Frequent Miler on the Air - Million Mile Madness 2024 | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep278 | 10-25-24

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Have you heard about our newest team challenge yet? The good news is we have some prizes to share this time, and the bad news is...it is proving to be way more challenging than expected! (01:25) - One reader sends their appreciation for the fresh look of our podcast on YouTube. (02:47) - You can find all our how-to videos on our Resources page here. (03:41) - Waived award redemption fees / surcharges, even on one-way tickets – with Cardless Qatar Card (08:02) - Citi adds Preferred Hotels iPrefer at 1:4 ratio [new transfer partner] (13:24) - Amex launches 200K Biz Gold / 250K BizPlat referral offers Learn more about the American Express Business Gold card here. Learn more about the American Express Business Platinum card here. (17:42) - Hawaiian Business Card duplicate account number issue resolved...and more thoughts about Hawaiian / Alaska merger (21:15) - Chase reduces travel protections (31:45) - What crazy thing . . . .did Air France do this week? (36:37) - Transfer bonuses from Citi to Virgin and Wyndham: Yay or nay? (39:23) - Million Mile Madness! Find out more about challenge updates and details here. (40:20) - SAS EuroBonus Millionaire basics... (42:29) - Is the SAS EuroBonus Millionaire promo worth it? (52:12) - Million Mile Madness 2024 - how you can participate and what you could win! (1:03:08) - Stephen's challenge status so far... Help Stephen with some tips (and potentially win an awesome prize for your tips) here. (1:05:14) - Nick's challenge status so far... Help Nick with some tips (and potentially win an awesome prize for your tips) here. (1:09:51) - Read our post on what still works for Amex airline incidental credits here. (1:12:25) - Find frequently asked questions about the SAS challenge here. (1:15:44) - Greg's challenge status so far... Help Greg with some tips (and potentially win an awesome prize for your tips) here. (1:26:15) - Check out Nick's FAQ post about the SAS EuroBonus promo (and our Million Mile Madness challenge) here. (1:28:08) - What are some best practices to make sure points don't expire?

let's get into the giant mailbag what crazy thing did city this week it's time for mattress running the numbers ready for the main event the main event frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event million mile madness 2024 yeah we talked a little bit about this last week, but this week we're going to dive into the latest Frequent Miler Team Challenge and all of the exciting new information about the prizes we're going to be giving away, as well as the kind of scary to us information about how this is much harder than I think we originally thought. It is definitely more challenging. I didn't expect it to be easy, but as we've poured some more time into it, it's definitely more challenging than I gave it credit for. We'll talk more about that as we get into today's main event. And again, like Greg said,

we're talking about the new prizes too that have been announced, which are pretty awesome. So we'll talk about that in a little bit, but first don't forget that we always have the timestamps in the show notes. So if you want to jump ahead to a segment or return to one later on, you can always find those timestamps by expanding the description box and seeing the show notes there. Also, wherever you're watching or listening to the show,

don't forget to like it, leave it a thumbs up, leave some feedback, leave us a review or that sort of thing. We appreciate that wherever you're doing it. And I guess now that means it's time to drag out this week's Giant Mailbag. Giant Mailbag time. Today's Giant Mail comes from Ian. Ian says, I wanted to take a moment to say how much I'm enjoying the fresh look of your podcast on YouTube. The new weekly segments are a fantastic addition. It's clear that you're putting a lot of effort into the details, like the updated background, and we definitely appreciate it.

Thanks for all your hard work. Yeah, I mean, we've got a nice new look around here, don't we? So if you're watching on YouTube, then you're checking out the new pad here. So for those listening via podcast, we've done some things to make it look like Nick and I are sitting in a office together, basically, side by side. We're not. No, Nick, we're not. But also, we've improved the video quality a bit, at least on my side.

And I think Nick was already recording in HD. And Kerry has been doing a lot behind the scenes with the editing and putting graphics up and things to to make it all look good and of course uh ian mentioned uh the new segment so you know in addition to the podcast which are the coffee break segment once a week um card talk which we try to do once a week um and of course the freak miler on the air show, uh, we've also been doing how to videos and that's only on, uh, YouTube, not on the podcast. And that's where we will share our screen and walk you through how to do this, that, or the other thing. And it's, uh, people are liking it. So give it a look if you haven't already.

Yeah. And like Greg said, you have to give it a look. And I know that probably some people say, oh, but I prefer to listen. And we totally get that. And obviously, we're going to continue making plenty of podcast episodes that publish in podcast form. It's just that some things lend themselves better to showing to be able to share a screen. They're just more visual to show you how to book something. You really kind of have to being able to share a screen. They're just more visual to show you how to book something. You really kind of have to be able to see it. So we've got that up on YouTube, so you can go check that out there and probably, hopefully, learn something new

and let us know what else it is that you would like to see a how-to segment about. All right, let's talk about this week's card news because there was some big news this week. And kicking us off is a piece of news that I find really interesting. And that is that the cardless Qatar card, so Qatar Airways cards, I should say, both the Visa Infinite and the Visa Signature card, came out with a new benefit a week, two weeks ago, within the last couple of weeks. And that new benefit is waived award fees, waived award redemption fees.

And initially, the wording of things on the website made it sound like that would only apply to round trip bookings. And we had held off a bit on posting it because we were following up trying to get an answer. Does this also apply to one way bookings? And so Stephen was able to find that yes, it does apply to one way bookings. And that's great news because the award fee makes up the majority of the surcharges that you pay on a Qatar Airways Avios award. Now, this is interesting because it means that you'll save in business class probably $250 each way, maybe even a little bit more in what the award redemption fee is. It's not going to waive taxes. You still pay the taxes. And if there are other carrier imposed surcharges, you'll still pay

those. But this is the majority of the taxes and fees in most cases on a Qatar Avios award. Keep in mind, it's only valid on flights operated by Qatar. So if you're using your Qatar Avios to book a British Airways flight, for instance, you're not going to get that redemption fee back. But if you're booking, you know, yourself, Qatar Q Suites to fly somewhere, you know, very comfortably and nice, then you can enjoy not paying that award redemption fee, which could be huge, particularly because unlike other cards that have offered something like this, you might be hearing this and saying, oh, that sounds kind of like the British Airways visa, which has up to $600 a year in award fee rebates. The interesting thing here is there's no cap. And the benefit exists on both the Visa

Signature, which is, I think, an annual fee of $500, if I remember correctly. That's the Visa Infinite, rather, but also on the Visa Signature, which only has like a $95 or $99 annual fee. Yeah, $99. Unlimited award fee rebates on a $99 card. What? What? Yeah. Yeah. That's really sweet. I think we should mention there is a catch here though. You have to spend $15,000 on the card in the first year to get this benefit and $25,000 on the card in the first year to get this benefit and $25,000 in subsequent years. So it's not the annual fee alone that kicks in this benefit. But still, it does make a compelling reason for people who book awards regularly to get these cards, which I think is important because I didn't see a really good reason before with these cards. But this, I mean, if you book enough awards, it could be absolutely huge. Yeah, I mean, it could be. And keep in mind that obviously you could be earning lots of other transferable currencies that you transfer to Avios potentially with transfer bonuses and whatnot, and then just move those over to the guitar side or even if they're in your British

Airways account, at least in some cases, I've been able to just pull from that same combined balance without even bothering to move them over to Qatar Airways. And so, you know, if you use this benefit once a year, so the first year, you only have to spend 15,000 subsequent years, like Greg said, 25,000. But if you spend that 25,000, and you use this benefit just one time a year, it's like an extra 1% return on your spend. And so when you add that on top of whatever you're earning on the card, that might turn the card into a decent everywhere else card. Again, that though is contingent on you using the benefit at least once a year. But if you go one year where you use it four or five times that kind of, you know,

covers the cost of spend for a bit on maintaining that benefit if you're going to use it in the future. Of course, if you know you're not going to use it a particular year, just don't spend the 25K that year. So I don't know. Airline-specific cards in general don't excite me very much

because there are so many great transferable currency cards on the market and there've been so many great transferable currency bonuses. So I haven't really been intrigued by an airline-specific card in quite a while i think that's a pretty intriguing benefit if you really like flying qatar airways it's going to definitely continue to be a very small crowd to whom that's going to appeal but it's a little bit

more appealing now than it was before right right there's something in there for for some of us yeah for some of us yep all right next up we got maybe good news for you yeah so city city's added again they've added a new hotel partner and it's preferred hotels so preferred hotels we've talked about lots of times before because it's possible possible to book certain preferred hotels using choice points. And we've talked about that a lot. And we've talked about it a lot when we've talked about Citibank because Citi lets you transfer your Citi points 1 to 2 to choice, and then you could then book preferred hotels. But this is not that.

This is the ability to transfer from C city to preferred hotels I prefer program. So you get I prefer points and at a ratio of one to four. So you get four times as many preferred hotel I prefer points as city points that you transfer. That's the good exciting news is the fact that it looks like you'd be able to do really well with this because they have fixed point pricing for their hotels. So, for example, a nice hotel might say it costs 100,000 points when available. Well, I prefer or Preferred Hot hotels does not have the requirement that all hotels in the program participate at all first of all in the points program secondly they don't have any requirement like some hotel programs do of requiring that if a standard room is available

that it be available for points so what we found is that it's really, really, really, really, really, really hard to find hotels where you can book the whole thing with points. So just because it says you can book it for 100,000 points per night, which would translate to only 25,000 city points per night, doesn't mean that you'll ever find that ever. Now, I haven't had a chance to check on this yet. A reader told us that she called about this and was told that they were experiencing fraud issues with their online booking. And just because it doesn't show any points of availability might not be the end of the story. You might be able to call and book it. But how you would know, I'm not sure.

Except theoretically, you would know because you do see a calendar of availability. Like it shows like all the dates that 100,000 points should be available. It's when you click through that into certain dates that it shows not available. So maybe if it shows on the calendar, maybe you can call and book these. But I can't say that for sure yet. Well, Greg, I prefer can call and book these, but I can't say that for sure yet. Well, Greg, I prefer being able to book online. You're such a dad.

But potentially good news. I mean, like Greg said, nice hotels might be $100K if you can actually find them to book them that way. So that's like 25,000 city points. $100K might sound like a lot, but it's really not a ton of city points. Anyway, it's pretty on par with what a nice Hyatt would cost, for instance, if you're using Hyatt points. So so there may be some good uses there. And I don't know if we mentioned this and all that, but the cash in points can be a pretty good deal. So you can still be getting a good deal. If you're looking at it as like a discount off of the cash rate, because that's all it's going to be. It it as like a discount off of the cash rate because that's all it's going to be it's basically a small discount off of the cash rate at a decent

rate for your points so you gotta be willing to pony up the cash for the hotel and then sometimes yes sometimes only sometimes yeah yeah so sometimes it's really bad value of we've seen the value of i prefer points for cash and points bookings vary from a high of close to one cent per point, which would mean getting four cents per city point to a low of minus almost a penny per point. Meaning the cash portion actually goes up when you add points as opposed to the cash rate without the points in cash. So you have to look very closely at whether you're saving and how much you're saving before wasting any points on that. I prefer, did you hire somebody from Spirit to run your program? That doesn't make any sense. All right, but that's the way it goes sometimes in this game.

If you really can book over the phone, though, all jokes aside, that might be interesting because it may mean that there's more availability you're gonna be competing with a much smaller group of people who even a know that you can do that over the phone potentially when you can't online and then b who are not only going to know that but also take the initiative to call so yeah so ask me why i didn't test it why didn't you test it yet cra Greg? Because I tried to test it, but I wanted to get some points in my account first. And Citi's transfer page doesn't like my I prefer ID. It just won't take it. It shows a red line around it, and it's like, nope, I'm not going to let you go forward.

But we know, right, I think you, Nick, transferred a few points to make sure that it does work for some people. Yes, it does. Not for Greg. Correct. So that's why you didn't test it. Ask me why I didn't test it, Greg. Why didn't you test it, Nick? Because I prefer being able to work online.

He's going to keep doing that until I laugh. So I had to laugh. All right. So that's Citi and I prefer. Next up, Amex launches some great referral bonuses. And when I say great referral bonuses, I mean really great new card offers that are now available via referral for some people. You have to be targeted. These are very similar to what we've been seeing from Amex for the last couple of years in that only some people get targeted

to refer to the really big awesome offers. But those big offers are on business cards, the business gold card. There's now a referral link for some people for the offer that's 200,000 points after 15K in purchases in the first few months. And then the business platinum, that's 250,000 points after 20K in purchases in the first three months. Huge, huge offers. I think the business gold offer, if I remember correctly, of six months to spend business platinum, though,

I think it's still three. Either way, amazing, massive, huge offers, lots of points to be had all at once there. So some potentially great deals. Plus, you know, if you have this one of these offers, you could refer, for instance, your player to if you've got another person in your household, and you know, you could pick up 30 or 35,000 points for the referral potentially up to see your MX account to see what you're targeted for. But I think that the increased offers also have increased referral bonuses for the person making the referral. And it's just like a really nice haul of points. Yeah. And if you don't think you can qualify for these because you already have a business platinum card open or a business gold card open, but my wife just got like automatically approved, even though she had a, you know, I think it was the business gold in that case already

open. And so it's worth a shot and see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. And she did get the welcome bonus, by the way. If you don't get the pop-up saying you're not eligible and you do, you know, get approved and you meet the minimum spend and

everything, you should get the welcome bonus, even if you've had the card before. And even if you chat with a chat representative and they're like, oh, no, you're not going to get the bonus. If you didn't get the pop up, just do the spend. You're going to get the bonus, probably. So yeah. Yeah. These are great offers. They're amazing. You do have to be able to do quite a bit of spend in order to meet the offers. So keep that in mind. But we're in a good time of year. If you do any reselling, obviously, this could be an easy time of year to pick up stuff on sale to resell. Of course, end of year estimated tax payments coming up. If you thought tax payments didn't count, you're wrong, they do. And so there's a number of different good uses. In fact, I know someone who's in the middle of

a renovation who sent me an email last week and said they were thinking about opening the business platinum card because they've got a lot of expenses coming up anyway. And they saw this 200K offer. And then I emailed back and said, oh, wow, it just went up to 250K. And of course, he had applied the day before and got the 200K offer. But then he said, but I've got like another 10K in expenses coming for this next week. What do you recommend next? And I said, oh, well, you want a business gold card then too. And, you know, toss that on the pile. So keep in mind, if you got big things like that coming up, sometimes a't think it's going to last very long, the ability to transfer Amex points to Hawaiian Airlines.

But maybe by the time you get these, maybe it'll still be in place. The ability to do that is still in place as we record the show. So that's a short-term, probably, opportunity to be able to move Amex points indirectly to Alaska Airlines because you can move them to Hawaiian now. You do have to pay a small surcharge. Excise fee. Yeah. Excise tax, they call it. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Amex, only when transferring to a U.S.-based airline do they do do this but they charge a small fee anyway so you do have to do

that but but you could get your points into hawaiian and then it's really easy to move them over to your alaska account and then you have your uh valuable alaska miles so um that's pretty cool i finally got my alaska miles house in order by the way oh you did yeah going off the outline a little bit here nick that's fine so so if you remember i had applied for and and got the hawaiian business card and they had created a new account number for me and i was kind of ticked about that yes but anyway i finally called them and they transferred me to alaska who then uh no they transferred me to Hawaiian who, uh, then what they did is they moved all of my points that were in my old account to the new account and just closed my old account, which I probably could have done myself, honestly, but, uh, it's probably good to make that official

and make them do the heavy lifting. Yeah, exactly. So, so so then then i was able to move you know my well over a million points over to my alaska account i was also able to move my wife's alaska miles to my alaska miles very indirectly so i moved her alaska miles to her hawaiian account and then because i have a credit card it was free to move because I have the Hawaiian credit card. It was free to move her Hawaiian miles to my Hawaiian miles account. And then of course, free to move those Hawaiian miles to my account. I had thought about doing the same thing with my son's account, but I ultimately decided he has some Alaska miles and he now has Hawaiian miles from Hawaiian Airlines credit card card i decided it's good for him

to start building up his stash of alaska miles so so i just moved his hawaiian miles to his alaska account and he's he's you know getting going there and now we need to decide how many of his mx membership rewards points ought to become alaska miles as well yeah i'm glad you made the the point though to bring this up, because Alaska has been explicit that they don't intend for that transfer to continue long term. We don't know when it's going to end. But with the speed of everything so far, I just we mentioned, I think recently, but I'll mention again, I don't think it's all that long for this world. We don't know when it's going to end. But I wouldn't be surprised if it ends sooner

than we expected. We originally said we thought maybe a year. I don't think it's going to last that long. I don't know when it's going to end, but I don't think that Alaska has any intention to allow those transfers to continue. Do I not think they've been clear that they don't intend for that to continue? So do it while you can. If you have any interest in moving over to Hawaiian, I am

waiting on a new card bonus to post and then I'm probably going to move some over myself because I want to have some more, especially for starting next year now that Alaska award redemptions are going to qualify for miles for elite status miles league credit, which by the way, now that we're going off script and we're on this question came in from someone just the other day about that. We talked last week, I think about how, or at least on a recent coffee break about how award redemptions now on Alaska starting in 2025 are going to earn elite qualifying miles. But what we didn't, I think explicitly enough mention is that will be when you're redeeming Alaska miles for an award. Someone asked us, Oh, I, I booked a, an award with my British Airways Avios for travel on

American or something like that. And, and it doesn't look like I'm getting any Alaska elite credit. What's up with that kind of a thing. And that I wouldn't expect you're going to get any elite credit there. Even if you get the, the frequent flyer number changed to your Alaska number, I wouldn't expect any league credit there. It'll be when you're using your Alaska miles to book an award that you'll earn elite qualifying miles. And that'll be in 2025. That's a good clarification for sure. Yep. Okay. All right. Back to our regularly scheduled program, which is to say back on with some organization here now. So there's a bunch of good news there a bunch of good stuff

but you're about to break hearts here and make people upset greg a little bit tell them what chase has done a little bit little bit uh so chase chase has long had probably the best travel protections on on a number of their cards with the pinnacle of those being the Sapphire Reserve card and the Ritz-Carlton card having the best automatic travel protections. gone down, have ever reduced. The big one for me is for trip cancellation and interruption coverage. So this is when you've booked a big, expensive, non-refundable trip, or parts of it are non-refundable, and you get sick or something happens that causes you to not be able to do the whole trip and the coverage theoretically then would kick in and pay you back for what you lose. What's changed here is it used to be that it said if you pay for any part of the trip

with your chase card, and this was true across all the chase cards that have trip cancellation interruption coverage, which is not all of them, but it's a lot of them. So I made it a habit of when booking, let's say, a big trip and parts of the trip are award flights, I would pay for the taxes and fees of the award flights with my chase card and specifically a Sapphire reserve card in my case, because that gives you the best coverage. But I would do that because I would be fully covered for not just trip cancellation, but other things as well. In October, when October started, they instituted new rules about a lot of the trip coverage

things. And one of them is specific to trip cancellation and interruption, where it still says you can pay partially with the card and be covered. But coverage is only up to how much you put on the card. So if you put the $5.60 from an award booking on your card, and then you have to cancel an expensive hotel that's part of that same trip, you're only going to get back $5.60. Yeah, that's horrible. That's terrible. Well, okay, so let's back up. The thing there that additionally hurts is that you could potentially be losing all those miles, right?

Not getting any coverage for that either. I'm not sure, to be honest, whether they covered anything for that in the past. Like if you used Iberia Avios to book an award on American Airlines, we know that's totally non-refundable, right? There's not even a fee you can pay to redeposit. So if you had paid the taxes on that with your chase card, I don't know what you would have gotten back before, but I know now you're not going to get anything back for that. Well, yeah. So the language is a little bit indeterminate there because it says something like, if you pay with your card or the rewards program, then you'll be covered up to the amount of the amount you paid and or the rewards used. But I called Chase, I got transferred to the benefits department. They and or the rewards used but i called chase i got transferred to the benefits

department they they said that the the rewards points that they're talking about there are the points that the card itself earns so what what they're what they're talking about is like using chase ultimate rewards points for example through the travel the Chase Travel Portal to book travel. That's what they're talking about there, according to the Benefits Administration. I do believe that, well, I don't always believe people I talk to on the phone. The way things are worded, I believe that. That's how I assumed, that's what I assumed it meant when I read it, but it's not 100% clear. So I think there is a little bit of wiggle room in that example of where you say, oh, I lost all my Iberia Avios because this American Airlines flight was not cancelable.

And you could point to the terms and say rewards points. Hey, these are rewards points. So you can try that. I don't know that you get anywhere. But you try and make that argument. Really, when it comes to insurance benefits, that is one thing that people constantly ask us about insurance benefits. Like, should I get travel insurance? And is it any good? And is this one better than that one? And it's always hard to say because it all comes down to a human being making a decision

in the end with an insurance benefit as to whether your claim is going to get paid out or not. And maybe you get a good human being. Maybe you don't. Maybe you get one having a bad day. Maybe you have one feeling really generous, who knows. So it's a little hard to predict. And like you said, Greg, I think that it does leave some wiggle room there. So we don't really know, but we do know that at least it's not worded to be as generous as it used to be. So it's really an intentional decision there, right?

They didn't used to have any of that language about you're only covered up to the amount, you know, in rewards or anything like that. Reserve has because that's a superset. I found that most other coverage is still fully covered if you pay partially with your card. So you still get full baggage delay insurance. You still get lost luggage reimbursement. You still get trip delay reimbursement. You still get travel accident insurance. You still get emergency medical and dental, which, again, is one of the ones that's unique to the Sapphire Reserve and the Ritz card. And another one unique to them, you still get emergency evacuation and transportation. So all of those are still in effect if you pay partially. So it only affects this one benefit. Yeah, that's actually mostly okay news for me because I don't usually pay for very

expensive trips in the sense that I don't usually have a lot of prepaid non-refundable stuff included in my trips. So the trip cancellation is less important to me, whereas somebody who books are like, if you book an expensive cruise to Antarctica, then you really want that trip cancellation coverage. Because if you have to cancel that and you're out 20 or 30 grand or whatever it might cost, that's going to be a big deal. And we've heard from people who've been reimbursed for trips like that before. In my case, I'm rarely booking something where there's that much of non-refundable stuff. So normally I'm more concerned with trip delay. If my trip gets delayed, is my hotel going to be covered? And so the fact that that stayed the same, that's really good for

me. So yeah, no, exactly. And you know what, for most people, you know, they would be paying for the non-refundable parts of the trip with this card anyway. And so they would be covered for those things, even for a trip cancellation and interruption. Good point. Good point. Not the end of the world. Okay. But that's not all that Chase has reduced. It was widely reported elsewhere, but we haven't covered it yet on this show, that car rental

CDW coverage is, they're discriminating against New York residents. They heard Nick is from- What are they going to get from New Yorkers? Come on, Chase. What are they going to get from New Yorkers, Chase? Oh, man. Yeah, they are. coverage is they're discriminated against new york residents they they heard new yorkers come on chase oh man yeah they are there so they changed the cdw coverage so cdw collision damage waiver coverage so if you're familiar with that essentially if you pay for your rental in full with your card that has cdw coverage then if you get in an accident they'll pay for damage to the car basically is what that coverage is is doing for you and it's primary for most people for most americans it's primary coverage which means that for a number of chase

cards it's primary right not all chase cards have primary cdw but good point a lot of them do sephir preferred sephir, a number of the airline cards, and so on. Ritz card, et cetera. Yes. Yes. And that is a good point because some of the airline cards I think have secondary also. So yes, if you had a card that has primary coverage, then it's the primary coverage. And so what that means is if you get in an accident, then that pays first before any other insurance. However, New York residents now get a different deal. The CDW is secondary now for me, which means that my personal car insurance will first be the one to pay for damage to the rental car. And therefore, my personal insurance may go up if I have to make a claim, which is really unfortunate. And so the coverage from my chase cards now is secondary on all of my Chase cards, which

really stinks because I always have used Chase cards. I say always have used. I did recently, if you've been listening a lot over the last year, I did recently mostly move to using the U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve on rental cars now. So I mean, I guess this change won't hurt me so much since now I'm mostly doing that. But I'm sure that not everybody has an altitude reserve card. I'm sure a lot of people out there rely on their chase cards for primary CDW, and it's really unfortunate that that's changed to secondary. Of course, if you don't have any car insurance, it's primary, so you don't have to worry about it.

Right. So should most people change, most New Yorkers change the card they're using or move to another state? Maybe you should get an insurance that won't cover car rentals. If you can remove that coverage from your car insurance. No. So apparently in New York, you are automatically covered no matter what. And so, yeah, you can't do that. If you own a car, that's the thing.

You have to get rid of your car if you want to. That's all. That's all there is to it. Right. Which means if you live in New York City, probably not a problem. You probably don't have a card or it's been stolen anyway. So I'm sorry. Oh, ouch.

Ouch. All right. So it says the guy from the Detroit area. Right now. I know that's that's a outdated view of New York city. Sorry. Sorry, New Yorkers.

Yes. I'm sorry, Detroit. No, no, no disrespect. I'm a big Detroit Lions fan. So anyway,

so yeah, I think that's a negative change, but you know, there's not much you can do about it if you're from New York, except get a different card to be your primary or like Greg said, don't have a car. All right. That's our card news for the week. Let's talk what crazy thing what crazy thing did air france klm

flying blue do this week and i don't know if this is really crazy crazy but i thought this was worth reporting anyway a quick segment so i was searching around for a an award to kind of plug a hole in my my itinerary for our upcoming trip here for the Million Mile Madness. And so I needed to just position from one place to another. And I did an award search using, I think it was award tool or points. I can't remember which one it was at first. It doesn't really matter. I tried one of those search tools and I found a flight that it said was available via Flying Blue. And actually, I knew of a different sweet spot that I expected to be the best deal. And I had no idea that Flying Blue would have an even better price, the best award price for the specific route I was looking

at. I was like, oh, that's an amazing deal. It's fantastic. I'd be happy to book that. So I went to AirFrance.us, where I usually go to look for an award ticket. And I logged in and did the search for the route and it said no awards available. It was kind of weird though, because it looked like it switched to a calendar view for a second. And then it said there are no award flights available on this route. And I was like, well, that's weird. Let me hit the search button again. I hit the search button again, showed me the calendar, calendar went away. It said no award flights available. And I thought, well, maybe they're just getting some Phantom availability, right? So probably it's not real. And I just kind of ignored it. Went and did something else. Later

on, came back to the computer. And so I used the other search. I think I started with Award tool. And the second time around, I used Points. Yeah. And sure enough, it's still showing that same flight that says it has six seats available. And I'm thinking, this is odd. Both of these tools are showing six seats available on this multiple times when I'm searching. Went to AirFrance.us again, same result. Said that there were no seats available. So again, I thought that that seemed like probably it wasn't real.

However, it was just kind of annoying at me since I saw it in both places. And I know that sometimes people report that airline apps just function better than the websites do. And I'm not in the habit of searching for awards in airline apps because for some reason, mentally, I'm wired to book flights on a desktop computer. I book hotels in the apps, but I book flights on desktop. I don't know why it is. I tend to do it all on desktop.

No, I tend to do it all on desktop. I just find it easier to, usually, to make sure i'm seeing all the relevant information i feel like it's easy on mobile to miss details that are kind of you have to scroll scroll to find them and you know whereas you might see it all on one page otherwise i'm also a prolific screenshot taker and i just like having them all on the computer so i can find them around if i need them so uh just easier to find them. I find. So anyway, I don't usually do that, but it did pop to my mind that sometimes people say that the airline app works better.

And so I said, well, where do I get to lose? I get the Air France app. Let me pull it up and look. And sure enough, did the search and right away, boom, six seats on that specific flight available in business class for the great price that I saw on award to own points. Yeah. And I still thought, well, maybe it is Phantom. Maybe it's not real, but let's give it a shot. So I transferred points over from Amex because there's a 20% transfer bonus as we're speaking

now. And so I saved even a little bit more than the price that I already thought was pretty great. And sure enough, went right through, booked it. No problem. Easy breezy, got the confirmation and the ticket number right away. So, so yeah, use the Air France app. You might find the availability that's out there on the website. Now, is that specific to finding Air France and KLM's own flights? In this case, it was a partner award. Partner award. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's even more surprising. And actually, I guess the thing I left out there too is it dawned on me, I think I noticed this on a word tool or maybe I didn't, it dawned on me, Yeah, that's not phantom because it's existing on another sky team carrier too so that's what made me question it and go to the app actually

now that i run through the whole scenario in my mind because i said oh it's available and it was more miles via delta of course but but it was available to them so i thought well maybe that really is available then and yeah sure enough in the app it was so might be worth searching the app if you're getting a no flights available result now Now, I haven't played around with it enough to see how widespread that is. Maybe it was just a one-off weird situation. I don't know, but I'm definitely going to start checking the app in the future. And also a good reminder that the award search tools are useful because if I had been in the habit of doing all of my own searches manually, I wouldn't have found that because I just would have searched on the Air France website.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. That's an awesome, awesome tip. So yeah, less crazy than awesome, but we'll take it as a crazy thing. Take some creative liberties here. Let's talk about awards points and more. We got some transfer bonuses out this week.

Just a real quick yay or nay. Tell me, Greg the Frequent Miler, what do you think about the new transfer bonuses? We got a 30% transfer bonus from City to Virgin, and that could be Virgin Atlantic, Flying Club, or Virgin Red. Yay or nay? What do you think? For most people, nay, but there's still some really good uses for Virgin points. So if you have a lot of City and you're not interested in calling, if you don't prefer to call to book your hotels, then that could be good. Well, Virgin does allow you to book online and I prefer that. So, there you go. Yeah, I would say this is a yay if you have a specific use. If you don't,

oh boy, I'd lean towards nay because dynamic pricing for awards on Virgin Metal is coming on October 30thth they did give us a month of notice on that but they're really in the habit of no notice devaluations with their partners we have no indication that dynamic pricing is going to come to partners anytime soon but then i don't necessarily think we will have indication if and when that happens so i uh i would be very not warm on transferring speculatively to Virgin. So I'm more nay. All right, 20% Citi to Wyndham.

Yay or nay? Yeah, so same thing. If we're assuming this question is based on the idea that you don't have a specific use in mind, then nay. Wyndham points often go on sale for less than a penny each. So, you know, at best, this is like getting around 1.2 cents per city point value, which is not not very good. I would I would wait till you have a good use for your city points and either either transfer to Wyndham at one to one when you have something specific to book or transfer to some other program like I prefer or choice or whatever to book other things. Yeah. My one quick thought on this is I saw one mile at a time said, you know, you can get this transfer bonus, but please don't because Wyndham points go on sale for less than a penny each. And they aren't

usually worth a lot more than that. And when I saw that, my first thought was a little bit defensive. I was like, yes, but you can still get good value with Vacasa and with cottages.com. So if you look at Vacasa, I think we figured with the math, basically, you're probably going to get about 1.3 cents per point or maybe up to 1.6 cents per point, right? But 1.3 seemed like about the floor-ish. It's a little wishy-washy because you don't know how cheap the place might be

to begin with, but around 1.3 cents per point. And so if you're getting a 20% transfer bonus on top of that, then you're looking at a decent value per city point. You can do well. You can do all right. So that's one to keep in mind. But yeah, of course, not speculatively agreed.

All right. I think that brings us to this week's main event. Main event time, Million Mile Madness 2024. it's not speculatively agreed all right i think that brings us to this week's main event main event time million mile madness 2024 all right as we mentioned last time we are reusing the name million mile madness i i first used it back in 2013 when i was when the goal was turned a million miles in one month and at that time that seemed like a lot. And it was really hard. But these days, it's not as impressive as it was. But so we're going to do... I'm still impressed with you, Greg, the frequent miler.

Thank you. Thank you, Nick. This time, we're going to each earn a million miles in less than a month, because a whole month, that's too much time. Way too much time. Somebody could conceivably earn a million miles in like a week, maybe. I don't know. A week would be pretty tight. But we'll talk more about it because of course we're talking about- Around a week, yeah.

We're talking about the SAS Eurobonus Millionaire Promotion. And so SAS, which is Scandinavian Airlines, which I have always pronounced as SAS in the past, but one mile at a time posted that actually in Scandinavia, people call it SASS or in Europe, people mostly call it SASS. So that's what we're calling it. So SASS is running a promotion where you can earn 1 million miles. That was the opportunity for one more of those. All right. If you register and then fly 15 SkyTeam Airlines by the end of the year, there's a couple of gotchas. You have to either earn or use SAS, rather, SAS miles. So you can't, for instance, and we'll talk more

about this in a minute, but you can't book like Virgin Atlantic with your Air France miles. That's not going to count. You've got to either earn SAS miles or use SAS miles, not miles from any other program in order for your flights to be qualifying. And there's some more gotchas that are going to come into play here as we discuss it a little bit, but that's the basics. You've got to fly 15 of the qualifying airlines and it's not all of the SkyTeam airlines. They're leaving a couple of them out. So it's 15 out of 16, essentially, or really 17, I guess, that you have to fly before December 31st. So we're going to talk a little bit about the promotion, what we think about it so far, especially now that we've had a little bit more time to look at it. Because when we first announced this competition, this whole promotion had been out for about a week.

And we had talked about how we could do it as a challenge, but we hadn't, I don't think any of us really looked very closely at what doing it would entail. So now that we've had a little bit more time, we've got more to say about it and more to say about where we are and what we're doing and what steps we've taken. And then of course, we'll talk a little bit about a number of different pieces of it. The what, the when, the why, the where, the how you can win and what you can win, which is going to be very important because we're turning this into a competition. So we'll talk more about the competition part aspect in a few minutes here because we're competing against each other to create a great itinerary. We'll talk more about what that is and what that looks like and how that's going to happen and how you can help us

so you can win awesome prizes. We've announced now what those prizes are and they're pretty good. So we'll get back to that in a second. But the first question on a lot of minds, I think, is, is this promotion worth it? Is this SaaS Euro bonus millionaire promo worth going after, Craig? Well, for us, obviously it is because we love doing these challenges. And so it's a fun way to spend a lot of frequent miler money and travel the world and generate great content. not doing it as part of a podcast or blog or whatever to, you know, design travel around this challenge so that you'll earn a million of SAS miles. So, I mean, I'll let Nick talk more about how valuable the SAS miles are or aren't, but I think the big picture is this. It is very expensive because you can't just book a couple round-trip flights and hope to get 15 different airlines covered in those. And you can't just book the cheapest possible fares because a lot of fares are non-qualifying for earning SAS miles. And only

when you fly a qualifying fare that earns SAS miles does it count. And none of us have SAS miles to use to redeem. And the reason we don't have them is primarily because there are no transferable points in the US anyway that will transfer to SAS. Even Marriott, who has like a list of like a thousand different transfer partners, they don't transfer it to SAS. So yeah, if Marriott's not going to do it, then no one has it. So it's expensive. It's going to be time consuming as heck. It's going to be uncomfortable if you try to do it cheaply. And cheaply is, we're talking thousands of dollars is cheaply. Right.

Thousands of dollars. And so if you do it for less than, I'm going to just make up a number, less than $5,000 or $6,000, you're going to be going in economy most of the way. And I mean, maybe you can, you can actually, you could probably do maybe around 4,000 and stick in some decent size business class flights in there, but there's still going to be a lot of economy to do it cheaply. And ultimately, the reason I'm saying it's not worth it is you can, you can sign up for some credit card offers and learn how to, you know to generate a lot of spend much, much easier than doing this. So if you're really just looking at the bottom line of like, I want points, I know

I'm going to use them to good value, so it's all going to be worth it. I think you should be comparing what happens if you put your effort towards getting those new, like 250K business platinum offers or whatever, and how many points you'll get that way and how valuable those points are before you commit to doing this. So that's my, I was going to say two cents, but my one million cents. I know. I mean, you hit essentially all the key stuff. It's definitely, I think, for the average person of questionable value, I think you could definitely do it in that $4,000 range that Greg talked about. And when I say that $4,000 range, we're talking about, well, Greg was talking about maybe getting a couple of long-ish flights in business class, some medium length flights in business class there. But if you flew it all in

economy, you could do it for less money on the flights. However, you're still going to end up probably needing a couple of hotels, you're going to obviously need to eat. And there is the time cost because you have 15 airlines. So even if you could fly to every single day, and there's almost guaranteed going to be some days where you can't fly to in the same day, then you're talking about still like seven and a half days, right? If you did two every day. And so probably you're looking at more like 10 days to two weeks at minimum. Now, if you have the time and you want to plan around the world trip, this could be awesome because this could be a way to get a fantastic return on a trip that you might have already been excited about taking. And as I build my itinerary, I'm definitely thinking, oh man, if I had a month to do this, then I could put together an awesome trip that also earns this

killer return. I just don't have that kind of time. So I can't do that. So I think if you're in that situation, you got a remote job, blah, blah, blah, maybe, then maybe it is. But yeah, it's definitely not nearly as easy. It's way more time consuming, both A, in terms of travel, and B, in terms of figuring the trip out, because you got situations like Greg mentioned with the fare classes, and also with flight times that don't necessarily line up to like arrive when you need them to arrive in order to catch the next segment that you want to catch. And so you may end up being somewhere longer than you wanted to be there, etc, etc. It's also there's a lot of uncertainty built into this because you can't enter your SAS number on all of the airline websites. Like some of the airline websites will take your SAS number, but some won't

yet because they're new to SkyTeam. And so not everybody's set up to even take those SAS numbers, which means you're going to have to apply for retroactive credit afterwards. You're gonna have to follow up with SAS and submit your boarding pass and things like that to say, hey, listen, I should have earned miles on this flight. And you can only start doing that eight days after your trip has been completed. And when I say trip, I mean that flight, eight days after that flight has been completed. And you can only submit those up until December 20th, even though this challenge technically allows you to travel up until December 31st. You can only challenge technically allows you to travel up until December

31st, you can only submit a missing mileage or retroactive mileage credit claim until the 20th. And because it has to be eight days after your trip was done, that means really you need to be done traveling on this by like December 11th or 12th in order to make sure that you've got the ability to file a claim if your miles don't automatically post or then fly again. But the problem, of course, is if you're dealing with an airline where you can't enter your Euro bonus number when you're making the booking, then you're going to be out of luck if you don't get the miles from that, because it'll be too late to fly another flight and also submit the missing mileage credit. So there's a lot of complication. I think this is

not for beginners. You may have looked at it and been like, oh, maybe I could do that. And yeah, maybe you can, but you're gonna have to put some time into it. It's not as easy as it might have looked on the surface. Now, that's not to say that I regret doing it. I think for a normal person, not worth it. Time costs, financial costs, stress, and the risk of maybe not getting the miles. Like if we don't get 15 airlines to credit, then we're, you know, if we get 10 of them, we'll still get 100,000 miles, but that's not enough to make up for the time cost and everything. So not worth it for a normal person, but the good news is we're not normal. So we're going to do it. It's a little

tough. I mean, and really, let me, one other point that I didn't make that I kind of wanted to make was a million miles. If you value them at one cent each, that's about $10,000. If you value them at one and a half cents, you're talking about $15,000. So, you know, the miles could be worth quite a bit. So if you could do this trip for even four or $5,000, it might be worth it if you're going to value the redemption side that highly. Whether or not you're going to value the redemption side that highly is going to vary person to person. Of course, we don't know. Maybe SAS will totally change their award chart next week. I have no idea. I haven't followed this program because you can't transfer

to it, even from Marriott, as Greg said. So I don't know how often they devalue or have devalued, if they're ripe for devaluation. I don't know how easy it'll be to find award availability on them in the future. I've looked a little bit at redeeming SAS points because I figured, okay, well, at the first half of this trip, I'm going to be earning miles, right? So maybe I'll have some miles on my account and I could redeem them on one of these airlines that I'm a little shaky on. We'll talk about why I'm shaky on some of them. And I looked at the award redemptions and the rates were not bad if you're getting a million miles, but not great either. They weren't like the best award rates by any stretch for the particular flights. So anyway, it's like they're going to be a decent value, not necessarily the best value. You can fly in business class to Europe for 50,000 miles each way if you find availability at that safer level with SAS. So 100,000 miles round trip, that's a really good price for business class to Europe. But you do have to find it available. And I understand pricing on their awards can be dynamic. On partners, decent deal also. Round trip business class on Sky Team to Europe is 130,000 miles. So that's pretty good.

A one-way is 60% of the miles. So you'll pay 78,000 miles one way for a business class ticket to Europe. That's not the best deal out there, but it's also not horrible. Again, if you're earning a million miles from this promotion, you could get really good value out of those miles. So they could be particularly valuable overall. I mean, I'm excited about the idea of a million miles. And if I weren't, we probably wouldn't be doing this. But I am excited about it. And I do think that I'll redeem the miles for really good value. I could end up with up to 10 round trips to Europe in business class, that will be worth spending a couple thousand dollars, I think. But, but, you know, it does rely on being able to find that availability and hunt it out and everything. So there are some

challenges. And then, of course, there's no way to top off your account. So you know, if you use that 130k a few times, and you end up with like 60,000 miles or worse, yeah, like 40,000 miles left over, you don't have enough for a 40,000 miles left over. You don't have enough for a business class ticket to Europe anymore. You don't have any way to top that off easily. So there's some challenges that make it again, difficult for a lot of people. But I'm excited about it, even though I sound kind of negative there. I'm not negative overall, because overall, walking away with a million miles after maybe 10 or 14 days of travel, I think is going to feel pretty awesome. So let's talk about what we're doing to make this competitive.

Yeah. Okay. So as if we need to do anything to make it competitive, it's going to be hard to complete as is, as the SaaS promotion is defined. But we are adding some things in. We talked about last week that we have to do it with as much SaaS as possible, that me, Nick, and Steven are going to be competing to see who can earn the million miles with as much SaaS as possible. By that, we mean speed, affordability, and style. And style, of course, is the word that Nick came up with last week. You heard it live. Yeah. Live on recording.

That was fun. It was the right word. Yeah. And Tim and Kerry are going to judge how well we hit those things. Speed, we're saying, is not only your quickness in completing the challenge, but spending the least amount of time in flight. And then, of course, affordability is pretty self-explanatory. And style, of course, is flying in comfort and luxury, hopefully, not a lot of luxury, but maybe some comfort. And then, of course, obviously, good lodging.

Maybe flying with a fedora on your head or something like that will be so helpful. You know, that's not so comfortable, though, because you can't put your head all the way back it's not great for sitting on a plane it's kind of inconvenient for that but for putting over your face to very good for that cover the light and everything it is excellent for that use on a plane which works a lot better

when you've got a lie flat seat and of course we're going to be flying an economy class probably a lot yeah unless our seats our economy seats break and they go flat we can only hope we're going to be flying an economy class, probably a lot. Probably. Yeah. Unless our seats, our economy seats break and they go flat. We can only hope. We can only hope. Right.

All right. So the person behind us isn't hoping for that, but yeah. So we're going to see what we can do. We're doing it again in November. We talked about that last week, mid-November taking off, I think, no earlier than the 3rd and coming back by the 23rd. Is that right? That sounds right to me. And each of us have little details that make it a different window than that. But for all of us, it's mid-November. You can find all the latest stuff at

millionmilemadness.com, where that'll redirect you to our challenge page that's all about this challenge. And there you'll find individual links to general information about the challenge, but also each of us have our own journal posts where right now what we're doing is we're documenting the process of trying to find the right routes to book all of this. And once we start actually flying, we'll also be updating those journal posts to talk about what's happened so far, what our next steps are and things like that and any challenges we encounter along the way.

Which there are sure to be challenges along the way, but that's kind of part of the fun. And so, you know, if you ask, well, why? Why are you doing this? I just talked about how I think for the normal person, it's probably not worth it, right? So then why do it? Well, I mean, first, you know, if you ask, well, why, why are you doing this? I just talked about how I think for the normal person, it's probably not worth it. Right. So then why do it?

Well, I mean, first, first, of course, because we're crazy like that, the idea of earning a million miles in a week or two, I mean, that's just too appealing not to go after it. And I think probably all of us, when we saw this, we were like, oh, I wonder how cheaply I could do that. I wonder if I can come up with a really good way to do that. And so I think it's just, we enjoy the puzzle aspect of it a little bit, the game of it and the thought of earning a million miles in such little time. Ironically, I think it'll somewhat show Greg's point that

if you really just want a million miles, you can do it with a lot less effort by opening a couple of credit cards. But I think that it'll be hard to find a way to do it that's much more fun, I think, than what this might turn out to be. So that's fun. And of course, we additionally thought this would be awesome because this would be a great opportunity to get readers involved. One of the pieces of feedback we've gotten in previous challenges is that readers would like a way to get involved, to be involved in the challenge. And this time around, you can be and you can win big. You can, you can. So we're going to talk briefly about how you can help us. And then we'll talk about how, what you can win. So the way to help us is read our journal posts.

And if you have suggestions and it can be anything from itineraries that would work well to really specific things like, you know, because we're going to be ultimately picking who helped us the most. Each of us will be separately picking a person and we're going to be making sure that we're not picking the same person as well. And those people that we pick as to be the most helpful are going to win a prize. And that prize is going to be pretty awesome, as we have said already. So the prize that you'll win, hopefully pending approval from SAS, we're waiting to hear back from them about this, but we expect anyway, that the winner that we each pick is going to win 100,000 SAS miles. So that's enough SAS miles for a round trip business class flight to Europe

on SAS or more than enough for a one way on Sky Team partners. So I mean, that's a pretty cool prize. That's we're talking about round trip business class to Europe. I mean, that's easily a flight that might cost you two or three thousand dollars if you use your miles that way. So, of course, obviously be up to you how to use your miles and whether or not you're gonna get that much is up to how you redeem your miles. But at any rate, it could be an awesome prize for somebody who's able to lie flat on the way to and from Europe

if you redeem your miles well. For sure, no question about that. But that's not all, because when we're all said and done, hopefully all three of us will have earned the million miles from the challenge, but that's not guaranteed. But hopefully at least one will have.

But regardless of how many people have, Tim and Kerry, the judges, are ultimately going to decide who won the competition overall. So it has to be someone that got the million miles from the SAS competition, but then also who did it with the most sass if if multiple of us uh got the million and that the person that that

person chose as the most helpful will be the grand prize winner who will who will get an additional what 300 000 sass miles 300 000 s SAS miles? 300,000 SAS miles. 300,000 SAS miles. So for a total of 400,000 altogether, because you already got 100,000. Plus. That's not all? That's not all. 400,000 miles is not all?

That's not all, folks. Hilton has generously agreed to kick in. They will award the winner five free night certificates. They're called Hilton Be My be my guest certificates something like that for to be able to stay uh each one will let you stay in a standard room at any hilton property worldwide uh for free um so they're similar to free night certificates but they won't work at slh or auto camp things like that yeah they work at Hilton brands. So you can stay at any of the various Hilton brands, Hilton, Waldorf, Astoria, Conrad. If you really want to

stay at a Hilton garden inn, you can do that too. You'll be able to pick where you want to use them. And of course, there's five of them. So you could use them all in one shot, or I assume you can use them one here and three there as you like. So that's an awesome prize. I mean, five nights could be just about any Hilton property in the world that's a Hilton property, Hilton brand anyway. I mean, that could also be just such a cool prize to win, to be able to pick where it is you want to go. And between your newly minted SAS miles and your five free nights, you could plan yourself an entirely free vacation or pretty close to a free vacation obviously you're still going to pay taxes on stuff you know you'll pay

the taxes on award tickets but pretty darn close you're gonna do pretty well if you are the winner who helps the champion the most you are gonna win i'd say that's a pretty awesome prize wouldn't you it really is i i would you know love to use it at a place like the Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives or the Conrad in the Maldives or Conrad Bora Bora. I mean, there's so many places that would be really exciting to go and stay for free. Amazing. Yeah. And you can potentially get there with your SAS miles. So I mean, this could be the majority of planning for a trip like that. And certainly, if you did use them for something like that, like Greg mentioned, the Conrad, the Waldorf story in the Maldives, the Conrad Rangali Island, Conrad Bora Bora, if you use your miles and your

free nights for something like that, what an awesome prize that would turn out to be. I look forward to hearing how the winner uses the miles and the free night certificates. I am hoping that you'll use them for something that really excites you. And I'm excited to hear about it. So if people want to help us out, as Greg mentioned, what we want you to do is help us. Help us so we can, in turn, reward you if you are one of the chosen ones. Keep in mind. A little fine print. A little fine print.

Fine print. Give me the fine print. Any and all prize-related expenses, including without limitation, any and all federal related let me start any and all prize related expenses including without limitation any and all federal state and or local taxes should be the sole responsibility of the winner we cannot accurately value this prize right or exactly this i should say i don't know how you're going to retain them so so that's a good fine print there yeah and and so how are we going to do this where are we what are we doing so right now i guess what you need to know is like Greg said, we each have our planning journals. And so you can give us tips, like Greg said, about specific routes, entire itineraries. I have one reader who

suggested an entire itinerary with flight times and numbers and fare classes. And then I've had other people who've said, oh, but check this out. There's this route that is priced really well in business class, or there's that route that is priced really well in business class, or there's that route that would put you at this airport in time to do this cool thing. And so all of those types of tips, I think, have been really cool to get. So please keep them coming in and we'll pick the people who are most helpful. And we're going to pick them at the end, like the end of the competition. So you've got time to be helpful, not only in designing the flights we book, but also in giving us suggestions about what to do in the places we

go to. And if something goes wrong, helping us figure out how to fix it. So there's lots of opportunities to be helpful still. Yeah, absolutely. I was just going to say pretty much the same thing that, that just because, you know, once we've booked the full itineraries and are getting ready to go, it does not mean that the chance to win is over because you might be really helpful even after that. We don't know what's going to happen, so we can't give specifics about how you can be helpful in those situations, but I'm pretty confident that it's going to come up,

that we are going to need help all along the way. Somebody is going to. I'm just hoping that it's not me this time. It's a reference to our last challenge. All right. So where are we? Status update. Where are we in things? What's up with Steven? Have you heard from Steven? You know what's going on with him? Just a little bit. So, you know, Steven, you know, I'm going to say Steven has, unlike me and Nick, hasn't won one of these team challenges yet. And so if you're not wedded to helping one of the three of us, you probably ought to help Steven. I'd love to see him win this one. So let's get him the edge he needs by giving him the awesome help he could use. He started off, he's going to be in Vegas. That's where he's going to start and end the whole thing. And he started off planning to go west from there. The last thing he said to us was that he was having trouble with finding a cheap Virgin Atlantic flight

by going west. So he had thought about, for some reason, like Virgin Atlantic, there's really cheap flights from the East Coast to London, but not so much the other direction. And their flights from England to further east are pretty darn expensive, or from further east to London are further expensive um so you know so anyway uh he thought about going to the caribbean where there's a couple of short like island hopper flights that virgin atlantic has but he quickly found that just getting to and from the caribbean is pretty darn expensive so that didn't seem like a good idea so last he said anyway he's now considering going east but i don't know i don't know where his head's at since he told us that. We don't know where Stephen's head's at.

But you need to get out there and give him some assistance, some help. Because like Greg said, it'd be great to see Stephen win one here and to get some assistance in figuring that out. Especially those of you who are West Coast based, because we do often receive requests from West Coast based folks who want more West Coast based content. And here, Stephen's going to be starting out in Las Vegas. So now's your chance to help West Coast. So give him a hand and give him your tips. So I think this has been really interesting. And I want to talk about a couple of things, both where I am and also some of the tools that have been particularly useful so far, because I think that they are re-solidifying the usefulness of some tools that probably we find the cheapest little hopper flights on SkyTeam Airlines and fly the long-haul flights in comfort and luxury and then just pick the shortest flights I could with SkyTeam.

I've decided against that. And I've decided against that for a couple of reasons. One, it was just making it take longer so that I could fill in the blanks with the ANA flights. And so I did have a reader who did a great job designing both the ANA around the world and the nested SkyTeam flights. So it was very good, but it was missing a flight across the Pacific still, and that was proving to be quite difficult. And then it was sort of daunting thinking, okay, well, then I got to transfer over some miles. Got to do it ahead of a time with ANA and hope that I find the availability and then take the time to call and hope I can book this and then consider the value of the miles used for that and the cost of the taxes.

And so how many miles would I transfer over? Because I'm not exactly sure which route I'm going to end up flying and how many miles it's going to cost. And so it just seemed like it was adding too much complication. And initially I thought I was fine with all of that. And then I got digging into the competition and I was like, I don't need anything making this more difficult. I think that was a wise choice. I thought it was a little crazy when I first heard it, but it'll make good content. I thought it was a little crazy too, but it was one of those things I thought was a little crazy, but would make for good content. And then I realized, no, it's just a little crazy. Yeah. And we should mention, I don't think we've told readers that

or listeners that how we're handling miles that we spend from our own accounts that that remember part of how we're going to be judged is affordability. And so what we're going to do is we're going to use the reasonable redemption value for any miles we spend towards towards the travel here and count that as if that's the cash cost. So if Nick had done around the world business class, let's say with ANA miles, after counting for the value of the miles plus the tax and fees, he's probably talking about over $2,000 in expenses. That's before accounting for any of the Sky Team flights. And that's why I thought

that was a little crazy. Yeah, it did seem like it might not work out to be affordable enough, although I'm still not sure that it's going to work out to be way cheaper than if I had done it that way. But we'll see. We'll see. We're working on it still. So we're not done yet. We're not at the finish line. But when Greg mentioned the Fifth Freedom Routes that Virgin Atlantic operates in the Caribbean, I realized that it's probably worth mentioning how much I've been using flightconnections.com. So that's a tool we've talked about a bunch of times before, where you can set it to a

specific airline and see a map, a physical map of the world with all of the physical, digital map, I suppose, because it's on the screen. But anyway, let's not split hairs, where you can look at all of their routes around the world. And that's been really useful, both A, for finding some of the fifth freedom routes. So they fly a bunch of routes from, I think it's like Barbados in the Caribbean, they fly a number of routes. And so if you didn't know which islands they fly to from Barbados, well, you can figure that out pretty quickly with flight connections with a free account without even signing up for an account. Actually, you just

go to the website and set one airline and see what those routes are. If you do have an account with them, then you can look at multiple airlines at once, which I'll say is useful. If you're looking to try to connect the dots between two different airlines, then that can be helpful. I found that to be particularly helpful in trying to plan out some of the places where I'll overlap and find cheap flights from one point or another. And Fifth Freedom routes also I found on, or not even Fifth Freedom, that's not the right way to say it, other routes on like Aeropa, for instance, their hub is Madrid, but they also have flights that operate from Palma de Mallorca and Barcelona that don't go to Madrid. And so I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't used

flight connections. So that's been a really good tool to use. And so I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't used flight connections. So that's been a really good tool to use. I have my first flight tentatively booked. So I say tentatively booked because I still am within the cancellation window as we record this and I probably could even do a change of some sort. So tentatively, I'm going to be kicking my trip off with a flight that I have booked through Delta, but not on Delta. So I used a combination of things. We have a resource post that explains what still works for triggering airline incidental credits on Amex cards.

I recently opened an Amex business platinum card. I wrote about that, how I opened a card for the new 250k point bonus. And as Greg mentioned, I already had a couple of business platinum cards open and I opened a card for the new 250k point bonus. And as Greg mentioned, I already had a couple of business platinum cards open and I still got approved for another one. So that was pretty awesome. But I had this $200 airline and so credit to use. And so I went to our guide to see, well, with Delta, what might trigger that credit beyond the things that officially trigger the credit. And I saw that there were a number of reports of success that people had noted in using a gift card, a Delta gift card to pay part of the cost of an airfare and then pay the rest of the cost of that airfare using the Amex Platinum card.

Now, I'm sure that there's a cutoff in terms of how expensive that rest of the airfare can be, but the amount for me was less than the higher amounts in our chart. So I used a Delta gift card to pay for part of it. And actually, I redeemed Pepper Rewards. I've been using the Pepper Rewards app some. We've talked about some warnings about why you should be careful with Pepper Rewards app. But I had some coins, some rewards waiting to be used in that app.

So I redeemed some of those for a Delta gift card. And then I used the Amex Platinum card. And I bought a Virgin Atlantic flight through Delta. And it is in a fair class that should qualify to earn miles on SAS. And there's a couple of reasons I mentioned this. Number one, because I expect to get the credit back from the business Platinum card because I expect it will trigger the airline incidental credit.

But then also additionally to say that the operating carrier is what matters here. So even though it's a Delta flight number, I booked it through Delta. The fact that it's operated by Virgin Atlantic means that it would count for Virgin Atlantic for the SAS promo, assuming that the fair class that I booked in is qualifying and it should be. So hopefully, knock on wood, that's going to work out. So that's my, my, my first part. Yep. Yep.

And I've got some other stuff laid out. I took the time to actually lay out all the flights several times already with different configurations. I started out just using Google flights and looking up the best prices and recording them and figuring out what the route would be without realizing how much time I would later have to invest in figuring out, okay, are those all qualifying fare classes? Because as Greg mentioned, some fare classes earn SAS miles and some don't. And so the cheapest flights are not always going to be the ones that earn SAS miles. And figuring that out has proved

to be a bit of a challenge. So I wrote a post this week about frequently asked questions about the promotion. And within that post, I have a section about how to figure out the fare class that you're looking at. Some airlines or online travel agencies make it very easy. They just include the fare class code right near the cabin. So if you're in economy class, it might say economy and in parentheses say S. So you know you're booking an S fare class. But other airlines and online travel agencies don't show that somewhere. So it's not always obvious and easy to figure out the fare class. So I spent hours, hours yesterday going through one flight after another to try to figure out, okay, I like these flights and the times and the costs, but are they the right fare class? And if not, how much would I have to pay to book the right fare

class? And can I do that? And so that's been pretty challenging, but it's also worked out pretty well. So far, my budget's looking pretty good, I think. I think I'm looking pretty decent on the affordability and I've gotten some great reader tips. So I mentioned I had one reader who just kind of laid out everything I thought did a fantastic job. And I just decided not to book that exact itinerary, but I've taken pieces out of it. I've had some other great reader tips to like a couple of readers that pointed out some roots in business class for like $150. And that's pretty amazing. I mean, not long haul life, don't get too excited, Greg. But yeah, I mean, there are some cheap business class flights out there, if you know where to look and

where to book. And so it's been great getting tips like that from readers. So if you're interested in that, if you're thinking about doing this promotion, you should definitely take a look at the comments section on all of our journal posts, because I'm sure there's been tons. I haven't looked at the comments on Greg's or Stephen's posts, but I imagine they've probably had some good tips there also. I thought originally I was focusing on speed, but I'm not so sure that that's going to be my strong suit anymore. I think right now my strong suits are looking like affordability. My strong suit is looking like affordability, and I need to add some more style. I think my itinerary needs a little more pizzazz.

I'm looking for opportunities. I found a couple. Thanks to reader comments. Again, I mentioned a couple of things earlier that were little hints at things you'll find in the comments on my post. So I don't want to give away too much to Greg all at once here. But at any rate, there are some opportunities for pizzazz that I'm eyeing up anyway that I think might work out well. And I need a little bit more of that because timing wise, I'm really surprised.

I'm having a hard time getting this under two weeks. And I'm not like including a whole bunch of stops and getting it under two weeks. It's just we have a lot of distance to cover here. And one of the downsides I thought I was going to mention earlier, and I neglected to, is just that SkyTeam flights are not always cheap. In fact, they're not the cheapest a lot of the time, because there's a lot of SkyTeam airlines in Europe and a lot of them in Asia. And those are two markets where competition from low-cost carriers is fierce.

So there are a lot of cheaper flights in those markets. So they're not always the cheapest ones. And so it's been a little bit of a challenge, I got to say. But I'm getting excited and I think I've got some things up my sleeve. So I'm feeling confident, but not satisfied yet. So we'll see where we go from there. Yeah, yeah, interesting. Okay, so I'm not as far along

as Nick. I don't have a full outline of everything. What I have is a rough outline. Uh, I have, you know, I have pretty good idea how I'm going to get to Europe and knock out a couple carriers to get to Europe. Um, I have a really solid two or three options for getting from Europe to Asia that I can choose from. And what I need to do now is, you know, figure out the specifics of how I'm going to get around Europe and how I'm going to get around Asia to hit all the carriers, I probably at this point will not use my Delta upgrade certificates at all. So I, yeah. Interesting twist. Yeah. So, so here's what, here's what happened.

I thought what I was going to do was fly, you know, let's say Virgin Atlantic and apply an upgrade certificate to that. And then at, you know, maybe after the upgrade clears, change the, change the, the, the credited airline from Delta to a SAS, but, um, yeah, people have reported that that doesn't go over very well. So I'm not sure that'll work. I still have some other, some things to think about with that, but I don't, I don't think that's very likely to work out. So, so that brings me to, so that was like, let's say to get to Europe. I'm probably not going to use that.

I'm disappointed for you but i'm happy for me because that just made the style competition a little closer to even yeah um well so the other part is the last part i i had found a really cheap flight uh to get home from asia on delta and i figured i'll definitely use a global upgrade certificate for that. And I still can because I'm not going to count on that for the Delta credit. I'm going to get the Delta credit in at the beginning and not at the end. And so I could get home that way. But I really want to nail the affordability on this thing. That's one of the things I'm going after. And by spending, let me just make up numbers, by spending, let's say $500 for that flight, that's one more flight where I could have spent $500 or even less on one of the carriers that will add to my 15. And so the point is, I wouldn't have to fly all of the Asian carriers around Asia

on those short flights. I could save one of them for that long flight to get back to the States. So I'm back and forth on that. We'll see where I go. We'll see. We'll see. But anyway, long way of saying I'm now much more focused on speed and affordability than on style. Wow. I'm surprised by that, Greg DeFrico-Miler. That's not on brand for you. That's not my style, is it? Yeah. No, not at all.

I'm going a little out of my comfort zone to go for those two. I didn't really expect you to be competitive on speed. I'm not going to lie. So I was less concerned. Just naturally, I'd like to get back sooner rather than later. But I wasn't concerned really that I was going to lose by much there. I thought, you know, maybe I'll lose. Maybe.

But if I do, probably not much because you're not really like a speed traveler. Now you got me nervous. Good. That's what I was hoping to do. And affordability. Well, I again, assumed that you would probably fly affordably. I thought that maybe you would focus on a little bit more luxury and say, ah, you know what? The budget can go by the wayside or I'll book an award flight here that's going to be more comfortable. I'm somewhat surprised to hear that you're laser focused on economy class on this one. So yeah, it's kind of morphed into that. So I can't really explain why necessarily, except that, except to say one of my early drafts of like the outline, I was trying to estimate the cost of things. And I had a fairly long business class flight in there, a cheap business class flight. But when I saw what the estimate came to,

it was a lot higher than I was expecting it to come to. And so I thought, oh, wow, I could cut that down a lot by taking out that, changing that one to economy and taking out that Delta flight can do a lot to reduce the cost. And so that's my thinking right now anyway. Interesting. Well, we'll see. We'll see where that goes. See, on the other hand, I looked at it and I was like, there's a lot comfortable business

class flight there. Maybe I could just be comfortable after a lot of economy class flying. I got the miles. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. That's- Yeah, we'll see. We'll see where I land. We'll see where I land miles. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. That's- Yeah, we'll see. We'll see where I land. We'll see where I land. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's not, you know, I haven't closed the door on it, but that's where my head's at. Well, I'm glad you mentioned about closing the door on it because you said before, you know, that I kind of laid out the whole thing and I have. I have a spreadsheet with all the flights that I could take, but I haven't booked them. I just booked the first one. So at this point, as long as we record this anyway, I'm still pretty wide open. Things could change. And I know just from searching the last several days that prices do change day to day. So while I have a potential plan set up, I also imagine that that's not going to be the final answer. And then as I hear tidbits like this, I already

imagine something's changing a little bit. So we'll see. We'll see. I'm pretty excited to see what everybody comes up with. I have no idea what Steven's going to come up with yet. And now I have some new intel on what you're working on. So that's good to hear. Yeah. Yeah. And let me tell you a little bit about how helpful people have been so far. So for one, I've been concerned about because I don't have a China visa about how it takes to go in and out of China. And I asked for more details and they followed through with everything I could want to know about it. And so that's awesome because now I feel pretty comfortable that I know what I need to do to get in and out of China without a visa. So that's awesome. Within my journal posts, people have been helpful in multiple ways. There are some people that have left entire itineraries. Some have left like, here's an itinerary for getting around Asia,

or here's one for doing all the European carriers. Those are both helpful. Some of the most helpful, though, honestly, have been specific flights. Like, here's how to get this specific airline dirt cheap from here to here. And, you know, as long as they've checked ahead of time that the fare code is eligible, that's where it's really helpful.

But, I mean, I can do that as well. Double check that one I get. Anyway, so all of those have been great. And so it's been a great kickoff, I think, to this whole challenge, getting people involved and actively helping us, which has been fantastic. Yeah, it really has been. And some of those tips have been fantastic because there are things that other people surely have way more knowledge about. You mentioned the getting in and out of China without a visa. And that's a great example where somebody who travels a lot more to that part of the world or is based in that part of the world probably has a lot more knowledge about how it works than you and I do. Even if we read up on

it, it's hard to get the same feel that somebody with a lot of experience doing it can give you. So that's been super helpful. I think I do have a Chinese visa. So that particular one isn't as much of a concern for me. But it's been interesting seeing how that could be done for somebody who doesn't have one. Also, like Greg said, tips like trip.com, for instance, is an online travel agency that lists very different prices. And specifically for the carriers based in China and Asia, a lot of prices are significantly better through Trip.com. And because I used to work with a company that did a lot of work in China, I'm familiar with ctrip.com. I know that's like kind of the big Chinese company. So I figured Trip.com was affiliated right away when I saw it.

Somebody commented, though, and said that the reason why you see some much cheaper fares is because there are certain fare buckets that aren't available to travel agencies outside of China. And so what they said is all you're seeing is the full fare business class if you're looking at like Expedia or Google Flights for the most part, etc. But Ctrip and then Trip.com, since it's a subsidiary and some of the Chinese-based online travel agencies have access to a greater range of business class fares. Now, it's still a little dubious because it's hard to tell in some cases which ones are, you know, what the fare class is and to know whether you're booking the right fare class or not, which is pretty important because you need to be able to get credit for the flights. But it was an explanation that I'd never heard before. And at least in the future, I would be far less skeptical. I forget

about this challenge. I would be far less skeptical if I were looking for a trip in the future. And I saw on Google flights that, oh, wow, trip.com is way cheaper than everybody else. Now I've got an explanation that I don't know if it's right, but it sounds pretty good to me. It certainly could be the right explanation there. So that's been cool because no one person knows all of those tips and tricks. And so it's been great to learn some of those from readers. So thank you very much for all of the help that you've been. Continue helping us, continue helping Steven so that we can complete this and hopefully each earn a million miles and then again like we said at the beginning then one person who is most helpful for each of us is going to win a hundred thousand miles and one of those three people will win an additional three hundred thousand miles and

five hilton be our guest certificates so uh gonna be a pretty nice prize to end up with. Somebody's going to hopefully win very big after we hopefully each win our million miles. Good luck to us. Last thing I want to add is Nick has been very helpful to me as well. So if you check out the FAQ post he published about the challenge, there's a lot of great information in there. He had examples of how to use ITA matrix to look for specific fare classes for a particular airline, for example. And I already started playing with that and found some really, you know, good opportunities that that I probably wouldn't have found otherwise. And then even like a little tip, like I didn't know that Expedia

showed the fare code so easily. And that's that's really good because, you know, you could find a fare in Google Flights. You could click through to Expedia right from there and see the fare code. And so it's very quick and easy to get from Google Flights to the fare code that way. And so that's awesome. That was a tip that came from readers, by the way. I didn't realize that. I never really paid attention because I think Greg and I probably both share that we don't book tons of paid flights these days. I mean, I know probably in a previous career you did, but these days, for the most part, we're usually booking award tickets. And even when we are booking paid tickets, I'm not usually concerned with what the fare class is. It doesn't really matter. So I don't usually pay much attention to it. So I didn't realize that Expedia showed up. It was a reader that pointed that out and said, oh, well, Expedia shows the fair class all the time, but trip.com doesn't kind of a thing. And I was like, oh, Expedia does. And I started clicking through. I was like, well, look at that. Expedia does. That makes it a lot easier. Great to know. Yep. Yep. Very good. So

hopefully some of those frequently asked questions will be helpful for you too, if you are looking to do this challenge. So you'll want to check the show notes for links. Again, you can go to millionmilemadness.com in order to get redirected to the Frequent Miler page that has all of the latest updates and all the stuff about the challenge. So that's the place to go if you forget and can't remember what it is or you don't find the link in the show notes that you're looking for, millionmilemadness.com. Tell your friends. All right. So that brings us, I think, to this week's question of the week. And so this week's question of the week is somewhat relevant, maybe especially for those of us that end up with a million SAS miles. So a guy writes in and says, hey, FM, with your help, I jumped into the points game with both feet. However, I did not pay any attention to whether or when certain points expire. Could you give a best practices pep talk about what you should do every year to ensure your points don't expire? Now, I don't know if you're going to have a whole pep talk, but what do you do?

How do you avoid this? I mean, we may end up with a million SaaS miles each. I got no idea what the expiration policy is on those. What do you do? Right, right. I mean, I just use Award Wallet. So I make sure with, you know, I'm registered with so many different programs, have miles in so many different programs that trying to track it myself would be impossible. So I put them all into AwardWallet. What you do have to do every now and then in AwardWallet, you have to go in and handle the fact that some of these programs are doing like a two-factor authentication.

And so you have to get a code and put it into AwardWallet so that it can log into your account for you. But the basic is that AwardWallet will let you know, let's say, three months before your points are about to expire. And then you can go look up. We have a great resource on the blog showing when points expire. And I think it says whether it – tell me if I'm wrong about this thing now that I'm thinking about it. I don't remember now. I don't know either. I was thinking about it i don't remember now i was thinking that it said how to renew the points but maybe it doesn't actually sure if it does

we'll have to double check that but anyway um point is most miles um most programs with the miles you can extend the activation period or you know make your your miles active for another 18 months or two years whatever whatever the expiration period is, um, just by having activity in your account. And that activity could be generated usually as easily as transferring another thousand miles from like Amex or chase or whatever, or booking an award or worst case with like certain airline miles. I've done things like spend 400 miles to get a magazine subscription. I don't even want just to have activity in my account. Yeah, yeah.

Because with many programs, earning or redeeming miles will count as activity to extend the validity of your miles. There are some exceptions, though, so you need to know the exceptions. And that's where something like a word wallet tool like that comes in handy for monitoring and making sure that your miles and points don't expire, because that can be a big hit if they do expire. Some programs offer avenues to reactivate those, not all do. And the ones that do offer programs to reactivate them, in some cases, it's pretty expensive to do. So you really don't want them to expire. And oftentimes it is so easy, Just transfer over another thousand miles, buy the magazine subscription, whatever it might be. Maybe even book an award that you cancel.

You may be able to keep miles alive. So you want to be on top of that, though. It's important. It's a good point. You do need to do something to keep track of the miles and points. And that may be an argument for simplification for some people to not spread yourself so thin with so many different programs that it's hard for you to track and manage. Yeah. Also it's a warning is that there are certain programs that

have no way of extending the miles. And for some reason that's really popular with Asian carriers that it's often the case with, with Asian carriers that you've got, like, once you get the miles, they're good for about three years. And if you haven't, once you get the miles, they're good for about three years. And if you haven't used them in those three years, they're gone. So that's more of like a warning, like, you know, before you transfer points to a program, it's probably a good idea to know what their policy is about that and whether it's easy to, you know, keep the miles active. And if it's not just, you know, keep the miles active. And if it's not just, you know, be very sure you're going to be using all those miles before you transfer from a

transferable points program. Yep. Great point. And the last point I want to make on this, the, one of the other reasons I included this was because just yesterday, as we record this, I, uh, I, it popped into my mind to redeem cash back from my cash back portals because I've used lots of different shopping portals over the years. And I was like, Oh, you know what, I should go around and just cash out a bunch of those, especially the ones that I'm not using very much anymore. And so I went to log into some where I knew I had rewards, I logged into one of them. And it showed a rewards balance of zero. And I said, I can't be zero, I know I had a few $100 worth of rewards in that account. And so I clicked to my activity and sure enough, like six days before that, it's that account closed due to inactivity

and they took all of the rewards away. And I was like, oh no, I mean, this is a few hundred dollars. And so I submitted a ticket and I'm still in the process of going back and forth and finding out whether they're going to reinstate those rewards or not. I did ask nicely, politely, I didn't demand. I mean, it's obviously if I left the account inactive, I left it inactive, but I thought it was kind of unfair because it said that my account was closed yet they're still sending me two emails a day. So it's not really closed. Anyway, at any rate, the key point here is that those things expire too. And so I've had that happen before with other shopping portals where they're charging inactivity fees sometimes after X amount of time.

And it's usually a long period of time. But still, if you get into this game and you open a million different shopping portal accounts because there's so many different ones listed on cashback monitor, keep in mind that you do sometimes need to monitor your cashback balances and don't forget to cash those out. Yeah. All right. Advice. That's the end of today's episode.

If you enjoyed this and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. You can join our email list, follow us on social media. You can join the Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where you can ask and answer questions like this all the time. And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a giant mailbag,

you can send that to send it to mailbag at frequent miler.com. Bye everybody.