Frequent Miler on the Air - Our favorite big spend bonuses | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep254 | 5-11-24

Episode Date: May 11, 2024

Some credit cards offer extra perks or progress toward elite status for big spenders. On this week's episode, we talk about which of those bonuses might be worth the spend. But before we get into that, this episode is full of news you can use and tips to keep in mind in regular segments like Card Talk and Mattress Running the Numbers. (00:00) Intro (01:26) A tip we neglected to mention regarding positioning flights (Giant Mailbag) (05:33) Card Talk (05:46) Venture X Business card losing Priority Pass restaurant access for new Visa cards (Card Talk) (08:57) Qatar Airways Cardless Cards (Card Talk) (15:16) What crazy thing . . . did Cardless do this week?  https://frequentmiler.com/cardless-appears-to-have-a-1-card-restriction/ (19:32) Mattress running the numbers: Is it worth spending to Qatar Airways elite status? Note: The Qatar Club Infinite card also comes with bonus Qpoints in the first year, which reduce the path to renewing status for your second year. The spend we discussed regarding renewal of status really applies to status for year 3 and beyond. (28:17) Award Talk (28:20) Flying by the Seat of our Points: Frequent Miler's 2024 challenge https://frequentmiler.com/flying-by-the-seat-of-our-points-last-minute-travel-challenge/ (31:33) You can now use JetBlue points to book Etihad and vice versa https://frequentmiler.com/earn-redeem-between-jetblue-and-etihad/ (35:30) Bilt adds a new transfer partner....Hilton Honors https://frequentmiler.com/bilt-adding-hilton-as-newest-transfer-partner-but-transfer-ratio-is-poor/ (37:32) Use Finnair Avios to book Nordic & Scandinavian hotels for great value https://frequentmiler.com/use-finnair-avios-to-book-scandinavian-hotels-at-2c-per-point-or-better/ (40:30) Amex Travel positive experience honoring a fare (46:04) Our favorite big spend bonuses (46:45) Alaska Airlines companion certificates https://frequentmiler.com/as/ https://frequentmiler.com/asbiz/ (48:16) Hilton Surpass card free night certificate https://frequentmiler.com/amxhiltonbiz/ (49:14) Hyatt consumer & business cards https://frequentmiler.com/woh/ https://frequentmiler.com/wohbiz/ (57:39) IHG Premier & Premier Business cards https://frequentmiler.com/ihgprem/ https://frequentmiler.com/ihgbusiness/ (1:01:47) Barclays Aviator Silver Loyalty Point bonuses & companion certificate https://frequentmiler.com/aviatorsilver/ (1:06:20) Aeroplan  https://frequentmiler.com/aeroplan/ (1:09:25) Question of the Week: How did Greg build up capacity for his player 3? Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, our favorite big spend bonuses. Lots of credit cards offer perks if you spend a lot on the card.

And we're going gonna cut through the noise and and talk about the ones that we think are actually worth spending on and the ones that we actually do or would do if we had those cards and but this show is also that's just the main event this show is so chock full of lots of other stuff there There's lots of card talk happening. We've got a four pole header on your way and lots of good mattress running numbers and lots of good award talk. So I'm looking forward to this episode. Full episode today. Before we jump into all of that, remember that you can find the timestamps in the show notes. So if you don't want to listen to one of the sections or you want to come back and listen to it for a third or fourth time,

not just the second, come on, keep coming back, then you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this. Give us some stars

and some feedback. Comment with something interesting that you liked or enjoyed about the episode or something that you have a question about. We always love to hear about those things.

So please don't forget that. And with that out of the way, let's drag out this week's Giant Mailbag. Today's Giant Mail is just a little piece of mail just from me. Last week, we talked about best practices for booking positioning flights. And one of the big topics there was booking backup flights.

So like another flight that you can take in case your initial positioning flight doesn't work out. We forgot to mention something really important. Whoops. Whoops. Yeah. Somebody commented on YouTube quickly thereafter. And I was like, oh my goodness, how did we not mention like the cardinal rule of positioning

flights? How did we forget this? Right, right. If you're going to book a backup flight, a flight that you're intending to cancel, make sure it's not with the same airline, not flying the same airline that you're booked on two flights at once, they'll just cancel one of them. And it might not be the one that you want to be canceled. So be very, very careful with that. And I don't know what other airlines actively do that, but I just wouldn't take the chance. So make sure you're always booking a different airline for backup purposes. Yeah. Southwest does the same thing. So I'll book a positioning flight on American Airlines and then book a backup on Southwest. They have to be two different airlines. If you book two flights on the same day on Southwest, they are almost guaranteed going to cancel one of those. At some point in the middle of the night, you don't know whether it's going to be today or tomorrow or the next day, and you don't know which one of them they're going to cancel. So don't do that. Don't book two flights on Southwest on the same day or United or whatever the other airlines are, because you don't know when they're going to find that and cancel it.

Now, I mean, theoretically, if they're far enough apart that you could take both flights, maybe you're safer. You know, if you're doing like a Long Beach to Las Vegas kind of a thing and you really could be flying there twice in one day, maybe that's safer. I don't know. I wouldn't mess with it. I'd use two different airlines. So thank you for bringing that up,

the person who commented, because we should have brought that up last week. I'm glad that we're able to address it here. But yeah, we did mention- I'm going to mention really quick where I got bitten by it was the Three Cards, Three Continents Challenge. When I had booked an around the world trip with ANA.

But before booking it, I had looked at all these different routes and one route that I thought I would probably want, but I wasn't 100% sure was available. I booked it with United Miles as just sort of like a stopgap to try to hopefully save that award space so that when I was ready to actually book the overall award, the idea was I would cancel that flight and then book the, the award. Um, I forgot about it. And so it turned out that with the round the world trip, I had a United flight. It wasn't booked through united it was booked through ana but it was a united flight same day as that that laceholder flight and once you know it instead of

canceling that backup flight that placeholder flight they canceled one that was part of my round the world trip so yeah it was all kinds of problems to get that restored so yeah so just be careful be careful i you know i've made that mistake before and caught it before they canceled it but i've definitely made that mistake where i just forgot that i had already booked something on the same day it pays to be organized in this game you know and do as we say not as we do stay organized a tool like award award wallet is useful for that because they track your your award bookings presumably although i don't know if that's easy to do with some of them unless you're forwarding the stuff. TripIt is another app that I've long used for that type of thing, forwarding my itineraries to keep them all kind of in one place so that I'll know what I've got.

But if it's a backup thing, I probably wouldn't always think to add that. So, yeah, you got to be careful. That's the thing. I don't usually put the backup ones in there because I don't want to mess it up. Yeah, it gets messy with extra stuff in there. I totally know what you're saying. But anyway, so again, be organized and be careful with that. All right. Let's get into the four-pole header here because we've got a Card Talk four-pole header. That's not a single, that's not a double header, that's not a triple header. It's a four-pole header. It is a four-pole. All right. First up in our four-pole

is the VentureX business card. This is about Priority Pass. So this is a sort of a notice. So up until recently, the VentureX business version of Priority Pass offered both airport lounges, as all Priority Pass does,

but also Priority Pass restaurants and experiences. Now, though, now that VentureX Business is being issued as a Visa card, if you get your Priority Pass that way, apparently you do not have restaurant access and presumably probably not the other stuff too, but just lounges. I think we haven't yet got confirmation exactly from Capital One yet exactly what's going on. You're probably good to go until if they eventually change you to a visa, then we'll see. Maybe you'll still have priority pass until that expires.

I don't really know. But then when you renew priority pass after that, I think you'll no longer have restaurant access from that card. So that's a bummer. We've been seeing a trend, especially with visa cards that offer priority pass to no longer offer restaurant access. Yeah, that is a bummer. And just to be clear, you will keep priority pass. It's just whether or not you have restaurant access. That seems to be the difference.

Now, it's worth noting there are some visa cards that still have restaurant access, notably the U.S. bank cards, which have a limited number of visits per year, but they can still be used for a restaurant. So it's not all visa cards. It's not priority pass through all visa cards that don't have restaurant access yet. No, no, definitely not. But that seems to be the case here. Now, I'll be really interested to see what happens, because at least one person has been told that eventually the VentureX business master cards are going to get changed to a visa.

So you get reissued a card. But other word has been that that's not going to happen. And I'm dubious on that because I have an old master card that's a venture card and venture has been a visa forever and they haven't forced converted it. Now, I had product changed from a different master card, but they didn't force me to get a visa. They kept me on the same network. So I'm dubious as to whether they are actually going to force existing cardholders to switch networks. So maybe this will be safe. Maybe. We'll see.

For those who already have the card. Yeah. Yep. It was a MasterCard. Okay. That's not it though. That's number one out of the four pull header. So number two. You know what? Actually, on second thought, let's back up the truck. This is Nick piping in post-recording to say that we had to cut out number two of the four-pole headers. So I know a few minutes ago we promised you a four-pole header. You're actually only going to get a triple header today. But don't worry. The second part of the four-pole header will probably be coming in next week's Frequent Miler on the air. So my apologies that we had to cut this one out. But we did beyond our control.

So here we go. I'm going to move you right ahead. We're going to skip this and pretend it didn't happen and move on to number three. To number three, card talk for the cardless cards. We got some double talk here. We got a double header with the cardless Qatar cards. So the Qatar Airways, Qatar Airways Privilege Club signature card from cardless is a $99 annual fee card. No foreign transaction fees, which, by the way, I was at the Travel Summit in Toronto last weekend, and I was really interested to or I found it really interesting.

I don't know if I'd say I was interested to learn. I found it very interesting that in Canada, there's only like two or three credit cards that have no foreign transaction fees, like period across all of the issuers in Canada. I was really surprised to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. So no wonder Canadians are interested in American cards. So anyway, $99 annual fee, no foreign transaction fees. You earn 4X when you're booking on cutter airways guitar airways 2x dining 1x everywhere else uh so that's like okay great nothing no i shouldn't say great okay nothing special there but but it's it's kind of even hard to say okay i mean it's like yeah not very good not very good okay not very good not very good but what makes it maybe interesting for some people is that you'll earn two q points for every 2000 obvious you earn using the card. And so you,

and you also get silver status for the first year and silver status gets your priority standby check-in priority boarding, 15 kilograms of extra baggage allowance lounge access. And we'll talk more about that in a little bit, but anyway, you can spend your way to status with this card it doesn't sound like there's a cap right you get two q points for every 2 000 obvious that you earn without any limit am i right yeah as far as i know no limit yep yeah so if you're a big spender you could spend your way to elite status with qatar but that's not the only card they're offering they They also have another one. Tell us about that. Yeah, we are not done with the cardless talk. The next one is the Privileged Club Infinite card. So this Visa Infinite card, $4.99 annual fee. So that must be chock full of great perks, right? Not as much as you'd think. So yes, there's no foreign transaction fee.

And you do get Visa Infinite benefits like extended warranty, purchase protection, concierge access, and luxury hotel collection. Yawn. Those things are fine, but they're not super valuable in my opinion. With this card, you earn 5X for Qataratar spend um 3x for dining and 1x everywhere else so you know i mean obviously with either card if you spend a lot with qatar itself i mean you would earn a lot of obvious that way uh with this one you'll earn a lot of points for dining 3x dining but i mean there's so many cards that offer 3x transferable points for dining that or better yeah that yeah that it's just not very compelling

to me at all um but you know uh if you are interested in elite status with guitar uh you will earn two q points for every 1500 av500 Avios you earn using your card. So you're earning at a faster rate than with the cheaper card for your spend. And for your first year only, you get gold status. So for the first year, gold status, which offers things like 5% off online award bookings. That's pretty cool. I didn't know this until this card caused me to look up what gold status gives you with Qatar. Quick question on that that you may not know the answer to. Is it only 5% off the cardholders or the status members flight?

If I have gold status and I book flights for my whole family, do I only get 5% off of one seat or do I get it off all four? I do not know the answer to that. You do get free award changes and cancellations. Now, that's typically with elite programs for the whole booking, not just for the one person. So guessing maybe the 5% off will also be for the whole booking. You get better award availability. It's not clear how much better. So, how much better, but, um, so those things seem pretty, pretty valuable. You also get one world Sapphire, uh, status, which will get you into one world lounges when, when flying, uh, anywhere and, and, uh, into their

business class lounges. And, uh, so if you're traveling domestically in the United States and you want to get into an American Airlines lounge, having that status will get you in. So that's pretty useful. And so we will separately talk more about Qatar's elite status and whether or not it makes sense to spend your way to it. But aside from that, Nick, what do you think? Are either of these cards worth getting? No, not at all. Unfortunately, no. I mean, they're just not,

they're not interesting because you can earn transferable points that you could transfer to Qatar, like at the same rates. I mean, you could earn 4X on flights with a card that earns transferable points that you could transfer to Avios or five points per dollar that you could transfer to Avios. So either of those earning structures can be matched with other cards on the market. Dining, like you said, can be matched or exceeded. So really, the only reason these cards would be interesting is for the ability to spend toward elite status, not even really for the welcome bonuses, because you can get better welcome bonuses on the obvious cards from Chase,

you know, the British Airways or Aer Lingus ones that you could then move to Qatar if you want to use them at Qatar. Of course, that requires you to be under 524. So perhaps you aren't eligible for those and then maybe you'd go for one of these. But the welcome bonuses aren't that strong. No, I mean, I just, I don't see a reason

to get these probably. Yeah. Especially when you consider our crazy thing that's coming in a minute. Right, right. The only use case I could see is like, let's say you know you're going to be booking or you're wanting to book a whole bunch

of QSuites flights in the next 12 months. Then maybe you want to get that infinite card so you have gold status, you get a discount, you get better award availability for that first year. So maybe for that first year it'd be worth it. But even with that, it's worth talking about the crazy thing. Yeah. So what crazy thing did we learn this week about cardless?

The cardless one card rule cardless has a rule which is that if you've ever gotten a cardless card before whether or not you still have it or you've canceled it you can't get another cardless card even if it's a totally different cardless card. So if you signed up for the if you sign up for that Mavericks card or what they used to have these sports sports team cards, you know, you you signed up for that in order to get a Mavericks T-shirt or whatever. And you canceled it long ago because you realize it was a bad deal. You're out of luck. You can't get one of these Qatar cards or the upcoming LifeMiles cards or anything. I talked to the co-founder and president of Cardless and asked him point blank,

is this true? Did you really mean for this to be the rule? And yes, he said yes, that's true. That's what the rule is. He did say that long-term, they understand that it doesn't make sense now that they've... So they previously weren't doing airline cards, but now that they've moved into travel cards, they have airline cards, they're intending to move into hotel cards too. He understands that it totally makes sense for people to have multiple cards. intending to move into hotel cards too um he understands that it totally makes sense for people to have multiple cards i mean people aren't especially boy once they once

they do hotel cards can you imagine saying right well since you're loyal to qatar you certainly wouldn't want uh since you got privileges or whatever cardless qatar card you can't get another cardless card you shall be cardless you are cardless yeah because if you canceled your cardless card you'd be cardless forever you'd be cardless so yeah so so that's that so anyway they understand the problem but um they're they're also very concerned about um people signing up for cards just for the points just for the welcome bonus points and uh he is himself a card churner outside of his business so he's he told me he's had over like 300 cards uh over over the over time and he doesn't want people like him um signing up

for cardless cards just to get the welcome bonuses and uh so he says so in the future, they plan on putting in place anti-card churning rules so that you won't be able to shows that you've been signing up for lots of cards you know good luck you're not going to get approved and i think that's probably true today all right so moral of the story is if you get it you can't cancel your guitar cardless card lest you be cardless forevermore so uh yeah so that's the thing. So even if it makes sense to sign up for the infinite card for one year, um, just remember that at least for the time being, it would lock you out of any other cardless cards. So, uh, that's a, that's a big negative potentially. On the other hand, they haven't been all that exciting. So no, so maybe you're not locking yourself out of anything interesting anyway, but you also can't product change. So there's no like, that's it. You've got that one

card that you get and that's it. There's no product changing at all, which doesn't make any sense to me at all from the airline perspective. It seems nutty to me. Like, I guess it's, it's a pretty small quantity of people, but I would think that if you're the airline and you're going to start emailing all your members, hey, get our new credit card. And like a bunch of them are getting declined because they already have a card with one of your competitors. Imagine that would get annoying fielding that after a while. But on the small scale that it probably is at this point, nobody will probably notice. But eventually, if they continue to expand to more airline cards, I could see someone getting annoyed with that. So hopefully they'll get that figured out. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that was our crazy thing.

It is indeed true. Let's get to mattress running the numbers and talk a little bit more about the cardless Qatar Airways cards. So let's talk about Qatar Airways elite status anyway, and what it entails, whether it's worth it. And should you spend to it, if you decide that you want to go ahead and, you know, lock up your one cardless card slot in a Qatar Airways card. So Qatar Airways elite status, what do we got? Silver status is like, okay, you get priority standby, check-in, boarding, a little bit of extra baggage allowance and lounge access. Now is that lounge access?

That's just when you're flying with guitar? I believe so. Yeah. Yep. Gold status. We talked about it before. You get some good stuff like 5% off awards.

You get free award changes and cancellations, better award availability, one world Sapphire status so you can get into one world business class lounges. Also, 40 Q credits that can be used for

it's sort of like paying for upgrades and other stuff. And then at platinum status, you get access to the first class lounge in Doha when flying business class. And you also get one world emerald status, which gets you into first class one world lounges. What I want to talk about though, so those are the threees. What I want to talk about though, so those are the three levels, but I want to talk about gold status because that seems to be the sweet spot where you get a lot of perks and where it's reasonable to consider, I think, whether it's worth spending your way to gold status. So let's say you get that Visa Infinite card from Cardless. You have one year of gold status and you want to keep gold status beyond that forever, forever beyond that,

let's say. So once you have gold status, which again, you'll get when you sign up for the card, if you get approved, you will need 270 Q points over the next 12 months in order to renew gold status. And so that's really the target we're talking about is like, what will it take to earn 270 Q points each year, every 12 months? It's not a fixed year timeframe's it's like a rolling 12 month thing um what would it take to to uh get 270 q points so that you can just keep gold status with your uh infinite with your cutter airways privilege club infinite card right i mean it's pretty easy because you get two q points for every 1500 obvious you earn using the card which is unique and kind of interesting in the sense that most cards that offer the ability to spend toward elite status,

it's based on spending X number of dollars. This instead is based on earning X number of Avios. So you get two Q points for every 1,500 Avios that you earn, and you need to earn 270 Q points in 12 months. So you get two for every 1500 spend you need 270 of these things that means you only need to earn 202 500 avios in 12 months in order to keep your gold status yeah and and this is also by the way assuming you're not uh earning uh earning uh you know from actual flying you know you could

be crediting your american airlines flights to qatar and everything but this is just just card spend so you would yes you need to earn over 202 000 obvious with the card um but keep in mind this card gets 3x for dining so if you eat a lot, you would only have to spend $67,500 on dining in a 12-month period. That's only about $1,300 a week. $1,300 a week. If you've got a hungry family,

I mean, you know, with Michelin star taste, then maybe you could do that. Less than $200 a day. So go out every day to a nice restaurant with your cutter card and, you know, eat. Every single day.

Eat a lot. Stay hungry out there. All right. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you think, Greg? I mean, I know that you enjoy fine dining. You like, you know, a good meal, a nice restaurant, Michelin star stuff now and then,

fancy presentations and delicious flavors and all that. I mean, what do you think? Are you thinking about getting this card so you can have elite status? So if you think about what elite status means to the average U.S. resident? It means often getting access to American Airlines lounges. I mean, because how often are you going to actually be flying international and get the value of one world first class lounges and Cutter Better award space and stuff? You might get that once a year, twice a year. year i mean you'd have to fly a lot internationally to really value those perks so so let's if you fly a lot domestically getting an american airlines lounges are not the cream of the crop uh when we're diplomatic way of putting it

and you're spending you're spending almost 500 on the card itself get the get the if you want aa lounge access get the aa executive card and you get you get lounge access i mean you know without spending 67 500 a year that's right spend you know get a card that earns 4x or 5x transferable points for dining. I guess it's hard to get the 5x uncapped for dining these days. I haven't because I have the old prestige card, but maybe that new card will offer it. We'll see. But anyway, get a card that earns 4x transferable points for dining, like the Amex Gold card or 3x so there's many cards that offer that and uh and you'll have transferable points they've used for so many things not just not just obvious or or a four percent cash back card and put the money in your pocket and do

something else with it if you don't want the transfer you don't you like you don't need to spend 67.5 on dining on this card now we did say when we thought about it, we said, well, OK, if you're the type that tends to book cash fares like business class, Q suites type cash fares for like a family. with like one or two round trips, because I imagine that you could probably find a way to spend $10,000 on the right round trip in business class on Qatar Airways. And so if you did that for four passengers, that's 40,000 times 5X, that's 200,000. So you're basically there for the number of Avios you need to earn to keep elite status.

Now, if you're the type that's dropping 10 grand a passenger times four then do you need gold status like does that really matter i don't know exactly but but hey i mean you do you so uh so yeah basically we just don't see any real use case now i say that maybe if you're flying enough on american or another one world carrier where you're going to be crediting flights, maybe you found like the magical way to credit flights to Qatar to earn a bunch of Q points on your flights. And you just need to bridge a small gap in order to get or keep gold status every year. Then is it worth it, Craig? No.

So look at it this way. You could be crediting to American Airlines. And the one downside, the one reason people don't like to, well, actually, no, there's multiple downsides. But the main reason people don't want to earn elite status with American Airlines itself is because elite status with American Airlines itself doesn't get you free unlimited access to american airlines lounges but as i said before if you get the a executive card and you credit to american and get elite status with america which we've talked about before there's millions of ways to earn loyalty points with american airlines so much easier to get high level status you could get your one world emerald or whatever for much less out-of-pocket spend than with this card. So I just don't see it. I don't see it working for most people. I mean, I'm sure there's that niche somewhere that makes sense,

but for most people, no. We haven't met that person. So, all right. So at least we don't know. They're hiding somewhere. But yeah, it's hard to imagine. So, all right. Thumbs down, down essentially on those cards

we'll see what happens with the avianca life miles cards which are expected to come soon also so we'll have more information on those in the coming weeks we hope so that's a match drawing the numbers award talk we got a bunch of stuff up for award talk today so first bit for award talk is exciting news the frequent miler 2024 team challenge is out. Yes, we are so excited about this. Our new challenge we're calling flying by the seat of our points. I keep accidentally saying pants, or at least in my head, you know, but flying by the seat of our points. The idea is this is a last minute travel challenge.

Nick, Tim and I are going to get instructions. This is all happening early June, by the way, and you can check out our posts with the exact dates and times. But early June, we're going to be on a live stream Zoom call with the whole team, and Kerry and Stephen are the judges and hosts of this challenge. They're going to be telling us during a Monday evening live stream where we need to be on Wednesday. And so the three of us need to book flights and try to outdo each other with how good of an award redemption we have to get to whatever this first destination is on time. And then there'll be challenges. There'll be many challenges when we get there as well. And then we'll get on another live stream like that night and find

out our next destination and so on. And so there's going to be three destinations involved. There's going to be hotel components where we have to also get good value booking hotels with points or free night certificates, things like that. And it's all going to be, every bit of it is the last minute. Three of us have no idea where we're going. We're going to come together at the first stop. We're going to spread out and go different places for the second stop, come back together for the third. So we're going to see each other twice during this event. And I think it should be just a ton of fun. I think it's going to be. I think they've cooked up some creative challenges, I think, for us in the destinations we're going to go to.

So hopefully we're going to see and do some cool things or have to figure it out anyway, how to do them based on the instructions that we're given. And and I'm also excited because so in planning this, we obviously talked about lots of different ideas and took a long time trying to figure out, well, how are we going to do this and make it work and blah, blah, blah, without us knowing what Carrie and Steven are thinking. But, you know, in all that discussion, Greg said, well, you know, maybe we should write posts about how we're preparing for this. And I was like, preparing? What are you talking about? It's last minute. I have no idea.

There's nothing to prepare, right? I mean, it's just you're going to tell me where I got to go and I got to go. And but then he made me nervous, like because he's like, what are you doing to prepare? What do you mean prepare? So then over these last couple of weeks here, as we've been discussing the final details before we announced this, I've started to sweat a little bit and started to see what I can do to prepare. And so actually, I've been spending more and more time preparing for something that I can't really prepare for. So I'm excited. I'm excited to see what happens with this short version of the story. Yeah.

All right. Absolutely. All right. Next up jet, jet blue and Etihad have teamed up. So now you can earn and redeem points reciprocally between jet blue and Etihad. So you can use jet blue,

true blue points now to book Etihad premium cabin, or at least business class, not first class, I don't think, but economy or business class redemptions on Etihad flights. And so what are the redemption rates looking like on this? Is this an interesting partnership or no? Yay or nay? It's very expensive. Yeah. So it's not a great deal, but it appears to be expensive in both directions, using Etihad points to book JetBlue, except with some exceptions, I think, that you found, Nick. But I've looked mostly at using JetBlue points to book Etihad, and prices are higher than I would want. There is some good news there, though. If you remember, American Airlines is a great way of booking Etihad.

But if you want to be in a premium cabin, you have to book within 30 days. They don't open up after that. JetBlue can see business class flights out till end of schedule. So if you want to book into the future and, you know, have free cancellations and everything, just like American Airlines does, then booking with JetBlue can make sense. And it's not so, you know, outrageously expensive that it would be a bad deal. I think it'd still be a good deal with points. It's just not what I'd hoped. Right, right. Well, I mean, I find that interesting still because we've got a whole bunch of JetBlue true blue points and you can lock up a few seats and then hope that, you know, if you cancel, they go back into inventory, whether they will or not.

But, you know, it could be a switcheroo possibility if you have true blue points to use. So we don't know. We'll see how that plays out over time. But it is nice that they have access much further out in the schedule and allow free cancellations, which of course is the problem if you use Etihad. Etihad recently reduced the rates on their own flights. So you would probably pay fewer Etihad points to book business class on those same flights, but you lock yourself into a really punitive cancellation policy. I think it's 25% of the miles, like far in advance. And as you approach the date, like within seven days, I think it's 75% you lose, like just period of the obvious that you used.

So it's just totally not worth booking through Etihad unless it's like tomorrow and you know you're going to fly it. So it's nice to be able to lock in those seats way ahead of time with JetBlue and still retain the flexibility to cancel. You know what? Here's the way to do this. Let's say you have a big trip that you want to take. You really want to fly Etihad first, and especially the Etihad first apartments, right? So what you do is you find business class for when you want to travel and bookable through JetBlue. You book it that way. This is if you already have JetBlue points. And then as the time gets closer and closer, you watch to see whether is it bookable with American Airlines. And if so, is first class bookable with American Airlines within 30 days? If so, great, great. And as it gets really close, as it gets to the point where you're not planning

to cancel no matter what, maybe you look at booking actually first class through Etihad. And if you succeed in booking first class in either way, then you cancel your JetBlue thing. And if you don't succeed, at least you still take your trip. You fly in business class using your JetBlue miles. And that's great. You still have a good trip either way. So I like that.

Yeah. It makes me more interested in JetBlue points. I haven't been particularly interested and I've pretty much ignored the JetBlue credit cards even when the welcome bonuses have increased. This might make me more interested in at least hearing them out on a card in the future in order to just build up that balance for

the day when I can take advantage of that exactly as you say. Right. And JetBlue has a points pooling so it's nice you can you know, pool your family's points together. point great point all right next up built adds a brand new transfer partner hilton honors so surely uh like american express you transfer one to two is that correct here really not no you know i i'm even going to fault built for this because I think it makes it extra complicated if you start having different transfer ratios, much as I want that. I mean, obviously, Hilton points aren't worth nearly as much as bill points.

So it's a ridiculous transfer at one to one. It'd be a terrible deal. Don't do it. Don't transfer your bill points to Hilton. But I think I would favor the simplicity of all one-to-one transfer partners over complexifying that in general and even if you made it one to two I still wouldn't be excited about transferring my bill points so it doesn't I mean unless you made it like one to two and a half or three or something I wouldn't be interested

anyway and so I keep it one-to-one terrible deal but you know don't do it but hey i guess it's always good that they have more partners and if you only need like 1 000 or 2 000 points and you want to transfer them over i mean still don't do it uh just buy the hilton points if you only need a couple of points so yeah well the one nice thing every time they had a partner i think this is still true correct me i think so but bill will give you a thousand points just for connecting up your account right 100 points oh only 100 points 100 power yeah hardly worth worrying about well right except that you need 2 000 points in your account as a base level member without any status in order to transfer to partners so i mean if you've got 1900 points in your account then

you know by all means connect hilton connect the various ones that you need to in order to be able to transfer points over. But yeah, anyway, not, uh, not exciting. And I'm, I had said before long ago that I imagine built will add Hilton at some point, and that'll be a really easy rent day, you know, 150% transfer bonus that still won't be particularly interesting, but it gives them an opportunity for one of those. So I saw that coming from a mile away, I feel like. So I'm not shocked to see it, but also not excited. All right, that's done. Nothing more to say there, but it's a bad deal. Use Finnair Avios to book Scandinavian hotels

at two cents per point or better. I wrote a post this week on how you can use Finnair Avios to book hotels in Scandinavia. Now, what you essentially do is you buy a voucher, like you buy a free night certificate for an amount of cash and a number of obvious. And so the suggested combination there of cash and obvious that you see if you're not logged into your account, you just go to the page is like, I don't know, let's say for one of the brands, it's 70 ish dollars and 2000 obvious.

And so at that rate, in many cases, you're getting two cent per point or better even with your obvious, which is pretty good. I mean, that's for hotel booking. Actually, two cent per point in general is a good rate, two cents per point. So that's not bad already. But, you know, the trick here is that you can choose the number of obvious you'd like to use. And so as you'll see, if you read the whole post, if you reduce the number of Avios, it increases the cash component, but only by a very small amount. And so your number of Avios being used, if you reduce that to the minimum to 500 Avios, you're getting really like more than 20 cents a point.

So that's the way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, you need to want to actually stay in one of these hotels. And so... Limited use. Yeah. I mean, for those that travel to Finland and wherever else these hotels are, it could absolutely make sense. Yeah. One brand that I covered is only in

Finland, really, and one location in Tallinn, Estonia. The other brand I covered, though, Scandic Hotels, they're in Sweden and Denmark and Finland and a couple of locations in Germany and Poland. So you've got a few options anyway, and you could get very good value out of your obvious there. But you will still have to pay a cash component, though.

Yeah, such a cool find. Although you did point out in your post that there's some danger because you can't refund the certificate once you get it. Yeah, you can't refund the certificate once you get it. At least I don't think so anyway. And the certificate's only valid for six months. I did have a reader who found some availability for voucher bookings farther than six months in advance. So here's the thing, and I didn't note this in the post, but I'll note it here on the podcast for listeners. You can book those voucher rates. You don't need the voucher in order to book.

So you need the code that we included in the post. And you can so for instance, you could book something that's eight months away right now. With one of the two chains anyway that I covered, you can book something that's eight months away for a voucher rate and you don't need to get the voucher until like I mean, you could do it on the day of check in, presumably, you just need to present the voucher when you get there. So I wouldn't recommend buying the voucher far in advance. I'd recommend buying it when you know you're going to check in. But the risk there then is, of course, that maybe they'll stop offering these vouchers

or maybe they'll change the price. And so maybe you'll be less interested in using it. But then you just cancel your reservation because reservations include free cancellation. So I would hold off on actually buying the voucher until you're really close to the trip because they're only valid for six months. And like I said, I don't think you can refund it. So good safety tip. OK, quick award talk story.

I've just had a big surprise right before we got on this with Amex travel. And so short version of the story is that Hawaiian Airlines has some really attractive fares right now for fall travel between Japan and the United States. So that's departing Japan, coming to the United States on the Hawaiian Airlines route. So they fly like Los Angeles and San Francisco, of course, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, New York, Boston. And so anyway, if you're flying from Japan to the airports that Hawaiian serves in the mainland US, fares are basically a little bit under $1,500 one way. And so if you're using points at one and a half cents per point, you're paying around 100,000, a little less, really 95, 96,000 points one way for a cash fare that you can then earn miles on. So that's a pretty good deal because,

especially if you're flying to the East Coast anyway, you're looking at probably earning around 12 or 13,000 points. So that's about the same price you would pay for an award ticket. And you'll, you know, obviously you're earning the miles on it. So that's nice. And there's obviously wider availability than there is for award tickets for a family of four that made it much easier for me to find a return for the trip I was looking for. Yeah. So there was available quite a few different days in different places. But what I found interesting was this. So I had four seats and I had booked originally to Los Angeles because they fly their new equipment that's just launching soon, I think, the 787 to Los Angeles from Honolulu. And that looks like it has a really nice business class.

So I booked that initially because there were not four seats available to New York. I live in New York, New York State anyway. There was only one seat at the cheap price on the day that I needed to New York. And so I booked four seats on a route from Tokyo to Los Angeles. And then within 24 hours, I saw, oh, wow, now there were four seats available for about the same price to New York. And so I wanted to change to that. And the fare that I had allowed for free changes, you just have to pay a difference in fare. And the fare had gone up like about $40 a person. So it was really inconsequential, a small bump in fare.

But I knew I would have to pay that. And so Amex Travel showed that there were four seats available at the new price. And Google Flights also showed there were four seats available at the good price to New York, the $1,500-ish a person. So I thought, OK, great. I'm going to call Amex Travel. Odd note, Google Flights shows the price on all of these flights, but there's no way to book.

Like we're usually when you click through a price on Google flights, it then will allow you to go to the airline or Expedia or whatever else. But in this case, Google flights just says, sorry, we can't find anywhere for you to buy the fare, but the fare does show up the Amex travel. And like I said, I had booked originally to Los Angeles, so it worked just fine doing it online using membership rewards points so I can get the rebate with the business platinum card. So anyway, I called to change. I changed. I had two separate reservations, my wife and one son on one reservation and me and the other son on another reservation because I use points from both of our accounts to book this. And so I called

and I changed my two seats to the flight we wanted now to go to New York. No problem. Easy breezy, $39 and change a person. Then my wife called to change her two seats and they told her, oh, it's going to be an increase of $3,000 per passenger. Like, wait, $3,000. We were expecting like $39 and change. And so I got on the phone with the Amex person she was talking to. And I said, I'm looking at it on Amex travel right now. It says it's available for $1,500 a passenger and there's four tickets left at that price. And so she starts trying to do some work in the background. And at that point I clicked through from the search results to like the booking page.

And when I clicked through the booking page, sure enough, it said the price has increased $6,000. And I was like, oh man, like the fare changed after I switched to passengers. And now, you know, so basically I figured we're out of luck here. Like I told her this is what Amex travel says. But now as I'm on hold and she's working on it, I'm like, oh, no, she's right. The fare did go up. And, you know, Amex can't do anything about that. That's just somewhere in the airline algorithm pricing tool. Right.

Well, wrong. Much to my surprise, about 10 minutes later, she came back and said, okay, we got it all figured out. $39 and change a passenger. She was like out of breath, so excited that it was going to be just $39 and change instead of $3,000 a passenger. And we were, of course, less out of breath, but also very surprised. I almost just hung up the phone because I was like, oh, there's nothing she can do. But sure enough, Amex was able to make that work. Oh my gosh. This is the second week in a row that you've told an unbelievable story that's worked out well in your favor. Last week, you were talking about calling Air Canada and they were basically answering the phone on first ring,

kissing your feet and throwing money at you. Well, the reason I share this though is because I've run into this before where the search results show a certain price. And then when you click through to actually book, the price has gone up. This happens with mistake fares and things like that from time to time where it shows the X price and then the price jumps up on the final booking page. I never in a million years would have expected that they had the ability to book the initial search result fare. And so that shocked me that they had the ability to book the initial like search result fair. And so that shocked me, like that there was a way to do that because now it had gone up. And even in Google flights, it had gone up. So I thought, oh man, we're out of luck. We're going

to have to switch back to the Los Angeles. Now the question is how to replicate that. So next time we run into something like that, how do we get someone to honor that? I don't know. Right. Well, we call and ask. I mean, I wouldn't have even called and tried before. Now I would. Yeah. Yeah. There you go.

Possible. So that's why I share the story because I would expect it not to work again. Maybe you'll never be able to replicate it, but at least, you know, now that there is some level hope. So there you go. Best of luck with that. Hopefully you've got my luck. All right.

That's a word talk. Let's get into this week's main event. All right. That's award talk. Let's get into this week's main event. All right. Today's main event, our favorite big spend bonuses. So credit cards often offer things with big spend. with spending a lot on a card. You might earn free hotel nights. You might earn, I don't know, extra bonus points when you hit certain targets. So there's all kinds of things. Lots of cards offer these. What we're going to do now is just discuss the ones that we think these are really good.

These are worth spending to that target amount for. So first up, Alaska Airlines, the personal card, the business card. Unfortunately, these used to be automatic each year, but now you spend $6,000 on the card and you get a $99 companion ticket. Obviously, it's not worth doing unless you are going to be using that companion ticket. But the thing is, the companion tickets are very flexible. So you could be flying from the East Coast United States through Seattle to Hawaii and round trip. And you could even do much more complex things than that.

And you get that companion ticket for $99 plus taxes. Yeah. I mean, if you can make that work, the companion ticket can be incredibly valuable also, not only because you can create a very complex routing, but because both passengers earn full miles based on distance flown with Alaska. So, you know, for 99 bucks, you could be earning well over $99 worth of miles on that second passenger's flight. So, so I think that's a maybe overlooked one for people that have the ability to fly Alaska. And that's the problem because you can only fly Alaska with it, not their partners. So you have to really be West Coast based probably to make this

work for you or New York based, I guess, because they fly to New York too. But maybe they fly somewhere in Florida too. It's not as useful for people based on the guess, because they fly to New York too, but maybe they fly somewhere in Florida too. It's not as useful for people based on the East coast because there aren't as many options. Although from a distance standpoint, you have options for much longer itinerary. So that's nice. All right. That's the first one up. Next up Hilton surpass card, the Hilton surpass card, the Hilton honor surpass card from American express offers a Hilton free night certificate with $15,000 spend in a calendar year. And so that's nice because Hilton free night certificate with $15,000 spend in a calendar year. And so that's nice because Hilton free night certificates are now valid any day of the week and they're not capped. So they work at almost every Hilton property in the world. There's a

couple of like timeshare type properties that they don't work at, but otherwise they work at all the, you know, Waldorf Astoria type properties and, you know, Conrad properties and stuff like that, the nicer places. And they're expected to also work at SLH when they partner with SLH. So that could be great for $15,000 spent. Absolutely. So yeah, if you have the Hilton Surpass card, I think it's worth spending that $15,000 to get that free night because that free night can be so valuable. Especially if you're doing it in a bonus category too. Don't forget that card offers 6 X at US supermarkets. So if you're doing it at that rate, you're basically earning almost two free nights at a top tier place with 15K spent.

Yeah. No, great point. Okay. Next is Hyatt. So Hyatt has both the consumer Hyatt card and the business one, and they're very different. So first, talking about the consumer one, $15,000 spend gets you a Category 1 through 4 free night certificate. It also gets you, for every $5,000 you spend on this card, you get two elite nights. So two nights towards elite status and towards milestone rewards. So we can argue about whether or not the 15K spend is worth it on its own for that free night. But if you're into Hyatt elite status, the combination of getting the free night for the $15,000 spend and a total of six elite nights for that $15,000 spend is a good deal in my book.

Yeah. I mean, certainly if you're not going to overshoot a milestone level by far, then yeah, I mean, it is, you know, it depends on how many nights you're going to stay per year in Hyatt, but I do the spend for the combination of the free night certificate and the two elite nights per 5k spend now, especially because now you can get some really good benefits at even the 40 night level. So if you hit 40 nights with Hyatt in a year, you're going to have gotten a free night certificate at 30 nights and at 40 nights, you're going to get what a guest of honor or the ability to get a guest of honor booking and a sweet upgrade, I think, with your choice benefits, you could pick those anyway. So anyway, I think it's worth

getting yourself up to 30 or 40 nights a year with Hyatt. 40 nights in particular would be best in my book because you can then guest of honor yourself and get yourself globalist benefits for a stay. So yeah, I think that one's a good one. On the business card, it's a little bit different. There's no free night certificate. Instead, every $10,000 spend, you get five elite nights. That's a little bit better. You'd only earn four with that much spend

on the consumer card. With the business card, you get five elite nights with every 10K spend. And after 50K spend, you get a 10% award rebate. So you get 10% back on your award bookings up to a maximum of 20,000 points rebated. So it's up to a maximum of 200,000 points used, 20K points rebated. So, I mean, that's kind of interesting. Do you find that one worth it?

Yeah. So this one's very much on the edge. I wouldn't say this is worth it for most people but the one case where i think it makes sense if somebody is really committed to getting high level uh hyatt elite status every year through spent like and a lot of it through spend and you have like easy big spend that you can do um i actually like the combination of the Hyatt consumer card for up to $15,000 spend, then put that card away. And then if you could spend 50K on the business card or actually whatever you need in chunks of 10K spend, because you're earning those elite nights at a better

rate, you can get to where you need to be. And then if you get to the 50K spend, that's just a sweetener that's worth a maximum of 20,000 points. So it's not enough sweetener to say you should target that, but the ability to earn elite knights faster for every 10K spend is very nice. Yeah, it is nice. Yeah. It really just depends. Like you said, I wouldn't target the 50K spend because remember, you're only earning one X on most purchases on these cards so you're accepting a lower rate of return on your spend than what you could get with other cards in exchange for the elite knights so the elite knights aren't exactly free to begin with and so yeah i mean getting 20 000 points back is better than not but it's not worth spending 50 000

dollars on this card to end up with an extra 20,000 points in your pocket, essentially at max, you know, right. Right. Right. Book enough in awards, but hopefully you are booking enough in awards to make that worthwhile if you're also spending 50 K on the card. So anyway, uh, yeah, so maybe, maybe at least in a couple of chunks of 10 K if you need them. And by the way, I mentioned the milestone rewards and we didn't mention all of them. I mentioned the 30 night and the 40 night milestone rewards at 50 nights, you get two more suite upgrades. So 40 nights, you get a guest of honor and a suite upgrade at 50 nights with Hyatt, you

get two suite upgrades. And then at 60 nights, you become globalist. You get a category one to seven free night certificate. That can be really valuable. Two more suite upgrades and two guests of honor bookings. So really, I mean, it works out pretty well to get any of those levels, 40, 50, 60, if you can get 60, that's obviously the target for a lot of people with Hyatt. So that's why you would consider the spend. Yeah, exactly. So, so, um, this one's complicated because these are not benefits you get directly from spend with the credit cards, but they're benefits you get indirectly from spend because you're staying in a high level park hyatt somewhere

where the yeah i'm going to make up numbers i don't know the exact but let's say the let's say the uh regular room rate is 25 000 points per night and the suite is 40 000 points per night and you really want a suite you're saving like 15 000 points per night um you know if you do um five nights they're good for up to seven nights day but if you do five nights at 75 000 points you're saving by using that free night certificate um and so now suite upgraded sorry suite upgrade certificate so now if you go back and look at if you pretend pretend those 75,000 points were earned from the spend, suddenly it becomes much more than earning one X. You know what I mean? So it's too complicated though, because what your actual earning on spend is so depends on also how many nights you're going

to be spending at Hyatt's anyway to get to those milestone levels and how you're going to be using those suite upgrades if at all. Yeah. Because to be using the suite upgrades, if at all. Yeah, because if you use the suite upgrades on a two-night stay, obviously, you're not going to get nearly as much benefit, but they can be used on a stay of up to seven nights. And the nice thing about Hyatt suite upgrade awards, we've said many times before, is that you can confirm them at the time of booking. I just recently booked a hotel in Tokyo, and I was able to confirm a suite right away at the time of booking because I saw it was available. So I booked the award for the standard rate, called in, applied the suite upgrade right away, and boom, I knew months in advance that I'm going to have a suite. So that's really nice and why many of us value those suite upgrades pretty highly.

But you have to be ready to use them and be using them in advantageous situations. So there are some ins and outs and what have you is in terms of making that worth it. It's not a no brainer. There's definitely some brain involved. Absolutely. And I went through a streak. Lately, I've been very lucky with my suite upgrades, applying them.

But I went through a streak about a year ago where I could not give these away. Every time I tried to use them, there weren't suites available or there was some other issue I was using. I can't remember if they don't allow them with free night certificates or something. And so it's just one thing after another where I couldn't actually use the ones that I want to use. But now I've had good luck. And now you can give them away. Whereas in the past, you couldn't. You the ones that I want to use, but now I've had good luck. So you can give them away. Whereas in the past you couldn't, you can give them away now. You can gift them to somebody else. So if you get into the situation where you just can't use it close to expiration, don't

forget that, that you are able to gift these now. Which, which, which is actually makes some of these, even like the category one through four certificates more valuable, especially if you have friends who are also in a Hyatt status. Because let's say it's about to expire and you have a friend who is about to book a hotel and could use that certificate. You could give it to them and they could later give you one of theirs that hasn't expired yet. You could trade back and forth like that. Yeah. Or my wife sends her, she gives her free night certificates to me because I have globalist status and she doesn't. So that way when I use the certificate, we get the globalist benefits. Right. Right. That's excellent. Yeah. A lot of,

a lot of benefits there. Okay. So that's the Hyatt cards, the big spend bonuses, the IHG Premier card. I want you to talk about this because I have ignored the IHG Premier card because I have the old card. I'm not eligible for the Premier card. Unfortunately, I really messed up and not getting the Premier card during the window when I could have. But anyway, so the IHG Premier has a bunch of different spending levels and bonuses that might be worth it. Yeah. Yeah. So we're now entering into the realm of like maybe as opposed to like, you know, what we actually do necessarily. But IHG Premier and the Premier Business Card both earn a base rate of three points per dollar. So that's decent,

but it's not great by itself because IHG so often sells their points for one and a half cents each. So it's sort of like getting one and a half percent cash back, which is not very good. However, at 20K spend, you get 10K bonus points and $100 statement credit. So right there at 20K spend, your earning rate jumps up. And then at 40K spend, you get diamond status. With the business card, they also have a 60K spend threshold where you get another 40K free night certificate that you can top off with staying at IHG hotels a lot, diamond status gives you free breakfast. And if that's meaningful to you, if you're a breakfast eater, as I am,

then it can be a very valuable thing to have diamond status. If you have the ability to spend a lot quickly, I think one way to play this is to, you know, have ideally the IHD business card. Well, it doesn't really matter. But if you have the business card or the Premier personal card, if you spend the $40,000 quickly at the beginning of a calendar year, then you'll have the elite status for the rest of that calendar year and all of the next. And then you could wait till the year after that to spend

another 40,000 so that you're not sort of wasting your spend up until that. So is it worth it? Totally just depends on how much you're going to be staying at IHD hotels. Because if you're going to be spending a lot, absolutely, I think it is worth it. Yeah. And you know, these big spend bonuses, I think it's probably we should have mentioned at the outset, the only people who should probably be considering big spend bonuses, especially at this 40 K level are people with very large amounts of spend. I mean, if you've got the capacity to spend a lot of money so that it's not just this, so let's back up and say the fastest way to earn lots of miles and points we've always had is new card bonuses. So opening new cards every couple of months or however often it is you're comfortable doing that and meeting the spend is going to earn you way more points and way more valuable return on spend than doing one big spend bonus a year.

So if you're only going to spend $40,000 over the course of the entire year, I would not put it on an IHG card for tons of reasons. But at least one of those reasons would be because you could have had three or four or five or eight potentially new card bonuses that were worth far, far more. But on the flip side, if you've got a business where you're spending a lot each month, or you've got a large tax bill, or you don't mind paying ahead in case you get a large tax bill, then, okay, then all of a sudden these things become worth considering because you have no problem hitting your welcome bonus spend on other cards and you can do this, then these become worth it. So that's the case on all of the big spend bonuses, really.

I mean, some of them seem more no-brainer-y than others, but all of them rely on you having enough capacity to spend. That's a great, great point. Okay. So, uh, cause I, I think that one's interesting, especially with the 40 K at the beginning of the year, you know, because it is tax time. And, you know, if you're able to float that and make a payment, a tax payment, an estimated tax payment close to the time when you're going to file your return anyway, then it

might be worth considering that card if you've got the ability to do that, but not everybody does. So, so that's the IHG Premier. Next up, the Barclays Aviator, the Barclays Advantage Aviator Silver. Now we've got the silver in here and actually the red or the silver offer a companion certificate with spend, but the silver card is the one that we think is probably more worth considering for a few reasons. So first of all, you earn both redeemable miles and loyalty points with all of your spend. So every dollar you spend on the card, you're going to earn one advantage, redeemable mile and one loyalty point, but you can earn loyalty point rewards. Well, first you, you can earn the milestone type loyalty point rewards. So at 15 K you get,

I don't know, like a ability to pick a seat, a nicer seat or something like that. And there's different things at each level that go all the way up to earning system-wide upgrades eventually if you've earned lots and lots of loyalty points. So this card can be worth it for earning loyalty points to get you to a threshold for one of the milestone rewards, probably not for the free upgraded seat, or I shouldn't say upgraded.

It's not even that. It's like main cabin extra or something of that sort. You wouldn't probably bother spending just for that. But if you're at one of the higher levels where the benefits become more worthwhile, then certainly it could make sense to spend to bridge the gap with every or with $20,000 spend rather. And let me take that back and not say with every at $20,000 spend, you get an additional 5,000 loyalty points. So you'll get 20,000 loyalty points for your 20K spend plus an additional 5,000 for a total of 25,000 loyalty points. So you'll get 20,000 loyalty points for your 20K spend plus an additional 5,000 for a total of 25,000 loyalty points at 20K spend.

Plus you also get a $99 plus tax domestic companion certificate that enables you to bring two companions with you for 99 bucks each. So you'll have to book a flight, a round trip economy class flight on American Airlines within the United States. And then you can add two people to it for $99 plus the taxes each. So that's, again, potentially a valuable

benefit. If you're booking a fairly expensive round-trip economy class flight within the United States, you could save quite a bit with the companion certificate potentially. We don't really know how easy to use those are. In the past, people reported that they were quite difficult to use. I've seen some more recent data points that they're easier. I've completed the 20k spend, so I anticipate getting one of these at renewal and look forward to being able to write about how easy or difficult it is to use one of those to see whether or not it's worth considering spending 20k on. So give me a few months and I'll let you know when I know. And then also at 40k spend and at 50k spend, you get those 5k loyalty point bonuses again. So when you hit 40k spend, you'll

get an additional bonus 5000 loyalty points and at 50,000 spend, you get a bonus 5000 loyalty points. So if you're somebody who's chasing after American Airlines elite status, those could give you bumps towards getting elite status and maybe make it worth spending. I mean, not all by themselves. You'd have to also highly value the redeemable miles, which in the case of American Airlines, unlike most others, you don't have opportunities to transfer to American Airlines. Built is losing that partnership in a few weeks, and then there's nobody that transfers to American Airlines. So it's possible maybe you really highly value your american airlines miles and so you find it worth spending on the card for those and the combination of also getting the loyalty points and the companion certificate

yeah it sounds like you're you're you're though uh you you're of the stance that basically the 20k spend is a sweet spot for this card yeah for sure most people yeah for most people for sure because you get both the 5k loyalty point bonus and the companion certificate so that's probably where i would stop spending for most people unless that you know additional where you're gonna stop spending well i mean i think so it depends on how easy you know like i like i have a very easy spending opportunity right now that's enabled me to do a lot of spend, but that's drying up sooner than expected. So that may change. I don't know.

Right now I have a capacity or I have had capacity for a lot of spend for the last several months, but not necessarily going to have that much longer. So we'll see. Now, really quietly now, our listeners want to know what is the spend and how can they do it? Well, so this is actually easy enough to talk about. I'm able to buy gift cards without an activation fee at a local chain that you wouldn't find anywhere else. And I'm able to buy money orders with them, except the place where I'm able to buy money orders is no longer going to be selling money orders pretty soon. So sooner than I expected. I expected that it was going away and it's going away even sooner than I expected.

So unfortunately, that's going to change pretty significantly for me pretty soon. So yeah, I'm stopping at 20K right now, barring any major changes. I'm stopping at 20K on that. We'll see. All right. So that's the Advantage Aviator Silver. Next up is Air Canada Aero Plan, right? Because you can spend and get some crazy benefits if you spend a lot.

Yeah, yeah. I put this one in here as our last card more because it's fun than because I would really do it. But for those who are interested in Aeroplan Elite status, the Chase Aeroplan card

gives you the ability to renew your 25k status every year with just 15k spend or get a status boost to the next level of status with 50k spend. So whatever status you achieve naturally, you could get to the next level by spending $50,000 on the card. Beyond that is where it gets a little silly, but there are things called priority rewards. And I'm not going to get into the details of these, but you get priority rewards with 100K spend, 250K spend, $500,000 spend, $750,000 spend.

But the really fun one is if you spend a million dollars with this card. One million dollars. One million dollars. First of all, we have to question what you're thinking, but you get a free award companion for the rest of the calendar year and all of the next, which means you could book any award flights for two, basically two for the price of one. And I don't think that's limited to Air Canada's own flights, right? I think it's like any, as far as I know. I mean, I can't say that I've quite hit the million spend yet. Well, we're a little short.

Yeah. So, yeah. No, I don't know. It's probably not limited to Aeroplan. But, you know, like, so this one's fun to talk about. But realistically, if you had a million dollars. It's so dumb. Yeah, I mean, it is. It's so dumb. But even if you wanted it, let's say you decided,, but realistically, if you had a million dollars. It's so dumb. Yeah.

I mean, it is. It's so dumb. But even if you want it, let's say you decided, okay, I'm going to spend a million dollars. I'm going to put it all on one card. Then just get like, you know, VentureX business or SparkMiles business or whatever. And, you know, put your million dollar spend on a card that earns two points per dollar that you could transfer to Aeroplan and you could have two million Aeroplan points. So, I mean, unless you're going to spend more than a million Aeroplan points, you've essentially got yourself a free companion on up to a million points worth of spend.

Yeah. I guess one exception. So, this earns three X at grocery stores. Is that capped? Yeah. No, I think it's not. I think it's not. You're right. If that's not capped, then I guess you, I guess you could earn 3 million miles with that million-dollar spend. And get the free companion on all of those redemptions. Of course, you could be earning 3 million city thank-you points. But, you know, anyway, so if you have a million dollars of grocery store spend, I guess it makes sense. You got to really, you got to really, if you laughed earlier when we said, all you got to do is spend 1300 a week on the, uh, Qatar airways, uh, you know, cardless card in order to earn elite status.

And you're like, ah, I spend that in an hour. Uh, then, uh, you know, maybe this is the card for you, but, uh, probably there you go. So, yeah. All right. So that was the airplane card that brings us to the end of this week's main event. And to this week's question of the week to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week has actually come up a few times in recent months, and it's one that I have not pulled out before. So I'm going to pull it out and put Greg on the spot here.

Jeff writes in and says Greg has previously talked about his player three, his son, who Jeff says, I believe, is around college age, a little bit older than that. Now, it sounds like player three is having no trouble getting pretty advanced cards at this point. Can Greg give an overview of how they ramped player three up on getting cards and build up their credit at such an early age? Thanks, Jeff. So your son's in the game. How'd he get in it? And how'd you ramp up to being able to get all these cool cards that he's been able to

get? Yeah, sure. That's a great question. When he turned 18, I helped him sign up for a starter card. I think it was a Discover It student card. And that helped him build credit. But also before that, I had added him as an authorized user to quite a few different cards, and that gave him credit history. Even though he wasn't the primary on those, that gave him credit history from the get-go. And he got the Discover It card and started using that for all his spend. Later got a couple other sort of lower-end cards like that. Meanwhile, I started helping him out by

helping him apply for cards with bigger minimum spend requirements, business cards mostly we concentrated on, starting with American Express, if I remember right. American Express business cards were very easy to get approved from with at the time, at least. And I would help him with the minimum spend requirements on those cards. And so he could do that. And so we did that for a while

and then applied for uh chase inc business card got that approved and again i'm helping him with the minimum spend and uh he's been approved for several inc business cards since then including um sometimes the same exact card with his same exact business. And so that's all been good. There's nothing really secret or special about what we did. It's just that I think building a credit history from the beginning is good. And so again, I'll just go back to when they're around 13 or so, start adding them as authorized users. And when they're 18, sign up for a student level card and have them use that for all things so that they start building their credit history between those two things. And then they should be pretty good to go to get approved for more cards yeah and to be clear for anybody who misunderstood or misheard when you said you're helping with minimum spend you're not like applying as like a cosigner type of a thing on these cards you've helped him because you have the capacity to do the spend but when because i do the spend yeah yeah that's a

good point i do the spend with his card and and I pay the credit card bill in those situations. You have to be 13 in order to add as authorized user, but some issuers don't have that requirement. So I added my kids as soon as they were born to a couple of cards. And so, you know, hopefully maybe someday that will help them because they'll already have a credit file when they turn 18, I hope. And so, you know, that's part of the preparation. But yeah, actually, Greg wrote a series of posts and they were based on the offers at the time and the things at the time. But he did write a series of posts of a credit card plan for what is an 18-year-old graduate, a college student, a credit card plan for a college student, I think. If you look that up, we'll include a link in the show notes.

And so that kind of laid out how many points he was going to have by the time he graduated if everything went according to plan. And obviously, the number of points will be different now, but the strategy involved will be, I think, still applicable if you're right. Right. There were there were also some posts that weren't really about like, here's the plan exactly. But but, you know, here's what you can do, you know, before college. And then when you're about college age here, here's some recommendations. So I don't remember exactly what was. Yeah. Yeah. It's been so long, but I think the general advice is probably still correct. Yep, exactly. All right. Very good. Well, we hope you enjoyed this show. these it's been so long but i think the general advice is probably still correct yep exactly all

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