cards or from this card this like messes up the display and i don't i just don't want to even see them true bro that is annoying say you have like 13 free night certificates and you're like oh my my goodness, like nine of these things are, uh, you know, garbage. So, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. So all that out of the way, is it worth upgrading to this and who is it worth it for? What do you think? Yeah. I mean, I think this is great for anyone who would highly value having priority pass and you back for the annual fee. And then it's sort of like

getting the priority pass for free on top of that in a way. So I think most people who travel a decent amount, this card is a really good card. This is one of my favorites. I have a big library of cards and this is one of my favorites. Yeah, I agree. I have two Ritz cards now myself. My wife has a Ritz card because it's just a good deal. The $300 in airline incidental credits, like Greg said, you do have to secure a message, chase, or call in order to ask for those reimbursements. They're not automatic. But the nice thing is that lots of different things can qualify. Officially, there's bag fees and seat selection and stuff, but unofficially lots and lots of stuff works. I mean, I had award taxes reimbursed on a bunch of award flights last year. And then of course,

baggage and seats on spirit and stuff like that. So it's very easy. And we've had lots of data points of things that you would never think would qualify for this that, you know, have, because it's all up to the person who, who, you know, manually submits the reimbursement. So there's a lot of latitude there. So that $300 is relatively easy to use. And then, yeah, like the 85K cert. I mean, just obviously, even if you don't use it for an 85K property, even if you used it for a property

that was like 65 or 70K, it's pretty easy to get, you know, four or $500 in value or more out of it. So you don't even have to maximize it in order to, to get great value out of that free night certificate. So yeah, I love this. A few people, if you have an old one out there, you might be like, wait, four 50, because if you opened one many years ago, you may be grandfathered in. I still am on one of mine to a $395 annual fee. And that's a slamming deal that they'll have to try out of my cold dead hands someday.

You know, certainly if you've got that, don't give it up. But yeah, so I, this is a great card. I've upgraded a couple of them in recent times and anecdotally I've shared the story, I shared it last week and then I got a couple of questions about, about the anecdotal experience I shared last week where I've had older Marriott cards that I've upgraded about a week before the annual free night certificate posts. Because if you upgrade to this, the way it's supposed to work is that your anniversary date changes to the date that you upgrade and your next certificate is supposed to post a year from when you upgrade. But I have upgraded right around my anniversary date. I don't know exactly when the anniversary date is, but I did it about a week before the annual certificate had posted to the account. And I

got lucky both times and I got the certificates from both cards within that next week. So both the card I upgraded from and the Ritz card. So that's not like a guarantee. That's just a gamble that I made and not something I would recommend. generally speaking, I've always recommended that people wait until after their free night certificate posts and then upgrade that way you don't risk not getting a certificate at all for that year. Um, but you know, I gambled a little bit and, and one, if you've got a brand new Marriott card though, that's been open less than a year, I don't think that that play exists for you.

So you just want to wait until after your year has passed and upgrade. Okay. Yeah. That's a good safety tip there. Yep. Okay. So that's the Ritz card. Great card to have and hold and keep forever and ever. Let's talk next about what crazy- Don't put too much spend on it. Right. Right. Correct. No, no, no. You know, actually, hold on. Let me back up to that for a second because I found that interesting. I hadn't actually thought about this. So I just

did the math. And so I'm going to hit you with a question that you probably haven't thought about really either. But we said, don't do any spend on it, probably, because Marriott points, we'll talk later, or we found them to be worth a little bit less than a penny a point. Although in the notes that Greg wrote before this, he said, but it's pretty common to be able to find opportunities to use them for one cent each. So to keep the math easy, if you said, OK, well, 2X, if I'm going to use the points at one cent per point or better, this is kind of like a 2% card, right? So if you do 75K spend on that,

instead of say a Bank of America card, where if you had platinum on our status, you can earn 2.625% cash back, right? So your opportunity costs there then is what? The 0.625% on the 75K spent. That comes out to $468.75. Is platinum status not worth it? At 468, rather than having to get the brilliant card, which you can't even get the bonus for. It could be worth that much, but I think, and we'll get into this, but I think the brilliant card, if you're willing to spend that much, I think the Brilliant card is the way to go. Even though the Brilliant card costs more, it comes with perks that will offset the extra. All right. And you could have both.

You could have the Ritz card and the Brilliant. You could. Yes. You just can't get the welcome bonus on the Brilliant, but you could get the card. Okay. We'll come back to that in a bit then maybe. So let's talk about what crazy thing did Alaska Airlines do this week? Yeah.

Alaska has a new offering, which they'll let you pay $5 a month for the benefit of getting ads a bit sooner than everybody else. So if you like reading Alaska's ads and you want in. Now, you know, I'm being a little bit facetious, but for $5 a month, you also get one free in-flight Wi-Fi credit each month. Now, that's use it or lose it. It's not like you could accumulate them up to 12 over a year or anything like that. So I think in-flight Wi-Fi costs around $8 with Alaska. So saving a little bit. Um, so I think in-flight wifi costs around eight bucks with Alaska. So saving a little bit, you know, so if, if you know, you fly that, you know, every single month with Alaska and would want wifi every single month, then this is a small discount. Um, but the other benefits, uh, that they described with this is, uh, advanced alerts

to some of our biggest fair sales of the year. Subscribers will be notified the night before a sale is announced. Take advantage of huge savings and seat selection. So. Yeah. Wait, you have to pay for ads? You have to pay for ads. Yeah. Isn't it usually the other way around? Like, if you get the Kindle with the ads, you pay less for the Kindle, right? Right, right. I don't get this. Hold on a second. You're going to pay to I certainly wouldn't do this, but I don't fly Alaska very much. I guess if you're really into Alaska's sails and maybe if you've been burned by not seeing them until people have snapped them up, then you'd want to get in on this. Maybe. Yeah, I know. I mean, you know, the thing about airfare sails is that, you know, there's all these algorithms, right?

It's not like really somebody's flipping a lever. I mean, they are sometimes, I guess, when they want to put something on sale. But in general, like when it comes to the cash airfares anyway, like they change all the time. It's not like a person, you know, like flipping things up and down, right? It's a computer system. So like something might be cheap at any time, any day. They may not have advertised it. And so like you're only going to get the ones that they actually advertise, which I don't

know. I just can't even imagine. No, that's a really good point. And also, if the sale is really great, there's going to be blogs and things. Right. Posting about it as soon as the emails go out. Probably even before the email goes out, because the email is going to be at like nine o'clock in the morning,

but the sale is going to start in the middle of the night or something. Yeah, I don't know. Wow. Wow. $5 a month for that. Okay. All right, Alaska. And, you know, if you're going to fly monthly

and like only once or twice a month or something, then yeah, I guess, obviously, if you save three bucks on the Wi-Fi, I guess. But yeah, I mean, if you're going to fly a ton, I think there's probably Wi-Fi subscriptions you can get. But anyway, okay, crazy Alaska, there's no way I'm paying you $5 to get your emails like, you know, 10 minutes sooner than everybody else. Forget about it. Okay, so that's what crazy thing. Let's talk about mattress running the numbers. This week's mattress running the numbers. We have choice privileges points on sale. And we've talked a lot about choice privileges over the last year. So you can buy choice points with a 50% bonus, which means buying the points for just under seven tenths of a cent per point.

Right. Zero point six, nine cents per point. So you got to buy 12,000 or more points to get that 50% bonus. And it's on until April 9th. So not very long, but a couple of weeks anyway. So is it worth buying Choice Privileges points for less than seven-tenths of a cent? What do you think?

I like this. So Choice, now in my case, I have a lot of Choice points, so I'm not a buyer right now, but if I didn't have them, I would be a buyer. Choice is sort of randomly very valuable. And what I mean by that is you can't really count on them. Wherever you happen to be traveling to may or may not have any good, might not have any choice properties, might not have any that you want to stay at. But they sort of randomly have some nice properties

scattered around the country, around the world. And also another part that's kind of random is how good the deal is. So sometimes the point price for a hotel is not that great, but sometimes it's really good. I found over and over again that getting over one cent per point on choice properties when the occasion strikes happens pretty often. They have some downsides and upsides. One big, big downside is you can't book a choice property more than 100 days in advance. So if you're a big advanced planner, that might be very, very frustrating to you. You can't book with points, that is. You can book with cash, but you can't book with points more than 100 days. Right, right. Now with points, one of the great things is that you can often book higher level rooms for the same point price. Unlike most

hotel chains, they don't charge like, here's the point price for a base room and here's a point price for a suite or anything like that. Basically, each hotel decides which room types are available for points bookings. And if they're available at all, they're available for that same price as the base room. So I've seen hotels where you could get the presidential suite for the same price as the base double room. And so that can be fantastic if you look into that. Wait, wait, a choice presidential suite, Craig? You're going to have to share that one at some point because I don't think there are too many choice properties with a presidential, but maybe. The point is that- They can call the suites whatever they want. Whatever they want to call them. That's true. It might not meet your

definition. The Motel 6 presidential suite might not be what you're expecting. But it's a good point because there's lots of places where I've found this opportunity to book a suite. And, yeah, I mean, being able to book that for the same price as a regular room, obviously, could be very desirable. Yeah. That's especially true with Choice took over Radisson Americas. And so there are tons of Radisson properties where you can do this, where you can book a suite or at least a high-end room for the same price, point price. And so that sort of indirectly makes the value of the points better. Because if you look at just, oh, how much value am I getting compared to the best rate, best

price available for this hotel for the dates I'm going to stay, you might calculate, okay, I'm getting one cent per point value, but you're also getting a nicer room. And now you might say, well, I wouldn't have paid for that nicer room, but still, you're getting a nicer room. So your points are worth somewhat more than that one cent per point in that example, but you can decide how much to value that. And they do have some – they're kind of known for the low-end off-the-highway hotels, but they do have some mid to high end brands, especially the Cambria hotels are nice, mid to high end. And the Ascend collection are independent hotels that range from not so nice to very nice, just depending on where you go. They also have a bunch of nice Ascend and other brands in the Nordic countries

that used to be a group together and called Nordic Choice, but they're now called Strawberry Hotels. But it doesn't matter. You can book them through the Choice Privileges website, and there's some really nice properties there and often really great value. Finally, they have a partnership with Preferred Hotels of the world, which are some really high-end hotels. And you can use your choice points to book the participating Preferred Hotels, which is not all Preferred Hotels. Good news there. Some people have noticed over the past few months that the award calendar for these preferred hotels booking with choice wasn't working. But I checked this morning before recording and at least the property I looked at, I was able to find open dates on the

calendar right away. So it appears to be working again. So that's great news. The bad news is you have to get someone on the phone who knows what you're talking about when you call Choice to try to book these. It's an adventure, unless you're lucky. It's an adventure. So making the choice to book preferred hotels may not be so preferred. But yeah, I mean, if you can get one, if you've written about a couple of them that looked quite nice. So. So, all right. So the moral of the story here is that you can do much better than the cost of buying the points. And none of that, by the way, mentions some of the oddball things choice has done over the last couple of years with experiences. They just launched this week auctions for experiences and they got some cool looking ones in there. I saw there's a Chicago bulls game that isn't going to be sometime in April.

It's not live yet, but but you'd get like a couple of sweet tickets and also get to watch warmups court side and and get a picture, you know, down by the quarter or whatever. So, you know, some things like that that you couldn't otherwise do.

We've seen that for college sports also from choice. They've done some pretty cool experiences. So yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So I don't know how many, uh, points make sense to buy in advance for, for potential opportunities, but I find it nice to have a, uh, a bunch. How many is a bunch to you, Nick?

I don't know. So I don't have enough right now. I feel like I would be more comfortable with, you know, I don't even have 80,000 right now. So I feel more comfortable with 80 to 100 to start. And then probably, you know, if I were in that area, I might even consider a little bit more. I wouldn't want to go two nights because remember, you can transfer city thank you points one to two to choice privileges. So you do have that option if you're collecting city thank you points. We don't collect many city thank you points in my household. So that's why I would be more likely to consider buying. And I think I probably will buy some because I feel like I'm a little lower than I'd like to be. Although I haven't used choice points tons of times these last couple of years. But I think actually I'm interested in keeping an eye on the auctions because I feel like that's something that'll get forgotten about pretty quickly. And there may end up being some opportunities because the number of people who both have choice points and remember to take a look at those, I think is probably going to be lower than with other programs. So I imagine there

could end up being some opportunities there. Yeah, for sure. Okay. All right. So that's match returning the numbers, choice privileges, maybe by those points, maybe not up to you, but certainly better than transferring one-to-one from other programs. That's for sure. All right. Let's talk about award talk. This week's award talk, we had several different items up. The first news item up is that United Airlines, United Mileage Plus, is going to offer family mileage pooling. I'm excited about this. This is something that we haven't seen

from the U.S.-based programs other than Spirit. I think Spirit's the only one that offers this so far, right? So United's going to be number two on that, I think. I don't know. Does JetBlue have it, too, maybe? Yeah, JetBlue has it as well. Maybe they do. I'm not going to try to say which U.S. programs don't have it.

I know Hawaiian has a way to share miles. It's not common. But at least of the bigger U.S. airlines, it's great to see this happening. I mean, at the time we're recording this, it's more on the rumor side, but it's from a pretty reliable source. So the ability to pull your miles together with your family members so that you can actually book meaningful awards, I think is great. I really, really, really, really, really hope that Delta and American Airlines and Alaska for that matter, follow their lead and do the same. Yeah, that'd be awesome. I think this is really good because it enables, you know, not only like first thought, of course, because I have young kids. Oh, well, my kids could earn miles on our flights and we can pull those together. That's useful. And that's one of the things I like about how Spirit does that, even though we don't fly Spirit often. I think that's a smart thing that they enable for people

that have a credit card or elite status or whatever. So it'd be nice to see this available broadly with United for that, but also even just for like a player one, player two situation. If a couple playing in two player mode, if they don't always travel together maybe they have two different jobs that has them traveling and and so when it's time to redeem man it'd be so much easier like if my wife my wife doesn't travel but if she did travel a bunch for work be so much easier if i could redeem all the miles that she earned like together pooled with mine and i can make the redemptions from my account so that way i can handle the phone calls if there need to be phone calls because she doesn't want to have to mess with that stuff. But if she were earning some of the miles, then great, it'd be easier to handle that. I like that

about Aeroplan that our points are pulled together there. And so I think that's going to be very advantageous for a lot of people. And if you play together with somebody that isn't in the same household, I don't know what the family mileage pooling have we have we gotten a rumor or i don't know an inkling as to who is going to be eligible for family pooling um it's about some kids or is it going to be like potentially anyone it's just that there's a there will be a rule against being in more than one pool so you know um but then maybe you know if you have a like an adult for instance, somebody that doesn't live with you may potentially be able to pull with them. And so, you know, whereas you may not otherwise be able to pull your points, your transferable points together to go to United. If you're able to pull your United points together, that'll it'll just be a good thing.

So I look forward to that. But if you hadn't set it up yet, which in my case I hadn't, you can't create it. Apparently, they had too much fraud. They had people basically selling points. And so I'm hoping that United implements some way to avoid that issue so that they can do what's best for the customer without having to take it away later because of people buying and selling points. That kills me how much that whole industry of buying and selling points really messes with the rest of us in a number of ways. A lot of customer unfriendly things have happened because of that industry. And that's unfortunate. Agreed. Agreed.

Agreed. I didn't even realize that Air Canada had taken away the ability to create that. So my wife and I had ours pulled and I forgot we had them pulled until we transferred points from built. And I was like, oh, wow, look at that. They're pulled. That's awesome. So I didn't realize that you couldn't do that anymore.

So good, good, good point there. All right. So United is going to do that. That's not the only piece of award talk this week. Chilean airline JetSmart is going to adopt American Airlines miles for those flights. I mean, which you could already do, I believe, by crediting to American, but now it'll be like when you are signed up for the JetSmart loyalty program, that's what you'll be earning as American Airlines Advantage miles. Interesting. Weird.

It's very interesting. It's very weird. I mean, in a way, it's similar, I think, to Avios, how British Airways, Iberia, a whole bunch of programs earn Avios. Sure. What's a little different here is that the Advantage program, I mean, it has AA in the name of it. That's not what's different here, Craig. What's different here is, had you ever heard of JetSmart before this week? Oh, I fly JetSmart all the time. Oh, yeah.

Okay. All right. I see. I've never heard of JetSmart. Never heard of this airline. It's just an odd one in my mind because it's like, I can't imagine that there was so much demand for this from either side that it would even happen. I just say it seems like a strange partnership to me. Not that I have anything against traveling to Chile.

It's just like, how many routes does America even offer to get there? I mean, it's not a big hub for them. So it just seems kind of weird. But I think it's interesting, though, on the other hand, because clearly they are following the Avios model's lead there. And if this goes well, who knows? Maybe there's some other opportunities where that will happen. And I actually think that that's got its conveniences, especially with the Avios program. We've seen each of the individual programs still maintain some of their own sweet spots and their own you know quirks and features and

drawbacks right also but uh you know i would i would think i would enjoy seeing that from some other airlines where we may be able to move points back and forth and take advantage of different things i just i like does jet smart even have an award chart like i know nothing uh and i don't know even if they do will it stay the same once they do this um you know it's it's uh there's there's no information there and i also wonder about the elite program will it be sort of merged together will you be earning uh loyalty points and things like that you know time will tell what kind of a route does jet smart like a route network does jet smart have i? I mean, do they? I haven't looked, but I imagine they fly all around Chile.

I mean, I can name a number of South American airlines I never in a million years would have known what JetSmart was. I think that's why it perplexes me. But hey, I mean, I guess it's probably a net win. There's probably no downside to it. It's just surprising. Yeah. All right.

Yeah. That's that. Speaking of that type of thing, though, that's not it, right? Finnair now has Avios. So Finnair points are now Avios. If you had Finnair plus points, you don't anymore. Now you've got Avios. They've converted over, I think. I don't think still as of now, right, you still can't move them to the other Avios programs.

Yeah. can't move them to the other Avios programs. They have Avios, but you can't move them, right? I have a bunch of Finnair Avios because there was a brief deal where you were able to buy Finnair points really cheaply. And it was still a good deal even considering that the Finnair points were going to turn into Avios three to two, if I remember right. So I had bought a bunch, and now I have a bunch of Finnair Avios. I cannot find a way to transfer them to British Airways or any of those other programs that use Avios yet. I'm still hopeful that this is brand new, and so no one's enabled that feature yet. And I haven't tried like calling or anything like that because there's no urgency for me. But anyway, that's where things stand now.

I did notice you can transfer your Avios from one Finnair account to another Finnair account for 10 euros. You could also do things like earn elite status or at least earn towards elite status by converting your Avios to tier points. So that could be another use for Avios if you're interested in Binaire elite status. The ability to transfer to another Binaire account for 10 euros could be useful for some people trying to combine points within a household that don't have an easy way to do it. Otherwise, you know, without having to wait the 90 days that you need to add somebody as an authorized user on a membership rewards card or something like that, that could come in handy, I imagine, although it

also could lead to the same problems we're talking about with United pooling. So we'll see how long that lasts. But but good to have that option anyway. So have you noticed anything interesting in terms of award pricing or is there anything notable here beyond the fact that it's happened? I haven't examined it closely, but we talked on a previous show about how their award chart is more zone-based than distance-based. So the prices didn't look great when we looked at the award chart, but it opens up potential opportunities that the other Avios programs may not. And so once we get the ability to move Avios around, that'll be more meaningful to people because unless you bought Finnair points like I did, you probably don't have them.

It's not easy to get them. Well, Capital One transfers to Finnair. Oh, Capital One does. Right. So if you have Capital One miles, then you've got a one-to-one transfer to Finnair Avios now, I guess. them it's not easy to get them until the capital one transfers to capital one does right okay yeah so if you have capital one miles and then you've got a one-to-one transfer to finnair obvious now i guess uh but but yes in general i guess a lot most people wouldn't have a lot of them yet so right right and uh and it gets more exciting once you can move obvious around because then you could take advantage of a transfer bonus to any one of the obvious programs and then move

it to the program that has the best award pricing for whatever you want to do. So that's why this is really exciting stuff going on and why I'm watching to see when we can move our Avios. All right, moving on to something completely different. You may have seen news that JetBlue has been canceling routes. They're hurting financially. They're kind of down the dumps. So the whole debacle with trying to buy Spirit didn't work out and cost them a lot of money. They lost that AA partnership deal that they used to have.

So things are just not good in JetBlue land for a number of reasons, and they're canceling routes. What I saw in the news was about them canceling routes to the West Coast. What I didn't realize was that that even affects me in Detroit. Detroit to New York, right?

Yeah, so I had a flight. I still technically do have a flight booked from Paris to Detroit through JFK, but the JFK to Detroit leg no longer exists. So they automatically rebooked me Paris to JFK, but then earlier than I arrive at JFK, a flight from JFK to Boston, and then a flight from Boston to Detroit, which that doesn't sound like a good- It seems inconvenient.

It seems inconvenient for a number of reasons. Yeah. It bums me out in so many ways. One way is I have on my to-do list, you remember that my wife has JetBlue Mosaic 4 and she has these four blade helicopter certificates that let us fly from New York area airports to Manhattan or the other direction. But you have to have a JetBlue flight in conjunction to book that. Sounds like you're going to New York after Paris. Sounds like you're going from Paris to New York and then finding a different way to Detroit. Yeah, maybe that's it. Maybe that's it.

Yeah. Bummer. Bummer. Big time bummer. Yeah, because I mean, that was convenient for you, right? To be able to fly to New York from Detroit and use those and probably thought you were going to have lots of opportunity and unfortunately unfortunately not so much. Yeah. Exactly. Uh, so it really ruins a jet blue for me for, um, not just the blade thing, but for international travel, the, the Boston still an option for international travel. Uh, cause we do still have a flight to Boston, but the timing does not match up well with the

international flights at all. So blah. Yeah. Bummer. Bummer. Too bad. And it stinks because JetBlue doesn't have any other domestic partnerships. So while they still had the American Airlines partnership, if they had canceled these, well, at least they probably could have rebooked you on an American flight, but now that's not going to happen. So yeah. Oh, yuck. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, that's that. All right. One last little quick piece of award talk. The Wells Fargo autograph journey card is now live. So that card is now available for applications. We talked about this in a previous episode just recently, maybe a week or two ago, we talked about this new card was coming and Wells Fargo now has

transfer partners. So you can transfer to all of their various partners, one of which is choice privileges, which we talked about earlier, and you can transfer one to two to choice privileges. So that's another option now for that. And top of Citi, I mentioned Citi before, I didn't mention Wells Fargo and it should have because with that autograph journey, you also have that opportunity. So cheaper way to get choice points. Yeah. Yeah. So if you have Wells Fargo autograph points or a city, thank you points and the city premier or prestige card, any of those combinations, you can transfer points one to two to choice. And I'm just mentioning that because going back to our previous segment

on the show, if I had those points available, I probably wouldn't be a buyer in the point sale to choice just because you have another way of getting the points at the time you need them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that would be on my mind because I mentioned before, I feel like I need some choice points and maybe I'd buy some, uh, maybe I would just apply for this Wells Fargo autograph journey card. I'm almost under five 24 and I would kind of like to get a Southwest card long-term. So I'm like, I'm trying to hold off just a couple more months here. So, uh, and I did try for the Southwest card card but i got denied for being over 524 so um so you know we'll uh we'll we'll see how that shakes out but i think that's why i'm gonna hold

off a little bit otherwise maybe i would do that instead of buying points yeah yep all right that brings us to this week's main event main event time mastering marriott's madness. We're going to do a mini deep dive into Marriott's Bonvoy rewards program. As you probably are aware, Marriott Bonvoy, it's a monster of a chain with so many brands that Marriott's website just says more than 30 brands. They can't even count how many brands they have, let alone how many hotels they have. Let's count it, 30. The marketing team just couldn't get any higher than that. That's just too many brands. Like, how are you supposed to know?

Anyway, let's not get into that. They have nearly 9,000 hotels worldwide. At least that's what the AI assistant on Google tells me. And as we know, they have a huge number of credit cards, most of which start with the letter B to refer to as the matrix of death for determining whether you're eligible for a welcome bonus on any one of those more than 30 cards. It's not more than 30. No, there's not more than 30, but there's a whole bunch. There's a bunch of Bonvoy cards. And very complicated rules about whether you'd be eligible for a welcome bonus. Befuddling rules.

Yes. So, all right. So, yeah. So you do need to consult the Matrix in order to figure that out. But that's not, you know,

that's good, I think. Also, reasons to enjoy Marriott, they have good elite benefits, right? So, I mean, you know, free breakfast, lounge access, that sort of thing. Well, most of the time anyway, right? Yeah. You do need a secret decoder ring to know what benefits you'll get where. So as long as you have that, you're good to go. But yeah, they do have pretty good elite benefits at some places. On the downside, as if the decoder ring wasn't a downside, but a downside of the program is they're absolutely plagued with destination fees, resort fees at many, many, many high-end properties.

And I hate that. Yes, as you should, as we all should. Yeah. Ugh, yuck. Hate that. Those two bullet points, the fact that you need a decoder ring to know what benefits you're going to get. And it sounds like a joke, but it's really not a joke. I legitimately have to go to our page about what elite benefits apply before I book a hotel often because I'm like, I can't remember what I'm supposed to get. And do I need to ask for it at check-in as my like choice thing? Or do I get it automatically in the U S is it a resort? Is it this like, Oh man, it's really, it's really terrible. Um, and I'm going to just about those resort destination fees. There's no escape. So Hiltonatt, Wyndham, they don't charge resort fees on award stays. Hyatt doesn't charge resort fees even on paid stays for top tier elites. Marriott,

it doesn't matter if you book with points. It doesn't matter if you're top tier elite. Doesn't matter if you're the king of England, you're going to be charged resort fees. Yeah, it's terrible. I hate that about, it makes me bitter about the free night certificates often because my free night certificate feels less free when I have to pay a resort fee in order to use it. And of course, you don't, you know, not all properties have those fees. So you don't necessarily have to, I guess, if you find a property that doesn't have them, but many of the higher end desirable places do have them. And so you're going to pay the resort fee and you're going to pay taxes on top

of the resort fee and you're going to get like next to no benefit in most cases for that. So I'm not a big fan. No. All right. Let's go over some basics of the Bonvoy program. You earn 10 points per dollar at most Marriott hotels. So if you booked a paid stay and you paid a hundred bucks, you would get a thousand points for that stay, for example. There are a few of the cheaper lower end brands that are five points per dollar, but most of them are 10 points per dollar. Right. They don't have an award chart. So how much a hotel costs in points, you find out the same way you find out how much it costs in cash is by searching for the

dates you want and saying you want to pay with points and see what Marriott tells you. Sometimes points are worth quite a bit, well over a penny a point. I've seen over two cents per point for some stays, but they tend to average more like 0.8 cents per point. So there's plenty of properties where you get very bad value for your points, and there are plenty where you get good. But the good news there is as long as you do even a little bit of moderate amount of cherry picking for making sure you're booking higher value properties with your points. It's pretty easy to get a penny per point value or better. They do have what used to be fifth night free awards, they will take off the cost of the cheapest night.

So if the nights vary in price from day to day, which they don't always, but whatever the cheapest night is, you won't have to pay. And if they're all the same price, like let's say every night is 50,000 points and it's a five-night stay, because of the stay five, pay four awards, you'd pay 200,000 points instead of 250,000 points for that stay. Which can be a good deal in some cases, especially like Greg said, I find it relatively easy to find properties where points are worth a penny per point or a little bit better than that even. And so if you're actually only paying for four of the nights or a five-night stay, if it was already a penny per point, that makes it obviously a little bit better. So you get to enjoy even better value out of your points if you need a five-night stay.

Yeah. And then many Marriott hotels offer multiple point price options for different room types. So like the base room will be like, you know, it'll be I'll make up a number 40,000 points for the night. But then you might see that that a Lakeview room, it costs 65,000 points. And if you look at the description, it says 40,000 points plus a 15,000 point upgrade, basically. So it's very inconsistent. It seems like hotels just make up whatever they want for the prices for those. I haven't seen any kind of pattern from one hotel to another around that. Free night certificates. You get those, for example, uh, annually from many different Marriott Bonvoy credit cards. Um, there are a couple Bonvoy credit cards where you have to pay,

or you have to spend a certain amount each year to get them. But, um, the, the free certificates, depending on which credit card you're getting them from or what promotion you earn them from. Most of them now are three different value certificates. There's 35K certificates, 50K certificates, and 85K certificates. There are others, so don't call our 800 number and complain. There are others, but those are the most common values. What they mean is, what a 35K certificate means is you can use it to book any hotels that cost 35,000 points or less. And let's say you find a hotel that costs 20,000 points. If you use your 35K free night certificate, it's gone.

You don't have 15,000 points left over or anything like that. It's just gone. But you could also use these to book something that costs a little bit more, up to 15,000 points more by adding Marriott points to the reservation. So you could use a 35K free night certificate to book a 50,000 point room night by adding 15,000 of your own points. It's important to note that you cannot use these to pay for upgraded rooms. So that stinks. It stinks. And sometimes it means you can't book the hotel at all. Like there may be a hotel you want to stay at where no standard rooms are available,

but you are seeing a point price for the hotel. And it's because all you see are these upgraded rooms and you just can't. There's just no physical way you could call them and they won't be able to do it either. You can't even if that but that price is less like if you have an 85 K certain Greg's example, the upgraded room is 65000 points. You still can't use the 85 K cert if it's not a standard room. Right, right. So that's that's very unfortunate. All right. Should we talk? Let's talk about the Elite program. It has five levels, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Titanium, and Ambassador Elite.

In order to earn those levels of Elite status, they count up how many nights you've spent at Marriott Hotels in the calendar year. And each level requires, so silver requires 10, the next level requires 25 nights, 50 nights, 75 nights, 100 nights. That last one, titanium, or sorry, ambassador elite status, not only requires 100 nights, but you have to have spent $23,000 at Marriott Hotels in order to qualify for that because it's so special. It's so exclusive and you get so many awesome benefits. You still pay the resort fee. You do. Yeah. So there are those five different levels. Really, the key level for most people is going to be platinum, but let's start with gold. So gold requires 25 nights or we mentioned earlier,

you have the Ritz card, get uh gold status and if you have there's actually several uh marriott cards and and amex platinum cards give you a marriott gold so it's easy to get gold status but it's not worth a lot you get uh you do have a chance of room upgrade but not to a suite uh you do get 2 p.m late checkout so that could be valuable um and you get a 25 point bonus on paid stays. So you get a few more points. Yeah. So instead of 10 points per dollar, you'll earn 12 and a half points per dollar at most

brands. So that's a little bump anyway. Platinum status is where it gets interesting. This is our free breakfast status, sort of. So platinum status gives you a 4 p.m. late checkout. That can be convenient. I like 4 p.m. late checkout. I think that's an awesome benefit to get. You get a 50 p.m. late checkout, that can be convenient. I like 4 p.m. late checkout. I think that's an

awesome benefit to get. You get a 50% point bonus. So instead of 10 points per dollar at most brands, you get 15 points per dollar at most brands. You get a welcome gift. And usually the welcome, well, I shouldn't say usually, sometimes that welcome gift will include an option to take free breakfast at properties. Other properties, you will just get breakfast for free. And then at yet other properties, you'll get lounge access. And so you'll have your breakfast in the lounge, most likely in those properties. You get room upgrades, which could include suites, could, not will, but could include suites. And in fact, if you've earned the 50 nights, the 50 elite nights in order to get your platinum elite status, then you get a choice benefit. You can pick from a couple of things.

And the one that's most valuable ish is that you can get five nightly upgrade awards. And so those can be applied to stays. It's a little complex with Marriott. You have to have enough of those to cover all of the nights of your stay. Each one's good for one night. So if you had a five of these and you have a five-night reservation, you can apply them. If you have a six-night reservation, you can't apply any of them. You need to have enough for every night of your reservation. And then the way the nightly upgrades work is you apply them in advance. You pick which room types you're willing to accept in exchange for your upgrade coupon, basically. And then starting five days before your stay,

they'll start looking for the ability to upgrade you. And I don't know what that means because it's some sort of a computer system algorithm thing as to whether or not you automatically get upgraded. It's not the case that like if that room is available, then you get it. It's just not the way it works. Maybe you'll get upgraded to it. And so it starts looking at five or five days out and then, you know, it stops, I think, 2 p.m. the day check-in or something. And it'll tell you, Oh, sorry, we weren't able to upgrade you and give you your coupons back. Yep. Yep. Um, so platinum is kind of the, the, the sweet spot in a way, like, because it's, it's not that hard to get, uh, and, um, and it does give a decent benefits at some hotels. Titanium is the next one that gives you, instead of the 50% point bonus on paid stays, you get 75% point bonus.

You also get, and this is all in addition to all the benefits of platinum, by the way. You also get United Silver Premier Elite status. So that could be really valuable. You get like free check bags, chance of upgrades and things like that. You also have the opportunity to get upgraded to suites at Ritz Carlton Hotels because platinum status people

do not qualify for that potential benefit at Ritz properties, but with titanium, you do. And if you get to titanium status through having 75 nights at Marriott Hotels, which is the standard way of getting there, then you also get another set of choice benefits like Nick was talking about.

You could pick from those five nightly upgrade awards or there's a couple other valuable ones that you could choose like a 40K free night certificate, or five elite nights. I'm sorry, five elite nights was one that you could have picked at the 50 night choice benefit. That's the only time it makes any sense because the only reason you would pick that is to get uh closer to titanium and in my opinion not um but once you're titanium picking that to try to get closer to ambassador doesn't make much sense for most people because ambassador the next level also requires that huge huge spend twenty three thousand dollars with marriott so um probably if you're spending $23,000 with Marriott,

you're already going to get to the a hundred nights. Although I don't know. I mean, I guess it depends. Yeah. You've got a really expensive property. I mean, you know? Yeah. Yeah. You spent a few nights on the North Island, uh, and boom. Right. Yeah. I mean, you do a honeymoon in the St. Regis Bora Bora or Maldives or whatever, you know, like it could be a significant chunk of the way there. Yeah. Yeah. So there are some special cases where it would make sense.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, so the titanium gives you small bumps. I think the United Premier Silver status, I think is probably the most exciting of the titanium benefits or the most potentially valuable for you, I think, in terms of something you can count on. Cause yeah. Okay. Maybe you'll get a sweet upgrade at a ritz maybe yeah but i did once i did once well there you go see i also failed to get them uh you know once or twice probably right

yeah okay and so ambassador status has a couple of benefits like a dedicated marriott agent and the ability to check in like choose your check-in time. You'd be there for 24 hours. You're 24. You can look that up if you want. If you're spending $23,000 a year at Marriott, you can look up more about that. Most people I think probably aren't. So ambassador is kind of like a man, kind of nice, but not all that important. All right. So that, that kind of runs down the elite benefits, right? Yeah. Yeah. Now let's, let's go over just real quickly, various ways of earning points. I mean, there's going to be more ways than we described, but the basic ways, earning

10 points per dollar at Marriott Hotels, earning more if you have elite status. Credit card welcome bonuses can be really big. Now those welcome bonus offers change regularly. So check out our blog, our Frequent Miler blog, and look at the best credit card offers page if you're interested in that, seeing what the up-to-date offers are. Credit card referral bonuses. So if you have credit cards and refer friends, you can earn points that way. Credit card spend. Is that a good way to earn your Marriott points?

Probably not. Probably not. And then it's unfortunate because that makes this program a little challenging because it's not easy to earn points anyway other than the new card welcome bonuses and maybe referral bonuses if you're playing, you know, within a household

and you're referring each other for some cards, maybe. But even then, if you got Amexex cards you probably have a better option for referring your household member if it's chase cards then you know then maybe it makes sense but uh but anyway yeah so no spend generally speaking doesn't make sense amex does occasionally offer some uh some spending offers where you'll get extra points per dollar spent. And those are sometimes just general, you know, spend X amount anywhere on the card and earn X points. And sometimes those can be worth it. Or authorized user bonuses. I don't think we've seen one of those on the Marriott cards lately, but it's worth keeping an eye out for those. Right. And Chase too will offer spend bonuses within categories of spend. Like they'll have like, you know, you'll earn 5X at grocery stores or whatever up to a certain amount of spend.

So watch out for those. Then it could be worth putting spend on the cards with those. True. There's miscellaneous promotions all the time. So we won't get into that. But, you know, keep your eye out for good promotions. Sometimes there's really good ones. Usually they're kind of a bum.

On that note, though, it's worth looking in the app if you're, cause you may miss an email or something, but if you've got the Marriott app and you go to the account section, there's a promos tab and there are promotions tab in there. And it's worth checking to register for anything that shows up in there. In fact, I just had a paid stay a couple of days ago. That's why it came into mind over the weekend. I had a paid Marriott stay, and luckily I had registered in that promotions section. Excuse me, within the app, I got double Elite Night credit and an extra thousand points on the stay I was going to make anyway. So it's worth checking there because you may not think to, you know, you may not notice it in your email.

You may miss notification, but in the app, it's really easy to register for something that shows up in your account. Yep. You can, of course, transfer points to Marriott from several different transferable points programs. Should you do that? No, no, probably not. I mean, you know, it's because we talked about before that Marriott points are generally worth a little less than a cent a point. Maybe you'll get about one cent per point. So your transferable points are generally worth more than that. Or you could just cash them out at one cent per point,

you know, and pay for your stay and earn 10 points per dollar plus your elite bonuses and all the rest of that. So generally speaking, no, if there's a transfer bonus and you're topping off for a really valuable award, it may be, you know, or you need a couple thousand points for a big stay, then yeah, I mean, I'm sure that there are some edge cases like that where it makes sense. But generally speaking, no, it wouldn't make sense to transfer to Marriott. Yeah, I agree. And I think they sell their points for 1.25 cents each standard. But every now and then they have a sale where it might be around like 0.9 cents per point. And I would much rather buy points for 0.9 cents each than transfer from a valuable transferable points program one-to-one to Marriott. That's like cashing out your valuable

points for less than a penny each, which I wouldn't want to do. You can also, am I right that you can, Marriott lets you now move your points. You could just get online. I think they have an online option to move your points to another person for free. You know, I forgot that you could do it online, but you're totally right. I wish I had remembered that because in the past you had to call to do this and you can only do, I think still a maximum of a hundred thousand points per year that you can move to another person, I believe. Unless if you know, tell me, okay.

And I meant to have my wife call to do this before the end of last year, because you can only do a hundred thousand points each year. And so slowly over the last few years, I've been trying to move her points over to my account. I totally forgot you could do it online because I would have just taken care of it myself if I had remembered that. So I'm kicking myself now for not having done that. But, but yeah, you can, it's free. It doesn't cost anything. And that's nice for those types of situations where my wife has Marriott points from some welcome bonuses. But usually, of course, this year I don't, but usually I have the Marriott elite status in the household. So we'd rather be redeeming points from my account. So we try

to move the points over each year. Yeah. Or next time you're talking to a friend or relative who says they have all these Marriott points, but they're useless. You hear that kind of thing all the time with different rewards programs that then say, all right, I'll buy you a beer if you transfer them to me. And that could be a good way to get them. Could be a great deal. Could be a great deal. So, all right. So you got those ways to earn points or accumulate them and put them together. And they can sometimes be decently valuable. Also, you got free night certificates. So you can get free night certificates we already mentioned from the various credit cards. And a number of those are annual certificates that you get every anniversary year. Unfortunately, you can't get those extended anymore.

Marriott used to allow an extension on those. So you can kind of get two years out of one and sometimes double up your certificates from two separate years. But nowadays, they're not doing that anymore. So you got to use it or lose it within that year after it's issued. Sometimes the credit card welcome offers come with free night certificates. Also, that can be another way you may end up with some free night certificates and various miscellaneous promotions. I registered for one last year where I had to stay like once or twice and I got a 35k free night certificate. I can't remember the details right now. But every now and then they'll run something like that where

you have to meet some sort of a standard and then earn a free night certificate. Yep. Yep. All right. Let's talk about shortcuts to elite status really briefly. And we are going to do this very briefly because we did a whole show on this. You should listen to a show called Easy Marriott Elite Status, which was episode 208. And there you'll get the full details. Or if you prefer to read, read the post called Shortcuts to Marriott Elite Status, and we'll have a link to it in the show notes. But real quick, easiest way by far to get Marriott Platinum Elite Status, which is kind of that sweet spot elite status, is simply get the Bonvoy Brilliant card. Now, it's a $650 card, but it automatically gives you platinum status.

It gives you a 85K free night certificate each year and $25 per month dining credit. So those two things could make up for most of that $650 annual fee if you value them highly. And then you get your platinum status. You also get 25 elite knights, whereas most consumer merit cards give you 15. So if you want to try to earn, let's say, titanium status, this will help you more than most Bonvoy cards. And finally, another way of going about it, instead of just getting the Bonvoy Brilliant and having Platinum status, is to have both a personal and business Bonvoy card.

Because while having two personal cards, they each give you like 15 or 25 nights with the Brilliant card. They don't stack together with multiple consumer cards. But if you have a consumer card and a business card, the Elite Nights you get automatically from having those cards

do stack together. So if you have a, what is it, $125, I think, Bonvoy business card from Amex, that gives you 15 Elite Knights. Almost all of the Marriott consumer cards, both from Amex and from Chase, give you 15 Elite Knights. So having two of those cards, you have 30 Elite Knights per year. If your consumer card is a Bonvoy Brilliant, then that gives you 25. So you have a total of 40 elite nights per year. So by the stacking of personal and business, you either start the year, every year with 30 or 40 elite nights, and then just obviously stays at Marriott properties, including award days. You'll earn actual nights and get to,

and then it will help you get to the 50 nights for platinum. Plus you get those choice benefits that way, or it'll help you get, let's say, to titanium at 75 nights. So that's a big leg up. But as I said, we have those other resources to get more about shortcuts to elite status. Yeah. Yeah.

And you mentioned in passing there at the end that remember award nights do count for elite nights. And so also your free night certificate nights similarly count as elite nights. So those help you get a little bit closer. So it's nice. You can stack all those things together to get yourself closer to elite status with Marriott. So yeah, check out our post for more details about your shortcuts or that previous episode, because we did talk about quite a few options there. And it can be worth it. In fact, I'm regretting, like I fell a few nights

short of platinum status last year, and I'm kind of regretting not having taken care of those. But now I may end up getting the brilliant card, even though I won't qualify for the welcome bonus because of the matrix of death that we mentioned earlier, which, you know what, we mentioned that briefly in passing, but I don't know if we really harped on the fact that there's complicated rules between chase and Amex in terms of whether you're eligible for a new Marriott card or not. If you have this chase card, you can't get that Amex card. Or if you have this Amex card, you can't get that chase card maybe, or, you know, there's a bunch of different rules. And we have a matrix that explains what you need to know in terms of which card you can have, or if you need to have had it for at least 30 days, or it has to be at

least 90 days insured, a welcome bonus, et cetera. There's a lot of complicated rules in terms of the eligibility that are unlike anything else out there. It's very unique to the Marriott credit card world. It is, yeah. So check out the show notes for a link to our post on how to figure out if you're eligible for a new welcome bonus with a Marriott card. There you go. Okay. I think that wraps up our main event this week and brings us to this week's question of the week. So this week's question of the week is an interesting one. That's going to require a little bit of thought probably, but I thought this was a great one that Mark wrote in with that I think is going to be applicable to a number of readers, especially in the West Coast probably, or anyone who lives in a city with high rent.

So Mark says, thanks for the great info on the podcast and the blog. I have a question about the upcoming ability to pay rent with an Alaska credit card through Built. Now we talked about this on last week's episode that this is going to be coming later this year where you if you pay rent, you could pay through the built rewards app and use your Alaska Airlines visa signature card, your consumer Alaska card, and you'll be able to earn three Alaska miles per dollar on rent. But what we didn't know at the time we recorded last week's episode was that you will also pay a 3% fee in order to use an Alaska card, whereas there's no fee if you use a built rewards card, which of course, using the built rewards card to pay your rent, you'd earn one point per dollar on rent payments, assuming you do your five transactions per month.

Okay, so that out of the way for background. Question about using the Alaska credit card through built. I live in California, an expensive high rent environment, which means my rent's high $3,600 a month in rent. Also for context, my local airport does have service from both Alaska and America. I've been using my built account for rent and just transferred a bunch of points to Aeroplan. But my question going forward is, do I want to switch how I pay rent? The way I'm looking at it, if I use the Alaska

card, at the end of a year, I would end up with about 130,000 miles plus a companion certificate on the Alaska card, which normally requires $6,000 in purchases per year now if you're a newer card holder. Also, with this amount of spend plus a little extra and some travel, it'd be pretty easy to get to Alaska MVP status. So which do you think is better? A free 44,000 built points, because if he pays his rent with his built card at one point per dollar over the course of the year, he'd earn 44,000 built points,

or paying about $1,200 because of that 3% fee to end up with 130,000 Alaska miles, a companion certificate, and MVP status with Alaska. It's got a bunch of other transferable points, lots of other ways to earn points. But that's the core of his question. He figured there are probably some other people in the same type of situation. What do you think, Greg? Is it worth paying the fee to earn that number of Alaska miles and earn towards elite status and all those other things with Alaska. Yeah, wow. This is the type of thing I would want to sit down with a calculator

and maybe a spreadsheet and work out exactly what that would really mean and look at what other options there are. So what's popping in my mind is like, would he really be paying that much for that? Or would he spend that much on his Alaska credit card anyway, even without this deal? And if so, then it's kind of a false trade. In general, outside of those extra things that Mark was talking about, I don't love the option of using the Alaska card to pay rent. Because what you're doing is you're paying a 3% fee in order to earn three points per dollar, but you'd earn one built point per dollar for free, alternatively. So if you treat bill points and Alaska points as being the same value, which they're not, I value bill points obviously more because they can be transferred to Alaska or to other things, but anyway, if we treat them as the same value, then you're paying 3% to get two

extra Alaska miles. And so that's like paying one and a half cents per Alaska mile to get those extra miles. And while that's a good price if you have an immediate need for them, it's not a great price, in my opinion, to buy prospectively. That said, he's buying more than that. He's buying that companion ticket

and what was the other thing? Towards elite status. Yeah, towards elite status. So in those cases, spending one and a half cents per Alaska miles, if you want to think about it that way, maybe that's a deal because he values Alaska miles more than that anyway. So I think I talked myself into, yeah, maybe that's not a bad way to do it. You know, that's funny because you talked me out of it. That's great. Talked me out of it because, okay, so it only requires $6,000 spend if you're a New

Orleans cardholder to get the companion certificate. So that level of spend, you don't need to pay your rent probably in order to hit the $6,000 spend. I doubt that the rent is what's going to make the difference in terms of getting that. And even if it did, you only need to pay your rent two months in order to get that. You don't need to pay your rent all year long in order to get that. So I think it really comes down to, yeah, the progress towards elite status and the miles. Now, I don't know off the top of my head, because I'm not an Alaska person, what the elite earnings are in terms of the spend and whether that's worth much or not.

I know MVP status is just the first rung. And so the benefits there are not like incredible benefits. So I think the point that Greg made that your choice here is to earn, if you consider the built points, you're only going to transfer those to Alaska, then your choice is to earn 44,000 Alaska miles for no cost or 130,000 for the 12 or $1,300 or whatever it is in fees. So I think that's the key point. The progress towards lead status, okay, yeah, you're right. I mean, I guess maybe that if it's going to bump you over to MVP,

I guess, but boy, that seems a little pricey to me. It totally depends how much you value that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's really what it comes down to because it's not a great price for the miles, really. I mean, it's better than buying them directly from Alaska, probably, but it's not a price that I would feel anywhere near compelled to earn them. I would rather just be using the built card at 3X at restaurants or 6X on the first of the month at restaurants. I'd rather be using the Alaska card to earn, or rather the built card, excuse me, to earn built points that I could later transfer to Alaska in general, I think, anyway, than paying a penny and a half per point.

But yeah, I guess the status really highly maybe. Yeah, and don't forget those built points. You might have an opportunity for a great big transfer bonus to another program that you wish you could have taken advantage of. But if you've been earning Alaska miles, then you won't have that opportunity because you don't have the built points to do the transfer bonus. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

with that fee, I'm just, I'm much less excited about the prospect of earning Alaska miles on rent. It's either way. It's, it's sort of, it's an edge case and it's, it's not a slam dunk in either direction,

you know? Yeah. So, so, so, um, Mark, either way you go,

it's fine. It's not a bad deal, but it's not, it's not a smoking hot deal either. All right. All right. Very good. Well, that wraps us up for this week's question of the week and this week's episode. If you've enjoyed this stuff and you'd like to get more of it in your email inbox each day or each week, you can go to frequent miler.com slash subscribing and that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media, Join our frequent miler insiders Facebook group where you can ask and answer questions about these things all the time. And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or for a giant mailbag

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