Frequent Miler on the Air - Mileage Running Delta | Ep92 | 4-3-21

Episode Date: April 3, 2021

00:34 Giant Mailbag: Hacking rental cars https://frequentmiler.com/are-car-rentals-set-to-be-the-most-expensive-part-of-your-trip/ 05:35 What crazy thing....did Air France do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/air-frances-flying-blue-miles-are-easier-to-extend-than-i-thought/ 12:51 Mattress Running the Numbers: 41K Choice Privileges points for just...8 stays? 19:03 Main Event: Delta Mileage Running https://frequentmiler.com/delta-elite-status-from-award-tickets-plus-50-to-75-bonus-on-all-tickets/ https://frequentmiler.com/delta-skymiles-complete-guide/ 49:14 Post Roast https://frequentmiler.com/6-points-miles-things-im-excited-about-or-at-least-hopeful/ 56:18 Question of the Week: How do you change your frequent flyer number on a partner reservation to get elite benefits? Don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a comment! Join our email list and follow us on social media at: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event mileage running delta with the latest promos is it worth flying delta just to get elite status you're going to convince me greg you're going to convince me to finally come to the dark side here we're certainly going to discuss it and we'll talk about how maybe maybe you could turn our guck trip into delta elite status oh that could be big that could be yeah yeah so that that'll be a lot of fun um of course we're going to start uh with the giant mailbag dig in dig in i'm curious what are the people saying this week right okay today's giant mailbag comes from Mary Graves, who replied to your post about rental cars. How renting cars these days is kind of a huge gamble.

Not only has it been more expensive, but people are frequently showing up at rental car companies and there are no cars to get, even though they had confirmed rentals. So Mary said this, we just got back from Park City and had a wonderful experience renting a Subaru Ascent seven days directly from Nate Wade Subaru, which is a dealership. The car was brand new, very easy after hours pickup. And when we dropped it off, they gave us a courtesy ride back to the airport. Highly recommend. So Subaru sponsoring today's podcast. Well, I mean, this, this comment made us, you know, do some Google searches. And we found that it's not just Subaru, but a number of car companies will rent cars through their dealerships. And I had no idea. No, I had no idea either. Yeah. I started Googling them and looking it up. Toyota's got a catch-all page to find dealerships that rent Toyotas and Ford dealerships, a bunch of different dealerships offer this. And of course it's not every dealer in every city, but it's some of them.

And I bet you, you're not going to show up and have them tell you they have no cars. So I mean, that's, I think it's a great little hidden hack. I saw that and I said, oh, that's, that's amazing. And we gave it a Google and found some other stuff about it. So, so yeah, when you can't find a rental car, try a dealership. Right, right. I wonder if any of the dealerships in Hawaii do this because, you know, we've been hearing from there was at least one reader who said, I'm going

to cancel my Hawaii trip because they weren't able to find any rentals. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that was the first place I started looking because I thought, oh, this would be awesome in Hawaii because I know they've gotten expensive there and that people have had issues not having cars. So and even in regular times, it's a little hairy getting a car sometimes depending on where you expensive there and that people have had issues not having cars. So, uh, and, and serious, even in regular times, it's a little hairy getting a car sometimes, depending on where you fly into in Hawaii, because they just don't have that many of the lots are pretty small and a number of the islands. So anyway, I, I took a look and I haven't found a dealership in Hawaii yet that offers rentals, which doesn't totally surprise me because there's only so much space on each island. So there's so much space you're going to have for your dealership for extra cars

that people might maybe rent. But if I find one, then that'll definitely get highlighted when I hopefully eventually write a post about this because I thought this was a really interesting hack. Who would have thought about that? Yeah. My guess, is that they probably aren't doing it to try to woo the vacation leisure crowd as much as sort of locals whose car is not available for, you know, because it's in the shop or whatever. And they're trying to get them hooked on this brand of cars is my guess is why they're doing it. More than money making. But who knows? I could be wrong. I do know, you know, Audi with silver car started moving their rentals instead of from being at the airport to their dealerships. So

that's sort of a hybrid version of that kind of that kind of deals. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's smart. It makes sense for especially for, like you said, the local rentals for people that might want to try out a car for a bit and see how they like it. So a smart strategy there, you know, I just wouldn't have thought of that. Somebody mentioned jokingly, are you going to pull up to the end as Maui in a U-Haul rental or something? And I said, Hey, I would no shame in my game. And so that, that would come to my mind. Cause I have rented U-Haul like vans before, for instance, cargo vans. And they're not usually very expensive. Of course, they might be in markets where car rentals are sold out.

But if you ran into the kind of situation where you're at the airport and there's no car for you and you're scrambling for something else, now you have some ideas. Maybe a car dealership, maybe a U-Haul. Right, right. And U-Haul, that's long been a sort of a hack for a cheap one-way rental because U-Haul is used to renting them one way. That's their sort of normal way of doing it. And so when you're having trouble finding an okay price because you're driving across the country or whatever and depositing, you could think about trying U-Hauliting, you could think about gas, but right. Exactly. Yeah. Well, you know, the, the cargo vans are, I think always a local rental. So if you just want a van, I think those are local only in every place I've ever seen.

I did a bunch of this for a while before I bought a truck to move stuff around when I was buying and selling bigger items. Uh, but, but the big trucks course, are all... That'll cost you a lot more, I guess. Yeah, but it will cost you more, I guess. These days. All right. Okay. So what crazy thing did Greg and Nick do this week? They talked about renting U-Hauls as a hack. What crazy thing did air france do saying this week isn't exactly right but recently this is recently we learned about something that they did a while ago and it's it's kind of bananas i mean it's it's kind of like city thank you level bananas um this this has to do with the way they expire miles. So Air France flying blue miles, um, for a long time, I thought the, that the only way to get, to prevent your miles from expiring was to earn, um, earn miles on an Air France flight or a partner flight credited to Air France,

or to get the Air France credit card and put some spend on it. I thought those were the only two ways to do it. And you're not the only person who thought that. That's been conventional wisdom, right? I mean, doesn't everybody know that? Right. I don't know if probably most people have no idea. but, but yeah, if people that have thought about it, you know, I think that's been the known, the known thing. Now, oh, and I guess elite status, which is another option. There's, there's a level of elite status you can get that keeps your miles alive. But of course, if you have that level of elite status, you probably are crediting enough miles to flying blue, enough paid flights to

flying blue that that would keep your miles alive. It's not an issue anyway. Yeah. Right. So it turns out that it's not that simple, that there are miles that are quite easy to keep alive and miles earned from not flying from partners. And by partners, I don't mean partner airlines. I mean, like, um, from a shopping portal, from renting a car and crediting, you know, earning miles to Air France, uh, from transferring, uh, points into miles, like transferring your, your, uh, Amex points to Air France, for example. Um, um those those are considered different kind of miles and all you have to do is to keep those alive is earn more miles from a partner okay so this is already a little bit crazy so so you have to whether or not you can extend your

miles depends on how you got them right so, I can kind of wrap my head around that. But here's where things get completely off the rails. Okay. If you then, so let's say you've transferred, I'll make something up, 100,000 points into Air France and you didn't get to use it when you expected to, so you're worried about expiring. In the meantime, you...

Oh, I'm sorry. Let me back up. If that's all that happened, then you can just transfer in another 1,000 points to keep them alive. For another two years. Another 24 months. That's all you did. That's all you have to do. That's all you thought the only way to keep them alive was to credit flight to your account. Maybe you flew a short Delta flight, credited like 500 miles to Air France for that flight.

Which you might have done since everybody has long thought that that was the only way to keep the house alive. So that would have reset the clock for two years, but it also set all of your miles to be flight miles. So now transferring in a thousand more miles from Amex or wherever is not going to help. So you're on, you're on a hard clock now for two, two years, or you have to, you know, fly again to reset it for another two years. So now what happens if you do transfer in another thousand miles? Do those also become flight miles? That's a good question. How do you get off this train, Greg? I don't know. I want to get off. I don't want to be out anymore. All we know is one flight. I want to get off this train. Well, we know from readers that transferring in a thousand more did not reset the clock on, on his expiring miles. I don't know whether the new thousand miles it's considered separately or for some reason gets lumped in with

the others. I, I would, I would assume it must be held separately. I don't know. It's completely bizarre. How bizarre, how bizarre, how bizarre. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's nuts because, you know, luckily for people who had their 2020 travel canceled and haven't yet, you know, credited a paid flight to air France,

you're in luck. Just don't ever credit a paid flight to air France. And it's easy to keep those miles alive, which is totally counterintuitive or I shouldn't say counterintuitive. It goes against everything we have ever thought about Air France miles. Right, right, right. So if you've heard that before. So I mean, the good news is that you can transfer points in, and as long as you don't do something crazy like credit a flight to Air France, then it's easy to keep your miles alive.

Who came up with that idea? Like what executive at the airline is like, you know what? Let's really discourage people from ever wanting to credit a flight here. Right. Which in most cases means actually flying air France. Right. I mean,

right. I talked about flying Delta and crediting it, but most of their flyers, most of their members are probably flying their own airline and, and, and yeah, they, they seem to be discouraging or it's, or it's sort of like,

well, if they're going to fly us at all, we're going to make them fly us at least all the time. That's right. At least every two years. That's right. It's like punishing you. You're locked in. Yeah.

Fly Air France. Keep flying. Yeah. So, yeah, I, I mentioned that it was like city crazy because city does these crazy things about how they track city thank you points where like right you got some points from a bank bonus you could do certain things with those and they have expiry dates but but miles or points from credit cards have no expiry and you could do more things with them and even though like if you pull all

your points together it looks like they're all in one bucket but it looks that way but it's just that he's still just a trick it's a trick and said he still still tracks um what they can or cannot do still tracks if you cancel one of your cards that had these points uh i mean this that had earned the points then then you lose those points. That sounds a lot like Air France. It seems like there's some overlap here. Is City going to issue the next Air France credit card? I mean, Bank of America card right now. Or did just someone from City thank you, like transfer over to Air France?

We're like, oh no, guys, you got this way too simple. Hang on. We'll fix this for you. We've got this. So you got some Air France miles and you want to keep them alive. Hopefully you haven't credited any flights. You won't credit any flights ever to Air France Flying Blue. Or you will from now until eternity.

Or you give in and get the Air France credit card. Right, right, right. Which is fine. Yeah, that's not a bad option. Not a great card, but it's not a bad card. No, exactly. All right. So that's the crazy thing.

That moves us next into mattress running the numbers. And this week, Choice Privileges is back with another promotion for us to analyze with a fine tooth comb. So Choice Privileges this week is offering, or this month, this time of year, this next promotion period, is offering bonus points if you stay three times. So, three stays. That's not necessarily three nights. Three stays. Yep. Yep.

You get 8,000 bonus Choice Privileges points on top. 8,000 points. On top of what you would ordinarily earn from the staff. Oh, really? Oh, okay. So, it's not the normal promo where they say it all adds up to 8,000. All right. There's a bonus 8,000 on top of whatever you would ordinarily earn.

If you stay five times, you get 15,000 points. If you stay eight times, you get 25,000 bonus choice privileges points and then if you stay at cambria suites you get an extra 2 000 points per night wow all right so if you say eight times and it's a 190 wait per night no no no i take it back i take it back i misspoke if you stay at cambria let me say it again 2 000 bonus points per stay rather per stay okay uh so so if you say eight if you stay at cambria let me say it again 2 000 bonus points per stay rather per stay okay uh so so if you say eight if you have eight stays you get uh 24 000 is that we said or 25 25 000 points plus if they're all cambria stays what does that add up to 16 000 so the total is 30 16 and 25 41 yeah yeah 41 000 points that's a lot of points that's a lot i mean that's that's like that's that's more than enough for a really

high-end choice hotel for a night more than than enough for a really high end choice. So this sounds awesome. So 41,000 points. I can't remember a choice promo unless it involved a all-inclusive stay that offered that many choice points. It might be an all-time high offer from Choice Privileges. So let's do it, right? Should we book eight stays

just for earning the points? Of course not. This is ridiculous. Why not? 41,000 points, Nick. Where did they come up with this? Like who, who in their right mind was like, what we need to do is make our regular Tuesdays, 8,000 bonus points promotion, just a little bit worse to encourage people to stay right now. Like what? They always do two stays, 8,000 points. So eight stays under that regular promotion would get you 32,000 bonus points normally. So yeah, I have no idea where they came up with this idea. They were like, let's cut that way down and maybe that'll encourage everybody to stay. Well, you know, I mean, so what I'm saying here is like, we should all stay eight times at choice hotels and maximize the heck out of this promo, right? Why wouldn't we?

Why wouldn't we? Because you can buy the points for like seven tenths of a cent per point or whatever it is. So you don't, yeah, you can. Hey, I mean, like 20, I think it's, it's moved up to eight tenths, but yeah. So, so the 20,000 and then it'd be 160, 40,000, $320, which is like probably much less than you're going to spend staying eight times. If you really want 40,000 choice privileges points, you can buy them. I just looked because I was like, oh, you know what? Daily Getaways sells these every year and they're normal. Daily Getaways, US Travel Association promo. And I've bought them before and I couldn't remember exactly how much I paid per point in those. But I just looked and it says the Daily Getaways 2020 is coming soon. So I don't know. I don't know if 2021 is coming soon also, but it seems to me like maybe daily getaways might not be happening this year.

Okay. So, so your point is that we should do the eight stays then in order to buy choice at more than a cost to do it by, by, by booking and canceling points and cash. Right. And that's the key that Greg just said there, by the way, that the way to buy the choice points cheaply, as we've said before, is booking the points and cash stays there. So you do need a few choice privileges points to start. So if you don't have any choice privileges points, you can transfer over like six thousand for membership rewards. But then you can buy them at like, you know, whatever it is, eight tenths of a cent. He's telling me that's right.

All day long. So no, this promote stinks. I mean, if you're saying you had a choice, probably just property. Okay, great.

But otherwise this is like the least generous promotion. I can remember seeing from them apart from the last promotion they made. What crazy thing I think it was, or maybe it was mattress running the numbers a couple of weeks ago where they were like, Hey, stay the next two weekends and get extra points. I mean, that was kind of silly too. So yeah, choice choice is getting a little cry. I mean, they're thinking outside the box. I'll give them that. Yeah. Okay. So I, yeah. And I was just

kidding around about, uh, wanting to do this eight stays. That's eight. That's a ridiculous requirement. Um, it's not even eight nights. Even if it was eight nights, I wouldn't be that interested. But eight stays, I mean, that's absurd. Well, and it'd be like, if it was eight stays for the rest of 2021, it would be one thing. But we're talking about eight stays between now and let's see, what was it? May 23rd. So you're talking about-, it's like less than two months. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, not even, not even eight, six weeks, seven weeks, something like that. Eight days and six or seven, like who is traveling that much right now? Right. So one

stay a week is not enough. No, no, it's not. It's like, well, you gotta be, you gotta be Stephen Pepper basically. Right. You gotta be living in hotels and and willing to change hotels a week a couple times yeah i mean no crazy you're crazy yeah yeah crazy yeah it's just getting crazier and crazier well at least they keep providing us material so so that's good all right speaking of crazy let's talk about the main event so delta Delta is out with a truly innovative, I think, promotion. What they're doing is that they're saying from now until the end of this year, they're going to offer 50% to 75% more towards elite status for all of your flights. That's not the innovative part yet.

That's great. That's pretty good. Yeah. That's great for those seeking elite status, but haven't gotten the innovative part yet. The innovative part is that this applies to award tickets too. So you can book, yeah,

you could book Delta awards, pay with miles, and you're book Delta awards, pay with miles, and MQDs when flying on award tickets, as long as you're flying on Delta Metal, and you will also earn the 50% to 75% bonus. So the 50% bonus is main cabin. So whether you book a basic economy or just regular economy, you get a 50% bonus on all the elite earnings um if you are in a premium cabin that includes comfort plus which is often not that much more than economy um you get that 75 bonus so wow that's the way the promo works um it's right so

i'm i'm confused here i mean you got my interest. Cause you're like, okay, you can earn elite status from reward tickets because I'm not really interested. I don't fly enough for business or that sort of thing in order to earn elite status. I'm not interested in paying cash for enough Delta flights to get elite status, but if I do this with award tickets, I'm at least a little bit more interested, but, but you're talking all this mumbo jumbo, MQM, MQS, MQS stuff. I mean, I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around it. And when you say Comfort Plus gets more than regular economy, then my ears perked up a little bit more because we've written some quick deals

recently on deals, flash sales to South America, for instance, where Comfort Plus was actually the same price as economy. It wasn't even anything more. So you can earn more points. So talk to me here. What do I need to do? How much do I need to fly? What do I got to book? How do I qualify for Delta Elite status using miles? I mean, the credit card offers right now,

you're looking at 70, 80, 90,000 renewable miles. Is that going to be enough to get me some sort of status? Okay. So, yeah. So the interesting status levels with Delta are platinum and diamond. So platinum status is where you, you get a lot of perks, including, um, a annual choice benefit where you get to pick, uh, regional upgrade certificates. And this is where you can, once you book a flight,

whether with miles, and this is new, or with cash, you can apply that certificate to upgrade to first class for that flight. And regional doesn't just include U.S. domestic. It includes some near U.S. flights as well, like to Central America. A number of flights to Hawaii count, not all of them. So the most long distance ones between Hawaii and like the East Coast don't count, but the ones that are closer from, I don't remember exactly, but let's say Salt Lake City and west of there are valid for that. And that includes if you start on the East Coast and have a connection in the way to diamond, but you can also pick global upgrade certificates as a choice benefit.

And those let you upgrade any economy flight to business class. And that includes, you know, long haul international flights. national flights, let's say you bought a flight to South Africa or to Australia or wherever, as long as it's on Delta or one of their close partners, you could at least theoretically use that certificate, if upgrade space available, to upgrade to business class. So you're in live business class for a long time. Those tickets are, you know, the price of those kind of tickets are usually astronomical. So the value of those kind of tickets are usually astronomical so the value of upgrading in those situations is absolutely huge so those are the two levels i think are worth considering if you're gonna go for delta status i mean like yes silver and gold

have some features that you might be interested in but i just wouldn't go that far out of my way for them personally. So we're going to talk about those too. All right. Now we have to talk. I hate to get too much in the weeds, but we have to talk about what MQMs and MQDs are. We do, especially because, I mean, I bet there's a lot of people out there

that are not Delta people already or that aren't elite status chasers who are award ticket flyers who might be interested but like me are like mqm mqd right what is this stuff right yeah all right so so the first thing you need to know is delta calls its elite status program medallion you're when you're elite you're a medallion member so the m in all of these things is medallion. So these are, and the Q is qualifying. So MQMs are medallion qualifying miles. And that roughly means miles flown. So when you actually sit on an airplane and fly a thousand miles, you get a thousand MQMs is the, is the idea. MQDs is dollars. So you get, if you bought a ticket that costs $500,

when you fly it, you earn 500 MQDs. So the reason I'm bringing that up, and I'm not going to talk about MQSs because that's just complicated. MQSs are segments, flown segments, and that's another way of earning status. But let's stick to just the two. I agree because that starts to muddy the waters. Yeah, right. Keep things as simple as possible. I realize that this is not a simple topic, but all right. So MQMs, miles, miles flown generally. In order to get platinum status during, I was going to say during a normal year, but even this year, you have to earn 75,000 MQMs. That means that without any bonuses going on, you have to fly 75,000 miles on Delta or its partners

to get platinum status. But you also need 9,000 MQDs. So that means, right? That means you need to spend $9,000 with Delta. And it's not like, and it's flights with Delta. Like you can't go into the Sky Club and spend $9,000 on drinks. That's not gonna do it.

You gotta spend nine grand in flights. So you might have been saying, all right, 75,000 points. So I got to crisscross or miles flown rather. I got to crisscross the country like nine or 12 or 15 times or something, but you got to also spend nine grand. I mean, that's not a small amount of money. I mean, if your employer is paying for you to fly and you're traveling all the time, it's probably no big deal. But if you're coming out of your pocket here, that's a lot of dollars. Right, right.

And there's a lot of ways, I shouldn't say a lot, but there are ways to earn more MQMs than we've talked about so far. So getting the 75,000 MQMs does not require really flying anywhere near 75,000 miles. We'll get into that. The MQDs though, until now, there wasn't really any, I shouldn't say any, but there wasn't any easy way to get your MQDs. But there is a way to get an MQD waiver, meaning you don't need to earn those MQDs at all to get status. And that is, if you spend $25,000 on a Delta credit card, you get an MQD waiver, good up to platinum elite status. So as long as you spend $25,000 during the calendar year

on Delta credit card, platinum or Delta reserve card, you don't have to earn any MQDs and you're kind of done with that part of it. And so it's all about MQMs. As I said, lots of ways to earn MQMs. So that's one way. Unfortunately, to get to diamond status, to get a diamond MQD waiver- Well, wait, how many MQDs does diamond normally require? Okay. Diamond usually requires $15,000 spend with Delta. And that's not credit cards. Then we're talking about 15,000 MQDs.

You got your MQDs. So yeah, that's money that you're supposed to spend on Delta flights. Right, right. So to get a waiver so that you don't have to spend $15,000 on Delta flights, you have to spend $250,000 on Delta credit cards within a calendar year, which is a little, little bit above most people's hair.

You know, regular, regular spend. Yeah. Just a little bit, just a little bit. Probably most people spend on the credit card, yes. Right, right, right. So one of the reasons this promotion is exciting is that now there's a way to, it doesn't lower the MQD requirement, but what it does, you're getting up to 175% of the MQDs for the flights you pay for or pay for with miles. So if you, let's say you're going for platinum status, again, normally you need 9,000 MQDs. With this promotion,

if you fly economy with the 50% bonus on MQDs, you would need a total of 6,000 MQDs to get platinum status because, I mean, $6,000 spend, sorry, because the 50% bonus gets you to 9,000 MQDs. Okay. Does that make sense? Okay. So you spend less. You only have to spend 6,000. You only have to spend 6,000 to get $9,000 of MQDs.

Okay. If you do Comfort Plus or higher, you only have to spend a hair over $5,000, $5,150 in order to get the 9,000 MQDs. Okay. Now, the way the MQDs work with miles, when you're booking flights flights with miles is each mile is counted like a penny. So if you need, you know, we talked about like $6,000 spend would get you 9,000 MQDs. So that's 6,000. That's like 600,000, that's like 600,000 Delta miles spent on award tickets would get you the same amount. I'm becoming much less interested. Right. And at the 75% bonus level, it's a little over half a million Delta miles spent to get that waiver.

With diamond status, they, I'm sorry, let me just jump in. And that has to be all on spend for your own flights, right? It's not like if you own a small business and you're buying flights for other people, that doesn't count, right? That's right. That's right. You don't actually earn the MQDs or MQMs until you actually fly. Okay so after your flight they get credited and and they should get credited uh pretty soon after after your flight is complete okay um the bonuses at least in the beginning aren't going to credit until late may but after that they should credit uh faster they okay so um the the the i think think one of the things that some readers have reached out to ask is like, does it make sense to mileage run for Delta Diamond status now by spending about 860,000 Delta miles on award tickets in order to get the MQD waiver for Diamond.

And then you'd get, however, MQMs are based on the miles flown plus the bonuses. And here's the thing, because the miles spent are treated like pennies i i don't really think that's the right question like the the question is do you want to spend you know 8.6 thousand dollars on delta flights whether whether it's using miles or cash um are you are you really going to book that that much in Delta flights over the course of this year? If you think you will, and if you think it's because you have so many miles, you don't know what to do with them and you want to spend them that way, fine. But think of it, that's also, you could say the same thing. Let's say you had thousands of dollars of Delta credits left over from canceled

flights. You know, same thing that's paying cash, but you want to use up all the all those credits, and you might as well get Delta status. Anyway, I think that's a tremendous amount to spend just to get elite status. I would think more about using those miles or cash to actually, you know, book the flights you want, rather than hoping that you can use upgrade certificates to get the flights you want. I agree. I agree. Yes. Yes. You're spending all of that to hopefully maybe be able to upgrade in a situation where it makes sense, where you're booking the economy class flight and there's availability to upgrade to the one you want. It happens to be the right time and the right place and the right blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

I mean, that seems like a large gamble to book flights just for that purpose. Like you said, it's fine anyway. I mean, might as well take advantage, but it doesn't sound like anything I'd be mattress running at this point. Right. Right. So, yeah. So, you know i think i think that the um except those who are like really really into delta i think that the um the the only level worth really considering for matches running is platinum because you could pick up a delta credit card and spend the 25 000 across the year just on the card doesn't it be with delta it could be you know any spend on the delta credit card will get you the um the mqd waiver and then all you have to worry about is mqms and there's a lot of ways to get mqms as we said so we both by the way just said mattress running and we meant mileage running oh i said it and i was like wait a minute what's the

word and i was thinking about it while you're talking i was like mileage running. I said it and I was like, what's the word? And I was thinking about it while you're talking. I was like mileage running. And then you said mattress running. And I was like, okay, darn it. I infected you. So, so for Larry K, who's going to point out our, our, our misstep here at some point in the next reader feedback, mileage running. Yeah. So mileage running, mileage running for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the spend, like you said, 25 K spend, we'll get you the MQD waiver. And then, so what about the MQMs? So if you want platinum status, spend 25,000 on the Delta credit cards and whatever you want, whatever it is that you're spending your 25 grand on throughout the course of the rest of the year to get your waiver.

But how do you get the 75,000 MQMs? Cause obviously you could fly 75,000 miles, but probably a lot of readers aren't going to fly quite 75,000 miles in 2021. So is there a shortcut? Yeah. So first let's talk about the credit cards. So if you pick up a new Delta Reserve credit card this year that comes with, or right now during the current promo you'll get 80 000 redeemable miles but you'll also get 20 000 mqms so that's a big jump right there if you want to do it that way with the delta reserve card also if you spend thirty thousand dollars on it um you normally get fifteen thousand mqms bonus And this is like a normal thing, not part of the signup bonus.

This year you get 25% more. So 18,000 and something MQMs. So that's another way of earning MQMs. If you don't want the expensive Delta Reserve $550 card, the $250 Delta Platinum card has a 90,000 mile bonus, redeemable mile bonus, no MQMs. But if you spend $25,000 on that card, which I'm telling you, you'd want to do if you're going for platinum status, you also get a status boost, they call it, which is MQMs. Normally you would get 10,000 MQMs. This year, you'll get 12,500 MQMs. So there's some ways through the credit cards to get bonus MQMs.

You can keep spending more and get more MQMs with each of those cards. You could also get multiple cards. So if you have like a business, you could get a business card that's equivalent in every way to the personal card, but you could also get the personal card and have both and get the MQMs from both. That's pretty interesting. So backing up to the reserve card for a second, if you spent 30 on that, you're telling me you'd get the 20,000 MQMs that you get as part of the current welcome bonus. Right. the 20,000 MQMs that you get as part of the current welcome bonus. And for spending 25,000, at least you'd get your platinum MQD waiver. But if you spend a total of 30, so $5,000 more than you were already going to spend to get the waiver, then you're going to end up with another 18,000 MQMs.

So you'd end up with the MQD at 30,000 spent on the reserve card. If you get it right now, you'd your MQD waiver and $38,000 of the $75,000, more than half of what you need in terms of MQDs, right? Right, right. And so if you actually did two Delta Reserve cards and you could spend $60,000 across the year, you could get all the MQMs you need. That's something we've actually already discussed in the past. So that's not new. What's new is how much easier it is to earn the MQMs through flying. So there's this 75% bonus we talked about. So at the basic level, if you fly a thousand miles in Comfort Plus, you'll earn 1,750 MQMs from that flight, right? With a 75% bonus.

That's what the new... Because normally you'd get 1,000, but now it's 75% bonus. Normally you get 1,000, but thanks to the new promo, you get more. Now things get a little more complicated because Delta also offers a class of service bonus on MQMs, meaning if you book full fare first class, you get a 200% MQM bonus. So normally without this promotion going on, you book full fair first class, you get twice as many MQMs as flown. That's not something I'm necessarily recommending unless you're, well, I don't recommend that, but discounted first and a bunch of other fair class, I'll tell you in a second, get 150% MQM bonus. That's discounted first class, discounted business class, premium select. So that's like on international flights, they're sort of in between comfort plus and business classes,

this premium select and full fare economy, I'll get 150%. So if you found, let's say, a great fare, discounted first class, long distance flight, then you have that 150% bonus. And that somehow interacts with the 75% bonus you get from the promo. And what I'm not sure of yet is how it interacts with that. So there's an example on Delta's promo page that suggests that the 150% from booking the discounted first class is the base fare for the promo, meaning 75% on top of that gets you to 262%, something like that of the overall miles flown. It seems to me like most promos don't work that way though. Mostos would would do 75 of the of the base which would be on top so so a thousand so what you'd expect is it to add up to um to uh 225 right so

you get uh so a thousand mile flight should get an extra 500 miles for flying discounted first and an extra 750 miles for the promo and adding up to 225%. So we don't know. It's somewhere in the 225 to 262% range for these flights. So, you know, it's at least better than double. So that drastically reduces how much you have to fly. And in order to get the MQMs needed. So it's not unusual to find, you know, some fair sales, where you can actually book first class fairly cheaply for a long distance flight. So that's the kind of thing that people will be looking for if they want to just outright mattress run.

Yeah, I mean, because if you flew TransCon, if you found a cheap TransCon first-class fare, you're talking 5,000 miles round trip on a TransCon. And then with this promotion, you're going to be looking at, I don't know, somewhere between 12,000. I'm sorry, not 12,000, but 225,000. I got to bust out the calculator, huh? Yeah. So you'd be at like 11,250 miles at least, and maybe it's going to turn out to be even more for each Transcon. So that really does drastically reduce like in half, but better than in half, the number of miles that you would need to fly to earn the MQMs anyway, to, to, to get your elite

status. So even if you don't want to go after like the reserve card, for instance, and the additional MQMs, your path to status is going to be much reduced. And if you do go after the reserve card and put that 30 K spend on the reserve card, then you really don't have to fly very much to get to Delta platinum the share. Right Right, right. And if your goal is something less than platinum status, then maybe the platinum card with $25,000 spend is a good sort of compromise because at least that gets you out of the MQD waiver. It gets you an MQD waiver for gold status, for example, if that's what you're more likely to get to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. So how do award tickets play into that? Award tickets don't get any sort of class of service bonus then? No, they should. I expect they will. I mean,

it says it will work just like paid fare. So I expect that when you book with miles, um, an award ticket, it should work exactly the same because it's not, it's how far you fly is the metric they're using. You're still fly exactly that far with an award ticket. So, um, so the fair class counts as like a cheap discounted fair class for, for instance, for, Oh, I see what you're saying oh yeah no that's a good question I'm not oh yeah I'm not sure interesting interesting so all right I'm you know what I'm still not going to go after delta elite status but I'm I'm intrigued because that does make the path a lot easier this year now there is another approach that you can use to get elite status with delta that we haven't talked about yet.

And so before you decide you're not going to seek Delta elite status this year, let's three months of Delta status and you can, you have much lower requirements for getting, for keeping that status for another year after, after meeting those requirements. So we talk about our, the Delta trip that we're going to be doing together, hopefully by the end of this year, before the end of this year, you might, you know, if you could get in on this status match challenge in time for that, so that that flying will count towards the meeting the challenge. Maybe you'd be able to not only have status during that time, but also extended for a whole year after that. So all I need is Spirit Airlines gold status to do this. So Delta publishes a list of the airlines that they accept matches to. And in some cases, they'll only match up to gold.

And then other cases will match up to platinum. And so if you could find, like, let's say you can match to Alaska MVP gold, then you'd be able to match, maybe if they accept you, match from there into Delta platinum. So let's talk about, I looked up the requirements

for during those three months, what would you have to do to keep platinum? Assuming you figure out a way. So we'll leave that. To get matched in the first place. So I got to figure that out. That's another. Do that as your homework. Yeah.

Gotcha. All right. match challenge to platinum you'll need 18 750 mqms and two thousand dollars and 250 two thousand two hundred fifty dollars of mqds um with the 75 bonus which the the promo specifically says the the promo does count towards challenges uh with with the bonus you'll only need uh under 11 000 mqms and um just under 1300 in mqds which does not sound to me like unreasonable for what we've been talking about doing for yeah yeah yeah Especially with all the various behind interesting, very interesting. So that's, yeah, that'll have to be. So now, now the challenge is going to be getting to the challenge. It's going to be, that's right. That's right. How I can get to that platinum challenge, which I think would make a great post. You investigating like the options for getting there that that would be a lot of fun. And of course, timing is interesting because for example, I don't know if this is possible, but it

seems theoretically possible to me that you could do a status match or challenge with another program and then use your temporary status to match over to Delta. So if that's possible, then not only do you have

to figure out which programs you do that, but you have to time it just right to make it make all that work. So, so that'll be fun. That'll, that'll be a fun follow-up and something that, you know, I think, you know, besides you, I mean, that's something that I think a lot of listeners might be very interested in because if there's a fairly easy path to this challenge, then we know that because of this promo, there's a fairly easy path to satisfying the challenge.

Once you complete the challenge, that's when you earn your choice benefits and can select those regional upgrade certificates. Wow. Yeah. So for somebody who like never flies Delta, that'll be a lot of fun to be able to find a way to finagle that and end up with Delta platinum status, despite the fact that I only rarely ever, ever fly Delta. And it'll

be like this one time. And then, but then I'm going to have to fly them a few more times. And I say have to, it's not like I don't want to fly Delta. It just doesn't work out in my travel patterns usually, but, uh, but that'll make it much more interesting and certainly intrigue me in terms of flying Delta. So, okay, that's some homework to look at for the challenge. So dual challenge now that's, you know, one of those ways I can earn bonus points on our global upgrade certificate challenge where Greg is passing the GUC is by getting elite status in some program. And I assumed it would probably be in a foreign program, but lo and behold, maybe it will be with Delta. It's certainly possible. And it's a high level status too. So I was assuming you'd be getting

like sort of the equivalent of silver status with some program. This would be pretty be, this would be pretty, pretty darn cool. That's right. That's right. Maybe parlaying that into something else down the road. And I'm sure you're happy to hear that no Delta credit card is required. You don't have to sign up for that Delta reserve $550. Don't even need that. Don't even need that.

That's right. Three cheers to that. All right. So, so awesome time to go after Delta elite status, potentially if you're going gonna be doing any traveling this year because you're gonna get lots and lots of bonuses so all right i think i think that wraps that up more or less right i think it does so then that will transition us next into the post

roast time yeah you got for me greg all right so this is really a uh podcast roast more than a post roast. A cast roast. It doesn't run. It's not nearly as much fun. So last, I think it was last week, you complained about the Wyndham shopping portal saying, there doesn't seem to be any way to show all the retailers so I can sort by the best deals on that portal. And so after the show, you know, I logged onto the portal and I was like, oh, here's a menu. There's only two menu options.

I picked one of them and right at the top, it said all retailers. What? And it was duplex. I don't know where that was. Click on categories and then all retailers and you're there. Who would click on category for all retailers? Because there's only two menu items.

It was that or deals. I don't remember that, but okay. But there was another option, which was, had you read Steven Pepper's post, he had a line in there that said, when checking through the full list of retailers and their rates, he went on to say other stuff, but that phrase was underlined because it was a hyperlink to the list of the full retailers.

Sorry, Steven Pepper. I apparently see the moral of the story. You got to read the post, guys. If you read the post, usually there's useful stuff in there, right? And so, yeah. Yeah, apparently I didn't read that one close enough because there was an easy, easy link to the entire list

and you could sort it by the number of points per dollar. So you could do exactly what I was complaining you couldn't do. Right, right. So there you go. There you go. So don't take my word for it, kids. A little roast there.

All right. Got me there all right so so greg this week wrote about six things he is excited about in terms of miles and points excited about and hopeful for and so well i think that's what was the title of the post title post is six things i am excited about i think is how we said it right excited and or hopeful or something like that. Or at least hopeful, yes. Or at least hopeful. So one of those things that you're, okay, your post says hopeful, but you drew me in with excited about is Radisson individuals.

So you're excited about Radisson individuals, which is apparently a program where Radisson Individuals, which is apparently a program where Radisson is going to have boutique properties, except they only have one boutique property. And you're excited about that, Greg? Yeah. No, I'm not at all excited about that one. There's one and you said you're not excited about it. That property isn't particularly interesting to me, but it belongs in my six things I'm excited or hopeful about. What? Why are you hopeful about this, Craig? Well, I'm hopeful that they'll add a lot more and that some of them will be really nice properties. And that's interesting because the Radisson Rewards credit cards would be great for their free night with 10K spend. if only there were good properties. I mean, there's a few, but not that many,

to spend those free nights on because those free nights are limited to USA, properties that are in the US. And so I've given up hoping that Radisson is going to build a bunch of new Radisson Blue hotels in the US. They seem to have stalled on that. So now they have this like boutique brand where it's really just independent hotels

that want to use Radisson's marketing muscle. They've become part of this new brand. And I'm hoping that there'll be some nice ones. And then I'll be motivated to spend 10K on my Radisson card and get that, you know, free night or maybe spend 20K and get a weekend. I'm almost hopeful in the opposite direction because I have three of those certificates about to expire and they're going to go and add all these awesome places right after they expire after I saw it. And I was like, because my certificates were issued last year.

And so if you're in that boat with me, those have been extended until June 30th of 2020, which means you have to stay by June 30th. It's not just by June 30th. You have to stay by June 30th. So I have three of these things. And it's like, where am I going to go by June 30th with three Radisson certificates in the United States? I just, I don't even know. Like I'm, I'm pretty much getting ready to wave the white flag on those and give them away because I don't think that it's likely that I'm going to end up using all three. There's a possibility I'll end

up using maybe one of them for like a country and in suites that's going to be not worth very much anyway. Uh, but if I'm going to be not worth very much anyway. But if I'm going to pay for a night, I guess I might as well take it for free. But, but that's basically like those things are about to die a painful death on me. And then Radisson's going to go and add these awesome properties. And I say these awesome properties, there's only one so far, right? I mean, like who creates a collection for one hotel? I know. Yeah. You would think you'd have a few signed up. You know, I think they announced it a while ago, probably pre-pandemic, and they probably didn't get as many hotels signing up as they were hoping for. Interested in their marketing muscle. Right.

I mean, that's the part where I'm not that hopeful is because I just can't imagine why a nice boutique hotel would go with Radisson versus Hilton's Curio collection or Marriott's autograph collection. It's unbound. There are better brands that, that have a similar idea. And so, but still, you know, there's a chance, there's a chance, there's a chance. And we can, we can hope for the best because there's like Greg said, there's just very few desirable Radisson properties in the U S where you can use those certs. And I had thought that I had some ideas in mind for them, but of course that was all pre-pandemic. So now after the pandemic is over, I'll have some uses again for those in the future at some point, I suppose, if I ever

decide to spend for them again, but I would love to have some better reasons. So I'm roasting you here, but I'm hopeful as well. Yeah. So as far as spending points, not free night certificates, the, I had written a while ago about that new Radisson blue Maldives. I looked up the reviews the other day and all the recent reviews are really glowing. They're like five-star reviews. So early on, I think there were some issues, which almost happens almost all new hotels. So, so here's, you know, so here's hoping that they build something similar in the U.S. so we can use our overnight certificates. I'll use the Radisson Blue Maldives, you know, Panama City, Florida.

Florida edition, yeah. Help us out, Radisson. Help us out. Great. Let's do it. All right. Let's do it. So that brings us to the question of the week. So Ned in our Frequent Miler Insiders group asked a question.

Thank you very much. Stumbling a little bit there. Asked a question very relevant to today's discussion because we talked all about ways to kind of get a shortened path to Delta elite status. And people that have elite status frequently ask this type of question. So Ned says, how to obtain elite status benefits on partners? For example, I have Alaska gold and come tomorrow. That means one world sapphire. This week now, that means one world sapphire. Or how do I leverage my Delta gold for my Air France reservations? Do these require one to register

their partner elite frequent flyer number on each specific reservation? Thank you. Sorry for not editing that as I was speaking. But essentially what Ned is asking is, how do I get my benefits if I'm flying on a partner? So if I have Delta elite status, or I now have one world elite status, because Alaska joined one world, how do I get my benefits when I'm flying on some other airline? What do you have to do? So first, let me say that partnerships are all over the map as to what degree they treat you better because you're elite with the partner. So you might do it correctly, but still not get any appreciable benefit out of it.

But, uh, that said, usually there's like lounge access or, or, um, sometimes, uh, seats, free seat selection that you wouldn't have gotten it otherwise, but having things like free upgrades is fairly rare in partnerships. Although now Alaska and American, uh, are doing, um, some of those things. So that's, that's nice. The yeah, the way is, is pretty simple. If, if you book through the, if you book the partner through the program that you have elite status in. So for example, you have Delta gold status and you book in air France flight, but you book it through Delta, then you're

all set. You don't have to do anything. Your Delta SkyMiles numbers are already attached to the reservation and your elite status benefits should kick in automatically to the extent you have any. If you book through Air France or through some other means and it's a flight marketed by the partner, I've used Air France as an example, then you need to just go in and make sure that that flight, that your Delta number is attached to that itinerary. And there's different ways of doing that depending on how you booked it. But usually at the very least least you could like call the airline that, uh, that the ticket is with to

attach your, your Delta number or your, uh, or your Alaska number to, um, depending on which partner we're talking about. And I want to stay on hold for hours though. What are some of the other ways to do that? Yeah. I mean, uh, a lot, Nick, if you have better, if you know other ways, let me know. But some of the airlines just let you do that online. Certainly when you're booking, usually there's an option to do that. Do you know a secret way? I don't know a secret way necessarily for Air France, but I know sometimes you're able to do that through some other partner in the alliance.

I know with Star Alliance, I've had that happen before where like I've been able to book a ticket on, I don't know, pick some random Star Alliance airline, let's say ANA, just as an example, flying on ANA and I made the reservation with my United miles and I've been able to go to the Lufthansa website and toss in the confirmation number and somehow change my United frequent flyer number on that. So, you know, I don't know what all of those various tie-ins are, but sometimes you might have to go to a third party within the Alliance, their website, because typically, at least with Star Alliance,

I'm not as familiar because I don't book as many awards on other alliances where I have to worry about this. But with Star Alliance, often you can take the confirmation number and toss it into any Star Alliance carriers website. And I shouldn't say any, but many of the Star Alliance carriers websites. And because they're somehow connected, you can usually view the reservation. So you may be able to edit stuff now, whether or not that saves it. I don't know. And like Greg said, you might just be able to go to the operating carrier site with your confirmation number. And then again, in there, edit the flyer details to put your, your frequent flyer number that has elite status into the reservation and try to save it. Yeah. And I've done exactly what you're talking about with one world reservations. And

there's, I can't remember the latest, but I feel like it was Finnair or somewhere, but where, where you could go and edit the reservation and put in whatever frequent flyer number you want, as long as it's a one-world reservation, they let you edit it. That was just an example. I have no idea which airline it really was. It still works, yeah. But so that's a possibility. Also, the Twitter teams. Try the Twitter teams. And we talked about Twitter recently with Hyatt, but same thing goes here. Give it a shot. Send a message to the Twitter team of the airline that ticketed the flight. So whichever airlines

miles or money, you know, wherever you booked it, try the ticketing airline first, maybe if they're not able to help you try the operating airlines. So, but you should be able to change it. And you could call in order to do that, like Greg said, but especially these days, I feel like it's so hard to get through often with various carriers. So if you're having trouble with that, then those are some online methods that might work. Yeah, great suggestion. All right. So there you go.

There you have it. And in terms of elite benefits, like Greg said, you're typically only going to get benefits on a partner airline if you have a level of elite status in the alliance that gives you alliance-wide benefits. So like you use Delta, Ned's question, you use Delta Gold as an example. And I don't know the benefits of Delta Gold, but I don't believe it's a SkyTeam anything. So I don't think that you're going to see very much. Yeah, I can't remember for sure, but I think it does do things like, and I could be wrong, but I think it does do things like if you're flying a partner, international partner in economy,

you can still get into the Sky Team Club or something like that. All right, so there you go. I'm not sure whether gold is enough to do that, but yeah. Got to look at your benefits. Okay, all right. So best of luck with that, Ned. And hopefully that helps other folks in that situation. So I want to thank you for being out there with us this week.

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Yeah. It's a little bell icon. Okay. So now there's going to be one right here. Cause I'm going to splice that into the show. And you just, you just like grab the, the,

no, no, you don't open. You just, you just poke it. Like with your poke, the bell, poke the bell.

Yeah. You poke them. And then that way it notifies you it lets you know well what good is it if while you're poking it notifies you well it doesn't notify you then it notifies you in the future when we when we post new content that way you receive a notification on your all right this is on youtube you're talking about on youtube youtube all right all right do something else on your podcast podcast platform i don't. There must be a notification thing somewhere. And just ding that notification thing somewhere. Ding it. So you get it.

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