Frequent Miler on the Air - *Please* tell us how to find business class awards | Ep159 | 7-16-22

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

[Update: The wrong episode was initially loaded. This update includes the correct episode.]. Wondering how to find those elusive business class awards? Greg and Nick discuss the tricks in their toolbags. 00:28 Giant Mailbag 1:48 Mattress running the numbers: Daily Getaways https://frequentmiler.com/daily-getaways-2022-first-2-weeks-of-offers-announced/ Are any of these deals worth speculatively buying? Our analysis: 3:46 IHG points for half a cent each 4:35 Hilton points for half a cent each 4:47 Wyndham points for 1.17c each 5:30 Best Western at 0.55cpp 6:38 Choice points for 0.52cpp 8:35 Marriott gift cards for 20% off Hyatt points 11:31 #3Cards2Continents3Updates https://frequentmiler.com/frequent-milers-2022-team-challenge-3-cards-3-continents/ 23:34 Awards we booked this week 27:00 What crazy thing....did London Heathrow Airport do this week? 30:18 Main Event: PLEASE tell us how to find business class awards. 1:11:17 When is Ask Us Anything? Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ 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. Please tell us how to find business class awards. How do you work that sorcery? So today's topic comes directly from our giant mailbag in a way. So I'm going to jump right into the giant mail. This giant mail comes from in response to my post saying, I finally booked my round the world award. And in the comments, Carolyn said, could you please, all capitals, please describe the process that you go through to

find these business class awards. I'm unable to find anything that would get me around the world in business class for those few miles. Easy to find and coach, but never business. Thank you in advance. So you're welcome in advance, Carolyn, because we're going to step you through the process in today's main event. Because the two of us have been doing some searching for business class awards, right? I mean, it's fair to say the two of us have done a little bit of searching this last couple of weeks. Oh my gosh. It's been on our minds 24-7 and it doesn't stop. Even after booking, it doesn't stop.

No, it doesn't. We've been at dinner and I'm like pulling up my phone. Hang on, let me just look up this one more thing. My wife asked me to get her a glass of milk or something. I sit down, I'm still searching on the phone and she starts to get up. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm not thinking straight.

Just thinking about awards. So we'll talk about it, Carolyn. We got it on our minds. We do. We do. We do. Today, we're going to start next with the mattress running the numbers. So today's mattress running is regarding the daily getaways. All right. So what are daily getaways? Let's start there because people who are new to the game might not know. So daily getaways is an annual promotion run by the U.S. Travel Association where they sell various travel stuff. It's hotel points or sometimes packages for

rooms or experiences, blah, blah, blah. So each day over the course of, I don't know, three, four weeks, they create a new deal, they release a new deal, and there are different numbers, different quantities, et cetera, and different quality of deal. Some of the deals stink and some of the deals are really good. And so that's the essence of it. Each one goes on sale. I think it's 1 p.m. Eastern each day. And some of them you have to be right there on your computer at one o'clock, refreshing, refreshing, clicking in order to get the best of the deals. And others will hang around for like a couple of weeks because they aren't as, as, uh, as good. So that's right. Right. It's coming up. And so these come around about once a year during normal times. Usually I think it's more in May, but this,

this year it's in July. And so we're going to go through, there's a whole bunch of, uh, deals for, for hotel points or gift cards and what we're going to do, here's the game for today. We're going to go through each one and say, is this deal worth buying prospectively? What I mean by that is in almost all cases, we could say, well, yeah, if you were going to book this hotel for more than it would cost to buy the points and you could use the points for it, then you might as well buy the points and use those points to book the hotel. But that's boring. I don't care about that. The question here is you don't have plans to, you don't have specific plans to use these points or get certificates. Is it a good

deal to just go ahead and buy it as is? Let's get into that. First deal, IHG points for half a cent each, deal or no deal? No deal. They go on sale for half a cent all the time. There's no need to buy them prospectively from Daily Getaways. Just buy them around when you think you're going to need them because they're almost always on sale for half a cent each directly. Agreed. I want to add to that, that daily getaways deals that I think Nick mentioned this briefly, but some of them are really hard to get. And so putting yourself through the pain to try to get a deal that you can get anytime it's not worth it. And one more thing to add there, you can often buy IHG points at half a cent each and pick the quantity you want rather than being locked into specific quantities, the ones that Daily Getaways offers, which might not even match your needs perfectly. There's just no sense.

Right. Great. All right. Next deal. Buy Hilton points for half a cent each. Same. Hilton sells them for half a cent each almost all the time. So no need to buy them in specific quantities from daily getaways.

Totally agree. All right. Next deal. Buy Wyndham points for 1.17 cents each. Probably not because Wyndham has been putting their points on sale for one cent a pop. Although I say that and it's like they have been, but not as often as IHG and Hilton do. So 1.17 isn't that much more. So it's possible. And also Wyndham tends to cap how many points you can buy. It used to be 45,000 points a year.

Now I think they've permanently lifted the cap to 120,000 points per year, but these should be in addition to that cap. So if you need more Wyndham points or think you might need more Wyndham points, maybe, but it's murky at best. Yeah, I'm going to say no, personally. Best Western, 0.55 cents. I have no idea. I have no idea. I'm going to say no. Okay.

So I didn't even bother to check our reasonable redemption values for best Western. But what I remember from, from looking up their, their point values is, is like, while there's occasionally a hotel that's worth significantly more, it's, it's kind of rare. And so I, I think you're going to be not,

not even close to certain of, of breaking, breaking, even let alone getting a good deal out of that. And to be clear, I don't have anything against Best Western. I actually like Best Western as far as a budget brand goes. I would gamble on a Best Western over a gambled choice hotel any day of the week.

Now, there are some really nice choice hotels. I mean, those ones where you're like, I don't know if this is going to be all right or not. I'd rather go with the Best Western because I have more faith in that brand in general, but not going to buy the points. Right, right. I guess I would agree maybe with that assessment, but as far as having faith in the value of the points to get good value, not so much. Choice is a good one to be next, given that you just brought that up.

Now, you can buy choice points through daily getaways this year for 0.52 cents each. So about half a cent each. In past years, I remember it being more like 0.44, somewhere in that range. I thought it was even 0.32 one year, maybe. I don't know. Maybe I'm misremembering that. But yes, it's not as good as it has been. Right, right.

But let me say that the old points and cash trick where you book a points and cash day and cancel it, the price has gone up for the points to that. Last I checked, it was like 0.9 cents to buy points that indirect way. So this might be the only way to buy choice points really cheaply. What do you think? Yeah, no, I think that this one is worth potentially buying speculatively. I have bought choice points in daily getaways several times in the past

without an immediate specific plan and use for the points, just because I know that when I get the occasion to use those points, I am definitely going to get more than half a cent in value because it's so easy to get one penny or more out of choice points. So this is a pretty good deal.

It's half off hotels, basically. I actually, for a hot minute last night, thought I might be getting in on this one to book a hotel in one of my destinations for the Three Cards, Three Continents challenge. As it turns out, I'm not going to be buying them for that purpose anyway. Maybe I'll still buy some for personal use though. I have some choice points, but not as many as I'd like. And at half a cent each, I might be a buyer. I don't know. Would you though? I mean, you got lots of city points probably, right? Yeah. But no, I agree with you. I think it's a deal. I mean, if you're extremely flush with city points, you can transfer one to two. So that's a better deal. But this is basically like transferring pennies one to two to choice points. So I think that's a better deal. But this is basically like transferring pennies one to two to choice points.

So I think that's a good deal. Agreed. I'm in for choice. We'll come back to that. Okay. Yes, I would be in for choice. All right. All right.

Next one. Marriott gift cards, 20% off. I don't know. I mean, you can definitely get good value out of that. So there's part of me that says yes, but there's also a part of me that says there are frequently Amex offers. So you can very often get 20% off of specific quantities through Amex offers. And every now and then Marriott sells them directly at 20% off. So I hesitate to lock up too much cash in a gift card currency that I could usually get on sale or at least get on sale often enough

that I don't want to lock it up for years at a time. You know what I'm saying? So if I think you're going to use it in the next year, yeah, then buy it. Sure. But if you're like, I might use that three or four years from now, then I wouldn't bother. Yeah. Gotcha. I'm a buyer at that rate. Yeah. I realize that it's not a spectacular deal because it comes around every now and then. But I also know that I'm going to be spending money at Marriott Hotels in the future. And so the ability to easily save 20% off of a certain amount that I prepay, good deal on my buck. There you go.

All right. Last one, Hyatt. Ability to buy Hyatt points for most of the deals are for 1.32 cents each. There's one deal that gives you a 1.2 cents per Hyatt point. Yeah. It's a really good deal for Hyatt points because you can redeem Hyatt points for far more than that. I hesitate to spend that much on Hyatt points because I can generate them pretty cheaply through chased cards, right? Through like Inc 5X at Staples when they run all their visa fee, you know, fee-free visa card deals and stuff. So I'm really hesitant to pay more than a penny each for those points.

However, if you're not into MSing at all, then definitely this is almost a no brainer, except it's probably not worth your time because these always sell out in less than a second. So you're not going to get them. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So that's unfortunate. Yeah. I mean, I think this is definitely a buy, but it's so hard to get that. Good luck with that. Yeah. Yeah. I've never, I've tried just to see if I could get it in my cart each year. Haven't gotten it in the cart once yet. Right. And I'm pretty good at those kinds of things. Haven't been able to do it. Yeah. Yeah. I think there must be people that have like written scripts or something that just like hammer the site for what they want and load it into the cart.

That's unfortunate, but there you go. All right. So that's it. So we have a few definite or a few that we agree with that are buys. I think just to summarize real quickly, I think it's, um, we agreed on choice points at about half a cent each. Uh,

we kind of split the vote. I agree. I kind of split the vote on Marriott gift cards. And we both agree that I had, I had as a goodbye, but it's a, uh, a tough buy.

So goodbye. Right. You might as well buy a lottery ticket that day too because your chances are about as good all right moving on next segment today three cards three continents three updates oh come on i thought you were gonna say at the same time i almost did i stopped all right so so updates update number one comes in from steven so steven tells us that he plans to do a daily getaways deal for a hotel night so he's going to do one of these he is going to buy or at least try to buy the points from one of these

deals for one of his hotel nights on his trip so So that obviously begs the question, which one is he buying, Greg? What do you think? Backing up really quickly. What is this three cards, three continents? Oh, true. In a sentence. Oh, so in a sentence, we are each taking three credit card bonuses.

We each chose three cards. We're going to use the bonuses from those three cards to travel to at least three continents. Though it sounds like maybe we're going to all end up with more anyway. And this will have the trip will happen in September. But if you want to know more about it, you can go to the frequent miler site. And there is not a link right at the top. Is there should be a link right at the top.

We should probably make sure that's there. Right. But you can find it. You'll find it. Type in three cards on the search box. All right. So back to Steven. So he said he's going to do one of these daily getaways for one of his hotel nights. Which one do we think he's going to do? Do you have any guesses? Yeah, I think it's going to be the choice privileges points. I think it's got to be

the choice privileges points because that's the best chance to get far outsized value. Now I'm a little hesitant. Maybe he's going to go for Hyatt, except I don't think he could really plan on getting Hyatt points because it's so hard. So since I don't think that he's going to plan on getting Hyatt points, the plan has to be choice because that's the one that typically is possible to get one of the packages. I've been able to get one of the packages every year except last year, actually, in hindsight, I think. So generally, I've been able to buy those. It's probably something possible and very easy to get double your money, so to speak, in value. Choice privileges, we've talked about before.

There's a lot of good uses. There are some nice higher-end choice properties within the choice portfolio. But then Greg's written a lot about the preferred hotels partnership. And then beyond that, we've also talked about how a lot of choice properties, you can book any room for the same price. So a lot of properties, you can book a suite for the same price as a standard room. So there's a lot of reasons that would be good. And you can't book choice properties so far in advance.

So it fits in well with the fact that, okay, the trip is within the window for booking choice awards days. So I think it's going to be choice. That's my prediction. That's probably a good guess. You know what I realized as we're debating this, and I don't have the answers in front of me, is that the answer largely depends on what the minimum purchase requirements are for these things. Because, you know, it's one thing to buy choice points for half a cent each. But if like you had to spend $500 to get that, you know, that deal, he's obviously not going to do that. That's part of the reason I'm not buying them. Because the need that I had didn't fit with the quantities that are going to be for sale.

And I found something else to plug that need. But yeah, that was exactly the issue I ran into. I was like, okay, well, then I'm going to still have to transfer some points to choice or buy them indirectly after the fact. And so it just wasn't going to work out to be enough of a deal to make it worth buying the points unless I could get them in the perfect quantity. So you're right. It does depend, but the choice one you can buy in small enough quantities that I think that that's probably going to be it. I don't think he's going to buy IHG points or Hilton points. Cause he could just buy those direct.

So it can't be those probably not Wyndham. So he's got Marriott 20% off, you know, maybe he's got some paid stays in his, in his plans and he's got a good deal on a Marriott. He's got to have an Amex offer. I don't know. Maybe, maybe. So I do think there's a chance that he's going to buy Hilton points, whether or not it's through this package or not.

If he found like a good Hilton that charges about 10,000 points, then that's a $50 hotel stay, which would be pretty good. So we'll see. It'll be exciting to see. So that's Stephen's update. Now, what about you? Do you have any updates for the Three Cards, Three Continents Challenge? I do. So I've been talking about how I need to change this award and I've been trying to call and I have not been able to get through to a human yet in the times, the windows of time that I've had. I take that back. Yesterday, I was planning to call and I have not been able to get through to a human yet. Uh, times the windows of time that I've had, uh, I take that back yesterday. I was planning to call and instead I spent hours retooling yet again and deciding a new, but now I really have it set exactly what I want.

I just want to call in and change my, my booking. So, uh, so I need to get that done, but I'm, I'm very confident that I will today, uh, one way or another after we get done recording this. So, um pretty sad and I'm excited. The trip is a lot different than I first imagined it, a lot different than I second and third and fourth and fifth imagined it. In some ways, I'm disappointed about some things that I cut out, but in other ways, I'm excited about the breadth of what I'm going to be able to do. So I wrote it this week about Aeroplan Awards and the sweet spot in their award chart from North America to the Pacific and how much flexibility and how many options there are.

And so I'm pretty excited about what I'm going to be able to do. So that's exciting. My other key update this week is that I booked a hotel through the hotel collection. I intended to use fine hotels and resorts, but I found a deal better. I needed a two night stay exactly. And I found a deal through the hotel collection that met that need very well. And also now that here's where I need a rule clarification. And so maybe readers are going to have to chime in. But the other benefit here for me was that my hotel collection booking was more than $200. So

of course I have a platinum card, which has a $200 credit for a prepaid fine hotels and resorts or hotel collection booking. But actually my booking was more like $300. So the thing here is that when you prepay a hotel collection booking with your platinum card, you earn five X points. So I believe I will earn 1,500 membership rewards points from the booking. Now, my question for readers is, can I use those points in the challenge? Because those 1,500 points could come in handy. Right, right, right.

So the confusion here is that we previously discussed this as a team and said, if you're earning miles on your flights, we're not going to count those as things you can use for the challenge. It would just be too hard to account for awards on a hotel and, and just saving the money and, you know so, you know I, if it was up to you because ultimately, we're going to be letting our audience decide who won. And so as long as you come clean about what you did, people can decide, was that legit or not? And go from there. So I think you need to decide, is it likely that people will frown upon that? Well, you know, so what made this really particularly interesting to me is that originally I was looking at a one night fine hotels and resorts booking and it was coming out to $208. And so with that thousand points that I would earn from the booking, that would cover the

$8 overage. So it would be perfect, like a perfect cover there to cover the overage on the spend. And so I was intrigued by that saying oh well look at that i'm gonna get a stay of a little bit more than 200 for free so to speak uh so so that's where originally i was going with this but now the 1500 points could actually come in pretty handy so uh so i we'll see we'll see we'll have to find out but and that's all contingent on me getting the trip changed the way that I need to get it changed. The nice thing with these fine hotels and resorts and the hotel collection bookings is that they are freely cancelable and changeable. So I've booked it.

But if for some reason I can't get somebody on the phone with their plan or the award space that I need disappears, then I could still cancel this and change to something else. Right, right, right, right. So, you know, boy, I think I would gamble on it if I were you, if I needed those extra 1500 points. I mean, you know, I've talked about how in the 40K to far away challenge, we had discussed in advance that it was okay to like stay with friends if we would like during a normal trip, stay with friends, then we could do it during the challenge. And I did so in Cape Town, knowing full well that there would be some of our audience that thought I was kind of cheating because I wasn't using the 40,000 points and $400 in that challenge for that part of the trip.

And I think that's a legitimate criticism. And so, you know, I think this is a little bit less of a, you know, breach of the sort of intent of the rules. So, you know, I would probably gamble on it, but up to you. We'll see. I'm looking forward to see what you do. I've got a little, you know, a little wiggle room in the budget. So that's, I don't know that I'm going to definitely need the points yet, but I might. So there we go. That's that.

All right. That's my update. We did two updates. We need a third update so we can get into the main event well third i already mentioned that that i've i've since we last recorded the show i've booked my round the world award and um but now sort of a update to that update i'm rethinking it a little bit so as i I had booked an ANA round the world award, I have the ability to cancel it for 3000 points. And if you remember, I signed up for a 90,000 point, um, Amex gold offer. Uh, and I had to spend $4,000 on that card, you know, to, to get that bonus. So, so I have 94,000 on that card to get that bonus. So I have 94,000 Amex points to work with

that are transferable to ANA. I transferred 90,000 points to ANA to book this round the world award. Now, if I want to redo it, I could transfer another 3,000 of my points and then I have another go at it. Now, why am I thinking about that? I actually have a plan that's pretty good, but there are little pieces of it where I think I could do better. And I'm trying to figure out, is it possible to build it again even better than what I already did? So do I think it's likely I'll redo it? No, but there is a chance. There you go. All right.

Build it better, Greg. Build it better. Obsess over it. And I want to mention with that that somebody asked in the beginning for us to account for how much time we spend trying to build this stuff, trying to build these awards. And I understood where the person was coming from. But on the flip side, this is something we enjoy and something that we're doing, hopefully for the benefit of readers.

So we're spending way more time on this than probably most people will. But that's partly motivated by the desire to win because we are challenging against each other here and partly motivated by the desire to find and write about stuff. That's going to help other people help you save time when you go to book these things. So, so we're definitely pouring a lot of time and effort into this. This is not necessarily reflective of what you would need to do if you just wanted to book a trip to a and B, uh, but hopefully you'll get some ideas about what you can book based on our trials and tribulations. Exactly. Exactly. Well said. All right. So

what does that bring us to? Awards we booked this week. What'd you book, Greg? So I didn't book an award, but I did have a Marriott certificate expiring August 13th, something like that. And I realized I didn't have any plans to use it. So crossing my fingers, I called up Marriott Rewards or Marriott Bonvoy, sorry, to see, is there some way I can extend it? I came up with this whole story about how, you know, I needed it for a stay in September, which was true enough. And it turned out I didn't need the story. One-time extension, no problem. Well, it's good to hear that it's back to business as usual on that, because that's the way things had been for a long time. But then of course,

since lots of stuff had gotten extended during the pandemic, they weren't being generous about re-extending things that had been extended, but this sounds like it was a certificate issued last year, right? Right. Right. It was, it was a new certificate. It didn't expire end of June, which is all the ones that had been extended a few times during the pandemic expired end of June. And if you didn't use them in time, those they wouldn't have extended again, I was told. But any expiring from now on are ones that probably hadn't been renewed previously. And so as long as you hadn't renewed them previously, you were allowed to renew at least once. I checked some things. I asked him, is this available to me only because I'm an elite member? No, all members can do this once per certificate. And I asked him, what other sort of

rules are there around this? And an interesting thing I learned is they seem to have a rule saying you have to call within 30 days of expiry. He said that if I had called a month earlier, they would have said no, because it was two months from expiry. And so you need to wait apparently until it's closer to expire, maybe for calling, which is to your benefit in a way anyway, because when they extend it, they extend it for exactly a year from the day you call, not from the day it was going to expire. So it actually benefits you to wait as long as possible before calling. So pretty good, pretty friendly rules there from Marriott.

That's great. It's a weird thing to come out of my mouth in the show. Well, yeah. When you said Marriott Rewards, I called Marriott Rewards. No, Marriott Bonvoy. I'm sorry. And I thought, no, I'm sorry. You had to call Marriott. I'm sorry you called. And I should say too, they picked up right away. That's good. I don't know whether it's because I'm an elite member or not, but it was actually a very pleasant phone call. That's great. You know, cheers to Bonvoy not Bonvoying me on this one case.

That's nice. That's nice. Lucky you. All right. How about you? Any awards you can book this week worth talking about? No, nothing that's worth talking about at this point. So no, we'll hold off until next week.

All right. Let's get into... So are we going to get into the main event or crazy thing? Well, let's do the crazy thing since you brought it up. What crazy thing did London Heathrow Airport do this week? That's right. So we'll do this kind of quickly here. So the Heathrow Airport put out an announcement to all their airlines that could fly through there saying, stop selling tickets all summer long, starting like immediately. They basically said, we just don't have the crew to handle the number of passengers that are already ticketed,

let alone anymore. And they said they want to set a cap at 100,000 passengers per day. And in response, Emirates put out a pretty lengthy response to this, which I can sum up as suck it, LHR. They were very like, they didn't mince words. They're not going to stop. They didn't mince words. No, they didn't. They're not going to stop selling tickets. They feel like it would do such a disservice to their customers that are relying on them to get them places.

And they're certainly not going to reroute existing customers to get under that 100,000 mark. And I took one quote out of their longer message here. They said, moving some of our passenger operations to other UK airports at such short notice is also not realistic. Ensuring ground readiness to handle and turn around a wide-body long-haul aircraft with 500 passengers aboard is not as simple as finding a parking spot at a mall. I don't know. I just enjoyed that phrase. No, it was excellent. And, you know, it's a really good point.

And I have to imagine that airlines pay a lot of money for those slots, right? You know, like they're not cheap. So, I mean, if you've ever been frustrated by poor customer service from a hotel you paid for flight, you took or whatever. Imagine what these airlines are paying airports for the airport services. I would be as unhappy as Emirates was in this message, I think, if London was suddenly like, oh, sorry, guys, you need to not only stop selling tickets, but you just have to cancel flights on people who have already paid for them because we can't handle the capacity. I would very much be like, we're paying millions and millions. Find the capacity. Yeah. I mean, not only that, they point out that in its heyday in 2019, London Heathrow was serving well over 200,000 passengers per day.

And they're now saying they can't handle a little bit over 100,000. And, you know, I think Emirates is basically saying, yes, you can. You just need, you know, more people. You need to hire more people. And that's easier said than done. Sure. No question. Oh, yeah.

I mean, I don't know what's going to happen short term, but this isn't a surprise. you need to hire more people and that's easier said than done sure question oh yeah i mean i don't know what's gonna happen short term but like this isn't a surprise you know everybody knew so it's it's pretty unexcusable that he throw has done such a poor job here i feel like but uh but you know i how's it gonna play out what's gonna happen here oh my gosh yeah i don't know but i'm just glad i'm not flying through there in the next few weeks. I think that's, uh, well, for sure, for sure. We're all hurt. So, uh, wish me luck.

All right. So, uh, so that out of the way, let's get into this week's main event. Main event. Please tell us how to find business class awards. How do we do it? All right. That's what everybody wants to know, right? I mean, it's hard.

A, where do you even start? What do you do? How do you find them? B, do they even exist? C, what sites do you use? And when do you search? And how do you search? People wonder this all the time.

We get questions all the time about how to find these. All the time. All the time. We get questions all the time about how to find these. Preston Pyshke All the time. All the time. So I took a stab at sort of going back and recreating what I think is my process because it's not really a linear process, but here's roughly what it is. So I'm going to step through what my process is and Nick is going to jump in and add whatever he needs to add to say what he would do differently or whatever. So first of all, assuming I have a destination in mind, one of the first things I always do is I literally just get on Google Flights, select business class, assuming I want business class flights, and look at what the paid tickets are to where I want to go. I'm not so much looking at the

price. What I'm looking at is what airlines and routes pop up in that search because that tells me like, are there any nonstop routes to where I want to go? If so, I certainly want to look for awards on those first. Are there one-stop routes that would be preferable? Are there routes that involve carriers that I really want to fly? Like, oh, look, Emirates flies. Maybe I should be thinking about flying first class instead of business class. So that's the type of thing I use with Google flights is to, is to find, um, what are the good routes? Um, sometimes I expand that a little bit by, by having it go to near where I want to go. Um, so for example, let's say I want to, I know I want to fly to the Maldives. Um,

well, I don't necessarily have to leave from my home airport. So what I might do is look the other way on Google Flights. Just say, I want to look from Maldives to the United States and look at those routes and see what carriers are involved. Same thing I mentioned before. And that gives me, that's just the first step giving me idea what's out there. That's, I think that's all pretty interesting. It's not exactly the same as I do. So I don't typically look at the paid flights first. What I do actually is I look at the airport I want to go to. And so I start there and I Google just the name of whatever airport, Maldives airport or London Heathrow or whatever it might be. And I go to

the Wikipedia page because there's a section for airlines and destinations. So I click to the airlines and destinations, and then that tells me which airlines fly there because I have a good grasp on which airlines are one world and which airlines are star Alliance, et cetera. Then I can take a quick look at which airlines serve it and determine, okay, so which types of points are likely to make it easiest in order to get to that airport. So that's usually where I start. And lately I have been using flight connections very heavily also. So I know that's another tool that you got in the list to talk about because that's my next step. I want to know, okay, where are the non-stops from the airport I want to get to? Because that'll help me search the individual likes. Exactly. That's my next step.

Absolutely. So the Google flights thing I mentioned mentioned and Flight Connections, they're not necessarily in that order. Yeah. And they're not really all that different, honestly. Right, right. They're serving a similar purpose. Flight Connections is nice and visual. Basically, it shows you a map of the world.

You could click on any airport and it'll show you all the flights like that, that are out of that airport in or out. And so you could visually see, oh, look, there's three flights to the United States from this airport. Click to see which airlines actually service those routes. And that gives you a good start. Which days of the week. And that can be useful. Which days of the week too. Sometimes it might be something

that's like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or like five days or whatever. And that can make a difference because you might've searched the wrong date and not realized, oh, well, it's just because this airline doesn't fly on that day. I need to search a day sooner or a day later. So flight connections, I think can be really helpful in that regard, because when you first look at Google flights, you're just going to see whatever flights on the date you pick and you might not realize, oh, well, there's totally different airlines serving it the day before. Yep. Yep. And flight connections will also let you, at least with the paid version of it, filter by alliance. So let's say you know you want to use ANA miles, then you're going to want to filter to star

alliance and it'll show you just the flights that are star alliance i use that so much for building my round the world award to see what was available with star alliance i used it so much two years ago for the 40k to far away because i had united miles to use that are also star Alliance. It's been my go-to tool. If I seriously, if there's, if I had to pick one tool that, that I've spent more time on than anything else, it's probably flight connections. That's interesting. That's a really interesting point. And, you know, I think it's also interesting because I know you use the paid version and I

only use the free version and, and I probably should just pony up for the paid version because I just want to support them. And I probably should just pony up for the paid version because I just want to support them. And it's a great tool. But I use the free version because I typically narrow it down to which airline it is that I want to fly. And with the free tool,

you can narrow it down by airline. You cannot, with the free tool, narrow it down by alliance. You can search by individual airline or you can check, I think, multiple airlines. So you could scroll through the list and find all the Star Alliance carriers if you want. And that's where the Wikipedia page comes in handy because I can see, OK, these are the airlines that serve it. So I can check the boxes for the ones that are in Star Alliance that I know serve this airport.

I'm pretty sure you can only do one airline at a time on the free version. Might be. Possibly. I've only been looking at one at a time. I mean, it doesn't cost very much. Pony up for the annual subscription. I should. I should just for the support. Yeah. I totally should. It's worth it. Yeah. But I use that tool though, because I'm usually looking to see, okay, well, where can I connect dots on a more complex trip? And I'll get into that a little bit more in a few minutes. But you'll often find that, okay, maybe in a few minutes, but you know, you'll often find that, okay, maybe you can't find business class on some piece of it, but you maybe need to just

piece the trip together differently than what you're finding, but we'll get there in a few minutes. So I find that tool invaluable. Really, really great. All right. Yep. Yep. Okay. So now you've got some idea of what, what routes you might be interested in. You've got some idea of what airlines you're going to be wanting to look more into. And why do you want to have an idea about the airlines? Well, I mean, that's going to be critical in knowing which sites you can use to search for award space. And which types of miles you're going to use. And which miles you use. Absolutely. So the next step is if your dates are flexible for when you're going to fly either altogether or if specific segments are flexible, then I really like to use tools that give me a month at a time calendar view of searches. If you're really constrained to just a particular week,

there are some other options, but as far as things that'll give you a month or more across a wide range of airlines, there's only three that I can think of that are pretty good at that. The first is Seat Spy. Now Seat Spy is not actually good across a wide range of airlines. It has specific airlines that you can pick, but it'll show you a whole year of results at once for a given route, both outbound and return, all at once, pretty quickly. If you're looking for awards on one of the airlines that serves like United, it's amazing because there's no other way to get that kind of quick view overall. The problem is not, it only serves so many airlines and not all of the ones it has are actually useful. So for example, Air France. It shows, Air France has award availability all the time because they just charge whatever they want to charge.

And so what you really want is when do they have saver awards? And it's not filtering by that. So you get a calendar full of results that make it look like, oh, there's awards all the time. But then when you click on specific ones, Seatsbuy will say, yeah, this premium economy will cost you $319,000 one way. And then you realize, oh, all right, tool's not helpful there. But it doesn't do that for all the airlines. No, it's a useful tool for United for finding safer availability. It's for British Airways, for I don't know, those are the two.

Virgin Atlantic. Virgin Atlantic. Might be good for Etihad. I'm not sure what they all are. Yep. The next one I use for calendar search is American Airlines. So they have a pretty good tool for searching a month at a time through, you know, all their partners that are bookable online show up and, and there are some pretty great one world partner airlines that you could find on there like Qatar and, and Japan Airlines and, you know, you name it, there's, there's a bunch of them. And one nice thing about their search

is that it'll often dig up routes I hadn't thought of. So, because it's not going to limit itself to non-stops between the origin and destination you put in. It's going to look for other ways. And then you might find, oh, look, it's showing a business class flight, but it's like economy from here to there. But then, oh, business class from, let's say, I don't know, LA to, I don't know, to Tokyo, I guess, for Japan Airlines. And maybe you weren't even looking to go to Tokyo, but oh, okay, I can go from there to wherever I want with another award. So I find that really, really useful. And in the same vein, United. United will also give you a monthly calendar of results. Same thing, that'll find routes that you didn't think to look for.

United's a little more friendly in that you could go back to the advanced search and say, I want non-stops only. So you can force it to show what's available for a specific route for a whole month at a time. I don't think there's a way to do that with American. There's a non-stop track button. Oh, there is.

There is. There is. Yes. Yeah. I don't know what I was thinking. I've used it quite a bit. That's right. They both do that.

They both do that. So yeah, actually, Americans is more user-friendly. Yeah, I think Americans is more user-friendly because with United, the other things that are helpful to know is that once you get that calendar view and it's got a whole bunch of prices, but then when you're on a specific date, it's not as intuitive as it used to be to sort the business class awards by price. So there's like a little filter sort button somewhere you have to click and then a dropdown menu appears where you can pick to sort it by business class lowest price. But it's like the most complex dropdown menu ever for what used to be just a click the down arrow next to the business class

awards. So you do have to kind of hunt for it, but you can find it and then you can sort it by the lowest price business class awards. But you need to do that on each individual date you click on, whereas American makes that much easier to see. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a really good point. And one thing I should say about American, it used to be a big frustration that they included British Airways results in there because British Airways does offer a lot of award availability,

but they also charge outrageous fuel surcharges on those awards. And the nice thing is that their search results show you an estimate of the, of the taxes and fees. So if you see, Oh, look, there's, there's a flight for 70,000 miles, but it's like $800 in fees, then you'll know, Oh, well that's probably British Airways. I want to look at a different date. So that makes it much easier than it used to be. It does. And I got, I got to give American credit also in that I feel like they are very good at piecing

together, like Greg said, awards that are a little bit more complex automatically. Whereas you might have to hunt around a bit with other sites. I feel like they do a reasonably good job of finding, okay, is it going to be four stops? Fine. We'll find you a four stopper and it'll have a small leg in economy, but most of it's going to be in business. I don't know if there's a cutoff point here because I haven't run into the situations. Maybe you can help me. But I found often with United and with Air Canada, they'll price something as a business class award where one or two of the really long hauls are not in business class. And that's really frustrating because you look at Aeroplan and they'll list stuff as a business class award where 7% of your itinerary is in business class. And I don't feel like I've run into that with American

Airlines. I've found things where there were mixed cabin. There is a red warning that'll tell you that the class of service isn't available on all of the legs. But I haven't run into situations where that's been like the majority of the itinerary. Right, right. Yeah, I don't know off the top of my head. I will say, I think in last week's show, I claimed that United does a better job of that than Aeroplan. But then immediately after we recorded, I was doing some United searches and I came up with similar things where there was a very short hop, like let's say LA to San Francisco

that was business class and then flying around the world in economy. And it showed up as a business class award. It's ridiculous that they get away with charging for a business class award in that situation, in my opinion. It is. Yeah. Some people surely pay it and don't realize. There have to be people that pay it and don't realize that there's two little seats instead of one when you're excited because you found that great business class award. And I feel like that's one of the most deceiving sites for the search results being in mixed class. And just this morning, I discovered that it's even worse on mobile because there isn't that little icon with the two seats on mobile. It just looks like it's

business class. And I was like, no, there can't be all these business class seats to Australia. Like on the days that I'm looking, they can't be right. And it wasn't, it was like all economy class across the Pacific. And then, you know, like a little tiny hop within Australia and business class that was coming up as business class awards. And on the website, like you said, there's that little tiny icon that if you happen to know that that represents mixed cabin, then you know. And if not, it's not at all intuitive. And then that didn't exist on the mobile side. I couldn't believe it. I was like, oh, this is highway robbery trying to charge people business class prices for that. But anyway, so that's something to look out for. Now, those are definitely the good calendar tools

to use. But I want to mention along with this, that if you have a lot of Amex points, you should also probably look at the Aeroplan site. Now, it's not as good because you can't look at a month at a time. You're only going to see a week's worth of results. And it's really annoying because you can't click around the week's worth of results the way that you should be able to, or the way that you intuitively think you'll be able to. But the reason I say- That drives me nuts, by the way that you should be able to, or the way that you intuitively think you'll be able to. But the reason I say- That drives me nuts, by the way. Yeah. And I'll touch on that in a second also. But the reason why I say you want to go to the

Air Canada site is because Air Canada specifically has tons of partners that are not in the Star Alliance. So you're not going to see the results on United. And there are some routes and things you can do that you just couldn't do with your United miles. So you'll never see those results if you only search on United. So if Aeroplan is an option for you, then you should probably also search at Air Canada. At least once you narrow down a set of dates for your trip, you should be looking there because there's just so many partners that aren't in Star Alliance that are desirable, that you actually probably want to fly on. So it's worth looking at the Air Canada site for that.

Now, the things to be aware of on the Air Canada site are A, if you search, it'll show you a week of availability, like the prices for other days, but you can't click on any of those days if the day you land on has any availability. You can't click on any of the others. If the day you land on has no availability,

then you can click on one of the other dates that has availability. But once you've done that, you're not gonna be able to click around on any of the other dates. You're going to have to just redo the search every time. It's super annoying. So you're just going to have to get in the habit of modifying search up at the top each time you want to change dates, which is, again, super annoying, but that's the way it works. Just hit the modify search up at the top and put in a new date. So that's part number one. Part number two is the mixed cabin thing,

where you have a very short segment in business class. And most of the itineraries in business class, which unfortunately they show, like many of the others that we talked about. Most is an economy class. And that's not what you want, but they make it at least a little more visually easy to see whether or not you're going to want to touch one of those awards because it says mixed cabin in red when less than 50% of the itinerary is in business class and mixed cabin in black when more than 50% is in business class. So if you see a mixed cabin in red, you can almost always ignore it because it's not going to be enough in business class to make it worth paying the business class price. If it's in black, then you'll want to click on it or at least mouse over it. And it'll tell you the percentage once you mouse over it, the percentage that's in business class. And if it says 85 or 90% or something like that, which I've seen, then you know, okay, well, it's just this tiny little hop somewhere that's probably on a plane that doesn't even have business class. So that's probably not a big issue. And if you click on the price, then it'll show it'll expand and it'll show you which leg or legs are in economy class.

So that's a limitation to keep an eye on. But I think it's better. It's more user friendly than some of the other sites because you can immediately eliminate stuff as you scroll through. It'd be like, oh, it's red, the mixed cabin. I'm not interested. And keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's great to know. United search results also say mixed cabin. They do. In the box where the price is. So it's pretty clear. It is, but then you have to expand to find out, okay, well, how much- Find out how bad it is. That's true. Is this a horrible one or is this a good one? Whereas with Air Canada, you know the red ones are bad. So ignore those all together. Yep. Yep. And, and, uh, you know, Air Canada is also the best site for searching for, I think, Eddie Hyde award availability. It's, uh, not that easy on other sites necessarily. And, um, super easy on, on Air Canada site. Yep. Yep. All right. Um, so what if you, you know,

you're not looking for a calendar widewide set because you want to go on a specific day? What's your favorite tool for searching broadly for awards there? I've been using point.me the most because that's the one I started using. I should probably compare more with AwardLogic than I have been. So I'll let you talk about AwardLogic if you've been using it. I've mostly been using point.me because I find it to be a particularly good tool that alerts me to deals that I wouldn't have found otherwise. Often they'll find awards that I didn't think of or didn't realize I could book with these miles or those miles. So I find that to be a really good tool. It's not perfect. It definitely does miss some stuff. And I've picked up on that more. The

more I've been doing this award searching and the more I've looked at complex routes, I've picked up on situations that it has missed that I've found through other sites. So it's not 100% perfect, but it's very good. And it has saved me miles more than once already because it's found things that I didn't realize were possible. So that's what I typically do. It annoys me a little bit that you can only search one data at a time and that it's a little slow, but I sort it by price and walk away and do something else and come back in a minute or two and see what it came up with and that works.

Yeah. For me, I haven't used it very much. And part the reason is is uh you know i've been mostly doing star alliance and the united search tool is good enough you know it's not great it has but um but it's so much faster it's like infinitely faster than than uh point me is and i i've just been getting very frustrated by how slow it is and i know know they're working on that, trying to improve it. But award logic is probably often less accurate, but it's a lot faster. And so if I were to spend much time with one or the other, I would actually probably spend more time with award logic. But then when I find results, make sure to verify them in other systems.

You know, I think the reason you're leaning so heavily on United though, is because you're looking at around the world award. And so I think that makes sense because you're probably searching non-stops all the time. And that's typically, to be clear, that's typically the best way to piece together your complex international awards is to just look for those long hauls, like direct, non-stop, to be able to piece them together into something. However, the limitation there is that some programs have much more flexible routing rules than what United has. And so that's why I've been obviously using Aeroplan a lot because their routing rules are way more flexible than United's. So and the advantage of a tool like Point.me is that it is searching multiple programs.

So it will find those routings that are valid for Aeroplan, but not valid for United and recognize that and show that this is bookable with Aeroplan miles and not show it bookable with United Miles because it isn't. So I find that a tool that's complex, that searches a lot of different programs like that can be useful because it's aware of rules that I might not know on my own. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody out there doesn't know that you can route via either the Atlantic or Pacific to get to Asia with Aeroplan, but Point Dimey knows that for you, so you don't need to know whether or not you can. Yeah. Yeah. And those are good points. Plus, it has the ability to know when an award is available directly from an airline's own program and not from others. So, for example, an award search I did earlier today showed up a Turkish flight and I

was wondering why is it only showing me Turkish miles as the only way I could book it? And I realized, okay, because it's not available through their partners. And I confirmed that with a search on United. A downside is when I switched to a date where they did have availability, they didn't show LifeMiles as an option for booking it. But I went over to LifeMiles website. Sure enough, it came up easily. So, you know, it's a great tool, but it's just not perfect. And no tool like that is going to be perfect because it's just an impossible task to handle all airline programs and all possible award searches. It sure is. But yeah, that's a great point. And that's another thing to

like if you're the kind of person who doesn't only travel on saver awards. The nice thing about a tool like Point.me and I think AwardLogic may, I don't know if AwardLogic has the same capability, but the tool like Point.me at least can show you those non-saver awards also. So if you're willing to pony up the extra miles for a non-saver level award directly through that program, you can see those prices too and compare from one airline to another. And there are definitely people who do that. So that kind of tool can be useful. Well, to be clear, they're not always high priced awards. That's also true.

So like in this example, the Turkish price was very low. It's just that they only provide that award availability for their own members booking it in that case. No, that's a really good point. I wrote a post a while back about like some sweet spots I found. And the one that I really wanted to book, I'll let the cat out of the bag. And the one that I really wanted to book, I wanted to start in Asia and fly to Mongolia via Istanbul. So that was my plan because they fly to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia and they fly a bunch of places in Asia. It was 30,000 miles in business class for almost 30 hours of flying

to do that route. Unfortunately, the surcharges were like 320 bucks, so I couldn't do it. But those legs were only available booking through Turkish. They were available on the Turkish website, but not through any other Star Alliance carriers. Yep. Because that made it impossible to book without the surcharges. And I had to give that plan up. Gotcha. All right.

Well, I'm very much looking forward to seeing what you do, you know, put together here. We'll see. It's going to be, it's going to be pretty exciting. Hopefully everybody, I mean, I can't wait to see what everybody does. So yeah. I'll tell you what, between our conversation last week on the podcast and your post about how to build these like sort of round the world type of aeroplane awards, you know, I'm thoroughly convinced that that has got to be the best program for flying around the world, you know, or, or very long distances. Anyway, it just has so much flexibility and so many great, uh, airlines that are, you know, part of their alliance plus their partnerships is just unbeatable. It is, it is. And the point that I didn't make clearly enough

in the posts that I wrote about our plan this week is that you could double what I did. And so for 210 or 220,000 miles, which is a very reasonable price, you could do the whole thing over again or choose an entirely different route to get back home. And it can be similarly complex. So that's where we're talking about. You can make your own round the world there because those routing rules are so flexible that you can fly in one direction more than the distance entirely around the world, almost, or very close to the distance around the world. So I don't know one way. So it's pretty wild. It's a beautiful thing. Yeah. All right.

All right. So what if you know what airline you want to fly and you're trying to find the word availability on that specific airline? What, what tools do you use for that? I, I, maybe I'm, I'm lost here. You tell me, I don't, I don't feel like I have the right answer. So you're talking about like Singapore and finding like Singapore available to give me an example. So, well, so like United, for example, suppose you, you, you want to fly United. They've got a, they've got a great route. You can of course use United's own website. Downside is it'll show you, it'll show you awards no matter what, even if they're not available to their partners, it's not available to book with ANA miles or airplane miles.

For United specifically and for a few others, which we mentioned before, I really love how Seats by works. Let you pick a from and to airport and we'll find all availability for a whole year at once. Another one that I really like is Expert Flyer. So Expert Flyer has a whole lot of airlines that it supports. And when you run searches, you have to pick a from and to, and you have to pick a specific airline to search, but then you can search for business class awards. And what's great about Expert Flyer, which Seatsby doesn't do, is it'll search for connections as well. It won't just search that nonstop route. So with one click, you'll be able to see across seven days time, is there any award availability on, you know, on this airline for this from and to, it'll also let you set up alerts. Actually, both of these programs will let you set up alerts

so that if there's not availability, when you want it, you can set up alerts and they'll email you when there is availability. And I think that's huge because availability does come and go. And so assuming that, you know, because you ran a search once and didn't come up with anything, assuming that that's the end of the game for that search is a wrong assumption. It definitely is because it changes day by day. Just as last week, I've been searching stuff over and over again and each day a little something changes. So that's a good point. Also, I'll say that when you know which airline you want to fly, another thing, depending on what matters more to you, getting directly to

your destination matters the most, then this next tip won't help you. But if flying on a specific airline or a specific type of product matters to you, then the other thing is to use flight connections to look at other airports that serve the sort of area that you want to go to. And so like an example that comes to mind is you want to use American Airlines miles to fly on Qatar Airways. So you go to flight connections and you put in the Doha airport because, you know, wherever you're going to go, it's going to connect through Doha and see, OK, where do they fly in the area I want to go to? I want to go to Europe. So where do they fly in Europe? They fly all over the place in Europe. So you can look at that and say, okay, well, I really want to go to Amsterdam, but you know what? I can get to Brussels. I'm making that up. I have no idea if they fly to Brussels. And I can get from Brussels to Amsterdam really easily. So, all right, I'm going to also

look for awards to Brussels. So you may need to broaden your search. And that's a tip in general, that flexibility is key in finding awards. If you're having a hard time finding awards, part of the problem may be a lack of flexibility. You have to be willing to fly on different days of the week sometimes or to different airports, maybe build an extra stop in a place that you didn't expect to. And that's where using these tools to search all of those individual pieces comes into play because sometimes you'll find stuff that the engines won't put together automatically. And certainly with the aeroplan examples that I gave this week, if you took the origin of the trip that I'm going to take in the destination and pop that into the search, the route that I'm

taking would never come up. It's because I've searched the individual legs that I wanted to fly and found, okay, this is available, that's available, and the other thing's available. And I know with Aeroplan, they will let me call and put those together, even though they don't show up together on the website. And so some knowledge about when and where you can do that is also helpful. And I don't know the secret sauce in terms of getting that knowledge. But if you're having trouble finding it and you have the flexibility for around the world, for instance, then you need to also look at some of the individual legs.

And one other quick example there is if you're going to connect somewhere, let's say you wanted to fly from Vienna to what was the example I used in the post, Vienna to Bali, right? And so you just pop in Vienna to Bali, it's going to show you some options. But if you see the first flight is from Vienna to Delhi, India, you may want to search just from Delhi to Bali because you may get more results on that route than you did from Vienna to Bali. And you may still be able to piece them together by calling Aeroplan. And in fact, I found that type of thing to be the case quite often. Yep.

Yep. Absolutely. Great point. And I need to mention that taking notes as you're doing this is so important, you know, write a note down which, which segments you found award availability in, even if you, you don't think at the moment that you found them, that you're likely to use that segment, just note it down. Cause it might come up later and they'd be like, oh yeah, wait, I can route through Delhi or whatever. Note down if it's at all likely that you're going to be using that segment, note down

the date and the times of departure and arrival because that's important too. I lied earlier when I said I use flight connections more than any other tool. What I use more than any other tool is Google Sheets because I keep all of these search results that are remotely possible in the spreadsheets. And then I piece them all together to try to find a combination that works. And when we talk about piecing them together, by the way, know that most programs will allow a layover of up to 24 hours. Now, some programs will allow stopovers that are longer than that in certain situations,

but almost all programs will allow you to have a layover of up to 24 hours on an international award. And the search tool will not always show you all of those options because maybe there's a connection available that only has a five or six hour layover. And so maybe that's what they show you. And perhaps that connection connects to an economy class flight instead of a business class flight. But really, 23 hours later, there is a business class award. And again, the search tool might not automatically show you that unless you search each of those legs separately, like the Vienna to Delhi, and then the Delhi to wherever you're kind of Singapore, let's say, and then the Singapore to Bali kind of a thing. It may not find those 23-hour connections that you may be willing to take. And maybe you aren't willing to take those, but without searching, you won't know what's possible. Right, right. One added complexity

during this day and time is that not all countries are open to visitors. And if you're going to do a stopover or even an overnight layover and you want to leave the airport, you better make sure that it's okay to do that. And that really complicated some of my plans because I'd find availability into a particular airport, but not availability out the same day. And I didn't really want to sleep on an airport bench overnight. Right. Right. Well, and searching stuff on ANA, I've seen a lot of stuff that connects between Narita and Haneda. And I don't think you can do that right now. I don't think it's possible. Right. Yeah. No, that's a great point is, is that, you know, you'll get that search result that says, you know, different airports or whatever, because it's a flight like with a layover in Tokyo, but not, you know, but it's going onward.

But then, oh, well, one flight flew into Haneda, the other one out of Narita. I am not allowed to go out of one and into the other on that, you know, because of the COVID requirements right now. Yeah, yeah. So that's something to be aware of. I, that's another thing I have done with every destination I've looked at is what are the COVID entry requirements? Not only the places I intend to enter, but even places where I intend to have a layover, just in case there's a misconnection, there's a canceled flight, a delayed flight. I want to know, can I enter and get a hotel and go somewhere or not? And what's the process and what's the cost, et cetera. So, so I want to know all of those things before the trip

happens. So it's worth looking into that. Now, you know, don't drive yourself too crazy if your trip is six months away, because goodness knows it might all change between now and then. But if your trip is relatively near term, you need to look at those things. Yeah. Let me ask you, have you found a site that makes it easy to look that up for each country and makes it simple to understand? No, I haven't, but I haven't looked for it either. And I bet that when I planned our Guck trip, I found that like the Emirates site, for instance, was really good at handling that for a lot of destinations. I know VeriFly, the app had that for a lot of destinations. I know Verify, the app had information for a lot of destinations in there, but I don't know if they have everything.

So no, I don't know if any readers have a great tool for checking on that, where, you know, it's updated and current information that would be awesome to know and helpful for everyone. So what really would, yeah, please do, please do. Because it's been a little frustrating because a Google search brings up all kinds of things. Some are six months old and some are like the country's own website that is almost unintelligible the way the rules are written. So just want a simple thing that says, yeah, yeah, you're good. I just want to say, okay, Google, what are the requirements and get like the current requirements. But that's a really big frustration for me that I have known because I knew that the

response it gave me was out of date. I'd be like, okay, no. Like for instance, when I was going to London recently, I did an okay Google to ask what requirements, if any, and it said that you needed a test and to be vaccinated. And I was like, no, I know that's not true anymore. So you have to do a lot of research. It'd be really nice if there was one site for that. For a while, Google was showing it right in their search results. They had a little box that was like the COVID rules, but I'm betting it was too hard for them to keep that up for the whole world. So they just gave up and took it away.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Last piece. Let's say you find an award and you just want to know what's the best award price you can get to book. Which miles should I use? I've got transferable points.

What should I transfer to book? Do you have a favorite tool for that? Frequentmiler.com. No, I mean, I feel like Point.me does a good job with that. And I assume AwardLogic does the same in terms of showing you the different options for booking that specific route and that specific flight, because it will show you the first price it shows you is the lowest, but then it'll also say, you know, plus 16 other options. And you click to expand and it'll show you which points you can use, which points you can transfer from to which airline programs and what the prices are through those various airline programs. So I think it's a really useful tool for that. Also, of course, you could just manually search for award charts in just about any airline program.

If you know it's a Star Alliance award, you can just type into Google LifeMiles award chart, ANA award chart, blah, blah, blah. That's a little slow. I would rather pay the $5 for the 24-hour pass for Point.me is $5 or the $20 even for a month for AwardLogic, I think it is. So I'd rather pay for that and let somebody else show me the price quickly. Yeah. No, I agree. agree point me is a great tool for that um it does miss some possibilities um as to does anything i also like to supplement with a tool called award hacker it's a free tool it'll show you um how many miles a particular route will cost in different programs and um it won't tell you things like what would the award fees be, which is something PointMe will tell you, but it'd be really useful. It's really useful because if

it comes up with things that PointMe didn't show you, then you can look into it more to see, oh, what would LifeMiles really charge for this, for example. But do look into it more because I think it still has Aeroplan's old award chart, which has changed like more than two years at this point. So at least last I looked, it was still showing AeroPlan's pricing from like two years ago before they changed the chart. So if it's that out of date on one of the programs, I have to imagine that other programs are out of date also. So you do need to probably double check. Absolutely. Yeah. It's just one more piece of information that, yeah, there's no single source that's going to be correct about everything, unfortunately.

But hopefully this sort of grab bag of things that we talked about is enough to get you started and to find these elusive business class awards because, you know, all three of us have apparently done it for, um, for our challenge coming up in September and this, despite the fact that people have been saying that, you know, awards are non-existent this summer, including into, into September. So, um, they're out there, uh, not saying it's easy, not the summer, but, uh, if you're looking a little further out, it's definitely doable. And a point that is worth belaboring one more time is to search for those long haul flights individually. If you live in, let's say, Phoenix, somebody recently wrote that lived in Phoenix and was saying they were having trouble and wondering how to search for these awards. I don't know if there are any big international awards departing Phoenix, but I don't know of any off the top of my head. So you're not going to don't bother.

Don't waste your time searching from Phoenix, search from LA, search from San Francisco, search from Salt Lake city, places that you can get to easily from Phoenix, probably search from Dallas, the places that are going to serve those long haul markets, and then worry about how you're going to get from Phoenix to Dallas or LA or Salt Lake city later on. That's something you can figure out at the end because that flight won't matter. Like if that's not available in business class, no big deal. You're going to spend an hour in economy or whatever. So search for the long haul routes first. Yeah. Yeah. Great, great advice. All right. All right. So that brings us to today's main event to the question of the week. And this week's question of the week is a lighthearted, easy, simple question of the week, but it's a

good one. I liked it. I saw it come in last night. So Jan asked in our Frequent Miler Insiders, Jan said, darn, I missed another live Ask Us Anything. Do they happen on the second Wednesday of every month at 9 p.m.? Greg, what's the deal? Like we didn't Ask Us Anything live this week. We've been doing this like monthly. What's going on? How does somebody know when these things are going to happen? That's a great question. So just last night, we decided to switch the schedule. So Jan was right. We were doing it on the second Wednesday of every month, except for months where we didn't do it. The second Wednesday of the month, which is like a bunch of the months this year. Our new plan is to do the first Wednesday of every month, because that's easier to remember. We're going to continue,

at least for now, doing it through our Frequent Miler Insiders group on Facebook. So make sure you have joined that Facebook group if you haven't already. And we're going to create a event, like a recurring event on there that shows the date and time of these things. And that might help as well. Now that we changed the format last night. So in the past, Ask Us Anything has been just me and Nick talking with Kerry or Stephen behind the scenes, kind of feeding us questions secretly. Questions posed by readers, of course, that are- That's right. That's right.

Questions posed by readers live while we're online. And what we decided to do was, no, let's make it a team event. Everybody on the team who's available should show up and be a box on the screen and be available to answer questions. Carrie is now asking us the questions verbally. So she'll, she reads them, uh, from the audience and then, uh, ask them out loud. And, and then we, then whoever is best equipped to answer it or best equipped to say, I don't know, this is the one who answers it. And one nice thing about that is if Nick or I are not available a particular month, it's okay. We can still do it with the rest of the team. So

we have more flexibility now, I think, going forward to keep these up to date and on schedule. On schedule on the first Wednesday of every month. I think that makes a lot of sense. And so if you are free the first Wednesday of the month, I think that makes a lot of sense. And so, you know, if you are free the first Wednesday of the month, set a calendar reminder in your phone. First Wednesday every month, 9 p.m. Eastern time, that is, of course, to join us in our Facebook group

because it's fun. It's fun to answer questions and ask questions. So come on out. Exactly. All right. So that brings us to the end of today's episode. So if you've enjoyed what you've been listening to and you'd like to get our posts in your email inbox each day,

you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social media. We're on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. We have our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, as Greg has mentioned. So those are all ways that you can connect with us. And then, of course, if you have feedback or a question, et cetera,

you can email that to mailbag at frequent miler.com. Thank you very much. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye everybody.