Frequent Miler on the Air - Partner up to Maximize rewards | Ep211 | 7-15-23

Episode Date: July 15, 2023

It takes two to tango -- and you can dance your way to plenty of points and miles to make those dream trips happen twice as quickly when you play the game with a partner. This week, we talk tips and strategies for collecting rewards with a travel partner. 00:00 Intro 00:33 Giant Mailbag 02:18 Card Talk: Chase Sapphire Reserve frequentmiler.com/csr 19:41 Award Talk 19:44 PointsYeah https://frequentmiler.com/pointsyeah/ 22:28 Fiji Airways ticket refund update 24:38 Choice + Radisson merger news https://frequentmiler.com/choice-radisson-loyalty-programs-being-combined-on-july-18/ 27:01 Hyatt x MGM partnership ending 9/30/23 https://frequentmiler.com/hyatt-farewell-cheap-mattress-runs-status-matching/ 29:53 Mattress Running the Numbers: Should you book MGM properties to earn Hyatt elite status? 37:03 Main Event: Partner up to maximize rewards https://frequentmiler.com/3-inks-approved-again-420k-points-in-the-bag/ 1:05:52 Question of the Week: Is it possible to buy Hyatt Globalist status? Are there any shortcuts? 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 Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, partner up to maximize rewards. It takes two to tango.

It does. And we're going to be telling you why getting together with another is going to be worth it to get rewards and maybe other things too we'll see uh first we've got the giant mailbag uh today's giant mail comes from srini vasan sorry if i butchered your name he asks or she actually i don't, asks if we can use voice recognition to transcribe our podcasts for those who prefer to read. And what I have instead of promising to do anything like that, I just have a quick answer for you, which is that YouTube already does that for you. So if you go into YouTube on a desktop, you can turn on closed captioning and that'll show you

what we're saying. But if you want to just read, you can click, there's like three little dots at the bottom right of the video, and there's an option to show transcript and that'll show all the words right there. If you're on mobile, click the little word more and scroll down a little bit and you'll see an option to show transcript there. And so either way, you can read what we have. And we don't have any immediate plans. So to publish the transcript on the blog, but just wanted to let everyone know that the words are out there. They are there. And remember, of course, we always also include links to relevant posts in the show notes. So if you want to read more about what we're talking about, we always include links to those posts in the show also. I mean, one of the advantages of using this medium is that it gives you an opportunity to talk freely about things

that sometimes maybe even we don't want to publish. So we've chosen not to publish them in blog form. So that's part of the reason why we probably won't publish transcripts of the podcast. But again, like that information is almost always out there and posed. It's just a matter of looking for it and sometimes reading between the lines. All right. Very good. Now it's time for card talk. Today's card talk is brought to you by the Chase Sapphire Reserve card.

Oh, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. That makes it sound like an advertisement. And we do not have advertisements at this point anyway on this show. So it is not brought to you by that card. Let's be clear. Let's. Thank you. Thank you, Nick.

It is not brought to you by the Chase Sapphire Reserve card. But that is the topic of today's card talk. All right. Let's get in the basics of the Sapphire Reserve card. I'm actually the topic of today's card talk. All right, let's get in the basics of the Sapphire Reserve card. I'm actually surprised we haven't covered this one yet, but it's a mainstay in the points and miles world, but it's also an expensive card, $550 annual fee, no foreign transaction fees. But in exchange for that $550 annual fee, $300 that you spend on travel each year gets automatically reimbursed. So that brings your sort of net out of pocket down to 250. So not,

not horrible. We've got a really great either. I don't know. We'll talk about that in a second. Right. So whether or not it's worth it. Yeah. So like you said,

not horrible, but more expensive than most of the premium cards, perhaps less not expensive than the other ultra premium cards, depending on how you look at it. But yeah. Okay. So earning rate, let's talk about the card, right? So it earns three X on travel and dining. So easy, easy breezy there, three X on all your travel and all your dining. And that's kind of nice on the travel side because you don't have to worry, well, is this taxi going to code for 3X? What about my cruise? You don't have to think about it.

It's just travel in general is 3X and so is dining. So that's great. 10X hotels and cars booked through the Chase Ultimate Rewards Portal. How excited do you get about 10X for hotels and cars through the Chase Ultimate Rewards Portal? Yeah. Well, first, let me say, I don't get excited at all about the car rentals at all. I've never found a situation where I could get anywhere near as good of a deal going through a portal to rent cars as I could other avenues. Hotels though, when booking independent hotels,

so I guess I should back up. I wouldn't use it to book like a Marriott or Hyatt or something like that because I won't earn elite credits. I might not get even any elite benefits during a stay book like that. I won't earn points. But if I'm booking an independent hotel where none of that stuff would apply anyway, it used to be I would go through hotels.com and get sort of 10% in rewards kind of through them with their old rewards program. But that rewards program is gone, replaced by a terrible rewards program. And so getting 10x hotels in those situations, I actually think is really good. Yeah. Or in a situation where you just don't care about the hotel points from that particular chain, you're not planning on collecting more of them, then why not get 10 transferable points? So I agree with you there.

I don't use this often, but I can see the use case for it. So there you go. But I totally agree on the cars thing. Somebody asked me the other day, do I book through the portal for 10X on cars? And it was a different credit card portal. But at any rate, the answer is almost always not even just no, but absolutely not, because you can almost always get a better price shopping around through other avenues. I use auto slash a lot, but even through kayak and other online search tools, you can often do much better. Okay. So that's 10X for hotels. It can be useful sometimes. Then, of course, 5x on flights booked through Chase. And that can be nice because flights are generally going to be the same price in most cases, whether you're booking through Expedia or Priceline or the Chase portal.

So it can be good for that. On the flip side, the caveat is that you do add a level of complexity in the case of irregular operations. If there's a flight cancellation, you end up with a flight credit or something, then you're going to have to go back through Chase in order to use that credit. So there's some potential hassle there. And some people throughout the COVID years swore off booking through a portal again, though I will say that they call them irregular operations because they don't happen regularly. So it's not a, I don't think that those things are so common as to totally swear off looking through the portal.

But I add the caveat because I'm sure that some readers would jump in to say that they wouldn't use it for that reason. But on the flip side, I would consider using it in cases where I'm pretty confident I'm going to take the flight. Now, do you, though? I still just book directly when I'm doing paid flights because I, I don't think the extra two X rewards is going to move the needle on, on, uh, you know, how many rewards I'm going to have overall and, and the convenience of if something goes wrong,

being able to just deal directly with the airline, I find better. Um, that's a great point. I, I, to be honest, I don't book that many paid tickets.

And when I do, it's often either with Southwest, which I'm not booking through the Chase portal anyway, or lately with United because I have lots take the 3X you get on travel from the Sapphire Reserve and eliminate the potential for a headache. Okay, great. So that's 5X on that. And then also 10X on lift rides through March of 2025. This is one that I am not using and golly, I should be. You should, yeah. Why not earn 10x on those? And I just am in such a habit of using Uber, and I really need to work on that. What about you?

Are you using this? Yeah, no. The trick is link your Lyft account to your Built Rewards account. And if you don't have a Built Rewards account, create one. It's free. And then you'll get a few points. I can't remember how many. Just two or three, I think, per dollar for each lift ride and then if you pay with your sapphire reserve that's 10

more points per dollar both types of points can transfer to our favorite program hyatt for for hotel rewards so uh they play really well together so that's a great way to have really rewarding Lyft rides. And Sapphire Reserve Card also, at least for now, gives you Lyft Pink or whatever it's called, the Lyft subscription service, for whatever benefits that gives, which changes now and then. So I'm not going to get into those details right now. You know, the reason that I haven't gotten into that habit

is because Lyft is generally just the United States. If I did mostly domestic travel, I would make a very strong effort to switch to Lyft for exactly what Greg just described. If you're mostly traveling domestically where you can have access to Lyft, then you should be doing the exact stack that he's talking about. I'm doing more international travel than domestic. And then I end up using Uber because that's what's available if either of those are available in most cases. But there you go. So yeah, great opportunity. You forced me to give a Lyft anecdote. So shortly after Lyft introduced some new perks for their members, for their Lyft Pink members. And one of them was you get a car faster. Like you get, I don't know. And I was in Charlotte, not anywhere near the airport. I needed a ride, looked at Uber. All the cars would take like 20 or 25 minutes to get there.

I looked at Lyft. Most of the cars would take 20 or 25 minutes to get there. Except they had a little thing saying, you know, whatever that feature is, get it in like five minutes. So I click that it was the same price. Um, and it actually came a little bit faster than it was advertised. So that was, that was great. I have no idea how often that would work. I I'm sure it wouldn't always work, but that time it was fantastic. Got a toss getting my lift all organized on my list of to dodos. All right. So there you go. All right. Now, should we talk about perks of the card, I suppose?

Yeah. Yeah. Let's go through some of the perks. So the card gives you one and a half cents per point value towards travel book through Chase. So that means if you just want to use your points straight up to book flights or hotels and not have to deal with award availability and all that stuff. It basically takes the cash rate and applies your points towards it, but you get 50% more value than

if the points were just pennies. And so that's pretty good for people who just want to keep it simple and just want to book basically equivalent cash. Just as a comparison point, most other cards give you one cent per point. There's a couple other chase cards that give you 1.25. So this is the best you could get at 1.5. It gives you also the ability to transfer points to airline and hotel partners, which again, there are other chase cards that'll give you that capability, but you do need at least one in your household to be able to do that. It gives you a priority pass membership. So for you and up to two guests, you get unlimited free entry into lounges, but you also get priority pass restaurant credits and priority pass, like all the priority pass things. It's not limited the way Amex and Capital One's priorityes are limited to only lounges.

This one is not. You know, quick anecdote on Priority Pass I just found kind of interesting. I flew out of Nice yesterday, Nice, France, and I was flying with tons of business. So I had access to whatever the lounge, I think it's called the library lounge that's in the terminal I was in. And so did customers from some other airlines. But there was somebody behind me in line that was flying SAS business and SAS didn't have an agreement with the library lounge. So they couldn't get into the library lounge and that's the only lounge they were. I heard the attendants telling him there wasn't another lounge. So if they had priority pass, they would have been able

to get in. So that's a great example of a situation where they were flying business class and they couldn't, there was no lounge for them unless they had a priority pass. Did you guess them in? You know, I, I, like I was already in the lounge at that point. I did think about going back out. Like I was, I was like in the lounge and overhearing it. Uh, I did think about, I didn't do it in that case, but I, I should have probably. So shame on me. Shame on me. Cause I have done that a time or two. It's fun to sort of give that benefit to someone just for free and that surprise and delight, basically. I did it once with a restaurant in Australia with a couple behind me in line because, of course, I got the Ritz card and the Ritz card

offers unlimited guests. And so I said, what do you guys want? Be my guest. So it's kind of fun. But anyway, so all right. So you get priority pass. You get the best travel protections in the business, right? I mean, this is the card you want if you do run into those irregular operations. Yeah, yeah. It has things like six hour trip delay protection, whereas most are 12 hour. For all of its travel protections, you can just pay partially with your credit card instead of in full and you're covered.

So for example, let's say you're booking an award flight and you just pay for the taxes and fees with this card, you still have full coverage. So that's fantastic. It has things like emergency evacuation coverage up to $100,000 and emergency medical and dental coverage up to $2,500 per incident, which is really unusual. I haven't seen that on any other card except the Ritz card, which has identical travel protections to this one. Exactly. You get $100 credit for global entry application fees once every however many years it is you can apply for global entry four or five years, whatever that is. So it'll cover your global entry application fee. And then of course, you get benefits we mentioned already with Lyft, the Lyft Pink membership, but also DoorDash. And then you get DashPass for X amount of time. I can't remember

what the end date on that trial is. And also the Instacart benefits. So you get, what do you get for Instacart now with the Sapphire Reserve? Right now, as we're recording this, it's $15 a month. I prefer not to list out all the benefits for these because they each have different end dates. And whenever people watch this in the future, I don't want to confuse their own with not to list out all the benefits for these because they they each have different end dates and whenever people watch this in the future i don't want to confuse everyone it has a mishmash of of benefits for right now for door dash lift and instacart you can look it up on our site for what the current details are so what are your thoughts good card great card so so you know so we've talked before about the Ritz card,

and I have the Ritz card, so I don't feel a need to have the Sapphire Reserve card. But I think that you are the better person to talk about this because you've run the numbers before on what it takes for this card to make more sense for you than, for example, the Chase Sapphire Preferred, which only costs $95 a year. So there's quite a big difference in the annual fee. Of course, the Sapphire Preferred only earns 2x on some

categories where you can earn, or at least on travel, and you can earn 3x with the Sapphire Reserve and travel. But the Sapphire Preferred nowadays, I guess, also earns 3x on dining, right? It does. It does. So what's the deal? Yeah. So there's less benefit today than there used to be. I rely on, I like having the best in class travel protections. I don't buy my own travel insurance or anything like that. So for me, the combination of getting the best rewards for travel spend, 3X rewards, there are other cards that offer 3X rewards, but I can't think of anyone that offers better than that for all travel. Like they might offer better for a very specific category, but not for all. The combination of that plus great travel protections makes this card a winner for me.

So I'm willing to say, okay, yeah, $250 a year net basically after the $300 rebate, it's worth it for me. But I don't think for everybody that's necessarily a slam dunk. I travel a lot. And so even though I book a lot of flights with awards or book a lot of hotels with award points, I don't book all of them in either case that way. And so a lot of, a decent amount of money goes to travel and I put it all in the Sapphire Reserve and get a lot of points that way. And a lot of security knowing I have the best in class travel protections. So that's my thought. I do think it's not a slam dunk for everyone. So you have to sort of do your own math. And I think like Nick, if you have the Ritz card, which has the best travel protections and has a better priority pass membership, then the justification for this one is harder to make.

Now, I do have both cards. And so it's tight's uh it's it's tight it's tight but i'd much rather earn 3x uh sapphire reserve points than i don't remember how many points the ritz earns for travel but well it depends yeah which aren't worth to me nearly as much as chase ultima awards points yeah and it doesn't have a general travel uh spending bonus so you're generally going to be earning 2x, especially on hotels that aren't within the Marriott brand. Right. So it's 2x Marriott points, not 2x transferable points. You know, I keep one

Sapphire Reserve in the household really primarily so that I can write about things when flights are on sale and it's one and a half cents per point. I get an easy screenshot. I'm paying for it really. It's silly just to be able to write about it because I'm a blogger. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't keep a Sapphire Reserve in our household because I will keep a Ritz card no matter what. And like you said, those travel protections matter to me. So I would probably do a Sapphire Preferred. Now, the problem in my household is that my wife has the Sapphire Reserve. I have a Ritz card. And really what I think I need to do is change that around so that I have both the Sapphire Reserve and the Ritz card and she'll

downgrade her Sapphire Reserve to something else because I'm always the one who's pulling out my wallet at checkout at hotels or whatever else. And I don't usually have her Sapphire Reserve in there. And then I don't end up getting the 3 X that I should be. So really, I need to organize my household a little bit better. But we're going to talk about organizing the household points and all the rest of that when we get to the main event. So we'll get into more detail with that soon. I think if you spend a lot on travel, this card can become a no brainer. But you have to spend quite a bit, though, for it to become enough better for it to be a no brainer, right you have to spend quite a bit though for it to become enough better for it to be a no brainer. Right. I mean, I can't even remember exactly how much, but it'd be

a fairly hefty amount. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you're just earning one point per dollar over the Sapphire preferred, for example, but, but it's, it's more complicated than that because you could get the, you could get the ink business preferred, which gives three X for all travel. Yeah. But then you're not getting the best in class travel protections. So. Right. Right. Right. It's not it's not a pure mathematical decision anymore because of that complication. You know, what I think is really interesting about this, this part of the chat is that both of us clearly value the best in class travel protections and neither of us ever buy travel insurance. And we got like, we've definitely had a lot of readers push back on us about the fact that we don't buy travel insurance. And so here are two guys who are like, nah,

I don't buy travel insurance or like, oh my goodness, I keep this card for its travel protections. It seems a little crazy to me, but it's, but it's true. I mean, I do as I say, not as I do. So you could argue that we're sort of inadvertently buying it by keeping these cards and using them to purchase travel. Yeah, for sure. All right. All right. So we're going to skip over a crazy thing this week and we're going to talk about award talk. We got a bunch of things for award talk this week.

So why don't you start us out? You wrote about something new this week that's exciting in the award talk realm. Yeah. No, let me say points. Yeah. That's the name of the new tool. Well, it is a dumb name point. Yeah.

But but it's a really cool tool. So it's it's for searching for award flights. And it's very similar to other tools we've talked about before, like PointMe or AwardLogic or even Rome.Travel is the other one. And unlike the first two I just mentioned, PointsYet is free. So in that way, it's like Rome.travel. But what's unique about this is that it offers three free alerts. So you can watch, so you can do your award searches online and it's quick. It'll search a bunch of programs, not as many as PointMe or AwardLog logic, but still a bunch. And if you don't find exactly what you're looking for, you can set up an alert to just keep checking in the background for you until a good award shows up and it'll email you when it does. And so that's something that used to be

that alert feature. Award logic was the only one in this group that that uh did that before and it was also the most expensive of the tools and it was like the one reason i thought it was maybe worth paying for that tool was uh for that feature and uh now points yeah is free at least for now so i would jump on that i already have have. And yeah, enjoy that feature. Also mention it has two of my favorite features from other features from AwardLogic and PointMe. So one of my other favorites from AwardLogic is you can search three days at once.

So that's a great feature of AwardLogic. A great feature of Point logic. Uh, a great feature of point me is that it'll, you can search both business and first class at once. So award logic can't do that. Um, but point, yeah, it does both of those things. So, uh, you know, literally if to me, the only thing I need to do, add more programs, and then I wouldn't see any point in using one of those other tools. Great points. I was trying to tee you up for the, yeah, come on now. Too much delay there. I was slow, but I got it in there eventually. All right. So I'm going to sneak in an award talk that we didn't put on the list before the show,

but it popped into my mind a little while ago when we were talking about our regular operations. So just a quick award talk update. So back in April, I had this trip booked to Fiji that I had to cancel. And part of that trip was that I had booked business class tickets from Fiji to Australia on Fiji Airways using Amex membership rewards points with the business platinum card for the 35% rebate. So altogether, it was like $3,200 in tickets. and Fiji Airways using Amex membership rewards points with the business platinum card for the 35% rebate. So altogether, it was like $3,200 in tickets. So after the, so there's 320,000

membership rewards points. And of course, after the 35% rebate, I don't have the math on my top of my head, but I think it's like 218,000, if I remember correctly, net points that it was costing me for the four tickets, which is a little pricey, but whatever. That's beside the point. Point is that I had to cancel the trip because the kids got sick. And and so I had contacted Amex Travel and they contacted Fiji Airways. And I was advised to fill out a form online asking for a refund. And if I had just refunded over the phone, I only would have gotten half the money back for the tickets. But the agent was very firm that I should indeed fill out the form for the refund. And so I did. And I updated once or twice saying that Fiji Airways like forever afterwards, like a month afterwards said, oh, yeah, we got your request. You're going to get your money back probably

within 60 days. And a reader had told me at a conference that, yeah, you'll get it back. It'll probably take about six months, but that's just the way they operate right now. So I've totally left it alone. I haven't touched it since. And I got another email about a month ago saying, hey, yeah, we're still working on it. You get your money back within 30 days. And then wouldn't you know it, last week, I got the refund for the four tickets. So I got the full $3,200 back. So I was made whole. So I thought that was awesome because I wouldn't have expected it. And I probably wouldn't have been as calm about it if not for the fact that I ran into somebody who told me that, yeah, this is just the way they operate. They were a travel agent.

They said, it's just the way Fuji Airways operates. It's going to take a while. Just take their word for it that they will eventually get it back to you. And sure enough, they were good to their words. So I was very pleased to see that. That's fantastic. So you stumbled upon the very long way of cashing out your Amex points at 1.54 cents each. So nice job there. Right. Okay. So some more award talk news.

Choice bought Radisson Rewards, by the way. They bought Radisson, and their programs are merging on July 18th. And so if you have any Radisson points still sitting out there, those points will each be collapsed so that you'll have half as many choice points as you had Radisson points. But that's okay, because I think choice points are worth more than double Radisson points. So I wouldn't be too sad about that. I do want to mention a little, to me, this was an interesting little outcome of the merger of these programs, is that if you have choice diamond status going forward, once these programs merge, you will be eligible for free breakfast at Radisson Blue, Radisson, Radisson Red and Park Plaza Hotels.

So what's that all about is they're basically preserving top tier Radisson reward status had that benefit of free breakfast at those hotels. So they're preserving that for people who have that. And another reason that's interesting is if you plan to stay at those hotels and you want that free breakfast, there is a way to get choice diamond status without earning it by staying at lots of choice properties. And that is Cambria Hotels has a status match opportunity. If you have status with another program and you actually stay at least one night at a Cambria Hotel, you can basically match to choice diamond status and then go ahead and stay at all those Radisson Blue Hotels and get free breakfast. And when I say all those, I think I know of two or three in the United States. So not a lot, but... There's at least two. I can name two of them also, Radisson Blues in the United States, but maybe

there's three, who knows. All right, so quick question on that, though. You would have to complete that Cambria stay before the merger. Not only would you have to complete it, you'd have to end up with the choice diamond status before the 18th. Am I correct in that understanding? Or is that wrong?

I don't think so. No, I think anytime you get a choice diamond, you're eligible for breakfast. That benefit is my understanding. There you go. OK, perfect. Awesome. So you got some time to complete that. OK, another award talk tidbit this week is, sadly, break out the sad news, folks.

Hyatt and MGM are ending their partnership on September 30th. It's been all over the blogosphere, so hopefully you've read it. But if you haven't, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news because that's a big time bummer for a lot of reasons. Hold on, quick post-recording interjection because over the next several minutes, we're going to talk a whole bunch about the end of the Hyatt and MGM partnership Explorist or Globalist, to MGM

Gold or vice versa, matched your MGM Gold to Hyatt Explorist status, that ship has unfortunately sailed. It is no longer possible. That matching opportunity ended July 14th, the day before this podcast was set to publish, and we realized towards the end of the show that we should have mentioned that and we didn't. So I just wanted to make that clear that if you have not yet done that match, you're not going to be able to. We do briefly mention another matching opportunity that might be out there. But anyway, I wanted you to keep that in mind as we talk more about why it's such a bummer that this partnership is ending. So why would you care about the Hyatt and MGM partnership if you're not a gambler? Or why should you still probably care

about it between now and September 30th? There's a few reasons. So first of all, if you have Hyatt Explorer status or better, you can match that to MGM Gold status. If you have MGM Gold status, you can match that over to Hyatt Explorer status. And so for years, it's been possible to just continuously match that back and forth and keep those statuses in both programs. Explorer status doesn't get you a lot with Hyatt, but it gets you a 2 p.m. checkout anyway. And on the MGM side, it gets you waived resort fees, which that's a $30 or $40 a day benefit if you're going to stay at an MGM, gets you free parking, some other stuff. And then more importantly, if you would like to get a free cruise, the MGM Gold status would potentially get you a free cruise with Carnival or Holland America, some others that we've written about that and talked about that extensively.

So some reasons you might want that. But then the other piece of this, of course some really cheap MGM properties in Las Vegas, like really, really, really cheap MGM properties in Las Vegas. Sometimes I've seen them for $3 a night, actually a little bit less than that. When you're not paying a resort fee, that's a pretty cheap way to accumulate lots of Hyatt Elite Nights. And so it's a major bummer to see that opportunity to get easy Hyatt elite nights evaporate. It sure is. It sure is. I haven't, I haven't really taken advantage of that at all, except the, uh, round Robin of, of keeping the elite status, uh, going. Um, but yeah, that's, that's a, that's a shame. So another, uh, great sort of opportunity ending this year, which is,

which is sad to see. It's also sad to see because if I went to Las Vegas, I almost always stayed at MGM Properties because I wanted my Hyatt Elite Night credit and Hyatt points for the incidentals. And of course, you could dine at any of the MGM properties and charge it back to your room at any of the other MGM properties. And then earn Hyatt points on your incidental spend and all of that. So it's been lucrative. It's been great. I guess now, if and when I go to Las Vegas, I'll probably end up staying at Caesars properties because Caesars Diamond

gets you no resort fee. Although I say that and I have MGM Gold for however long that lasts now at this point, I don't even know when the expiration is. But so that's that. Bad news. Enjoy it while it lasts until September 30th. So speaking of enjoying it while it lasts, let's get into mattress running the numbers. That's the question here is should people book these MGM hotels in order to earn Hyatt Elite status until September 30th. And when we say until September 30th, let me clarify, you have to check out by September 30th. If you have a stay that goes into October, that whole stay is not going to count. Right. So you check in like August 15th. And if you check out September 30th, you're going to get all those nights. If you check out October

1st, you're going to get zero nights. You're not going to get the nights up until September 30th, you're going to get all those nights. If you check out October 1st, you're going to get zero nights. You're not going to get the nights up until the 30th and then just not the last night or something. You'll get zero nights. So make sure you check out by the 30th. And that's an important thing for Hyatt people in general to know. I find people don't always know that. You need to know that the end date for the promotion is when you need to check out. That's right.

That's right. So Hyatt, we've talked a million times about this, but just to reiterate here, um, Hyatt's mid tier, low tier status isn't worth much. I wouldn't even consider doing what we're talking about to get discoverist or explore a status, but Hyatt's top tier globalist status, which requires 60 nights a year, 60 elite nights that you've earned over a year, is the best status of all the mainstream brands that there is. It has just the best perks overall. And so the question on the table is, does it make sense to plan a trip to Vegas to book cheap MGM hotel nights to earn Hyatt Globalist. It used to be called Diamond way back when. Preston Pyshko Right. It certainly might. You only have so much time. You don't have enough time between now and

September 30th. You barely have enough time to get 60 nights in if you're going to try to get all 60 that way. Hopefully, if you're chasing this, you already have some Hyatt nights or plans to pick up some other Hyatt nights later in the year. Does it make sense to pick up cheap, easy elite nights? I mean, yeah, if you've got any interest in going to Las Vegas, yeah, I think it definitely like if you're actually going to go to Las Vegas, or you're actually interested in going to Las Vegas, then yeah, I think it's almost a no brainer if you can book one of these cheap places. Now, I did book rooms at several different MGM properties during my my trip in April. And and so I can tell you the rooms Excalibur and you're turned off by the fact that they're not very nice, you may want to book someplace else to actually stay and just show up and check in at Excalibur.

Luxor, I find Luxor to be fine. I know that some people probably turn their noses up at it, but I find Luxor to be fine. Park MGM was surprisingly weird. The property is really nice. The rooms are really dark and weird. So I guess i would probably stay there it's not like dirty they're just kind of dark uh and mgm was quite nice so those are at the cheaper end of the mgm spectrum uh so you know that those are my thoughts on those specific

places but yeah i mean if you can find one of these places and now it's going to vary a little bit if you've matched to mgm gold status you have have MGM gold status. It's worth logging into your MGM account because you'll sometimes find offers for incredible prices. I mean, I'm not kidding you when I say like I've booked rooms for $2 and 46 cents a night or so. So like you might find some incredible deals like that. And if that's the deal, then yeah, maybe it is worth booking a mattress run trip to Las Vegas, particularly if you're not too far away from it or you want to try to pick up these elite nights in some way. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I would guess that July, August, September, it would be particularly cheap because this is Vegas and it's probably, unless you want

to be cooking your eggs on the sidewalk, you're probably not going to be too comfortable outside during that time. And so I would just guess that properties are going to be cheap during that time. Do you think that's true? Yeah, no, I recently had looked at a stay last week and five nights was $14 and change all in at Excalibur. So I don't know if that's changed now because obviously there's a lot of people probably looking to book now. And also it'll vary. If you want to go on a weekend, it's not going to be like the $3 a night that I'm talking about. Those cheap rates are Sunday through Thursday or Friday, depending on the property rates. So the

cheapest rates are going to be weekday nights. Your weekends are always going to be more in Las Vegas. That's just the way it works. So, and also I should mention with this key point, if you have one of those offers in your MGM account for like, when I'm talking about these $3 a night, what it actually is, is in my MGM account, it says up to two free nights or three free nights or four free nights, depending on the property. So let's give Excalibur as an example. It'll say up to four free nights at Excalibur. Now, if you book four nights that are totally free, then you're not going to get any Hyatt Elite credit.

But if you got up to four free nights and you book a five night stay, whatever that fifth night costs, in this case, let's say, I don't know, divide by five, $70 for the fifth night. The way it actually kind of ends up is they average it out and say, okay, you're paying $14 a night, or let's say it's $15 for that fifth night. That was the example I was looking for. Then they're going to average it out to $3 a night. And all of a sudden, even though you're not supposed to get high elite night credit for the free nights, you probably will. So yeah. So is there a chicken and egg problem here? So to get those deals, you have to have like MGM gold status and, and, uh,

if you don't already have Hyatt status, you can't just match to it. Yeah. Is there, is there a, a other way to get there? Uh, well, the problem is if you don't have MGM gold status, then even if you found really cheap nights, it wouldn't be as exciting because you would have to pay the resort fee. So they're going to go up by 30 or some 30 something dollars a night with taxes on the resort fees. So no, there's not a great option. I don't know if this is true, so don't quote me, but you may still be able to match to MGM Gold, I think, in Atlantic City at Borgata. I don't think they do it in Las Vegas, but in Atlantic City at Borgata last I knew. And when we went back in March, you were still able to match from, for example, Caesars Diamond to MGM Gold. So if you have that opportunity, you live near Atlantic city and you can try to make that match happen in person. Maybe you can pick up MGM gold that way. I don't know about MGM Springfield or, you know, national Harbor near Baltimore, but it's worth trying

at one of those places maybe to see if you can get a match to MGM gold. Cause yeah, you're going to probably need to have that to make this interesting. I would think any way to make it interesting. Preston Pyshko All right, there you go. Greg Foss Okay. So what do you think? Do you think we should bother going on to the main event? Or just call it a day? Preston Pyshko We should get there. We should get there. It's about time. It's about time to get to the main event. People tuned in for the main event, Greg. So let's give the people what the people want to hear. Welcome to the main event. All right.

Main event time. Partner up to maximize rewards. We're going to be talking about ways in which playing in two-player mode, playing the game, the Points and Miles game in two-player mode, can get you so much more. And so you don't need to be married to do this, but, you know, the more you live together slash travel together, the more benefits will be to working together to maximize your rewards. So, yeah, you know, if you're sort of on the fence of whether or not to marry that person, you know, consider how many rewards might be in it for you. And, you know, before you say no, it's just a little little tidbit, a little life advice. Right. Right. Right. Right.

So, I mean, but it's true. So why? Why and how does this work out? And specifically, we're mentioning, I think Greg mentioned living together, because that's going to be a particular advantage with some, some of these potential deals. But it depends on which program you're working with, you don't necessarily need to live with the person that you're playing the game with, depending on which issue you're working with. So I mean, this could even be like a brother or sister, cousin that you, you know, like to work together with, or a friend that you like to work together with in order friend that you like to work together with in order to earn more rewards, depending on which program we're talking about. So how can we do this? Where do we start? Absolutely true. So first of all, a couple can sign up for twice as many cards as one person alone can. So every card that's out there that has a good offer. Both of you can sign up. Even if one person is an

authorized user on the other person's card, that doesn't matter. You can still sign up for your own account as well. We get that question all the time. People are always like, oh, if I'm an authorized user on somebody's card, can I still get the welcome bonus on that card? And I mean, yeah, universally. I don't know of a situation where that's going to prevent you from getting a card as a primary cardholder. So yeah, of course you can get that card. And I mean, yeah, universally, I can't, I don't know of a situation where that's going to prevent you from getting a card as a primary card holder. So yeah, of course you can get that card also. Right. Right. And we've said a billion times, like signing up for cards, the number one way to earn lots of rewards quickly. Um, so you can do it together and earn, uh, twice as many as a family. And now quick, we're going to get into combining points. Not all,

but I, but just for the purposes of this section, I want to say that you're not necessarily going to be able to combine points with every single card offer, right? There are some where you won't necessarily be able to do that. But we're talking about combining strategy to some extent here, which kinds of points you want to earn or which hotel free night certificates you want to earn and when so that they can become useful. So when we say sign up for twice as many cards, we're talking about, you know, with the strategy of doing it with a partner, because that can really enhance the game for you. So, yep. And, and we're also assuming that the reason it matters to you

that the other person's also earning as many rewards is because you're going to be traveling a lot together and using each other's points to book things. So you'll both benefit from that is the idea. Next category here is referring each other. So in many cases, if you have a credit card, you can refer others and they'll earn the welcome bonus points and you'll earn a referral bonus. And I'm going to give one example that I just did and I wrote about on the blog, which is actually in my family of three. So I'm including my wife and my son in this, we each referred each other to Chase Inc. business preferred cards. So we went sort of in a circle referring each other.

Right now, the Chase Inc. cards have referral bonuses. The person who does the referring gets 40,000 points if someone applies with their link and is approved and gets approved. Yeah. And the person who gets approved to the Inc. Business Preferred, the offer right now is for 100,000 points after $8,000 spend in three months. And so by referring each other and all three of us got approved right away, that's 140,000 total sort of family points per person or 420,000 altogether of bonus points.

That's not even counting points from spend itself. So I think that's just a great example of how you can turn some referrals into tremendous number of points. I should mention Chase Inc. is kind of special in that there are four different Inc. cards out there. And if you have any one of them, you can refer people to other ones. So all three of us had Chase Inc. business cash cards, for example. We were able to refer each other to the ink business preferred, even though none of us had that card. You know, and this is like, let's quantify this for a quick

second and say, first of all, Greg, like he's talking about almost a half a million points in his household. I mean, that's crazy. It's a fantastic score. But then let's let's pare it down to just the referral points. So let's say you're just playing in two player mode, right? You don't have a third person in your household. You just refer each other for this card, just the referral points. You're talking about 80,000 points between the two of you. I mean, that's like a new card bonus, right? Between the two of you, you cash that out and have $800, you know, in your, in your hand, or you could use that for, you know, obviously stays. I mean, we've just recently, I wrote about the Grand Hotel Victoria at Lake Como, fantastic.

And 29,000 points a night at the time I booked it. Now it's 30 or 35 or Greg's written about the Ventana Big Star. That's whatever that is. What is it? 30 or 40,000.

I can't remember if it's category. That's now 40 or 45,000. So you're talking about a couple of nights that potentially two nights at a property that costs well, like $2,500 a night. You know, that's an awesome bonus in order to just refer each other for a card.

So it's totally worth taking advantage of this. We do this in my household all the time. We'll refer each other for cards because this is just easy, you know, what I call low-hanging fruit. It's easy pickings on the points. And when we talk about this, okay, this made sense for Greg because it was a great offer. And it makes sense for a lot of people because this is a great offer. But think about this at other times too. I'm going to give an example with Amex that we've done before when Amex has had these

plus five referral bonuses where sometimes they'll offer the opportunity to get more points on dining or grocery or something or other for referring someone. And so we've done that in my household before and referred to a card that waives the annual fee for the first year, a card we don't even care about necessarily. But one of us has opened it up just in order to earn the referral bonus. And that can be worth it potentially. Or even if you refer to a card that has an annual fee, whatever you're earning from the referral bonus alone might make it worth doing that now and then just to pick up some easy points. If you've got an Amex card that offers, for example, 30,000 points for a referral and you refer your household member to a card that has a $95 annual fee like the Business Green card, for instance, you're going to earn points that are

worth way more than $95 for that referral. So it totally makes sense to take advantage of these referral bonuses is the story I'm trying to communicate. Yeah. And another thing about the Amex cards, if you have a card that earns membership rewards points, for example, which are our favorite, those are the transferable points. You can then refer someone to any, well, almost any Amex card on the market. And just like we were talking about before, you'll earn membership rewards points. But if they sign up for, let's say, a Hilton card, they'll get Hilton points or free nights or whatever the welcome bonus is. And as Nick was saying, it doesn't even matter if there is a welcome bonus on whatever card you refer them to. You'll still get the bonus as the person doing the referring. And I do want to point out a special case here.

Amex has something we refer to sometimes as pop-up prison. And that's where if you've been signing up for cards a lot and canceling them when the annual fee comes due and so on, sometimes Amex will decide they don't really want you getting new welcome bonuses. And so you'll go to apply for a card and a pop-up will tell you, you can apply, but you're not eligible for the welcome bonus for this card. And so we call that pop-up prism because you're prohibited from earning any more welcome bonuses, at least on that card. And the thing to note here is that if your primary goal is to earn the referral bonus, you can still have whoever you referred

apply and sign up for that card. Even if they won't get a welcome bonus, you will get the referral bonus. So that's a nice thing with Amex. Yep, yep. That's a great point. So referral bonus is definitely, you want to refer each other to cards

when you have that opportunity. It's just easy points to pick up. And, you know, again, just like Greg said at the beginning, signing up for twice as many cards when you're playing in two player mode, you can pick up twice as many referral points when you're playing in two player mode because you can both pick up points for referring each other. So that's another easy path when you're partnering up now. Maybe this is where we should talk about. I'm looking at the show notes really quick. Maybe this is where we should talk about the difference, though, between the Chase side and the Amex side, because your points on the Amex side are not combinable. So you're going to both have, for instance, if you both have membership rewards points, your membership rewards points are separate. Now, they are usable together, but they're in separate piles and you can't combine them into one pile on the membership rewards points side.

So they're a little bit more separated. Now, there's a way around that. If you have somebody as an authorized user on one of your cards, you can transfer to their loyalty accounts if they've been an authorized user or employee cardholder for, I think, 90 days or more. So there is a way to sort of combine the use of the points, but it's not quite as easy as it is with Chase. Chase makes it a lot simpler to combine forces in your points, right? Yeah. With Chase, as long as you're in the same household, you can freely move your points, chase ultimate rewards points from one person's card to another um and if you're not in the same household there there are uh provisions to allow like business owners to move points to each other and i i haven't played with that to figure out

what the limitations are on that but there are ways to do it with with chase business cards so for example you can move your if you had both chase personal with Chase business cards. So for example, you can move your, if you had both Chase personal cards and business cards, you can move your personal points over to your business cards and then presumably move out of household to a business partner who also has Chase business cards. Yeah. And my wife just recently opened a Chase Inc cash card. And so when she's earned the welcome bonus on that, when we're ready to move or use those points, she'll probably just move those over to my chase ultimate rewards account. So then I can move them to my Hyatt account or wherever it is.

I'm booking the award from, since I do most of the award booking. So it's really easy to move those points around between two players and a household. So that's a really nice benefit on the chase side on the Amex side. Like we said, it's a little bit more complicated, but doable. Now, we didn't mention Capital One because there's only so many Capital One cards you're going to probably be able to get before they stop approving you anyway. But you can refer each other with Capital One also and earn those welcome bonuses. And the one nice thing about Capital One side is it is also easy, not quite as easy as Chase because you can't do it online yourself. You have to call, but it is still easy to transfer points. And the nice thing on the Capital One side is you can transfer your Capital One miles to anybody with a Capital One miles

earning card without a cap. So if I had points on my Capital One card and I wanted to send them to Greg's wife who has a VentureX card, I think I could do that. You know, it doesn't have to be necessarily somebody that you live with or have a family connection with. So Capital One makes it easy to combine forces. You should do that, by the way. You should do that with a lot of your points. I'll get right on that. Just, you know, you have to give me her number because I need her number in order to do it.

So just give me her credit card number and we'll be all set. I'm going to be like, why do you need her security code? I don't understand. But yeah, so... But the point there is, if you do both have Capital One cards, you can combine forces very easily. And that's a card, Capital One is

an ecosystem that I feel like there are a lot of people into that are maybe beginners and got that because they saw it on TV and may have an old Capital One account and it's good to know that you can easily combine the forces in your Capital One cards. And let me say quickly, City does allow moving points to other people, but then those points expire. And so you need to be ready to use them as soon as they're moved. There's a lot of potential complications in doing city cards in two-player mode. So I just don't think we have time to dig into those details here. It's complicated.

Good point. So let's move on to the next topic. Yep. All right. So a particular strategy that many people use and that I have tried to work on perfecting in my household because we didn't start out perfecting this. I wish we had. It was one of those things that if I go back in time, I would perfect the strategy on this. And that is signing up for hotel cards or applying for hotel cards at or near the same time or at least the same time of the year, even if in separate years. And the reason for this is because many hotel cards come with an annual free night certificate. And so if you both apply for a card at the same time that

offers an annual free night certificate, or at least at the same month each, even if they're in separate years, then every year, you're going to get your free night certificates at about the same time. And so you'll have about a year to plan potentially a free two night stay somewhere if your certificates are getting issued at the same time and expiring at the same time. So it makes it a lot easier to use those. I mean, a lot of people will find a one night free night certificate to be less useful than two one night free night certificates. So that's a really important part, I think, of the strategy in signing up for hotel cards is trying to plan or time that out. So you's a really important part, I think, of the strategy and signing up for hotel cards is trying to plan or time that out. So you get the free night certificates at about the same

time. Yeah, it really is a pretty big deal. And like Nick, I didn't do this when I started out. And so I've had situations like where, okay, we want to book a two-night weekend in January. I've got my cert ready to go, and my wife's cert will arrive in her account January 12th. Right. Is the award night still going to be available on January 19th when we want to go or whatever the date is? It's just really awkward. Yeah.

Well, when one expires like three weeks before the other and you're like, oh man, and then, you know, they just stay right in between. It's just, it becomes annoying. So trying to time that out. So at the same time is I think a key part of the strategy. And I don't know. I mean, would you,

so if there were an incredible hotel card offer, but you were like, the timing was really bad in terms of lining up the free night certificates, would you jump on it? Would you hold off and wait? Is the timing more important than the current offer? Well, I mean, if it's a great offer, why not both sign up at that time? If you're both. So good point. Good point.

I was thinking if one of you already has the card. But good point. Good point. Yes. Obviously. Oh obviously oh yeah as opposed to waiting till the same time of year next year yeah uh it just depends how good the offer is i guess but yeah yeah it's an inconvenience to not take your free certificates issued at different times of year inevitably causes headache for me at least so uh so good piece of play two player strategy sign up for your hotel cards at or at least near the same time if you can't meet all the spend at once and you gotta pace those out or split them out by you know a month or two or something in order to be able to have enough time okay but you don't really want it to be more than a month or two probably

now elite status what can you do here uh so so one of the things you could do is concentrate on earning elite status in just like one person's account for any given program. So let's take American Airlines, for example, because you can earn elite status mostly from shopping now with American Airlines. And so let's say you two travel together a lot, then rather than earning American Airlines loyalty points in both programs, what I would do is say, no, all the shopping both people are going to do, go through the Advantage shopping portal under just one person's account. And that way the loyalty points earned from those purchases will go to the one person's account. And then as long as you're traveling together, you'll both benefit from that one person's elite

status when traveling together. And so there's similar plays like that with hotels and other airline programs as well. But that one's, I think, the most obvious, I guess, to talk about how to do it. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I mean, it becomes the same thing with other programs too, though. And I think it's worth mentioning specifically Hyatt because that's one where it can be really useful to focus on elite status in at least one person's the highest elite status you can get. If you get to globalist in one person's account, you want to try to focus as much as you can on that, even if both players, for instance, have a world of Hyatt credit card. And so you have two free night certificates every year.

Nice thing is that Hyatt will let you gift your free night certificate to somebody else. So if you focus on getting one of you to globalist status, the other person who also has the Hyatt card can gift their free night certificate to the globalist member and get globalist benefits on the stay when you use that. So it certainly makes sense to focus on getting one person over the threshold for that highest level. Now, if you have enough travel between you, separate travel, there may be instances where both of you, it makes sense to both end up with elite status, but I wouldn't want to have two people each end up with explorer status over one person with global status. Definitely not. Definitely not. Okay. And Hyatt's also a great example because in the cases where

you're not traveling together, the one with globalists could book a guest of honor stay for the other one and you'd still get all the globalist benefits during your stay and don't even have to play any games pretending that the other person's going to show up. Right. So it's a great program for that. All right. So that's, I think, focus on earning elite status in one account, both enjoying the benefits. That's a key tip. How about Amex offers? You can certainly do pretty well when both people have a hot Amex offer, right?

Yeah. So Amex offers, usually you can't, let's say you have lots of amex cards uh you can't register any one offer to multiple cards in your account but if both you and player two have the offer in your own accounts you could both sign up and take advantage of whatever it is like uh sometimes you get things like forty dollars off a two200 hotel stay, or maybe you earn 5,000 Amex points for various things. So every now and then there are some great offers. And by doing all this in two-player mode, you have doubled opportunities to take advantage of that kind of thing. But this isn't limited to Amex offers.

I mean, this is like, there are many situations where there are deals available that are limited to one per customer, one per loyalty member, one per whatever. By playing in two-player mode, you can do whatever it is twice. Yeah. And one specific Amex benefit that might be worth calling out is if you both get the business platinum card, then one of the benefits on that card is a $200 Dell credit that you get two times each year, once between January and June and once between July and December. But the nice thing is that Dell will let you split tender online. So you could both use your $200 credit on one $400 purchase and split tender over the two cards on one single order. So there are times where

things like that can really become valuable benefits. And in the case of Dell, sometimes there's also an Amex offer for 10% back. And so you could split tender and both of you take advantage of both of those things at once. And those are things that I think Greg and I perhaps take for granted because we're so used to taking advantage of those things for multiple people in our households, but they may not be as obvious to somebody who doesn't normally engage in that type of activity. But anything that's limited to one I know is limited to two because I can probably repeat that with my wife. So that's a good tip. All right. So the last topic we're going to talk

about is that by working together, you can keep fewer premium cards. So let me give a specific example of what I mean. Let's say you like the Sapphire Reserve card. You like the fact that it earns 3X for travel. You like its best travel protections. And maybe you like the ability to use points for 1.5 cents each towards travel, book through Chase. people traveling together, there's no reason for you both to have that card or even for both of you to have any Chase Ultimate Rewards card that has an annual fee. As long as one of you has a card with an annual fee, and if you're in the same household, you can move all your points to the person who has the card that has the annual fee and then transfer to your rewards programs or book travel and get 1.5 cents per point value if you have the SAFRA reserve card and you'd get the travel protections too. So that's sort of a strategy for keeping, keeping your, um, your expenses down while

benefiting from all of the, you know, great, uh, perks and things you can get from some of these very expensive cars, cards like the Sapphire reserve. Um, you could do similar things with various like Amex platinum and, uh, other cards as well. Yeah, absolutely. So it really reduces your costs in terms of not needing as many premium or ultra premium cards. And you could have a strategy where one partner keeps only fee-free cards in the long term,

right? Or one person is just focusing on cards with no annual fee in the long term. Maybe they open cards with an annual fee short term in order to earn a welcome bonus, but then either downgrade in the long run or cancel those cards because they aren't the person who's going to be the main booker of the travel or the person using those ultra premium cards most of the time, which I think for a lot of people that probably is realistic where there's one person who's really hyper focused on this stuff and another person who's just a willing participant playing along. So, you know, you could keep that person with those fee-free cards. And so, yeah, I think you gave some great examples there. If one person has the Sapphire Reserve,

you can move all the points to that one person in your household and then use that person's Sapphire Reserve to book your travel or transfer to your partners. And so I think that that's a strategy that works really well on the Chase side. And so I think that that's a strategy that works really well on the Chase side. And then also, of course, you have your Chase hotel cards. And so Marriott cards, the nice thing about Marriott is they also allow you to combine points. Now there's a limit. You can only move up to 100,000 points per year from one person to another person, but it can be any Marriott member. So it doesn't have to be somebody in your household when you're talking about moving Marriott points. Like I said, up to

100,000 points per year, you can receive up to 500,000 points per year, but that's a nice benefit. Hyatt lets you transfer points to another member without a specific point quantity limit, but you can only do it once every 30 days in or out. So for instance, my wife has the World of Hyatt credit card and earned some points on doing spend on that for the free night certificate. But then she can move her Hyatt points from her World of Hyatt account to my World of Hyatt account by submitting a form. So it allows for, again, with some strategy, playing in two-player mode and earning some nice points. I mean, initially, she earned the welcome bonus on that card, moved the points right over to my

Hyatt account, and I used them to book our stays. And that's because I have the globalist status in our household, although actually, we both did the built promotion, and now we both have globalist status. But that's another one of those silly blogger access things that wouldn't really make sense for most people to have done. So, yeah, I mean, I think that those are all some really helpful strategy tips, right? Yeah. And these are things that I think you and I do all the time and lots of couples and teams. I know a brother and sister sort of team that does some of this kind of stuff. And people do it all the time. It's, as we said, a fantastic way to earn a lot more rewards.

And more useful quantity. If nothing else. Because a lot of- Very useful quantities, yeah. Yeah. If nothing else, remember the referring each other bit because there are so many points on the table there that you could do really well. There are.

And a lot of times you'll find it's easier to use points when you have a larger quantity. And I mean, that should be obvious to some extent. But certainly if you want to travel in premium cabins, having all of the points in one account, the ability to put them all into one account is a benefit because then you could book both awards with one account. Most airline programs for people who aren't familiar will allow you to book a ticket for anybody. So again, you get all those points into one person's account and they can book the tickets for both people. So being able to put all those in one spot, so you're on one reservation or you have enough for the round trip award that

you want can all be really useful. So following some strategy for that is good. Now, does it make sense to get involved in more than one ecosystem? People often ask this, like if we have the chase cards that we want, does it make sense for us to dip our toes in the Amex pool? And my answer to that is almost invariably, well, yeah, when an offer is good, of course it does. You know, there's absolutely, you know, you could run this strategy with each issuer. So and I think that it makes almost all the more sense when you're playing in two-player mode because you could double that great offer, right? So all of a sudden, that great offer becomes far more useful yet because it represents tons of potential points.

Right, right. And also, I would look at also programs like American Airlines or Alaska Miles where they don't have good opportunities to transfer from other programs where you're earning lots of points from welcome bonus. But they each have credit cards where when you watch for those bigger than usual offers, if you both sign up, you're very quickly going to have enough points to do meaningful trips with those points. So don't forget those kind of programs as well. Very good. All right. I think that wraps us up for the main event. And that brings us to this week's question of the week, which is quite relevant since we're talking about hotel elite status today. We talked a bunch about Hyatt and we had a question that came in that was perfect for this from Hem. Hem in Las Vegas,

interestingly enough, writes in and says, I wanted to ask and also point out this opportunity. I wanted to ask if buying globalist status exists or if a shortcut exists. I happen to be on eBay where people are giving shortcuts for this, for Hyatt Global status. Read the reviews and it looks legit. What are your thoughts? Can you buy Hyatt Elite status on eBay, Greg? The reviews sound good. Greg Foss, I don't have any firsthand knowledge of this, but that sounds awfully fishy to me. Someone's selling top tier elite status for Hyatt on eBay. What could go wrong? No, there's no...

What could go wrong? There's no... Let me say it another way. I know there is no sanctioned way that Hyatt would allow that. So if it's actually working and maybe those reviews are legit and maybe this is actually working. It's not something that Hyatt would be happy with. And so as soon as they figure out what's going on, they're going to cancel all those accounts that were involved in that. I would not play with that at all, personally. Yeah, I mean, we don't mess with that kind of stuff at all. I mean, there's mileage brokers that buy and sell miles and stuff.

And I'm not even a little bit tempted to dip my toes in that pool because I don't want very similar issues there. Yeah, exactly. The airline programs don't like it. If they figured out you're going to be stopped and worse things can happen. You could actually be stopped from traveling or the people actually traveling with those miles that they bought could be stopped. Bad stuff can happen there. I wouldn't do it either. No, there's nothing good to come of that. And I thought that this was particularly interesting coming from somebody who lives in Las Vegas and asked, is there any shortcuts to get to globalist status? Well, we talked all about your shortcut today. Get yourself over to Excalibur Luxor. Hopefully you got a way to get to MGM gold status and so you can get those resort fees

waived. But even if not, you could earn through stays if you find cheap enough rates with the $30 and you may be paying 40 or 50 bucks a night. Maybe some of those nights make sense. The other shortcut to high elite status, of course, is spending on one of the higher credit cards because you earn two elite nights for every $5,000 spent on the consumer card. On the business side, remind me, Greg, it's... You get five per $10,000 spend. The consumer card also gives you five elite knights right off the bat and discover a status. So I think the play would be like do enough spend and or stays to get to explore a status,

then match... You'd have to do this quickly then match to mgm gold and then do the rest of your uh stays cheaply as an mgm gold member to get to 60 nights yeah you know and as i as you said that i thought back and i'm not even sure that when this publishes are you still going to be able to match Tam GM gold? I think that that was pretty limited in terms of the amount of time left. So, uh, so you're gonna have to double check. Don't tell people. Yeah.

I'll have a link to Steven's post in the show notes. Don't tell me that now, Nick. Yeah, I know. No, that, that would be horrible if that's the case. So, uh, yeah, we'll see if that, hopefully when, when the show notes come out, you'll see a note about that one way or another as to whether you can even still do the match if you miss the opportunity uh again i think you can do it in atlantic city but that's not going to necessarily help him in las vegas uh but still if you find cheap enough nights anyway uh until september 30th that is potentially away and

of course keep in mind that award nights count towards elite status with hyatt so if you find some cheap category one nights that can be another shortcut to get there. We've published posts on shortcuts to Hyatt elite status. And the other big one is if you know somebody with globalist status, they can book a guest of honor stay for you. So even if you have a friend who is a globalist member, you could transfer your world of Hyatt points to them. And this flows right in with today's topic on earning rewards together. You could transfer your points, your Hyatt points to your friend's Hyatt account, and they could book an award for you as a guest of honor, say, again, assuming they have globalist status and you'd get their globalist benefits. So there's a number of different ways to take advantage of that.

And I'll have a link to a post that we have about how to get Hyatt globalist benefits without having Hyatt globalist status that'll explain some of those types of things and some other options that you have there as well. So hopefully you're able to take advantage of some of that. But yeah, I would not be looking on eBay for anything like this because you just don't want your loyalty account shut down. Please don't do that. Don't do that. Not a good idea. There's nothing good to come of that. Anybody who's selling it knows that it's not okay by the program rules. So whoever you're working with is already doing something that they know is violating

the rules. So bad idea. All right. That brings us to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed this stuff and you'd like to get this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social media.

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