Frequent Miler on the Air - Our favorite travel rewards of 2023 | Ep232 | 12-9-23

Episode Date: December 9, 2023

The year 2023 has seen our travels take us all over the world. This week, we look back and discuss our favorite award redemptions of the year 2023 and of all time. Subscribe to our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ 00:00 Intro 01:35 Giant Mailbag 04:10 Travel Talk 04:28 Alaska wants to buy Hawaiian Airlines 12:00 EU261 claim 14:33 Card Talk : Hawaiian Airlines credit cards 22:30 Award Talk: Avianca customer service might be better than its reputation suggests. 29:30 Main Event: Our favorite travel rewards of 2023 31:05 Special situation: Party of 5 (ANA First Class and LATAM Business Class) 35:34 Qatar QSuites (maybe) 37:06 British Airways Club World Suites 39:35 Air France business class  42:01 Turkish Airlines business class 47:24 Our all-time favorite flight awards 47:31 Etihad First Class Apartments 48:08 Old Singapore Suites / ANA First Class flight 50:29 Our favorite hotel redemptions of 2023 50:38 Eichert's Private Hotel in Queenstown, NZ (SLH via Hyatt) 52:11 Grand Hotel Victoria in Menaggio, Italy (on Lake Como) (SLH via Hyatt) 54:13 Kona Seaside Yacht Villa through Vacasa (Wyndham Rewards) 57:27 Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, Florida 1:00:57 Greg honorable mentions: VIlla Copenhagen; Kimpton Fitzroy; Ventana Big Sur, Inn at Bay Harbor 1:02:57 Comfort Hotel Bolivar in Rome, Hyatt Regency Nice 1:04:44 Our all-time favorite hotel awards 1:05:48 Necker Island 1:09:36 St Regis Bora Bora 1:13:14 Non-flight or hotel rewards 1:13:30 BLADE helicopter flight 1:15:45 Cruising for free thanks to casino status matching 1:20:11 Which cards are worth getting in the hopes that they get grandfathered? 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 travel rewards for 2023. Nick and I are going to talk about all the travel we've done with Points and Miles

and talk in depth about our favorite ones. What really changed for us, like what our best trips are and where did we get fantastic value? Yeah, it was pretty amazing. We both traveled quite a bit this year. It's nice to be able to be back in that. And I just often stop and look at what we're doing. In fact, I was just on vacation last week and several times I was like, this is just amazing that we're able to do these things that I never would have even thought about doing, you know, if not for all of this fun that we have with Miles and Points.

So we'll talk about some of our favorites from this year. But don't forget, wherever you're watching the show, listening, etc. If you like it, don't forget to like it. Hit the like button. Give us some feedback. Leave a comment. All of those things are helpful for other people finding the show, too. And don't forget, we keep the

timestamps in the show notes. So if you want to skip ahead to something or you want to return to something later on, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes, whether that's in the description on YouTube. If you're on a mobile phone on YouTube, it's a pain to find that description box, but you've got to expand it somewhere to find those and whatever podcast platform you use, you should be able to find the show notes pretty easily. So don't forget to check out that stuff. Now, Greg, drag out this week's giant mailbag. In today's giant mail, we've got three reviews from Apple podcasts and they're all good. I would say I picked the really good ones but i was gonna say yeah it sounded like you had to like weed through all of the negative ones to be like don't worry they're

they're okay yeah no i mean it's we're very blessed that that uh i couldn't even find a bad one if if i tried really hard although i i think i read one that was slightly negative a long time ago on the show but once yeah i don't know where that one went. Anyway, first up, we have Elizabeth Rose, who says, I've been in the game for a while. Frequent Miler is my new favorite resource. I can't believe I've been sleeping on Frequent Miler for years. They have great info, a really positive way of sharing it. And they prioritize providing the best deals even when they lose out on commission. What more could I ask for? Keep up the great work. Thank you, Elizabeth Rose. I mean,

I'm glad that you found us. Thank you for waking up. The alarm was going off. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Here you are. Great. Awesome. Exactly. All right. Next up, we've got Tyson Bobby, who says simply the best. These guys are the points and miles geeks, points and miles geeks. I love their blog, their Facebook group, and this podcast. I've learned tens of, I've earned tens of thousands of miles in luxury travel with their tips,

and I love how much they love the game. It's a fun game to play because we also have enjoyed tens of thousands in luxury trips that who would have ever thought we would have been doing probably. So yeah, I mean, I love it. Love that you love it, Tyson.

And I love to be the Geeks Geek. And I love that our love for the game comes across. So that's that's really cool. All right. Last one. Sam, I am. I am. Sam says great podcast for turners.

I am a vet of the game and learn new things every week. The hosts are warm and genuine, which is a big plus. You know, I think one of the things about this that I enjoy hearing is learning something new each week, because I feel like I still learn something almost every week. So, you know, there's just there's so many things to learn that just in researching things or just things go wrong or go right. And one thing or another happens where we're constantly learning stuff. And so, you know, there's always things for all of us to learn, even in the things that we thought we knew a lot about. Yeah. Yeah. And he says the hosts are warm and genuine, which is a big plus, which triggers my dad joke. Dad joke warning. Another another big plus is the Swiss flag. True. True. Thank you for that. Yes, it is. All right. Let's just move right on

to this week's travel talk. Wait, travel talk. Is this a new segment you threw in on me, Greg? I did. I didn't know where else to put these things. A couple of things I thought were important to talk about, and they didn't quite fit as award talk or anything like that. So yeah, travel talk. Travel talk. Let's talk about travel. So this week, big news. I was on vacation snoozing, but the big news while I snoozed was that Alaska is going to buy Hawaiian Airlines. What? They're going to buy them or die trying. Yeah. They put in a huge offer for Hawaiian Airlines, and unless the DOJ stops it, they say that they're going to keep the airlines marketed separately. So there'll still be something called Hawaiian Airlines and something separate called Alaskan, but they'll share the same rewards currency, which will be Alaska's mileage plan miles. So that's good because I mean, that's actually great for

frequent flyers, I think, because Hawaiian miles have limited use of some good uses, but not considered very valuable. Alaska miles much more valuable. So potential goodies, good stuff there. So really good stuff, some really good stuff there. So so let me just say right out. One of the things I love about this is that Hawaiian has a number of destinations that they serve in the Pacific Ocean and not just in Hawaii. But I flew them, for instance, to Papeete to Tahiti, you know, a few years back when I went to French Polynesia. So that was cool. And now being able to do that, like an ad Hawaii as a stopover, because Alaska allows a stopover on a one way, a free stopover, right?

So why don't Hawaii stop over and continue on to French Polynesia? Hello, vacation time. Yeah, right. That seems like it'd be a lot of fun. I'm kind of excited about some of those types of possibilities. Get to places and stop over in Hawaii on the way. Why not? Right.

Absolutely. And, you know, Alaska doesn't today have any lie flat seating on their planes, but Hawaiian does on their long haul flights. So that's a nice addition to Alaska's route network for sure. And so, you know, it brings up some questions. I'm just going to ask you these questions. We don't know the answers to these things. But first up, is it worth signing up for Hawaiian Airlines cards now to get those Hawaiian points and hope that they'll convert one to one to Alaska? You know, I feel like maybe it is. What are the chances that Alaska is going

to convert those at less than one-to-one? I feel like it's relatively slim. It'll probably just be a one-to-one. And being part of my lack of enthusiasm for Alaska miles has been the propensity to devalue with no notice or notification, but they recently have changed things. And it sounds like it's going to be a net positive. We talked about that on the show a few weeks ago, like most award chart spots are looking better. And we're kind of doing away with that whole idea of from and rather making a standard saver price, so to speak, for each of the different types of awards. So I'm feeling more confident about Alaska miles. but the other part of my

sort of dampened enthusiasm for Alaska miles, there just hasn't been many ways to get them. They don't transfer from different transferable currencies. And so you have like what two credit cards you get, but now, now all of a sudden you've got a couple more options with Hawaiian. So maybe you should be considering the Hawaiian cards. Yeah. Well, and, and not only that, so there are two programs that, uh, that I can think of that transfer to Hawaiian miles. So American Express Membership Rewards which is good, but it's not something we'd normally recommend transferring to Hawaiian. if those miles become one-to-one with Alaska, there might be something there. It'll be very interesting to see what happens to those, those relationships between these transferable points, currencies and Hawaiian airlines. When what's underneath is Alaska.

I, you know, I, I just don't know how that all look. Will they keep that partnership or not? It'd be great if they do. Yeah. And it wouldn't be totally unprecedented. Let's keep in mind that, you know, there's all the different obvious currencies out there, right? And so there's some situations where some obvious programs partner with one transferable currency, but others don't. And you can still kind of mix and match and move them around. So it's not impossible if they're going to keep Hawaiian marketed separately, that Hawaiian mileage plan will be a transfer partner still.

And so you may have a backdoor way to get Alaska miles from transferable points. Yeah, absolutely. You know, a example that comes to mind is for a long time, Citi didn't have a way to transfer to British Airways. But then once Qatar became partners with them and shared the Avios currency, now you could transfer from Citi to Qatar, which you could always do before, but now those can also easily transfer over to British Airways. And so that is exactly what you're talking about here

as a possibility. So that's that's pretty exciting if that happens. Yeah, it sure will be. And it'll be even more exciting if we ever see a transfer bonus from built again. So we'll see how that that goes down. And then the other question that it brings up is what about Alaska's companion certificates? Because the Alaska credit cards come with a companion certificate that you can use for travel on Alaska Airlines. Now, if Hawaiian is going to be marketed separately, I don't know. But then again, if it's really technically part of Alaska, will you be able to use your companion certificate for travel on Hawaiian Airlines? Yeah, it's intriguing. You know,

what do you think will happen there? Because because so the the issue is that right now you can only use them on Alaska Airlines itself. Alaska has some like short haul international flights, but nothing like nothing like what Hawaiian has. And so if they open it up to all of Hawaiians network, that makes those companion tickets like incredibly valuable. Seems unlikely they'll do that. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem unlikely. I don't think that's going to happen. And maybe that's part of the impetus of keeping them marketed separately. Maybe not. I don't know if that may that's too niche of a case for it really to make a difference. But I think I see it more likely that Alaska will define those companion certificates as being like, you know, contiguous United States only or

or maybe U.S. and Hawaii. Well, they have to allow Alaska. Well, yeah, that's true, I guess. Well, I mean, sort of. I mean, they're really based in Seattle. Right. So they have to. You're right. I guess they kind of have to. And they've long served Hawaii. So I guess I'll need to keep Hawaii in there there i don't know if they if they take alaska out of their companion ticket if alaska airlines takes alaska out of their companion ticket they will win next year's uh bonvoy crazy thing yeah well or well what crazy thing as well yeah that would be nuts yeah i don't see that happening but anyway but we also agree that we

think it's very unlikely i think it's very unlikely that those companionship will be usable on all of hawaiians roads right right so it might be on on restricted routes but certainly not all of them but we can hope all right but that's not it for travel talk this week we have something else up uh tim tim tim did really well on a compensation claim, huh? Yeah. Yeah. So Tim, Tim wrote up a post called How I Got Over $1,400 for a Delayed Flight, a Guide to EU 261 Claims. Basically, he talks about how when flying to Europe on a European carrier or from Europe on any carrier, if I've got that right, and you're delayed, you're eligible for a certain compensation depending on how long you're delayed and everything. And that's something that a lot of us have sort of vaguely known about,

but unless you're in the situation where you have to deal with it, you probably haven't understood it, the ins and outs and how to go about filing a claim. And so I just wanted to mention, really, this is a resource now that's out there on the blog that you can look up. And so that if you're ever in this situation, you could look up, see, are you eligible? Okay, next step. How do you go about filing for a claim? Yeah. And I have to read this because on my way back from Europe, my flight was canceled. And so I had to look into this a little bit myself. But a little bit before Tim posted this, I started looking into it. And I think that my flight was eligible. And I reached out to the

airline and they told me, oh, no, we notified you. And so I had to write back and say, no, you didn't notify me. And just today, actually, I got another email saying, hey, we're still working on that. We'll let you know what's up soon. So I need to read through Tim's post and see what else he did. Because, yeah, it's one of those things that I knew it would probably apply. But then I had a lot of questions. Like in my case, we were departing Finland. And so we were departing the EU, but we were connecting in Istanbul. And really, it was the flight from Istanbul to New York that got canceled and we got rescheduled on. So that's not from or to an EU city, but it's on the same ticket from Finland. So I think it all counts. But anyway, it's confusing if you haven't actually done it yourself. And it's not necessarily straightforward as to how to do it. So definitely worth looking that up if you ever find yourself in that type of situation. And I mean, in our case with four passengers, if we are eligible, as I think, then I think we'll end up eligible for like twenty four hundred euros for the four of us, plus hotel accommodations for the time we were delayed. So it's a significant amount if I'm right. And I think I am.

So we'll see. Check out Tim's resource for your own needs. Absolutely. All right. That brings us to Card Talk. This week for Card Talk, we just mentioned a little while ago here how you may be interested suddenly in the Hawaiian Airlines credit cards.

So let's discuss the Hawaiian Airlines credit cards as they exist now. Yeah. All right. So as is often the case with these co-branded cards, there is both a consumer and business version of the card, and they're very, very similar. There's also what appears to be a bank. So both of those are issued by Barclays, first of all. There's also what appears to be a Bank of Hawaii, Hawaiian Airlines card. But if you go to apply for it, it just routes you to Barclays. And I think when you get the card, it would say Bank of Hawaii on it, but it's really the same card as far as I understand as the one that if you apply directly through Barclays. So we're just going to talk about the consumer and the business one. They each

have a $99 annual fee and no foreign transaction fees. The consumer card earns three points per dollar for Hawaiian Airlines flights, two points per dollar for gas, dining, and grocery stores, one point per dollar everywhere else. The business card, very similar, three points per dollar for Hawaiian Airlines, two points per dollar for gas, dining, and office supply stores. That's the one place where it's different.

So the consumer one was 2X for grocery stores and the biz is 2X for office supply. That's the one difference in the earning rate. And they're both 1X everywhere else. What do you think about that earning rate, Nick? Even that's a little generous, isn't it? I mean, two points per dollar. We've talked about lots of times before. That's not exciting because there are a lot of cards on the market where you can earn two transferable points per dollar. So and that's especially true with Hawaiian because you could get yourself a, for instance, a Blue Business Plus card from Amex and have two membership rewards points per dollar spent on the first $50,000 per year.

And then it's one X after that. But anyway, if you're spending up to $50,000 a year, you could easily get two miles per dollar everywhere and transfer that to Hawaiian. And of course, grocery stores, you get four X with the Amex gold card. So, yeah, this is very ho-hum in terms of ongoing spend. I wouldn't use it. Absolutely. So as is the case with, I'd say most co-branded like airline cards, spending on these cards doesn't tend to make a lot of sense, except in cases where they have some kind of big spend bonus or if it helps you earn elite status. This is not the case here. All right, let's talk perks. They have a

couple perks in common, and then there's a couple that are unique to the consumer card. So the perks that are in common, when you sign up, you get a one-time 50% off companion discount on round-trip coach travel between Hawaii and North America on Hawaiian Airlines. Well, that sounds really good, doesn't it? Half off a companion?

I mean, half off a companion is you get a quarter off of the airfare for two people. And I'm going to guess, I don't know this for a fact, but I'm going to guess it's only on eligible fare classes or something like that, right, Craig?

It's not like the cheapest ticket, I bet. That's where it gets really bad. It's only for full fare economies. So you're paying, you're probably going to be paying 50% to 100% more in order to get 25% off. Yeah, it's more of a punishment than a perk. And then another perk that they both have is is uh the ability to share miles uh for free so you can now when you have the card you can uh move your points from uh to other people or uh get them from other people

for free um so that's actually really a nice thing. And, you know, if they keep this long term, that'd be kind of an interesting way, sort of a backdoor way of moving Alaska miles around if the Alaska purchase of Hawaiian actually goes through. Yeah, that could be useful for a couple. And to be clear, if you're a couple playing in two-player mode, this means that theoretically there are two cards, right?

A business and a consumer. So if you each signed up for those, you could sign up for four cards, apply for four cards, and then theoretically combine all four welcome bonuses into one account. Right, right. So that's pretty nice. Okay, so then the consumer card adds some perks. One is two free check bags when your flight is booked through Hawaiian Airlines.

So yeah, that one's kind of surprising that the business card doesn't have it. It's so common for airline cards to have free check bags, but at least the consumer card has that. And then consumer has another punishment perk. A hundred dollars off a companion ticket for round trip coach travel between Hawaii and North America on Hawaiian Airlines at each account anniversary. So you get another. Coupon that you probably don't want to use because you'll be paying too much to get the hundred dollars off. Yeah, I mean, unless you're somebody who plans a lot of last minute travel where you don't care how much it costs. And so you're going to save a little bit over paying the full fare price. But then if you didn't care how much it costs,

I guess you probably wouldn't care about the discount. So yeah, I don't know. Those discounts are not particularly useful. Really, the reasons to have these cards are the welcome bonuses, the ability to share miles perhaps and i guess the two free check bags if you book directly through hawaiian and that's only on the consumer card that that's a decent perk because i don't think there are many opportunities to get free bags on hawaiian so i think that's about it right right um you know and it's one of those things that when you're flying to hawai a different carrier and then have Hawaiian as a connection to another island, if your airline that partners with Hawaiian gives you free check bags for whatever reason, you have their credit card or a lease status or whatever, then I believe it'll check all the way through even a Hawaiian because of their partnership. But when you come back and your first leg is Hawaiian, then you're stuck.

All that said, if you only do that once a year, two free bags for $99 is not a deal. Not a deal. No, no, no, it's not. It's a bad. It is. It's a deal. It's a bad deal. There you go. It's only a type of a deal. It's a bad deal. There you go.

It's only a type of a deal, just not a good deal. Right, right. And you're prepaying it too. Right, right. Yeah, no. Yeah, so, yeah, as Nick said, it's mostly the welcome bonus that these cards are interesting, I think.

And for those who live in Hawaii, certainly the consumer card, the free check bags can make a lot of sense because you're probably flying them a lot. Yeah. And Hawaiian miles do have a couple of decent uses even before they merge here with Alaska miles. Not many, but they have a couple. So some of their flights to Pacific Islands can be not totally unreasonable with Hawaiian miles. And also their inter-island flights can be reasonable-ish, although we've mentioned before Southwest flies between the islands and you get two free check bags for a person. And often I find that they're cheaper anyway than Hawaiian. So I don't know how useful

the inter-island flights are, but it's an option anyway. So those are a couple of uses that could be okay. But really, we're talking about these not because of the value of Hawaiian miles. We're talking about them because we're anticipating that they're going to become Alaska miles at some point. So our mileage plan miles at some point, that's most likely going to be where these miles will become valuable and why those welcome bonuses will be of interest. Right. Yep. Yep. Hopefully. There you go. All right. Let's talk about award talk this week. We're going to skip over a couple of other regular segments and go to award talk. So for this week's award talk, I wanted to quickly mention that Avianca customer service might be better than its reputation suggests. And so I wanted to just briefly tell an anecdote

where I had my my flight home, booked home from Europe was booked with Avianca LifeMiles. And this was a manual booking I did via email, which I don't know is even possible anymore. It seems they've shut down the old support email address. And and so I think people have been saying they have not been able to make a manual booking anymore, which is really disappointing. But I made these bookings like beginning of the year, January, February, or thereabouts anyway. And so I booked five passengers to fly from Helsinki to Istanbul to New York. And so again, those were manual bookings. And I was a little nervous from the beginning because I had written about that. And a few readers had commented to say, look up all the horror stories of people showing up at

the airport with tickets booked on Turkish through Avianca that didn't have a valid ticket when they got to the airport. And I was like, oh, am I going to run into an issue with that? So I've been nervous for months that is there going to be something to that? It's been hard to pull up the confirmation online. Turkish gives you an error. If you try on the website, it says you got to go through your original booking channel in the app. If you fight with it enough times, eventually it'll show the reservation, but you need all the ticket numbers for the individual passengers and the names in order to be able to even get into the reservation. I could only change one seat and then the whole thing, a crash, and I have to start over again. It was a real big pain. So I was a little nervous all along that something was going to go wrong with this to

begin with. And then sure enough, something did go wrong. Turkish canceled my flight from Istanbul to New York. And so I noticed that just like 10 days before we were due to travel home from this trip, that they had canceled that and tentatively scheduled us on a flight the next day. So now my layover in Istanbul was going to go from like, oh, I don't know, 16 or 18 hours to all of a sudden, like 40 something hours. And so I was nervous immediately because I thought to myself, well, first of all, I assume that means Avianca has to reticket this. Nothing tells me that, of course, nobody reached out to let me know. But I but just experience tells me that Avianca has to reticket this. Nothing tells me that, of course. Nobody reached out to let me know. But just experience tells me that Avianca has to reissue the ticket in that case.

So number one, I thought, am I going to have trouble with that? Is Avianca not going to be able to do that? Because now there's no award availability probably on that next day that I'm scheduled for. So I had no idea if that was going to work. And then even if magically they were somehow able to fix that, generally speaking, is that going to work? Because Avianca doesn't do stopovers on award tickets. Now the layover is more than 24 hours. So is that going to cause me a problem? And we actually had two different PNRs. We had four passengers on one PNR and one

on another PNR. And so is that going to be an additional headache? Is she going to have to call? My wife's sister was coming with us. Is she going to have to call separately and navigate this somehow? Or am I going to have to sit by the phone and help her through it? So I had a lot of nervousness going into calling Avianca to try to get this fixed. And much to my pleasant surprise, it was super easy. I called, I explained exactly what happened. Agent understood exactly what I was saying, took both confirmation numbers at once, pulled it all up, knew what was going on, said, yes, they do need to reissue the ticket. They had to actually transfer me to somebody else initially to reissue it. But that somebody else also understood what I was talking about,

took both confirmation numbers. So it wasn't like I had to do one at a time or anything. They took all the information at once and put me on hold for a few minutes and came back and said, OK, we reissued the tickets there in your email. And so I looked and sure enough, there they were. And boom. And I mentioned that somewhere, posted that somewhere. And a number of readers commented to say that they have also had similarly positive experiences lately calling and talking with an Avianca agent. I mentioned that because it's sort of a complex situation that you might expect a general customer service agent to be a little confused by, but boy, everybody knew exactly what I was talking about and what needed to be done. It was a short call. So I've been very happy with that. Last couple of times I've had to call

Avianca and sure enough, I showed up at the airport, no problem at all, checking in, no issue, checking in for either flight. Again, both times I was sort of nervous. Am I going to run into an issue where this part of it didn't work for some reason or we don't have a valid ticket? I had all the ticket numbers written down and the names. And I was like, I had it all on my phone ready to go because I was anticipating a problem. And there was just no problem at all. It was totally smooth sailing. That's awesome.

And this isn't the first time you've talked about Avianca in glowing ways on the show because you called their customer support about something else in the past and had a great experience. And the reason it's noteworthy is because people have in the past avoided booking through LifeMiles because of their reputation for being very difficult. And so hearing that they've been in real life, the opposite of difficult is fantastic. So that certainly makes me more interested in booking with LifeMiles than before hearing these kinds of stories. Now I just wish they would like- Get rid of the cancellation fees. Well, yeah, yeah, that's on my list. The first one I was gonna say is fix their award booking,

the search tool so that you can actually find what you want. And, and yeah, second, it would be nice if they would either get rid of their change in cancellation fees, or at least make them more in line with what other carriers charge. They're too high. That's definitely the big problem. And it didn't cost me anything for the record. It wasn't my fault that they canceled the flight. Yeah. So I wasn't surprised. I was, again, slightly nervous because they did send me the new ticket information, but then they also sent me just for two of the five passengers, sent me the sort of travel document that if you've ever done a manual booking, you know what I'm talking about. And if you haven't, I'm never going to be able to describe it to you. But it's this long text email with a lot of stuff. And within that, it said, please call within such and such number of hours to pay the taxes on this award kind of a thing.

And I didn't notice that until a couple of days later. And I was like, wait a second. I paid everything already. I told me the tickets were reissued. I don't think I had to pay anything more. And I looked at it and the receipt had like PD, like paid for all the various taxes. So I thought to myself, well, I shouldn't know anything else. I'm not going to worry about it. So, uh, but that was in my mind as I got there anyway. Is that going to be an issue, too? But again, again, Avianca was fine. It was easy.

It didn't cost me anything. It was quick. And like you said, what's notable there is that that's not what people the image I think that people have of Avianca's customer service. I think they earned themselves a bad reputation for years, but it seems they are training their people. So yeah, yeah, that's that's fantastic. All right. All right. That's fantastic. All right.

All right. That's that. That brings us to the main event. This week's main event. This week's main event is our favorite travel rewards for 2023. You know, I first titled this our favorite travel awards for 2023. Then I realized that's confusing because we're,

because people show is an award show because it's not an award show is an award show this is not an award show but but we have plans to do like awards like our you know the the bonvoy awards where we're going to list the the worst uh deals of of the year but but also um a show where we do the best so So those will be award shows. This is a reward show. Reward show. Okay, using your rewards to reward yourself with an award ticket. So, yes, so there are favorites of 2023. So how so?

I mean, what do we mean favorites? What does that even mean? Yeah, so we're talking about, you know, the best in-flight experience, the best hotel experience, or it could be the most incredible value you got from your points or miles. It could be that the airplane itself was the most awesome, but even maybe the flight attendants and food wasn't or whatever. So it's very squishy. What exactly we mean? Very good. All right. We'll talk about the best according to whatever criteria we want. That's right. Totally up to us. Entirely subjective, but that's what you get. So where do we start with the best of 2023? Yeah, we're going to start with flights.

But first, we're going to talk about a special situation, which is that the entire Freak-O-Miler team in June flew together on what we call the Party of Five Challenge. And both Nick and I really enjoyed some of the flights there. And I'm pulling this out as a special case because a big reason we enjoyed these flights so much is because we were all five of us traveling together. We flew ANA first class from Tokyo to San Francisco. And we were the only people in the first class cabin. So the Freak Miler team was the entire first class. And it was just the most fun, you know, flight ever. And, and so I am pulling this out as a special case because it's not like, you know, you're going to have that experience that we did when you, if you fly in a first class,

but, um, another one that was kind of like that, uh, La Tom business class, uh, from LA to Santiago, Chile. Um, we, we all loved that flight. Uh, we were all together. We, we didn't have the whole cabin to ourselves far from it, but, um, we still had sort of a whole row mostly to ourselves and just really enjoyed that flight. So those are special cases. Well, and both of those were really good value in terms of miles compared to cash costs and distance flown. They were both really good values. So we use Virgin Atlantic miles for the ANA first class redemption, which has increased since. So it'll cost you more miles now, but still not totally unreasonable. And Lantam was Alaska miles, which still, to my knowledge at this point,

anyway, still 45,000 miles one way in business class. That'll change next year, though, right? Yeah. With the new chart, it'll go up a bit. I don't think it'll be terrible, but it'll go up a bit, I believe. Yeah. So decent values. And I want to make sure we don't sell short for a second here. The fact that, yeah, like Greg said, what made the A&A first class light for me was that it was just the five of us. So we had the whole first class cabin. So we do a whiskey tasting with their expensive whiskeys and have fun in the flight attendants, I think, seem to enjoy it almost as much as we did. The fact that it was just this group of people traveling together that had the first class cabin. And I guess we probably aren't the typical first class customers.

I mean, we had hats that had our faces on them. All five of us, right? I mean, we're trucker hats with the five of our faces. Probably not the typical group that buys out the first class cabin, so to speak. Exactly. And each of these first class suites have a seating area, I guess, that's opposite the main seat, where I think the idea normally is like, if you're traveling as a couple, the couple can dine together. And because we had like the middle section with two first class suites next to each other, we were able to put four of us all together.

And then Stephen stood at the end of one of the tables, basically. So we sort of had a five person dining room in a way. And although Stephen had to stand, I don't think he mind. It didn't seem like he didn't seem to mind, but it was really special. The other thing you said was that, you know, not like this is something you're ever going to do kind of, you said something like that. And, and no, probably not because the chances of finding five first-class seats on an A&A flight. I mean, this was like a needle in a haystack. We got lucky one day and the floodgates opened and there was that availability. But I think part of the takeaway for this should be that if and when you ever get that opportunity, hop on it. Because, you know,

as much as I love traveling with my family and I do, I have a great time traveling with my family. There are very few opportunities where I'm ever going to fly with four friends in first class on a situation like that. And so if I saw that opportunity and I had the chance and the miles and the knowledge of everybody's details to book that, I don't think I would hesitate because it was so much fun. It's totally worth it as a once in a lifetime type of a thing. So so if you ever do get the opportunity for something even remotely like that, totally worth it. Totally. All right. All right. All right. Now let's move into our individual favorites, uh, starting with flights. So, um, my favorite is a maybe. So by the time you listen to this, I hope I will have flown cutter Q suites if all goes well. But while we're recording this, that's not happening until late tonight. And anything could go wrong.

Currently in Ann Arbor and need to fly to JFK before catching this Cutter flight. So that has to go right. And then the flight is at like one 30 in the morning and they have to not switch aircraft to something that's not Q suites, which they're known to do. So there's all kinds of possibilities. I think it's supposed to snow here in Michigan today. I haven't checked.

Oh my goodness. You're making me nervous here. You to snow here in Michigan today. I haven't checked. Oh, my goodness. You're making me nervous here. You're cutting this a little tighter than I would. Yeah, it's it's it's a little scary. So anyway, maybe this will be outside of our party of five stuff. Maybe this will be my favorite flight reward of the year. Yeah, well, that's exciting. So you'll have to keep an eye. I'm going to say

keep an eye on our Instagram because I bet that there will be an Instagram picture or video or something if this does go right. At least I hope so. You better better get on there and toss up a little something and let us know so that people can go and check it out. So there's got to be something up for that. All right. So that's that I think is a really good example. I think for me, one of my favorite flights of 2023. And this is kind of irony to me because I wouldn't have ever thought that this would be it. But British Airways club suites, I we've flown them a couple of times now. We've flown this year from London to Vancouver, and they're just comfortable. I like the seats and I like the privacy, the fact that the doors close on the suites, the kids fall asleep and can totally chill out in that environment. So, I mean, it's no Q suites, but it's a decent option for a suite anyway with a door that closes and one that we've been particularly comfortable with. And the food has been better than I would have expected on all of our British Airways

flights. And I say that just because I don't have an image of British food that appeals to me necessarily. I don't like fish and chips. So there's just I don't know. I don't have a thing in mind that I associate as being a British type of food. And yet the food on all of our British Airways flights have been really good. So that was actually one of my favorites and a decent value in terms of the number of miles.

I used American Airlines miles for that. So I think it was the 57.5 K one way in business class for a really long flight. So that was probably my favorite, well, or one of my two favorite flight redemptions of the year. Yeah. Meanwhile, my last club suites booking was my least favorite award flight of the year because there was an equipment swap for me. And with British Airways, if you get into their club suites, that's one of the best business class products, or so I'm told. Um, but their, their older product, their older business class, which is on most of their airplanes is one of the, one of the worst, at least that flies. Um, and, uh, yeah, so that's what we got

to fly in and it was just as bad as, as, uh, I used to not mind it, but, but now that I've flown like more and more like better products, I really do mind it. My wife hated it. It was, yeah. I mean, there's just like no place to put anything and you're, and you're, everybody's like really close together. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's not good. I mean, I'll take it over. Of course. Economy any day, but. Comparing to competitors. So what else is out there? It's just not competitive. Yeah. That's too bad. That's too bad. All right.

What's another favorite for you then this year? All right. So one of my favorites this year, I flew Air France business class to Copenhagen. So it was Detroit to Paris and then a short, you know, leg to Copenhagen. So it was Detroit to Paris and then a short leg to Copenhagen. And the main reason it's listed as my favorite really has nothing to do with the onboard product. I mean, it was all fine. It really is just that this was a rare case where I had, we had very specific times we wanted to get there and we wanted to leave and we had to get there in time for a tour and all this stuff. And I was able to book the exact best itinerary that existed. Like, you know, if I was like, had all the money in the world and could pick whatever, you know, flights I wanted, this probably would have been it or it would have been certainly one of the contenders.

And so that's special because often with award travel, you have to be a little flexible. And in this case, I didn't. I paid 70,000 Air France Flying Blue miles per person for business class. But now, you know, recently they've changed their per person for business class. But now, recently they've changed their award prices for that route. And to go to Europe now would cost only 50,000 for the same exact flight. So that's a heck of a deal. The interesting thing about these flights is that the little flight from Paris to Copenhagen was one of the most memorable for me, even though the seats are just like economy seats with the middle seat blocked off. We had the best

flight attendant ever, like ever, on that short little leg. And he was so good that one of the other passengers actually hugged him goodbye after the journey. He was just in the business class area and was just amazing. And we did not get that service on the return of that same leg. But whoever that flight attendant is, kudos to you. You made a memorable flight for what normally would be totally forgettable. Yeah. Wow. That's an awesome compliment.

You should do the feedback thing for that and make sure that somebody else hears that, too. That was a great compliment for him to get, probably. In terms of my other favorites this year, I hesitated a little bit on whether to put this one in there. But I put in Turkish. So we just flew this literally. I came home yesterday from a trip. And so we flew Turkish business class from Helsinki to Istanbul to New York. And the reason I say I hesitate is because the plane, both planes, the plane from Helsinki to Istanbul was pretty old it still had like the tv screens that come down from the the ceiling you know like the the route map and everything and so

it was it was old and a little dingy looking and then the flight also from Istanbul to New York JFK we were on the A330 I think it was and uh well there's a lot of leg room, a lot of space for your legs, the seats, I had a really hard time. My three-year-old sitting next to me, I couldn't get his to go all the way flat. And then when we got to the end of the flight, it just wouldn't go back up. And one of the flight attendants had to manually reach in and grab something to adjust it and put it back up. And I had a hard time figuring out how to get mine all the way flat, too. There was a way to do it, but it was a little bit of a pain. So it wasn't my favorite in terms of the most comfortable, although there was a lot of leg room for anybody who hates those little narrow legwell, whatever they are, the little area

for your legs and behind most seats. This was very much like LATAM in that there was sort of infinite leg space. So that part is nice. And the little cubby at your foot to store some things during the flight was also nice. But it was a good value, 60,000 life miles apiece. That's from Scandinavia to the East Coast, the 60,000 miles rather than the 63 that they charge for business class for the most part between Europe and the US. And taxes and fees are relatively low departing Finland. I think it was $70 or $80 a person or $90 maybe with the fees that Avianca adds. So pretty reasonable in terms of taxes and fees. So good value on miles. But more importantly for me, this was sort of like a test run because

we travel with young kids. And on the way to Europe, we took advantage of the New York JFK to Lisbon sweet spot without Bianca Life miles, 35,000 miles, one way in business class, which sounds great and is in some ways, but it's like a six and a half hour flight. So it's very short and you have meal service and everything disturbing you along the way. So with young kids, you're talking about, you know, maybe they're going to get four hours of sleep or five hours of sleep. And, you know, we ate at the airport ahead of time so that we could try to go to sleep right away. So even if they got six hours of sleep, that's not enough for a three-year-old and a five-year-old. So everybody's pretty miserable on arrival with a flight that

short. I'm more interested in the future and flying to Europe on Turkish a because it's a 10 and a half hour flight from New York. So plenty of time for everybody to get a full night's sleep on the way to Europe and wake up like it's a regular day when we get to Europe and we're in the right time zone. And then B because the Turkish business class lounge, both of us reviewed experiences with the Turkish business class lounge last year. And it's just so nice. There's so much going on. The food is really good. And it's just so nice. There's so much going on. The food is really good. There's a kid's area. There's like a flight simulator and a golf simulator. It's a great place to spend a little bit of time. So I'm excited about that in the

future. I would definitely choose the plane probably more particularly in the future, although you can only be so particular when you want four or five seats in business class, you take what you can get. So also when your original flight is canceled and you're rebooked on another, you can't be picky about what you're rebooked on. Right. Right. Although they did give me a few options, I should say, for rebooking. So there was the one that they put us on, but they said that they could put us on a couple of other flight options too. So we did, we did get, we were given or at least told that there was an option for a couple of others. I didn't believe it because one of the options they told us

there were not five seats for sale on that flight. So I doubt they would have gotten us on it. But anyway, long story short, I think Turkish to Europe, especially for people who want to travel business class with young kids is probably a good idea. We flew it in the opposite direction, which also actually worked out pretty well. The kids got enough sleep on the way home that they both went to school this morning. You know, one goes to like a pre pre-K program and the other is in kindergarten and they both were fine this morning going to school. They got enough sleep on the plane and on the way home. So that worked out pretty well. So let me ask you something about that. I've, I've talked before about how impressed I was with the onboard catering when I flew from Sofia, Bulgaria to Istanbul, which is like an hour flight.

Your flight from Helsinki, I assume, was a bit longer, but still not very long. What was the catering like on that? I say full meal. It wasn't quite the same as the it wasn't was not the same as flying from Istanbul to New York. But it was similar to your the experience that you had reported. It was a three hour and 15 minute scheduled flight. Honestly, that's pretty long. Yeah, it is pretty long, but it didn't really impress me the the catering on that flight. I was a little disappointed, actually. The food was so so and not as extensive as I expected for a flight of that length. But the Istanbul to New York flight catering was excellent. There's an onboard chef wearing the chef outfit and the whole nine yards. And so catering was very good on the Istanbul to New York.

I was very happy with that. Nice. All right. Okay. Moving on. Let's talk about our all time favorite flight rewards. Mine has to be when I flew Etihad first apartments. I mean, you get a whole room, you get an onboard chef, you get a shower in the sky. I mean, it was, it was just incredible.

Yeah. I mean, that's a, it looks amazing. It's something I'd love to do someday. I haven't done. I've only flown a and a is like regular first class, I guess you'd say. I'm sorry. Eddie has regular first class. Yes. That's what I meant. Not the suites. And I was impressed enough with that. I can't imagine what the first class apartments are like. So that seems like an awesome, awesome redemption. Hard to top that. For me, my favorite so far, I put it down as a tie between the old Singapore suites, which I've only flown the old one. So I'm not picking those over the new suites. I've only seen the new suites, and I can only imagine what those would be like, which would be much better probably than the suites that I flew. But the old Singapore suites was so good still that that ranks up there. And then the ANA first class flight that we all

took together. I mean, those two, I think really stand out. Fantastic service, great food, good wine, hard to beat those things also. So, yeah, I mean, we've we've been lucky. We've been fortunate to fly some pretty amazing stuff. We really haven't. I've also flown the old Singapore Suites and not the new. And that also is in my top three as well. I mean, it's actually, it was almost hard to pick between Etihad First Departments and even the old Singapore Suites. But the Etihad Departments did edge it out but but not by not by a huge margin and they're both like the difference between flying in those things and and um even like a a regular like international first class which is still like really special is there's a huge difference in my opinion and and uh so yeah really really special on on board experience

and i've talked before about how like ground experience can be a whole nother thing and that my my favorite ever ground experience is is with liftonza that they do amazing things like um ushering you right into the lounge when you get off the plane and and uh handling customs for you right there so they just take your passport and then uh we've gotten driven from the lounge to our next plane in a mercedes things like that so that's that's the type of stuff that um eddie had does not do that sort of thing neither does well at least singapore when i flew them didn't do that sort of thing um so yeah yeah neat neat yeah it's pretty amazing we're able to use miles to do any and all of those things that those things are all within reach and and then we're able to kind of split hairs between you know where where those things kind of all pan out against each other in

the realm of absolutely incredible flight experiences. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to hotels. So we can use points for more than flights. We use them all the time for hotels. So let's talk about our favorite of the year. For me, my number one favorite has got to be in Queenstown, New Zealand. I used Hyatt Points to stay in a SLH, a small luxury hotel of the world property called Eichert's Private Hotel. And it's a category eight. So I think I paid 40,000 points per night, if I remember right. It's a tiny, tiny hotel. There's not that many rooms. Every room is a big suite and they give you so much personal attention. There's like an evening cocktail hour where there's a host who greets you, gets to know your preferences, pours you drinks, and then goes and informs the chef that you're ready for your canapes and the chef prepares them on the spot right then just for you. And it's also in the most amazing spot in Queenstown, which if you've

never been, I highly recommend Queenstown as a destination. And note that at least when I last checked, there were two SLH properties in Queenstown. The other one looks potentially more spectacular than this one. And so there's a lot of goodies there to be had with your Hyatt points. Yeah, Queenstown wasn't even on my radar until you went and my goodness, the pictures looked amazing. So it definitely seems like it needs to be on everybody's radar. So totally awesome redemption there. Funny enough, I think probably my favorite of the year was also an SLH property, a small luxury hotel, the world property bookable

through a high end that was the Grand Hotel Victoria, which I've talked about a bunch on the show over the last couple of months. So that's a Hyatt. It was a category six when I booked it. So my nights were either twenty five or twenty nine K per night, depending on whether they were peak or or standard. I had a mix of the two. But now I think it's category seven. So it's thirty or thirty five thousand points a night, I believe. So it's a little bit more now, but absolutely amazing hotel, just breathtaking, breathtakingly beautiful. Everything seems really high end. And the spa is just unbelievable. And it's kind of crazy to go to Lake Como and want to spend so much time indoors because

the spa is just that good. But yeah, a phenomenal experience and a hotel that ordinarily base rooms cost in the range of like 15 to $1,800 a night. And then it goes up from there. So, uh, it's a place that would have been totally out of reach if not for the fact that they have this partnership with Hyatt. If, if, and when Hyatt ever loses the partnership with SLH, I know I'll probably never be back at the grand hotel Victoria again, because I won't I won't, even as incredible as it was, I wouldn't consider spending that much per night on a hotel. So it was definitely something I'm glad I did, though. Yeah, no, that looks spectacular.

And let me mention both of these hotels that we talked about. It's very hard to find free night availability. Tools like Max My Point and with points, let you set alerts to be alerted when the nights open up. And so, uh, those are worth considering if your heart's set on a property like that, because, um, just hunting around and trying to find availability is going to be, is going to be tough. Uh, if you actually want to find something. Let's also talk about our second favorite of the year because we've both had a lot of good stays. My second favorite was on the big island of Hawaii. I stayed at the Kona Seaside Yacht Villa. It's a three- uh, condo right on the ocean, uh, waves crashing right outside.

And, uh, we paid 45,000 Wyndham points per night, actually minus 10% because I have one of the Wyndham earner cards. Uh, so that gives us a discount and it's, it was booked through Vacasa. So you can use your Wyndham points to book the Casa vacation rentals. And there were four of us staying there. We actually only needed a two bedroom, but the price wasn't that bad for having an extra bedroom so that we could the unwritten rule of what you can book your, what you can use points to book for cost of vacation rentals for. up to $500 per bedroom per night. And now it seems like the limit's down to $350 per bedroom per night. So you could still get very good value that way, but you will not probably be able to book this unit because it costs more than $350 per bedroom per night, at least at the dates that I've looked at. Yeah, that is a bummer. But but there are other gems probably to be found out there yet. So and constantly new ones being added, I imagine, as Vacasa expands its portfolio. So definitely worth a mention because, you know,

and I'm going to mention here, you said that the three bedroom is forty five thousand points per night because, of course, Wyndham charges fifteen thousand points per bedroom per night. So if Greg had just purchased the points from Wyndham for that, Wyndham frequently puts their points on sale for about a penny a piece. So you're talking four hundred and fifty dollars worth of points, minus 10 percent, actually, because like you said, you have the Wyndham business card if you have the Wyndham card. Yeah. So so you're talking about a huge discount over the cash price of a place like that, paying less than half, essentially, just by buying the points. You're not even earning it. Yeah.

No, exactly. And so, you know, especially since we were splitting the cost across two couples, if you think of it as just the cash rate, you're talking about about $200 per night. I mean, per couple couple and so that's right right i mean for hawaii that's already you know a value price not even considering that it's an awesome place right that'd just be like you know you'd be lucky to find a place that right right oh you yeah you'd be insanely lucky to find a place like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, I think that's with the lower, with the lower limit now down to three 50, I think your best bet is going to be to look for units that have more bedrooms than you actually need. So you'll end up

paying more per night, but it's still, I'm betting will be a good value overall, but you should, you should do the math and check that. Yep. Very good. Probably my second favorite stay of the year was the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando. So this is a property that's been well-known for a long time. And I know that, you know, this came out actually recommended by Greg, because this is a place that I know you've enjoyed in the past. It's a category four Hyatt. And so 15,000 points per night standard peak, I guess that's 19,000, I think, if I remember correctly, or 18,000. And I can't remember what that peak is.

I just know it's a great use of your category one through four certificate. It certainly is. And a good use of a suite, a standard suite, either a suite upgrade, if you've got those from Hyatt Milestone Awards, or just using points to book a suite, because it's such a big property. There are a lot of suites. So you often have a chance to be able to book a suite with points, whether that's a standard suite or one of their VIP premium suites. We actually stayed in one of the VIP premium suites at the end of last year, which was great. And then this year we or was it this year? No. Yes. At the end of last year year we did that. This year we stayed again and just used the points for a standard room.

But still, a great, great use of that. And a nice place. A good resort with mini golf, a rock climbing wall, a pitch and putt course, great pools. So plenty of things for the kids to do. And you're not far from all the various parks and fun that there is in Orlando. You know, I hadn't been seeking out resorts like this, where the resort is kind of like the vacation, you know, with all the fun stuff for the family. But I'm interested in feedback from readers about other places like the Hyatt Regency, Grand Cypress. You know, what are your other favorite Hyatt resorts like that that exists

that are maybe category one to four or maybe even higher, but have enough fun stuff where the hotel kind of becomes part of the destination within the United States, because a lot of our travel has been international, but I'm always curious about what other places exist like that. And you only care about Hyatt? Well, if someone really enjoys their Hilton property, don't tell us. Is that what you're saying? It depends. I pay 80,000 Hilton points a night probably for a domestic U.S. resort.

I mean, it'd be pretty nice. You know, it depends with Hilton. With Hyatt, you normally have an opportunity to get enough value that I would say, oh, okay, well, you know, 15,000 points per night. It's worth booking a long weekend in January, which we did. And now we're not going to be able to use, sadly, unfortunately. Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah. So my niece and her family stayed at the other Hyatt Regency in Orlando. There's actually two others, if you count the airport one. They loved it. So there you can also get confirmed suite upgrades and it's different. I mean, it's, it's,

you know, it's, um, more of a, well, they're both conference hotels. I don't know. I haven't stayed there, so I'm not going to try to explain what's different, but they really enjoyed it. Um, the location's different. This one's closer to international drive and all that stuff, um, out that way. Whereas the Grand Cypress one is like, you could walk to downtown Disney from there, which is what we often did like to go out to dinner or whatever. Yeah. Nice.

And you can see the fireworks at Disney from, from the hotel. And, and also we got to see a couple of rocket launches from you could actually see those off in the distance. Oh, that's lucky from our balcony. Yeah,

it was, it was like, yeah, there were two that week, the week we were there. So Oh, that's lucky. Yeah, from our balcony. Yeah, it was lucky. Yeah, cool. Yeah, there were two that week, the week we were there. So yeah, definitely very cool. So, all right, that's a couple of favorites, but you got a couple other special mentions here, right? Yeah, I couldn't leave it to just two.

I had a bunch of good stays this year. Villa Copenhagen in Copenhagen, obviously, it's bookable through Choice Privileges, also through Amex Fine Hotels and Resorts, which is how we booked it. The Kempton Fitzroy in London, it costs a lot of IHG points, but it's a really great hotel and a fantastic location. Ventana Big Sur, of course, I've been going there for years and really love it and loved our stay again this year. And the Inn at Bay Harbor, same exact. I've been going there for years. This is in northern Michigan. And you can stay there on Marriott Points. And that's another one. If you want to go in the summertime, you need to use a tool like Stay With Points. Now, in this case, not Max My Point. And let me explain the difference for a second. In the summer months, the Inet Bay Harbor does not let you book one night at a time. And Max My Point only sends alerts for if it finds like one night at a time availability. So stay with points lets you say

I'm looking for a three night stay anytime in June, let's say, or anytime in July and set an alert for that. So that'll work for that type of alert, but not for the other. Although I'll say that I booked this summer, I hadn't yet set my stay with points alerts, but I have a max my point alert set for this property. I found out a whole bunch of single night stays opened up for the rest of the year. And so then I just hopped onto Marriott and did a flexible date search, like three nights at a time for the summer months when Max My Point wasn't showing availability. And I found plenty of availability.

So I booked a couple of stays for the summer. Nice, nice. Very good. Awesome. My honorable mentions, so to speak, I'll add in here. One is a more reasonably priced award option or sometimes even reasonably priced cash option. That's the Comfort Hotel Boulevard in Rome. Now this is a more reasonably priced award option or sometimes even reasonably priced cash option. That's the Comfort Hotel Bolivar in Rome. Now, this is a comfort inn, so it's not the lap

of luxury. It's not one of these high end resorts that we've been talking about, like the Grand Hotel Victoria or I-Cards Private Hotel. This is kind of at a different end of the spectrum, but often a very good value. And we stayed at this place years ago. I think part of our honeymoon trip, we stayed there. And then here we are again this summer, we were there for a night or two. And what I love about this place is that A, it's often like 100, 150 euros a night or a reasonable number of choice privileges points. And the location is fantastic. It's, well, let me back up. It's in an alleyway where a taxi driver is never going to find it, but it's very close to the Colosseum and the Forum and all that.

So great location for walking around and exploring that stuff in Rome for a reasonable price. So I really enjoyed getting back there again. And it was kind of an old feel place I enjoy. Then the High Regency Nice, we really liked that too. It's beautiful. It's as beautiful as it looks in pictures. It totally is in real life also, and we both really enjoyed

we were only in Nice for a night, and we both agreed that that was a mistake. We should have stayed for a few days because we really liked it there and would have liked to have had some more time to explore. So in a future year, we'll try to get ourselves back to the Hyatt Regency Nice. That is kind of at the other end of the spectrum in that I think it was 25,000 Hyatt points per night. So not as reasonably

priced as the Comfort Hotel Bolivar, but quite nice. That sounds great. So next up, we're going to talk about... Oh, wait. Yeah. Hyatt Regency Nice. Okay. Next up, we're going to talk about our all-time favorite hotel rewards not just those that we booked this year but first I want to mention something real quick it looks to me Nick that except for that comfort in all of your mentions so far have been Hyatt bookable um so your your your uh diversity of points is not not not high on the rating scale whereas i i've got i've got hyatt i've got um windham i've got choice i've got ihg and i've got look at you go greg hopefully your arm doesn't get sore from patting yourself on the back there well done

nice job with that now to be clear it's not that i didn't redeem a variety of point. I mean, I did. I had a vacasas day in Alaska. I didn't mention that because I didn't feel like it was necessarily special enough to make the favorites. I did, did some Marriott points this year and some IHG, at least free night certificate. So,

so I did redeem some of those things, but yeah, I mean, it's true. Often my favorite stays are Hyatt stays. It's just the way that it works. Yeah. Yep.

Yep. Absolutely. All right. All time. Favorite hotel rewardatt stays. It's just the way that it works out. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. All right. All-time favorite hotel reward for me. It may be a stretch to call this a hotel. Yes. Yes, that's true. Quite a few years ago, I booked, I used 1.2 million Virgin Atlantic points to book a week on Necker Island for my wife and I. So seven nights, all inclusive. And we just had the best time ever. Yes, Richard Branson was there. Yes, we talked to him frequently. But there was so much more. There's so much to do. And it was just so much fun. Loved everything about it. Yeah, you can no longer book it for 1.2 million points uh and

they keep changing up how you can book it last i looked you can book with a combination of points and cash um so it wasn't maybe not that 1.2 million was like a great great deal but it you know it's it's not as uh cheap i guess as that um but it's still it's still bookable at least as i when i last checked yeah yeah yeah i mean that's i think the the fun there is like many of these other hotels that we've mentioned it brings something that would otherwise be you know almost untouchable with money into you know interview or at least something that would be so expensive that you you know, if you would ever consider it, maybe you would consider it once as some huge milestone type of a thing. Whereas this, you know, when you can use miles and points

to do it, it makes it feel a lot. I think it makes it feel more fun, to be honest. Right. I mean, isn't it more fun to walk into a place like that and think to yourself, I did this with this made up monopoly money? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, I've said a million times, like the points unlock our ability to do these things that we would never consider doing with cash. You know, never mind whether we could or not. Do we have enough money to do it? Like, uh, at, at the time back when I booked this, it would have cost $30,000 to book the week for my wife and I.

And we just wouldn't have even ever considered that. Like, why would you spend that much for a week? That's insane. Um, but instead I used all the tricks of the trade to earn a whole lot of Virgin Atlantic points quickly and book this. So yeah, the whole thing was fantastic. And you're right. Being able to, knowing that I booked it, I'm going to put in quotes for free, made it a lot more fun because it didn't feel like a huge investment and I had to get everything out of it because of that. Right, right, right.

It does make it feel different in the sense that you don't. Yeah. There are definitely been times where I've thought to myself, if I paid, you know, 2000 or $3,000 a night, you know, what I maybe I'd stress about this or that or the other thing, but it takes out all that stress because you're like, Oh, I didn't, I used some points that I earned at Staples and, you know, I can go back to Staples next week and earn some more and come back and do this kind of thing again. And that's pretty cool.

So, of course, Necker Island is a few more points than that. Yeah. And now that you say that, I remember there have been awards days where I've stayed at hotels where I've thought, wow, I'm having a great time. But there's things about this that if I had paid the rack rate of like $2,000 a night, I would have been so pissed off and it would have ruined my stay. Yeah, it's true. But as it was, it was just like, oh, well, that's not a big deal. And I thought of it as free stay. And so it made it more fun. Yeah, I agree. I think it takes a lot of the stress out of traveling and those kind of things,

or at least a lot of the pressure away of it having to be perfect. So yeah. Yeah. All right. For me, I had a hard time picking an all time favorite because I've been lucky. I've stayed a lot of great places like Greg. I have not been as lucky as Greg and that I haven't been in Ecker Island. So so I have a lot of great hotels to pick from. It's hard to pick one of those out of a bunch of places that were all pretty fantastic. But I guess if I were pressed, the St. Regis Bora Bora might be my pick.

And I picked that one because I felt like Bora Bora was one of the rare places that lived up to what the postcards made it look like in that the water is as blue and beautiful as it looks in the pictures. It's not just the magic of Photoshop. It's just that pretty. So I really enjoyed it for that. It was also a nice surprise because I had read some reviews from other people,

other bloggers, other points and miles travelers. And, you know, sometimes when we live in this world, I think on the flip side of what we just said sometimes we become over critical about you know what the shortcomings of things are and so i had read some somewhat critical things about the decline of this place and that i think actually set me up to have more fun because i was like oh this is so much better than what i actually expected based on what i read yeah you know wow we're all getting picky over, you know, small things. And that does happen to me too, sometimes where I'll notice that I'm getting picky over things that are really pretty trivial. So So that was a I think, a pick that for an award stay, and there was a Marriott, Greg, okay, to make you happy. Yeah, yeah, there

you go. I would pick that. Also, I mean, it didn't hurt that we had broken the news on the fact that that place was very short-term bookable for a very reasonable number of Marriott points. And so with a five-night stay, I paid an average of 48,000 Marriott points per night for that. So that added, I think, to the allure a little bit too. Yeah, for sure. You're not going to get that price today. No, definitely not. Definitely not.

And the Santa Claus Holiday Village, where I just enjoyed another stay in northern Finland, Yeah, for sure. You're not going to book that with Capital One Shopping Rewards, though. And I wanted to mention that because I've been using that Capital One Shopping Portal more and more. I keep getting these giftcards.com, 9, 12, 14% back offers and other stores as well. And so my original intention was to redeem that for hotels.com gift cards and book the Santa Claus Holiday Village because it is on hotels.com. But I dragged my feet too long. And by the time we went to book it, the nights we needed were no longer available on hotels.com. I had to book directly, but that would have been something that I would have booked with rewards, just not, you know, what we traditionally think of, I guess. Yeah, no, that would have counted if you, but I didn't. So it can't count as an all-time thing. And that place, to be clear, is not luxurious. So definitely a

big difference in terms of it's not luxury. You're going there for the fun and enjoyment if you have young kids. I mean, you get to meet the big man himself. Yes, exactly. Don't go in expecting much from the room let's just put it that way it's very basic and simple it's fine yeah clean yeah but not totally not uh not luxurious so anyway there we go so we got a whole bunch of favorite flights and hotels that were just from this year i mean that's pretty incredible when we go back and look at this stuff our all-time favorites that we just mentioned were obviously all time and not this year, but the majority of what we've talked about today is all travel that you and I have done just in 2023. Pretty amazing. Yeah. Right. But we're not done. There are some other things that we've used rewards or some kind

of reward-like avenue to book that are not airplane flights or hotels. So let's talk about our favorites there. In my case, I can only think of one, and it definitely belongs on a favorite list, potentially an all-time favorite list in this category, which is that we used JetBlue used jet blue top tier status to get free blade helicopter uh flight from from jfk airport to manhattan and we did that just a couple weeks ago had a fantastic um flight you know whole the whole experience was was really just so terrific and we were as lucky as can be. The weather was just perfect. I heard from some people that if the weather's a little off, they could cancel the helicopters. And so you got to get lucky, I guess.

But we had a great time. And this is all thanks to Delta, who had announced like they were ruining their program. And so their competitors, or lesser competitors, I guess, like JetBlue and Alaska came forward and said, Oh, well, if you're high-level elite with Delta, why don't you come be high-level elite with us? And so my wife and I applied for those matches. She matched to top tier JetBlue, which gave her these four blade helicopter transfers. So that was my number one favorite non-hotel, non-airplane flight. That looked awesome. The views just looked amazing. Views of Manhattan. It's got to be a great way to see Manhattan coming in. I mean,

and it's got to build more excitement too, I would think, you know, if you're excited about your trip to New York for the weekend, kind of a thing, you're going to go see some shows or something. It's kind of just build even more excitement. Right. I would think. It really does. And, you know, I would, you know, I would totally see, I wouldn't pay $250 per person like as a regular thing, but let's say you're, you're taking someone special to New York for a special occasion, or maybe you're going to propose in New York, whatever, like I would totally like see it being worth like paying for this to, to make that part of the experience and make the experience all that much more special. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I agree.

I think the same. Yeah. awesome. For me, the other thing I have to mention is cruises because I've taken all of these cruises. So this year in 2023, we took a Royal Caribbean cruise in February, and that was a Caribbean cruise. And then we took a cruise around the Mediterranean in July, and that was on MSC. And we took a cruise to Alaska in August on Holland America. And for all of those, they paid very little. I'm not going to say they were free, even though they kind of get marketed as free because there are still some costs associated, but very little for what those compared to what those would cost to book with cash.

Thanks to the magic of matching around with casino statuses. So starting with the Wyndham earner business card and Caesars diamond status, and then matching around in Atlantic City. And I also did some matching in Philadelphia. And so we were able to book all of these quote unquote free cruises. And in fact, that was three this year. We took two at the end of last year also. So really five and just over the last year that we've paid again, very little in order to do and gotten to see lots of cool places. I loved our Caribbean cruise this summer, not for the cruise itself so much on MSC, but for the port stops. We probably would not have planned a trip to a number of the different individual towns in southern Spain and France. But being able to see a whole bunch of them without having to pack up our bags, especially with the kids and move to a new hotel and all the rest of that. That was awesome.

So we loved the port stops and the entertainment on MSC and the Alaska cruise. We got gorgeous. Well, I shouldn't say gorgeous weather. We had kind of chilly weather compared to people who I knew that cruised the next week after us. But we had such clear weather the day we were in Glacier Bay that the views were just breathtaking, totally worth doing if you're interested in that kind of scenery. So that's been a great time. And the fact that we've been able to take so many of them, I mean, three this year on top of all the other travel. And then and then we have more booked for next

year, too. So pretty amazing. Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. I mean, I think it was last year, right? We gave the status matching to get free cruises, the deal of the year award on our show. And wow, the fact that it hasn't let up is amazing. It's also kind of interesting. I didn't notice this when we put our notes in for the show that both of our fantastic opportunities from matches, from matching status. So totally, yeah, that is interesting. Those are the additional things we discussed, but those are other opportunities that are out there. Yeah. Yeah. And just to tie some other things together, we talked earlier about booking with Wyndham points and getting 10% off if you have the Wyndham earner card. Get the Wyndham earner business card that not only gives you 10% off the cost of vacation rentals and anything else you book with Wyndham stays, but it also gives you top tier Wyndham status,

which then matches to Caesar's diamond, which then provides an avenue for getting all these free cruises that Nick's talked about. And he'll put in the show notes a link to his post on how to do that. I sure will. I sure will. And it's not necessarily that we're, you know, huge cruisers. I mean, we've enjoyed it. It's been fun. But for the value, for the money that we've gotten out of that, thanks to those matches, it's just been absolutely phenomenal. So and we've actually still continued to get some more free cruise offers i did some gambling on the carnival cruise a few people have asked me how much in order to get you know more free cruise offers and and i didn't i didn't write it down and track it i you know played like 10 or 15 dollars

a hand blackjack or ultimate texas hold'em for i know, I mean, a number of nights for two or three hours, maybe not every night. And, and I've continued to get free cruise offers from carnival. So we actually just booked one of those for next year, just the other day. So, and that was a good opportunity because with the deposits and stuff that lined up with an Amex offer. So we're able to make that one also very inexpensive. So fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. All right. I think that wraps up today's main event and brings us to this week's question of the week. And this is kind of fitting since we just talked about that wind and murder business card, uh, because Tim writes in and says, Hey, I recall Greg mentioning one of the podcasts.

He still holds an IHG card. That's no longer available. That's $49 a year and offers a free annual night. And sure enough, Greg and I both, I think, have that card. You still have it, Greg? Yeah. And we both still have that. Yeah, absolutely. And so Tim says, it got me thinking about a broader topic. If there are any cards you would sign up for now to be grandfathered in for the benefits

like this before it's no longer offered. Obviously speculative, but interested in that and any other stories you have around cards that are no longer offered, but have great benefits. And the reason why the card companies haven't eliminated them by either canceling or raising the fees. So what do you think? I mean, he goes on and says, what's really driving my questions. I'll be kicking myself if, you know, five years from now, we didn't sign up for this card or that card because everything goes up or changes so what do you think what are the best cards to get that you know you think might go away or you might

be able to get grandfathered in for is there any strategy for trying to figure that out yeah that that's that's tough i i'm not sure how you would know in advance except in some cases like we talked about early on the show the the Hawaiian Airlines cards, there could be an opportunity there. And I think this is a good time to pick up one of those cards and just wait and see what happens. Because one of those cards might become valuable in this new world with Alaska buying them. If we look back on you know some of these cards these special cards that uh have stuck around uh like why have they stuck around i'm not sure but um well you know tim goes on to ask why has ihg not changed the 49 fee on that and when do you expect it to change to a higher fear be canceled like do you have any any insight or thought about that? I mean, it's been so long since they've discontinued

it that they haven't changed it. I don't know if or when they ever will. I'm not saying they won't, they probably will at some point. I don't know. I don't have any insight into what goes on in the conversations, why they decided not to get rid of it, except maybe, oh, you know what occurs to me? Maybe they see it as a way to keep customers in the IHG ecosystem. So they already have those customers, like have a card and they don't want to, you know, force them to do to potentially cancel if they like say we're going to change you to a card that costs twice as much yeah yeah i mean it probably doesn't cost them since they're not continuing to offer it doesn't cost them a ton to to have those few cardholders out there who still have it and in exchange they get access to a customer base that they might lose otherwise you know so

my thought on this and i and correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm speculating here from my own memory. So hopefully Greg will jump in and tell me what I'm wrong about here. But when I think about it, the cards that have been grandfathered and stuck around for a long time, I think are mostly, if not entirely, chase cards. In general, I'm thinking of other issuers like Amex, for instance, when they got rid of their Mercedes-Benz Platinum card, they just made everybody have a regular Platinum card. They didn't keep them with a Mercedes-Benz Platinum. Or when Radisson, the U.S. Bank Club Carlson card became the Radisson card. But then when they got rid of that relationship,

they force converted everybody over to something different. I think Bank of America in general has done the same sort of a thing and changing people over to some other similar type of a card. The cards that I can think of that have stuck around at their old annual fees have generally been chase cards. There's the old IHG card, the old plus card. The I think there's some old continental card that's still out there or something and it's probably true on some co-branded cards obviously got the ritz card i think in my mind the ritz card would be one that i would say oh that's one worth going after sooner rather than later because um that's one that if they were to get rid of the ability to product change to it you're never going to be able to get it again. You can't get it as a new cardholder as it is. You have to product change. And so maybe that will no longer be an option at some point. And I realized, as I said that, that Citi is another issuer that has kept those around. You were waiting to see if you would come around a city because I can think of two city cards at least that have followed that path as well.

So there's the City Prestige card, of course, that you can no longer get. It's not available through product change or anything like that. And I still have mine. I still get a lot of value from mine. So I'm very happy to still have that. City Access More. The AT&T Access More card is another one that comes to mind that gives you three points per dollar for all online purchases. Well, all online purchases that they decide to code as online purchases.

And I'm actually disappointed with myself. I actually product changed that a few years ago because I was going year after year without using it anymore. And I'm regretting that because there's no way to get it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the maybe the moral of the story that a couple of those options there you can't get anymore. You know, there's that there's the ink plus card on the Chase side that you can't product change to anymore. So I think if there's a strategy, it's picking up those few cards that you can't product change to anymore. So I think if there's a strategy, it's picking up those few cards that you can product change to

that you can't get otherwise if they're interest you anyway. And then the other thing is that listen to what we say, because I think when the IHG cards, when it came out that you weren't going to be able to keep more than one or whatever, I feel like we told people,

hey, the time is now to apply. And I think we've been able to have that information in advance a few times already now where we've been able to say, Hey, this is going to be your last chance to get this card. It's going away now. It doesn't always work out. The Fairmont card eventually became a Sapphire preferred, I think. Right. So, which, I mean, I don't think that's a bad outcome. It's just that you didn't that card didn't get grandfathered and stick around so not every single one will but yeah I mean I think that's that's my only thought I think the Ritz card is the one that I would say get that while you still can because I agree I agree and just as a reminder about that card, in order to get it, you need a Chase Marriott consumer card.

So there's like at least three that come to mind that exist, maybe more, that you can apply for today. And once you've had the card for a year, call Chase or Secure Message. I guess you might have to call and ask to product change to the Ritz card and they've been allowing it for a long time now. And so hopefully that'll continue. But in case it doesn't do it as soon as you can. Yeah. Yeah. Because some of those co-branded cards like that, as long as the co-branded relationship has stuck around, I think those Chase cards have stuck around. So that's one where that seems to be the key. Yeah.

Yep. Yep. Yep. All right. So there you go, Tim. Hopefully that gives you at least some direction, best of luck to deciding which cards to get.

Of course, we can't predict the future and know which cards are going to get grandfathered or, or taken away. And anytime something has really outsized value though, you can pretty much guarantee it's not going to last forever. And so that's why I think we say Ritz card, because that one's pretty clearly worth more than its annual cost. All right. That brings us to the end of this week's show. If you enjoyed

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