Frequent Miler on the Air - Navigating Amex’s Welcome Bonus Family Rules | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep261 | 6-28-24

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Amex has long had rules against getting a new welcome bonus for a card you’ve had before. Now, they’ve expanded those rules to include "families" of cards. In this episode we'll help you navigate this confusing and tedious concept. (01:31) - With pointsyeah a reader found an interesting redemption for ANA first class... but found a great discount for “suffering” in economy to HND. (Mailbag) Read more about Avianca LifeMiles’ awesome mixed-cabin award pricing - First Class for less (05:15) - Southwest Companion Pass with one business card (Card Talk) Find out more about the Southwest Premier Business Card here Find out more about the Southwest Performance Business card here (18:14) - Bilt rent day promo (Award Talk) (19:42) - Alaska Airlines transfer bonus, up to 100% (Award Talk) Read more about the Alaska / Bilt transfer bonus here (24:18) - Alaska Airlines status match (Award Talk) (29:20) - Bilt Neighborhood dining (Award Talk) (32:09) - Hilton adds more SLH properties (Award Talk) (37:50) - Choice removes 35K cap on their points prices in the US (Award Talk) (39:22) - We've updated some of our RRVs (Award Talk) (44:46) - Use Virgin points to book AF/KLM (Award Talk) (50:23) - Fiji airways to adopt AAdvantage miles (Award Talk) (52:09) - Read more about Greg’s Predictions here (2024 Predictions Half-Way Check Point) (54:55) - Read more about Nick’s predictions here (2024 Predictions Half-Way Check Point) (56:27) - Read more about Stephen’s Predictions here (2024 Predictions Half-Way Check Point) (58:38) - Read more about Tim’s Predictions here (2024 Predictions Half-Way Check Point) (1:01:27) - Read more about Carrie’s Predictions here (2024 Predictions Half-Way Check Point) Main Event: Navigating Amex’s Welcome Bonus Family Rules (1:03:24) - About Amex's "Pop-Up Prison" (1:06:58) - Family types (1:09:08) - How to find the rules. Look for "Offer Terms" (1:12:16) - Skirting the pop-up prison (1:18:01) - What sites do you like the best, apart from your own? (Question of the Week)

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, navigating Amex's welcome bonus family rules. Amex has long had rules against getting a new welcome bonus for a credit card that you've had before. But now they've expanded those rules to include families of cards. So if you're trying to get a card that's similar to one that you've had before, you might be out of luck. We'll talk all about how to navigate through those rules around them and get yourself a whole bunch of welcome bonuses. Anyway,

we should really call this the dysfunctional family roles. Cause you hear family and you think, you know, love and togetherness and, and there's, there's not enough love with the MX family roles, but, but like you said, but it probably depends on the family,

whether you think it, think of it that way. So let's hope we'll get into that a little bit later. But don't forget, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So if you want to jump ahead to something or you want to come back and revisit a segment later on, you just have to expand the description and you'll find the show notes there. Wherever you're watching this or listening to this, don't forget, like it. Give us a thumbs up. Leave us some feedback. Leave a comment, question. It's your thoughts about what we've been talking about. We'd love to hear from you. So thank you very much for that. With no further ado, let's drag out this

week's giant mailbag. All right. This week's giant mail comes from Darian. He says he found an interesting award redemption for ANA First Class. He found that booking just the first leg of what he wanted to fly from Tokyo to San Francisco was over 100,000 Avianca life miles to fly that leg. But when adding, I should say, he found that for the second leg he wants to fly. But when adding on the whole thing, Singapore to Tokyo, but that part in economy, and then Tokyo to San Francisco in first class. So stringing it all together in life miles, he found that the first class portion dropped from over 100,000 points to about 51,000. And then he just had to pay for the economy part, which was in the 20,000 range. And so the total award price considerably less by adding on that whole economy segment. Welcome to the magic of LifeMiles. Yes,

that's awesome. Well done, Darian. That's very exciting. That's the way LifeMiles handles mixed cabin redemptions. And in fact, you wrote a great post about this years ago about Avianca Life Miles. Awesome mixed cabin pricing, award pricing, first class for less, if I remember correctly. So you should definitely check out Greg's post. There's going to be a link in the show notes to that post. But yeah, you found there's a lot of different fun ways to kind of game the system. It's one of the things that I love about Life Miles. Yeah, Yeah. And in fact, if Darian was able to, let's say he wasn't ending in San Francisco,

but flying onward to Boston, and if he could add United flights or Air Canada flights onward from San Francisco to Boston, he would, and in economy, it would drop the price considerably more. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. It is nuts, though, to think that just the Tokyo to San Francisco is 100k. But by adding on this additional leg, it dropped the price by almost 30%. I mean, that's a pretty significant savings over what the price would be for that one segment. So yeah, that's a nice little fun piece of magic. I'm glad you stumbled on that, Darian, and certainly something to keep in mind when you're looking up awards. The challenge, of course, is getting the Life Miles website to play along and show availability on the legs you want. And that can really be

frustrating. Sometimes I just got a message from a reader actually yesterday about this, because they were looking for an itinerary to Europe. And the flight, I think, from Austin to Frankfurt didn't show up available in business class on Lufthansa. But it did show up if it was Austin to Frankfurt to, let's say, Vienna. Then it was all available in business class. But Austin to Frankfurt to Warsaw, all of a sudden the Austin to Frankfurt was only available in economy class. And that could be mixed or rather married segment

logic at play. But even still, even sometimes when you are able to put those together through like another award site, the LifeMiles site doesn't always let you piece the stuff together that should be available. But when it does, it can be magical and it can save you miles. And don't forget, Darian, that you could also subscribe to LifeMiles Plus. The cheapest plan is $20 a month and you would get 10% back. So your 70,000-ish mile award, you'd get 7,000-ish miles back and pay a net 63K. Now, that might not be worth paying $20 a month for because you do have to pay for six months minimum. But if you're going to do any other award redemptions with Avianca, that can quickly become worthwhile. Yeah, yeah, good tip.

All right. All right, let's get into this week's card talk. For card talk, we've got exciting new bonuses out on the Southwest business cards. Yeah, so there are two different Southwest business credit cards, and both of them will let you make it possible, the new bonuses, make it possible to earn a companion pass just by getting the one card and meeting the signup bonus requirements. So either one will give you 120,000 bonus points after a total of $15,000 spend in nine months.

Now, the details of each individual card vary as to how you get to the 120,000 points. So like the Premier Business Card will give you 60,000 bonus points after a $3,000 spend, and then an additional 60,000 after $15,000 total spend. So whereas the performance business card starts off with an 80,000 points after 5K spend, and then you add on an additional 40K once you reach 15K spend. So they vary in how you get to that 120K spend, but the point is... 120k points. 120k points, right. Yeah, if you could do 120k spend, you don't need a welcome bonus.

But here's the thing. If you have a Southwest credit card, you only need a total of 125,000 points earned in a calendar year to earn a companion pass. That's good for the rest of that year and all of the next. And so just meeting the sign signup bonus minimum spend on these will give you more than the extra

5,000 points you need to reach that goal. And so yeah, one card, Southwest companion pass, good for unlimited number of flights. Whether you book with points, whether you book with cash, you can add a companion for free. You do have to pay the taxes. Yeah. And so this is notable because we've sometimes seen these offers where they'll say you get a companion pass with one card, but it's a limited time companion pass, right? We've seen that a few times where you get one for like one year or maybe even less than a year sometimes, I think, and 30,000 points or something. This is different because the bonus is giving you the opportunity to earn enough points for the companion pass. So really, you're getting two things out of that, right? You're getting the companion pass and you're getting, I don't know,

$1,500, $1,800 worth of points by the time you met the minimum spend. So I mean, that's a pretty decent combination because not only are you going to be able to bring a companion for free, you're going to have lots of points to be able to book a lot of flights to bring a companion for free. Right, right. That's a lot of flying in a year and a half or whenever it is that you have the companion pass. So here's the thing. Normally, we recommend waiting until good offers appear near the end of the calendar year. And the reason for that is the ideal path for one of these big bonuses is to apply near the end of the year and don't meet the welcome bonus minimum spend requirements until after your December statement closes or first thing in January. And the reason is by doing it that way, you'll get all of your bonus points, the beginning of the next calendar year, and then the companion pass will be good for

all of that year plus all the next year. So you'd have for two full years. Whereas if you do this offer now, um, and you, and you, uh, do the, you know, meet the minimum spend right away this calendar year, uh, you'll only have the companion pass for the rest of this year and all the next. So it's, it's really going to be less than a year and a half. Yeah, especially because you won't actually get the points in your Southwest account until your first statement cuts. And your first statement with Chase often takes quite a while. It's, you know, because they give you plenty of time before that first statement cuts. So, you know, if you open the card right away, you're looking at at least a month before that

first statement cuts. So even if you were able to meet the 15 K minimum spend really quickly, you're realistically not looking at earning the companion pass until about the beginning of August or, you know, end of July at the absolute earliest. If you were to open it the day you listen, you know, day we publish this, then, you know, maybe you'll get it in early August. And so you're looking at what, 12 and four, right? Ish or five, five, four, four. Yeah, 16 months or so. So not even a year and a half, as Greg said. Yeah, so that's definitely a bit of a downside.

It's not the traditionally best time of year to go after this. Of course, traditionally, we've talked about earning the companion pass by opening two cards, one consumer card and one business card. So generally, the strategy is to open one of each because you can't open two consumer cards. So generally, we've recommended in any way that if you want to go after the companion pass, you wait until after October 1st, you open one business and one consumer and then meet the minimum spending requirements on both of those cards January 1st or later. And then you'll earn all the points at once. And like Greg said, have the companion pass for almost two full years.

So this is a little different because this is one card and you can earn the companion pass and relatively speaking, or I guess more or less the same number of points that it would normally, you normally need two cards to earn that number of points, more or less. So what do you think? I mean, is it worth doing this? Because it's only one card, it's a business card, so it's not going to add to your 524 count. Or would you wait and go for the old two card strategy, assuming that's still necessary down the road? Yeah. Yeah. So if, if there's no way to have your cake and eat it too, then, then that's a big decision to make. Um, wow. I, I would, I don't know. Um, it's, it's, it's tough. I, I mean, like if you have a lot of Southwest travel or likely Southwest travel towards the end of this year,

then maybe it would answer itself because you would like to use it. Maybe this coming holiday season and Thanksgiving and Christmas and whatever, then I think that would be the answer is go for it now. Otherwise, it's a tough call. What do you think? What would you do or What would you do? Or what would you recommend? Yeah, you know, it really is a tough call because it's attractive that this is just a single card that you don't need to open to. And that's attractive for a number of reasons.

One, because it simplifies things. But two, also because it leaves open an avenue in the future to get a consumer card. If you want to keep this card open in the future to get a consumer card. If you want to keep this card open for a while to get a consumer card, maybe they run an offer or something like this in the future and you have the ability to do that. Or maybe you've got the ability to earn a bunch of other points in other ways. Maybe there's a decent referral bonus going on and you're able to pick up referral points and mix that with one consumer card down the road. So this doesn't tie up two slots at once, so to speak. So there's some attraction there. But yeah, I think, like you said, it depends on how much you think you would use it this year. Although exactly what I just said is the argument on the other side, that even if you would mostly use it next year, still,

it might be preferable to only use up one of those card spaces now, so to speak. So I don't know. There's not really a great answer. I don't think I think it's going to vary from person to person. I think generally speaking, most people are better off waiting until after October 1st. But it's kind of hard to say in this situation. There's part of me that says, you know, this launched late June. When's it going to end? Because we don't know usually when these are going to end. And it's become very unpredictable. It used to be the case, I feel like, that when Chase launched a new welcome bonus, it lasted quite a while. But we've seen over the last couple of years, some of the bonuses, especially like on the Marriott cards, have lasted just weeks or a month before they ended. So I don't know. Well, I have an answer for you, Nick. So Chase's website shows an expiration date of September 16th, which makes it possible to have your cake and eat it too, but it's complicated.

So you have to thread the needle here. So what you want to do, if you want to do it the hard way, and this is documented in our post on this card offer, what you can do is wait until very close to the expiration date or the day of the expiration date to apply. Then, once you're approved, ask Chase to move your statement date to early in the month, let's say the second or third or something like that. And the reason you do that is because then you can wait until right after, let's say, December 2nd is your statement close date. You can meet your your, you can meet your minimum spend then like on December 3rd before your three months are up. And because your next statement won't cut until

beginning of January, all those points will be awarded next calendar year. And then that way you'll have the companion pass for all of 2025 and all of 2026. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. And so that's the answer. Hence down, obviously, you want to wait until good. Well done there. Yes, that is exactly the answer. Things can go wrong.

You're threading the needle there, but it will work if you follow it exactly and you're careful about how much you're spending on it up until the right time because you don't want to hit either part of that welcome bonus too early if you're going to do this. Yeah, so that's the part that I think, especially for somebody who is not in the weeds with this, you have to know is that the companion pass requires you to earn X number of points. It's 135,000 points, but like Greg said, if you're a cardholder, you only need to earn 125,000, but you have to earn all of those points in the same calendar year, not within 12 months, but in the same calendar year. So if you hit the first part of the spending requirement, the first 3K or 5K, depending on which one you open. If you hit that now, and then you don't hit the rest of it until the beginning of next year, that's a problem because you're going to earn 60K now and 60K later or whatever the breakdown is on the bonus.

And if they're not in the same calendar year, then you're not going to have any companion pass at all. So you've got to be really careful. If you do what Greg just outlined, you've got to make sure that you do not hit that three or 5k threshold until after your December statement period cuts. And in fact, I tend to recommend that people play it extra conservative and try not to spend on the card at all until that point, because you never know. We've heard stories before. I remember a couple of years ago, there was someone who said a merchant accidentally double charged their card. And so they earned the welcome bonus because the merchant accidentally double charged on something. And then, of course, if your card number gets compromised, maybe somebody spends on it and you hit the bonus and that posts to your account.

You're facing an awfully hard uphill battle to get somebody at chase to claw it back so that they can re-award it right like good luck with that so uh so be very careful uh if you're trying to thread the needle just you know be cautious about how you thread the needle and know what you're doing you know think it out but but awesome offer that would be the ideal way to do it if you If you could earn the entire 120K in January and end up with a companion pass for all of 2025, essentially, and all of 2026, that's an amazing deal. Because again, you can bring the companion with you for free unlimited number of times. Like Greg said, doesn't matter if you use points or cash. It

doesn't matter if somebody else paid for your ticket with their points or their cash. You can still add your companion. You can change the companion up to three times per calendar year. So you want to bring somebody else with you on a trip and then switch it back to your spouse or partner or whatever. You can do that. So that's another great benefit of it. And so it's one of those rare things. And also, you don't have to add your companion at the moment you book. It doesn't matter.

If you have the companion pass, you can book a flight today for six months from now. And then all of a sudden, the day of travel, your companion decides they can come. As long as there's a seat available for sale, it doesn't have to be at the same price you originally paid or anything. As long as there's still a seat available for sale, you can add the companion. So it's really an incredible benefit. I've long said it's the best deal in domestic travel. So I think it's exciting. I think this offer is exciting, but definitely you got to be careful about how you time it out. Yep. Yep. Okay. All right. Let's talk next about award talk. I think we've got

a bunch of award talk coming out today, right? First up, huge news, huge news. And I've got to say, I didn't see this one coming because people asked. So Bilt has run some incredible rent day promotions. And lots of us have been wondering, are they going to run one of these big transfer bonuses again? Were the transfer bonuses dead? Are they never coming back? And we talked recently about the Wall Street Journal article. And so then there were people saying, oh, is the writing on the wall? Is it over? And you're never going to see a big rent day transfer bonuses at some point in the future. I thought they'd probably come back again, but I was almost certain that we would see those with either the hotel partners like Hilton and Marriott or whatever, Marriott,

I guess, or with foreign transfer partners like IHG is what I meant to say instead of Hilton, or with foreign partners like Avianca Life miles maybe or turkish maybe i said we'll never see one with one of the u.s based partners right forget about hyatt or united or alaska but i was wrong you were wrong um yeah so Yeah. So they're out with Alaska up to 100% transfer bonus on July 1st only, as usual, as they do with these rent The amount of the transfer bonus varies based on whether you have built elite status and how much elite status you have. So if you have the most, if you have the platinum status with built, which I'm very happy that I do, you get 100% transfer bonus. That means every built point becomes two Alaska miles. And Alaska miles and and uh Alaska miles by the way I I think are are great I I I had mixed mixed feelings initially when Alaska changed up their award charts and everything but I've come to appreciate them more and more as as uh their new award charts have become real and I keep finding

great deals through through Alaska so yeah so platinum members get 100% bonus and gold members 75%, silver 50%, blue, which is no status, you get 25% bonus. So if you think about it, we wouldn't expect Chase to ever offer any transfer bonus to, let's say, United, and we wouldn't expect, you know, Amex to offer a transfer bonus to Delta. And so seeing a 25% bonus alone would be huge news by itself. But this one goes all the way up to 100% depending on your status. So just incredible. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, not to mention that Alaska has not traditionally been a transfer partner of any of the transferable currencies. The only way to get Alaska miles has been either earn them through the program by flying and crediting flights to Alaska or the Bank of America Alaska cards. So this is a super new development, being able to transfer from a transferable currency at all. And then to not

only have that, but have a base level 25% transfer bonus for people with no built status at all, all the way up to 100%. And so, I mean, keep in mind at 100%, then if you've been earning 3x on dining throughout the month, that's 6x Alaska miles. Or if you were earning double on the first of the month, your 6x is becoming 12X Alaska miles. I mean, those are some incredible, incredible category bonuses all of a sudden. And makes rent-a-purchases that earned 2X on the first of the month look even more appealing. Again, if you're doubling that, that's an amazing return on otherwise unbonused spend. So very cool if you have had or if you have built points and you have use for Alaska miles.

I think this one is a pretty hot one. Are you going to transfer out all your miles or what? I'm not going to transfer all my miles. And the reason is I have about 53,000 built points. This transfer bonus, this first time we've seen this, is capped. 50,000 built points is the most that will double. So that's the only reason I'm not transferring all of them. I would transfer all of them if they would all double,

but I'll, I'll keep those 3000 for the around for the next transfer bonus. How about you? Do you have any built points you're looking at? I don't have, I don't have enough to make this appealing this time around. So, so no,

I'm not going to, but I would, if I had your 53,000, I would absolutely transfer the 50. You know, it's funny because we've traditionally always said not to transfer speculatively, wait until you have a use in mind, but these built transfer bonuses just kind of turn that advice on its head because at a hundred percent, it's really hard to imagine you would do better by keeping them and transferring them later to Hyatt or Aeroplan or Avianca or whatever than you would with double going to Alaska. So, yeah, I mean, I think I certainly would, especially at the 100% level. Even at the 75% level, I would transfer them all out, I think.

And exactly like Greg said, I was lukewarm on the new Alaska award chart when it came out because, you know, I liked the idea of some of the old sweet spots. But, man, I'm finding it, especially as somebody based on the East Coast, I'm finding a really appealing business class awards to Europe for forty five thousand miles. And you could do a stopover on a one way. I say to Europe, it depends where in Europe. It's somewhat distant space, too. But where you are in the U.S. Yeah. Where you are. I said being based are in the US. Yeah, and where you are.

I said being based on the East Coast. Oh, yes, yes. More appealing to me because it's a shorter distance to Europe. So that's why I'm able to get that type of deal. But anyway, so yeah, great deal there. But that's not all. So there's more to it. You also have an opportunity to status match with Alaska Airlines.

And so if you have status with built, if you have gold or platinum status with built, then you can do a match to Alaska, but matching requires transferring 10,000 built points to Alaska Airlines in order to activate the match. And that 10,000 miles does not get doubled. So you have to, this is sort of like paying a fee.

A lot of airlines have gone to this model where you pay a fee to do a status match, like $100, or we just saw the one from Air France. And the highest level, I think, requires something like $300. You have to pay in order to do the status match. So think about it like that, except you get to keep the points. You do have to transfer them to Alaska, but then you get to use them later on too. So it's not a bad deal to have to transfer 10,000 points to Alaska in order to get the match. So if you've got built platinum, you're going to

match to Alaska MVP gold. Again, you'll have to do this through a dedicated page. I think you said to in order to activate this promotion and you got to do it by July 1st, July 1st, the last day to be able to do this. So built platinum will match to Alaska MVP gold and built gold will match to Alaska MVP. So is that interesting? Exciting? Would you do that? Um, yeah, I mean, I would consider it if I, if I had a, uh, use coming up, um, for, uh, having Alaska status, but I actually, I matched from Delta during a brief window. So I have MVP gold 100K.

And so, yeah, so this wouldn't help me at all right now. But the nice thing is, often with transfer bonuses, they're like, you can only do it one time. With status matches, you mean? With status matches, you can only do it one time and with status matches you mean with status matches you can only do it one time thank you for that correction

this one they say that's not the case that this would not exclude you from doing future ones so you know if you could use it on upcoming travel having the status then I don't think it's a big price to pay to move 10,000 built points, if you have them, to Alaska. Although it would be a tough decision if you wanted to double them.

And so by doing this, you're having to hold back 10,000 from doubling. Then it is costing you 10,000 Alaska miles. Wow. Yeah. miles. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting. So if you're in your situation with 50,000, you know, essentially exactly 50,000 to transfer.

Yeah. It would cost you the chance to double that 10,000 miles. So then essentially it's kind of like you're paying 10,000 for the match and whether or not that makes sense is going to depend, not just on if you're going to fly Alaska, but keep in mind that Alaska elite status gives you benefits on American Airlines and other one world carriers. So it may still be worth it. Certainly, if you're going to fly any paid class fairs on British Airways leaving Europe. And then you're in a boatload of Alaska miles on those, especially if you have elite status, you're in even more.

So, you know, in some niche situations, I think there could be a use for that. But, you know, whether or not that's worth it to you, that's a tough question for us to answer. You'll have to decide that for yourself. You'll have to decide it by the end of the day on July 1st, since it's only running for a few days. But it is live already when this publishes, when you hear this podcast. It's already live up until July 1st, 2024. Right, right, right.

Before we go on to the third part of this, I need to back up a little bit and say, Nick, you mentioned earlier that you wouldn't have believed that there'd be a transfer bonus like this to a US-based airline program, but Build has previously had a 100% transfer bonus to a US-based airline program. And so you've got five seconds to tell me what airline that was. Five, four. Hawaiian. That's right.

Yes. I should have said a major US airline. I don't know how I could have excluded Hawaiian there, but I don't consider Hawaiian like, you know. I get it. It's not the same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, no diss to Hawaiian Airlines themselves. Just their program is not particularly compelling or interesting. There aren't a lot of great sweet spots in terms of awards. But, like, if you got 100% transfer bonus on 50,000 Alaska miles, you'd have enough potentially to fly round-trip business class to Europe from the east coast to the U.S. For, you know, what started out as 50,000 bill points. That's a pretty fantastic value. So yeah, anyway, exciting, more exciting than Hawaiian. You're right. I was not thinking of Hawaiian when I made that comment. Good point. But that's not all. There's more to rent day,

right? That's right. So the third component is it's called neighborhood dining, which if I'm reading between the lines correctly, I think this is going to be a regular feature of rent day going forward. But what this is, is they found a bunch of restaurants in select cities where they're going to let you repay for a dining experience at these restaurants. Basically, so what they say is each prepaid reservation will feature a curated tasting menu with dishes from renowned chefs and a selection of premium cocktails with built member exclusive pricing. It's only in the following cities, New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Austin, Houston, and Washington, DC. I found it interesting they called out-

Brooklyn got called out separately. Brooklyn, yeah. It's too cool to be part of New York City anymore. Yeah, I guess. Here I am in Ann Arbor and just not feeling the love at all, guys. Anyway, you can book these. They are starting at $75 a person or 6,000 built points. You can pay either way for these events. I looked at one of them as an example.

There's a restaurant called La Vida in Chicago, which is an Italian restaurant. And they advertise that it has three-course Michelin-rated tasting experience. I'm not really sure what a Michelin-rated tasting experience is. I don't either. But it sounds yummy. It sounds yummy. So three courses, two cocktails per person. And that one costs $125 per person or 10,000 bill points. So whether or not that's a deal is hard to say. But I think as someone who enjoys like great food, I'd be very happy to try one of these try one of these out but um

i'll have to do it when i'm traveling i don't have this opportunity at home yeah yeah you know i'd be interested but i wouldn't be interested in doing it with the built points it's you know you're looking at 1.25 cents per point on these which is not horrible but in a month when you could double those by transitioning them to alaska and end up with 20 000 alaska miles then it seems like a really bad deal to spend those on this if you would fly like ever um then i i wouldn't probably consider paying with built points yeah same same okay all right so there we go hopefully there'll be some more deliciousness and maybe they'll expand to ann arbor one of these days, Greg, you can hope.

I can hope. All right. So that's it for Bill. But we've got more award talk. There's a bunch more award talk. The next piece up I'm pretty excited about. So Hilton has added some more SLH properties that can be booked with Hilton points or with Hilton free night certificates. So they've added, I don't know, a dozen, 15 or so more small luxury hotels of the world properties.

So you may remember Hyatt used to have a partnership with SLH, but that partnership ended in May and Hilton picked it up. And we've seen a few properties go live so far. Now, again, a few more, including some properties that were long kind of hot hotspots, so to speak, places that have either been well reviewed by us or by lots of other people. I noticed Wentworth Mansion was in there, and I know you enjoyed your stay at Wentworth Mansion in Charleston. And then, of course, Kalala Island, which has been a big deal for its exclusivity, and the Grand Hotel Victoria on Lake Como, which I have loved and gushed about a few times. So they've added a bunch of other places, too.

And so the thing is, these places have been added. But my understanding is that each one that's been added has been added with exactly or about three weeks of availability at some point during the year. So you kind of have to stumble on when that three weeks is. And there's obviously very few rooms at most of these SLH properties. They are, after all, small luxury hotels of the world. So there's only so many standard rooms they have. So if you're looking right now, I'm going to say it's probably nearly impossible that you're going to stumble on availability. But the good news is this testing continues to expand and probably at some point we'll see it expand to more. And the even bigger, of course, good news is that all of these places have been available as standard awards.

Now, they've been, I don't know, I think 120K points for most of these. It depends on the property. It depends on the property. Like Kuala Island is 150K. 150, okay. The Grand Victoria in Lake Como is 120K. The one in Charleston, the Wentworth Manor is, Wentworth Mansion is 100K standard.

Now, when we say it is that, it actually can be less at times because Hilton doesn't have an award chart. These prices we're listing for standard rooms are the cap. Now, most of these, like Kalala Island, I'm sure you're never going to see less than the cap. With Wentworth Mansion, though, I did see a couple days that were like, not a lot less, but like 97k. So that was interesting. The other thing I saw there that I didn't see on the other few that I looked at was a premium room available. So the way Hilton does their awards is you can, if a standard room's available, you can book that for what we'd consider a reasonable number of Hilton points. If there's

a higher level room that you want, you can book it as a premium room award for a ridiculous number of Hilton points and get really poor value for your points. So the fact that that's there is not exciting from point of view of wanting to get good value for your points, but I found it kind of encouraging because it shows how well integrated they're making these into Hilton's system that they're able to do these premium room awards to get other rooms that aren't considered standard rooms. Yeah. I mean, it shows that their commitment to treating these like other Hilton properties that they've, I mean, they made it sound like these would be treated just like all the rest of the properties that are available at Hilton points. And it totally

seems that way. So when we're talking about these prices of 120 or 150 or a hundred, we're talking about the prices for standard rooms and they are being treated as standard room awards. So you can use a Hilton Free Night Certificate. Like if you have the Hilton Aspire card, you get one every year. Or if you've got a card where you can spend and earn a free night certificate, or if they come out as part of a welcome bonus on a credit card, then you can use those free night certificates at these places. And that's exciting because if you haven't been following along all along, we found that many of these small luxury hotels or the world properties are very nice. And so being able to use your free night certificate at some of these, especially places like Kalala Island, it has just off the charts rates. Being able to use a free night certificate

is just a phenomenal value. Oh, it's incredible. And so I can't wait till, you know, they are doing this slowly, methodically, you know, as sort of like a test, introducing each of these properties, as Nick said, releasing a sort of a handful of dates. And so it'll be great once they get it all settled and open the floodgates, then we'll be able to book these. I mean, a lot of people already booked them. The dates available haven't lined up for me yet. Yeah. And don't be surprised if you have a hard time finding availability at these places. I mean, even when they were part of Hyatt, many of the highly desirable ones were near impossible to find availability. I mean, I mentioned the Grand Hotel Victoria in Mignogio, Italy on Lake Como. And I've written about it a

couple of years ago, and I went back last summer, and it was always next to impossible to find availability. You had to get lucky and find dates available. It's surely not going to be easier when it's a Hilton property because there's just more people with Hilton points out there because of the footprint of Hilton. So expect it to be tough to find awards, but at least now there's some hope that you maybe could. So that's exciting. All right. Unfortunately, on the other end of the spectrum,

we got some kind of bad news out of Choice Privileges this week. Yeah. I mean, it's not the end of the world, but so Choice used to have a cap on the point prices for their hotels in the Americas, or at least in the US, maxed at 35,000 points per night. They've removed that cap. So silently, there was no announcement or anything. But in the terms, they just took that language away altogether. And also the lowest price went up from, I can't remember, $5,000 or $6,000 or something to $8,000 for the lowest, something like that. But good news is a number of properties that don't appear to have yet changed or gone up in price, but some have. And so, yeah. So your choice points are probably worth a little bit less now or you're going to need a few more of them It's not necessarily that the points are worth less, but you are going

to probably need some more of them, just like you would need some more dollars probably to stay at the same place that you stayed at a few years ago. So, you know, prices will rise. One of the inalienable truths from the sunscreen song years ago. So they are rising with choice finally. Speaking of points and how many you need and how much they're worth, we have new reasonable redemption values out for several different currencies. You and Tim have been at this, figuring these out, whittling them down, figuring out what are points worth. So what has changed? Yeah. So first of all, what are reasonable redemption values? We have different ways of coming up with what's a reasonable rate to expect to get when you're redeeming your points for hotels or for airfare. What kind of value is reasonable

to expect to get? And in general, we like these to be conservative numbers, meaning if you're trying hard to get a good deal, you're likely to do better. In some cases, you might do way, way better. But what we want is something kind of in the middle that you're likely to get about that value or more. So with hotels, what we've been doing over the years is looking at a number of markets in the US, because we're basing it on largely U.S. audience who spend their points mostly within the U.S. and picking some dates and looking at what's the median, what value you're going to get for your points. And let me talk about Marriott first.

So we looked at that last few years, Marriott has held steady at about 0.8 cents per point value. This year, looking at it again, they dropped all the way down to 0.7. So might not sound like a lot, but it is a pretty significant percentage-wise drop. So our reasonable redemption value for Marriott is down. Another one that's down, down big. So Hyatt, when we last looked at them, which I have to admit was too long ago, but they had jumped way up to 2.1 cents per point redemption value. That was the median, meaning half of them were higher than that. Now, when we looked again, they dropped down to, what was it, 1.7, I think. And then a new one we've looked at is Sinesta. So Sinesta, we talked about, I think last week.

Yeah. We said, don't take a siesta on Sinesta just last week. I think you said that. I don't know that we both said it, but you did. And because they're out with this huge welcome offer on their card. And so we decided, oh, it's time to take a look at what are points actually worth? And so we did this same kind of analysis and Tim found 1.02. So, wow, that means that Sinesta points, you know, on a one-to-one basis are more valuable than most of the other hotel points that we track other than that. That's right. So essentially what tim found was that you shouldn't take a siesta on semesta that's what oh boy the other thing is

that we we haven't had a great methodology for doing the same thing with airfare uh or airlines and and airline mile values however um the tool points path uh, you may or may not know, is run by a friend of ours, Julian Keel, who actually used to guest write for Frequent Miler. He's let us take a look at the data behind his tool. So what they do is they add award prices to Google Flights. So he's able to collect a tremendous amount of data on the actual cash rate prices for flights compared to the award prices. We looked at that with Delta. And Delta is lower point value than what we had as our RV. We had, I think, 1.3 before, and now we've dropped them down to 1.1 based on that data from PointsBath. So there you go. A lot of things going

down. Synesta going up. It's going down. It's going up. There you go. So we got some movement in reasonable redemption values. We do make an effort to try to make those as accurate and conservative as we can. And it's important that they're conservative so that you're making good choices when you're earning your points or at least when you're redeeming them. So you have an idea of how much you can reasonably expect, like Greg said, without a ton of effort. But do keep in mind that about half the time, even without much effort, just a lock half the time, you're going to do even better than reasonable redemption values. So as long as you keep that in mind as a sort of a floor for your redemptions, then you stand to do pretty well. That's the next one I find particularly interesting because the

new welcome offer on the Sinesta card that we talked about last week suddenly looks really attractive. If the Sinesta properties fit what you need, you can get quite a bit of value. It's a great welcome offer because that new latest welcome offer at the time that we're recording this anyway only requires a little bit of spend. It's a relatively small spending requirement for what turns out to be a really big bonus. So interesting. Anyway, we have that for reasonable redemption value updates. In interesting award booking news, a lot of people have complained about the fact that it is very

difficult, or it has been for a while now, very difficult to book Air France flights with Virgin Atlantic miles. And I ran into this myself. I was banging my head against the wall, trying to book a couple of Air France flights using my Virgin miles or my Virgin points. And just the website just keeps erroring out. You find the availability, it's there, you got the points, you go to book it, you fill in all the passenger names and the dates of birth and all the rest of that. You get all the way to the final page, enter your credit card information, you hit submit, and it spins for a while like it's doing something and you're about to hit the confirmation. But then it says, sorry, the award seats you wanted are gone. And if you just stopped there, you would think,

oh, man, somebody else scooped them up at the same time as me. But if you go back and search again, you'll see that no, nobody scooped them up. They're still sitting there. But for some reason, you can't book them. So that's been really annoying until we all read Greg's post about the secret for how to get this done. for a particular trip. And, and once you know it, the, the Air France flight, if I wanted to book directly through Air France, they wanted a gazillion points, something like 300,000 per person or something ridiculous like that. But Virgin Atlantic could see the same flight, could see the same seats, but only wanted about 48,000 points per person. It's a huge difference. Taxes and fees were a little bit more on the Virgin Atlantic side, but not egregiously so. So of course, I tried booking it through my desktop browser and exactly what Nick described happened.

I got to the end, filled out all my information. Boom. The seats are no longer there, it said. But I reran the search. They were still there. And as an aside, this happens with KLM too. This happened to me years ago with KLM. But anyway, so I kind of knew that it probably was bookable. But years ago when I did it, at that time, you used to be able to get Virgin's Twitter team to help you with things like this. Now, Virgin's Twitter team won't. So I tried doing it through the app. I tried doing it through the mobile web browser. And I repeated over and over different ways, error every single time. I tried calling. I was on know, and I repeated over and over different ways, um, error every single time I tried calling, I was on the, on the line forever and ever, and finally just gave up.

Finally, I, you know, I found out, Oh, wait a minute. Uh, what about this little button down here? There's, there's a button that, that sometimes shows up on the Virgin screen that says, uh, you know, contact us and one chat to know it. Chat to us is what it says. Chat to us. Chat to us. Yes, chat to us. So if you chat to us and you fill out the prompts

in such a way that you get past the robot and to a real person, then they happily can book the thing for you. And boom, the award of your dreams is there for you. So yeah, so I quickly wrote that up and we've already had a lot of people respond that, yay, they were finally able to book the thing they've been trying to book. So that's great, great news. And one of those people that said that was Nick himself. It was, it was, it was super easy. I was done in, yeah, I mean,

20-ish minutes maybe from start to finish. So it was quick. It was relatively, I say quick. It's not as quick as obviously booking it on yourself would have been. Booking yourself online would have been. But in terms of like level of hassle for the amount of hassle it was, I thought it was terrific. I was really, really happy. So yeah, it was a great solution. And now when I'm going to employ to use up, I have a whole bunch of virgin points and

there's some Air France KLM flights that work out well for trip I'm planning. So this is perfect. The timing was great. Couldn't have been better, really, because we had literally just decided, you know, the family decided, oh, we're all going to do this big trip and everybody's going to come along. And I was like, oh, wow, look at all this Air France availability that I can't book. And now I don't have that problem anymore. So thank you very much for that, Craig the Frequent Miler. That's awesome. Well done. Yeah. I'm going to mention really quickly

how the problem actually helped me. So when I first found the flight, only the 6.30 p.m. flight to Europe was available. And I didn't really want that because 6.30 p.m. to Europe from the East Coast, which this was, means that by the time you're tired and ready to go to sleep, they're serving breakfast and talking about landing. And so I don't like those early departures. So the nice thing is, and that's the one that I kept trying and it kept failing initially. Nice thing is that delay, after that delay, the 930 or 915 or something one showed up. And so that's the one I ultimately booked. And that's the one I really want.

Oh, nice. Nice. Excellent. Well, that's exciting stuff. So I'm glad for that. I'm glad that you stumbled on that. Thank you for finding it. Thank you for writing about it because that's super, super duper helpful for anybody who

I knew that there were readers that had transferred points and then weren't able to book because the website wasn't working and they couldn't get a phone agent to handle it. So I'm glad we've got that solved for at least some folks. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Very good. All right. Last piece of award news for this week is fiji airways

they've they've announced that they're gonna adopt advantage miles american advantage yeah they're gonna they're gonna become another american airlines advantage program or they're gonna adopt that as their loyalty program so interesting interesting. We heard that before from a South American airline that we weren't familiar with, Chilean airline. Yeah. One that we can't name because we don't know it. We said it and we were like, I've never heard of that one before. But yeah. So yeah, interesting. It's not the first. And so I find this actually, whether it matters or not, I don't know. We could debate that. But I find it very interesting from the perspective that this is something that British Airways has been doing for a while, right? They developed a rewards program, and I assume they realized that they could sell that to other people and say, hey, listen, we've already built the wheel here.

You don't need to reinvent it. Just rent our wheel. And so I assume that that's become a profit center for them because, of course, British Airways has the Avios program. And of course, IAG also owns Iberia. They assume Aer Lingus. So that's kind of all under one umbrella. But then, of course, you have Finnair and Qatar, which are totally separate airlines, but now also share the same currency. So American has wised up here. They've seen that and said, oh, wait a second. Maybe we got something we can sell here, too.

Right, right, right, right. So this is happening sometime in 2025, according to the announcement. We don't really know any details about what it will really look like. But we needed to mention this because of a special segment we're about to do, and it's relevant to this special segment. Drumroll, please. The 2024 Frequent Miler Team Predictions Halfway Checkpoint. Yeah, it's slightly more than halfway through the year now. And so we thought we would look back at the predictions that everyone on our team made the beginning of this year, see how are we doing so far? It's not slightly more than half. What are you talking about? It's like exactly the midway point, right? There's 12 months in a year. We're at the end of the sixth month, right? All right. Let's go with that. Yes. I don't know how to count.

You're absolutely right. We're spot on. Spot on. Spot on for the 2024 mid-year prediction review. Yeah. So my prediction that we would do the halfway point late was wrong. Try again. Try again.

All right. I'm going to just read the titles of each of my predictions to start. And we'll quickly say whether or not they're... So I think there's basically three ways of assessing them. Like, yes, it's come true. No, not yet. Or it's been proven false, um yeah that seems reasonable yeah so um all right so my first one amex green sorry amex will refresh kubernetes and reprice the business green card answer not yet no hasn't happened yet uh my next one Chase to make Ink Premiere a real ink card,

meaning that they'll make their ultimate rewards points able to transfer and move to other cards. Not yet. Alaska's Hawaiian Air purchase won't be challenged. Hard to say how to assess that. There's still time. There's still six months, so that one's, you know, wait till later. That one's in limbo um choice will crack open the hundred day booking window nope nope not yet

anyway um finnair will be added as a transfer partner to at least one more program i'm not i don't think that's happened yet well i, I mean, they kind of are now because you can transfer anyone that you can transfer to British Airways or Qatar. I can account that. Yeah, but we knew that was coming. What I literally meant was that some other one of the programs that don't currently have them would add them officially. Yeah, that has not happened yet. So I'm I'm over what, six, five. How many are there?

Five. Yeah. Over five so far. but all of them are possible still. I don't think anything's been proven wrong. How about you? Let's walk us through your predictions. Well, I predicted that Chase will add a transfer partner, and that's still possible. But it certainly has not happened. It's still possible.

It might be thin air. It might be. It might be. Welcome to. Might be thin air. It might be. Might be. Welcome to the program, thin air. That's not what I had in mind, but I'll take you because I could use some help here. Because I also said that Alaska Mileage Plan would become an unofficial transfer partner. And what I meant by that was that I thought that Hawaiian Miles would eventually become Alaska Miles. They would adopt the same program.

And so I meant that you'd kind of indirectly be able to transfer your membership rewards points to Alaska. Of course, they did become a transfer partner, which is even better than an unofficial transfer partner of Bilt. So even though I got this one wrong, I feel kind of good. It's still wrong. So, yeah, no dice there. Virgin Atlantic will devalue Delta Awards to Europe. There's still time, but it hasn't happened. And I'll be happy if I'm wrong on that one.

And I said the Delta is going to make elite status harder to get for 2025. And I still feel really confident about that. But we haven't actually heard anything about that, though, have we? No, we have no idea what it's going to be like in 2025. OK. Nothing there. Nothing there. Nothing there. So Nick has exactly the same score as Greg going into our halfway point, which means we both have a bunch of predictions that have not come true yet, but they could all come true.

Greg has an extra opportunity or two on me, I think, though. I have fewer predictions. That's true. A couple extra opportunities. All right. Steven, how's he doing i'll do steven then you do tim um steven's predictions airline loyalty programs will consolidate so he may have a feather in his cap with what we just announced about fiji airways that sounds like consolidation to me um on that other chilean one I think that was this year too, probably, or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was. I don't know. He gets credit for Fiji.

Yes. So good job there, Steven. Next one, Choice Privileges revamp. He's talking about them overhauling their loyalty program. Not so much. Wells Fargo co-branded credit card he says he expected another co-branded credit card to come out after um built and the um choice privileges ones and we have heard that uh the expedia card is coming so another another uh feather for ste. Looking good. Stephen also predicted a new American Express where they have the airline fee credits and you have to pick your airline, your favorite airline, in order to get those fee credits reimbursed, fees reimbursed. He predicted there'd be a new option there. That seems so specific and odd to me,

but thanks, Stephen, for making us look better by having one that isn't. You know, there are a bunch of newer airlines. So these last years, you got Breeze, you got, is it Avalo, I guess? There's a couple other, I mean, Allegiant's out there still. I don't think they're an option or I don't think.

I'm not sure if Allegiant's an option, but yes, I mean, there's some room. Not yet, though. Not yet. Not yet. And final one for Steven. The Amex Gold Dining Benefit will change again in some way. So he's talking about how they have different Shake Shack and stuff where you get $10 back each month.

And the list changed, I don't know, a year ago or something, slightly. And so he's predicting it'll change again. It has not yet. So still two feathers. Doing better than us. Much better than us. All right. Tim.

Tim says that Alaska and Hawaiian will be allowed to merge. And it was similar to Greg's prediction there. We don't know yet. So I'm not sure they're possible. The Amex Hilton cards won't become part of the family rules. So that so far has still been correct. We'll talk more about that in a little bit when we talk about Amex family rules. But so far, it's looking pretty good for Tim there.

Amex still has six months to screw that one up. But so far, so good. Next, the distance between Wells Fargo and Bilt Transfer Partners will be a kitten whisker. came out that had long been rumored that their transfer partners would be very similar to Bilt. So similar that the only separation would be a kitten whisker. Kitten whisker. Greg, is it fair to say that it's more than a few kitten whiskers difference? It's more than a lion whisker.

Yeah. I mean, just one example is the, you know, Wells, you could transfer to Choice 1 to 2. Bilt, you can't transfer to Choice. And, you know, I think Tim was thinking like that there might be some specialty partners that Bilt had that would not go to Wells. I don't think he thought Wells would have some that Bilt does not. You know, and so, yeah, they seem completely unrelated, I believe so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think Tim's in danger on that one. Tim is the first person on this to get one wrong.

So we have ones that are probably going to prove wrong by the end of the year, but haven't yet. This one's already proven wrong. So, yeah. So sorry, Tim. Sorry. Sorry, not sorry, Tim. All right. Hyatt will make it possible to transfer points online.

This was his bold prediction that it would be possible to transfer points from one person to another online. And sort of you could do that now because you submit the form online. But that's not what he meant. What he meant was that you'd be able to log in and I could send my Hyatt points, Greg, because, of course, I could do that. But I can't do it self-service. I got to get somebody from Hyatt to help with that. And it's a slow process. We haven't seen that happen yet. There's still time, but it's still as bold as the moment when Tim predicted it. Although I got to say they did make guest of honor awards easily transferable and other types of awards easily

transferable. So maybe Tim, maybe we'll see. And then finally, his bonus was that Kerry will have one of frequent milers top 10 posts of the year in 2024. I have no idea. I have not looked at the top posts from a traffic standpoint of you. I haven't, but I'm pretty confident that hasn't happened yet this year, but hopefully it will. We'll see. time there's time there's time there's time okay last but not least carrie's predictions so carrie weighed in for the first time ever uh with her own predictions this year and um hers are looking really good all right first one greg will get corrected every time he says cutter cutter guitar. Absolutely. A hundred percent. Always happens.

Next, next, next one. Nick will lose this year's annual challenge. True. I mean, very true, right? I mean, she, that's why she put you, that's why she put you in Morocco. Right. She's like, oh, I got one for you, Nick.

You're losing this year's challenge. Thanks, Carrie. I said you, Nick. You're losing this year's challenge. Thanks, Carrie. I said you to Morocco. All right. Yes. So, all right. Two right. The third one.

Tim will win this year's annual challenge. Right again. Wait a second. We let the person who predicted that Tim would win judge the challenge? That does seem wrong. Talk about it being rigged. I want a recount on that. Yeah.

And then finally, she said, Steven will settle down. He's been on his 50-state road trip for years now. And I don't know. I don't think we could give this to her. He's still road tripping through past the end of the year.

So Gary got one wrong just one yeah yeah no that one's definitely wrong and i'm gonna take some enjoyment in saying that one of carrie's predictions was wrong but the other three were right whether or not she engineered them to be good job carrie well done some Some quality engineering, if nothing else. No, good job. Good job. Well done there. So yeah, that's Midway Point.

Greg and I have a chance to catch Kerry, but I'm going to add another prediction that we probably won't. All right. So that wraps up that segment for this year. And it brings us to this week's, finally, this week's main event. Main event time, navigating Amex's welcome bonus family rules. All right. First, in order to talk about this, we have to explain Amex's pop-up prison. When you go to apply for a card and you press the apply button, sometimes a pop-up will appear that says you're not eligible

for this welcome bonus. If you continue, you can continue and you may get the card, but you won't get the welcome bonus or you can cancel and no harm, no foul. There's been no credit check or anything like that. First of all, I just need to go on a side here. A lot of people call this thing pop-up jail. They call it Amex pop-up jail, which just infuriates me because pop- a different word that doesn't alliterate? It makes no sense. None. Yet lots of people do it all the time. I hear it over and over. I see it written over and over, and it just drives me mad.

It's pop-up prison, people. Pop-up prison. I mean, they're not going to the county lockup here. It's pop-up prison. Okay. Why do you get a pop-up? There's two primary reasons. One, you've had this card or a similar card before,

and this is where the family rules come in. And so they're saying that the rules of the welcome bonus are that you can't have this because we know, we Amex know that you've had this card or a card in the family before another reason you might get it is because amex doesn't like you they right it's true it's funny because it's true now the reasons they don't like you very i mean like uh if if all you ever do if you never put any spend on any amex cards and you just you just sign up for cards just put enough spend to get the welcome bonus,

and then you cancel the card and you do that over and over, they're not going to like you and you're going to get these pop-ups. You're going to be in pop-up prison. Let's get it. Don't get it twisted here. Pop-up prison. Okay, come on, people. Get those Ps in there, please. That's right.

But that's not the one the the amex doesn't like you pop up is not what we're talking about what we're talking about is that um you maybe you you are applying for a uh delta um gold card and it says oh no you you've had the delta reserve card before and so that's not allowed. And so that's an example of the pop up we're talking about with family rules. All right. You know what? Before we move forward with the next family rule, I want to add one other quick thing here. When we talk about Amex not liking you, it's probably worth a mention to say that they probably don't like you sometimes,

but they may not not like you all the time. What I mean by that is that even though you get the pop-up on one or two or three cards, doesn't mean you're going to get the pop-up on all of them. And sometimes it's a case of like, I think you've said this before, that maybe you'll get the pop-up on all the consumer cards, but not get it on business cards. Sometimes it'll depend which link you apply through. So if you've gotten the pop-up once or twice, don't get discouraged right away and think, oh, Amex just doesn't like me. Keep trying.

Yeah, yeah. Send them flowers or something too. Right, right. All right. Just wanted to mention that because that's important. But the family language, the family rules, that's different. Then they decide they don't like you and it's a different kind of don't like you.

They don't want you to keep it in the family here and get another card from that family. So we got to talk about, well, who are the families here? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that there's two types of families we're talking about. So there's these sibling relationships. So for example, the Amex Platinum card and the Platinum card from Schwab and the Platinum card from Morgan Stanley, those are all kind of siblings. They're cards that are very, very similar. And so you can't get the welcome bonus on one if you've had one of the others these days. So that's one example of a family rule. Most of them though are more hierarchical than that, right? So that's a sibling type of thing, but then there's all these hierarchical ones. So like there's the fee-free everyday card and then the everyday preferred card. That's an example of like a family relationship, but where you have the no fee one and then the one with a fee, or you have the green card, the gold card, and the platinum card,

where each one is successfully a more expensive card when I go up the chain from there. Delta, gold, platinum, reserve. Again, it's a hierarchy. You go from the lowest priced one, the gold, to the platinum, to the reserve is the most expensive. On the Marriott side, the Bevy and then the Brilliant. They also have an old one that's no longer available. That's just the Bonvoy or something. Just the Bonvoy, but that's not available new. So that's not relevant to welcome bonus conversations.

The Hilton also has that kind of hierarchy where you have the no fee Hilton card, then you've got the surpass, then you've got this aspire. So they're a family, they've got a family of cards, but there's no family language. There's nothing preventing you from getting a welcome bonus on all three at this point. Family with no rules, Craig? So, but let's talk about why did I think it was important

to talk about these hierarchies? It's because the rules tend to be that if you've had a more expensive card before, you can't get a welcome bonus on a less expensive card, right? So the idea is that Amex is happy with allowing you to get the lowest price card first, and then later apply for and get the welcome bonus for the next level one. And if there's a third one, do that. So you can move up the chain, just can't move down basically and that's once they figure out you're a high roller you can't become a cheapskate all of a sudden and go for one of the

the the less expensive cards is really what it comes down to within a particular family so yeah so if you've had the expensive card the you know the more expensive most expensive whatever it is then the language will say you're not eligible for the welcome bonus on the cheaper card. If you've had the welcome bonus before on one of these more expensive cards, not even just the welcome bonus, if you have or have had and keep in mind with Amex, the language is always if you have or have had one of the other cards in the past, then you're not eligible. So if you've had a platinum card before, you can no longer get a welcome bonus on a gold card or a green card, even if you had the platinum card a few years ago. Now, I say a few years ago because how many years might make a difference?

And that's something we'll get to in a minute. But by the terms of the language, the way it sounds, it sounds like if you've ever had the platinum card before, that's it. You'll never be able to get a bonus on a gold or a green card again. Again, in practice, we've found it's not exactly applied the way that it sounds, but generally speaking, you're going to hit that pop-up. If you had a platinum card recently anyway, then you're going to get the pop-up if you try for a gold card or a green card, probably. Yeah. Until you know bonus.

And the way you can know is pretty simple. Well, you could wait and see if you get the pop-up. But a better approach, if you're considering applying for a card, is Amex always has a link somewhere that says offer terms. If you click that and look at that, you'll see the welcome bonus terms in there and you'll see something like this. This is what I found under the Delta Gold card. It says you may not be eligible to receive a welcome offer if you have had this card,

the Delta SkyMiles Platinum American Express card, the Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express card, or previous versions of these cards, meaning if they had other names in the past, then they still count as things that you can't have had. So basically, to summarize that, it's basically saying if you've had the gold card, the Delta Platinum card, or the Delta Reserve card before, you can't get the welcome offer here for this Delta Gold card. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a bummer, right? I mean, that's definitely bad news. But what can you do? I mean, is there a way to get around this pop-up prison?

There sometimes is. First, let me add on, though, that with these family rules are all within business or consumer, so they don't span. So if you've had the Delta Reserve business card before, you could still get the welcome bonus for the Delta Gold consumer card. It won't be a problem. Same thing, business platinum and personal platinum cards are separate things and they bonus for the delta gold consumer card it won't they won't uh be a problem same thing business platinum and personal platinum cards are separate things and they don't interfere with each other so all right so if you're in pop-up prison and we're going to talk about ways to avoid pop-up prison would we call that like a get out of jail free card? Just asking for a friend. Yeah, it's okay to use the word jail. In that context, you can use it.

Okay. All right. Good. All right. So what are your get out of jail cards here? Okay. So some ways to skirt the pop-up prison. Sometimes you'll get targeted or you'll either throw a mailer or an email or you'll find

an offer somewhere that doesn't have any of that language about what we call no lifetime language offers, where the offer terms do not say anything about if you've ever had this card or one of these other cards before you're not eligible. If that language isn't there, then you should be eligible for it. Another thing, and Nick talked about this before, is that after you've canceled a card, after you've canceled it, Amex eventually seems to forget that you ever had the card, or at least they treat it as if you haven't had it before. People tend to say seven years. So if I canceled a card seven years ago, then I should be okay applying for it now. Now in practice, we've seen much less than that happen at times. So it doesn't seem you know really uh reliable exactly what the

number of years is i've had it happen there was a time when i applied within i think it was four years of canceling and and uh they seem to have forgotten so so it's worth trying every now and basically and the worst worst case you get you do get the pop-up and, you know, whatever. Right. Right. So, yeah, there you go. So the lifetime is not necessarily quite as long as it sounds when they have the lifetime language. You can also try applying in different ways.

And when we say that, I mean, like, different browsers, sometimes different links, like whether you use a referral link or you just kind of Google it and go directly to the MX site or use an affiliate link of some sort, like sometimes clicking through a different link will yield a different result. And we don't have enough data to know. And it's kind of impossible to collect enough data to know reliably which thing will work. But but you might try something different next time than whatever you tried in the past. But then there's a couple of other trickety tricks. Yeah. Well, just in terms of trying different things, like, you know, you mentioned trying different browsers. Sometimes resubmitting the application, like, seems to have a different effect. Like, so, like, this happened to me actually just the other day. I had a um i had a

pop-up it wasn't it wasn't a you've had this card before pop-up it was i don't like you pop-up um but still um i i wanted to go back and see i was surprised i got that and i wanted to go back and see how i had filled in something like did, did I fill in something wrong? So I pressed the back button and nothing happened. I pressed it again and it went back to like before I had filled out everything. So it didn't really help me. But then I just went through again and boom, it worked. And I didn't get the pop up and I got approved for the welcome offer. So, um, that's what I'm just saying. Like, you just need to try different stuff and maybe, you know, you would think that doing the same thing again, wouldn't, wouldn't work, but sometimes it does. You never know. Sometimes it does. If at first you don't succeed, try and apply again. Uh, and so there, uh, there you have it. They get some different options, some different things that might work. And, uh, and the moral of the story is, so your strategy in general, if you're new and you're kind of getting started out is to start with the cheaper cards and move your way up to the more

expensive cards later on. That's a generalized strategy though. And I hesitate to recommend that too hard because like, if you see an amazing platinum card, welcome bonus, does it really make sense to get the green card now? You know, it's hard to say, but it's hard to give that as blanket advice that you want to start with the lower cards and move up. But if you see a good offer on a green or a gold card and go after that soon, because eventually down the road you may want the platinum card. And, you know, you don't want to lock yourself out of getting the green and the gold or make it more difficult to get the green and the gold in the future. So a little bit of strategy goes a long way with that. And again, keep in mind that the family rules apply all on the consumer side or perhaps all on the business side if they're on the business side.

But there aren't very many business cards. I don't think they have them on the business side yet. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. but there aren't very many business cards. I don't think they have them on the business side yet. Yeah, okay, yeah. So you're not going to be locked out of getting a Delta business card based on your Delta consumer card. So keep that in mind

when you're looking at the family language. I know we mentioned that, but I figured it was worth one more mention. All right, I think that kind of wraps up our main event for the week, right? Yep. So that brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week,

I'm going to pull back up here. I had it up. All right, So I'm going to jump ahead. But Benjamin wrote in, Ben wrote in with an email. And the key point here is what sites do our interests are beyond frequent miler what sites do you like the best who else do you like to read to get your news on points and miles i like your site but i check out some other ones i'm curious what the professionals like to read thanks ben so greg what other blogs apart from frequent miler do you enjoy reading um wow i I mean, I read so many and I'm, I'm a little hesitant here because I don't want to, uh, forget, you know, some of the ones that I, that I really enjoy. So, so then what tools do you use in order to be able to read the ones that you like? If you like, you say you read a lot of them, do you go to a million different sites individually? How do you do it? Yeah. Great, great question. Yeah. I use a tool called Feedly, which is a news reader app. And basically what it lets you do is subscribe to, I subscribe to like dozens of blogs. And usually what I just do, it just shows me whenever there are new posts that I haven't read yet, it shows me the headlines and maybe a snippet of the content.

And so each day I just go through and I kind of swipe to everything that I'm not interested in based on the headline. I'll just swipe to clear it as read and then go in and read the ones that are of interest. Once some, I'll call out, like I love Doctor of Credit for the breadth. I mean, Doctor of Credit just covers everything. It's not like written in a dramatic way. It's very dry, but it's like, here's the deal. And you'll get a lot of great information from them.

As far as great writing, one mile at a time when he has a story, sometimes things happen to him. And the way he tells those stories is so much fun to read. And I like him as a resource for airline reviews. So if I want to know what to expect, what seats to go to and everything, he writes very, very thorough reviews. So that's really great. View from the wing, I love Gary. He's a good friend of mine. I don't love – he does a lot of sort of fluff pieces about people fighting on planes or whatever. The more salacious headlines of the industry.

Yeah, exactly. But every now and then he writes a post that's more of an industry analysis. And he knows the industry better than anyone I know. And I love his, his analysis pieces when he's talking about what, what he thinks is going on behind the scenes, uh, that, that leads to, you know, whatever is happening in the points and miles world. That's fascinating. Cause he knows more when you say that, if you've never sat down and talked with Gary or listened to Gary talk, then you may not realize just like how he knows everything about loyalty programs. And it's like an encyclopedia in terms of the memory for it. So that's fascinating. So I really,

like you said, that's exactly true. I skip over all the things about like, I don't know, like events that are like a fight on a plane or whatever else, something like that. Like those things don't interest me. So I skip over that stuff. But anytime there's analysis about the industry, it's fascinating to read because there's always so much more context in history because he happens to know those things. And so I find that I learn a lot in those types of posts from view from the wing and I love that. So, uh, so yeah, that's definitely, uh, and totally agree on everything you said about one mile at a time too. Those are the reasons I go there. Love his storytelling, uh, uh, Ben's storytelling on one mile at a time when, whenever there's something fun and

interesting. And exactly like you said, if I want to know what the premium cabin experience is going to be like on a particular airline, there's nobody that does a better job. Right, right. So what did I miss that you like to read? So all those things, Doctor of Credit, of course, also fantastic site, great resources, tons of really awesome resources on there on things that we don't necessarily cover to, you know, in-depth resources on credit and building credit and stuff like that, that we don't necessarily get as into the weeds with. And then, of course, the bank bonuses and best savings accounts and checking accounts and stuff like that. So Dr. Credit, like you said, has a lot of breadth and it's not written in a way to attract your eyeballs unless you're interested in learning. And that's what I like about it. I love to learn there. But other sites, Miles Earn and Burn does a great job of kind of concisely hitting a lot of the latest topics and

getting some in-depth stuff and hinting at some of the other topics and things that may be related. And so if you read it regularly and are able to take some of the hints here and there, I think that it's a good resource, a good site to read. So one that I would certainly not hesitate to recommend somebody check out. Kind of reminds me in some ways of Mile Nerd, if you ever read that, in that everything is short, and so it's very short and to the point, not a lot of lengthy analysis, but lots of good information in a short space. So that's one that I've been enjoying quite a bit. And I like I enjoy different bloggers for different things. So I'll go to different sites for different specific purposes.

There's lots of other great people in this industry. I've also started to enjoy just watching some things on Instagram. Max miles points. He's I really enjoy his Instagram reels because he often breaks things down. It thinks that I know something about probably already, but I enjoy seeing how he simplifies things in a video format. And so I like that. I've started scrolling Instagram a little bit more lately, and I tend to enjoy his channel quite a bit. And I mean, there's lots of other great sites out there. So don't feel like this is an exhaustive list. Like Greg said, I look at a lot of them. I go to the boarding area homepage often, just boardingarea.com and scroll to see which headlines

interest me. And you mentioned View from the Wing and the analysis of the industry. When I want something that's not really miles and pointsy, but somehow travel related, I really like the Your Mileage May Vary blog. They often write about weird, random travel related stuff that isn't necessarily something I need to know,

but I find interesting and entertaining to read. So that's one that I think is another enjoyable one. Very good. All right. All right. Thank you very much for the question, Ben. Hopefully that gives you a few to check out anyway. If you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you

want to go to frequent miler dot com slash subscribe again. That's frequent miler dot com slash subscribe. Join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our frequent miler insiders Facebook group where you can ask questions about this kind of stuff all the time. And if you've got a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a comment that you'd like to be considered for a giant mailbag, you can send that to send it to mailbag at frequent miler dot com. Bye, everybody.