Frequent Miler on the Air - Predicting the Sapphire Business Card | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep310 | 6-13-25

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

*Our apologies for the occasional connection issues with Nick's audio*What the heck does "Mattress Cycling the Hyatt Numbers" mean? We'll find out in today's episode. We'll also talk about using online chat with Hyatt to get your way, and we'll predict the details of the new Chase Sapphire Business card.(01:25) - Did we just beat a Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast?Listen to Tim's origin story episode here.(02:51) - You can now move your Chase credit lines between cards online(05:26) - Capital One Spark Cash: $1500 after $15K in 3 months. $95 annual fee waived 1st year. 2% on all spend(07:52) - Rakuten closing accounts for too many "ineligible" orders.Read more about Rakuten account shutdown here.(11:28) - New Hyatt promo is offering up to 16k bonus points on stays at Hyatt Place, Hyatt House & Hyatt StudiosRead more about the Hyatt promo here.(16:01) - How to turn this mattress run into a mattress cycle...(19:07) - Hyatt buys some all-inclusive group that included properties in a number of other ecosystems (Hilton, IHG, Wyndham). But all award reservations were cancelled with no notice -- not honoring awards booked through other programs. Some people really got a raw deal here, being cancelled on a few days' notice with no alternative accommodation offered(23:37) - JetBlue restricting access to Mint for partner programs(26:17) - Updated RRV process(29:55) - Highlights from Nick's 2.5-week trip to Europe...Main Event: Predicting the Sapphire Business Card(39:28) - What we know for certain: nothing beyond "coming this Summer"(41:33) - What we think we know about the refreshed consumer Sapphire ReserveRead more about our predictions for the new consumer card here.(51:23) - Questions about the business card...(1:06:43) - If our predictions are correct...would this card still be worth it?(1:09:55) - We've heard you talk about Capital One miles and Major League Baseball tickets. Can you use cash to get the same tickets?Read more about this opportunity here.Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's frequent miler on the air, we'll talk mattress cycling the Hyatt numbers. Yeah, you heard that right. We'll talk about how online chat with Hyatt can help you get your way when the phone doesn't necessarily work. And we will predict the new Sapphire business card. What'll it be? What'll it be all about? We'll make our predictions.

Frequent Mylar on the air starts now. Today's main event predicting the Sapphire business card. As we're recording this, there are rumors about the Sapphire Reserve consumer card that are really detailed about how it's going to be changed. And it's possible by the time that you listen to this, you know, there might be some of that information confirmed. But while we know a lot about what's expected there with the Sapphire Reserve consumer card. We also know a business card is coming a Sapphire business card and very little is known about that. We're going to make our best guesses as to what exactly is coming. We will see exciting times and hopefully again, like Greg said, by the time you're listening

to this, maybe some of the information will be confirmed one way or another. So don't forget to check out the blog frequentmiler.com for the latest information. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this show. This episode, give us a thumbs up, leave us some feedback and some stars. We appreciate all of that. Let's drag out this week's giant mail back today's giant mail comes from Kathy. Kathy says, if there was ever any doubt what my desert island last meal gun to head podcast would be, we have a winner.

Recently I had been eagerly awaiting the season 2 finale drop of the Pulitzer Prize winning podcast Suave. Nothing to do with our hobby but highly recommend if you like narrative podcasts. And I saw that it had appeared in my app right at the perfect dinner preparation podcast listening time. But so had the coffee break on Tim's origin story. That's the frequent miler on the air coffee break. So I had I had to listen to the coffee break first.

Pulitzer schmulitzer. Love it, Kathy. Glad, glad that you're making good choices in life thank you very much for that but uh no seriously I'm glad you're enjoying the show we enjoy making it so we always love hearing from people that are enjoying it so that's awesome I love it glad that we were part of your dinner preparation I hope it was extra delicious yes I agree and we had a lot of fun in particular making that episode it was fun hearing from Tim about how he got into points and miles in the first place.

We we hadn't really even with all the time we've hung out with him, gotten all that information before. So you heard it first on on that coffee break. Very good. All right, let's talk about this week's card news. First up in card news, you can now move your Chase credit lines between your cards online. And I think this may not have been available for everyone,

but at least some people anyway, when they log in to their Chase account, can move credit limit between cards. Now it's long been possible to do that via secure message by sending a secure message and just asking a representative to move, say, five or six or or ten thousand dollars or whatever it might be from one credit card to another but then you have to wait for a while for somebody to read it and get back to you and do it now you can handle it yourself instantly so that's an awesome little upgrade. Chase card has a minimum required amount of credit that it needs to have. Like I think the Sapphire preferred, for example, needs to have $5,000 maybe of credit on it.

I'm not sure that's right, but just as an example. So if you had like 10,000 in that example, you'd only be able to move 5,000 to another card. I did it online just the other day. The thing that I noticed for myself, it may be that they're just slowly rolling this out, but when you go in to manage your card and you look for that option,

I was only seeing that option on some cards and not others. But when I clicked in to manage my credit, it then had a dropdown. Like I could pick from any eligible card where I wanna move credit from and to. So as long as you could find it available somewhere, you should be able to then get to all of the cards that your Chase is allowing you to move credit from.

And I'm not sure how they decide which ones are allowed and which aren't, but I think that's awesome. Maybe you'll just do that by yourself right then. That's gonna come in handy whenever we have, specific like really big purchases to make. And just as an example, end of year, I remember one time I had decided I needed to spend big on my Bonvoy boundless card in order to get a few more elite nights from Marriott so that I could reach the 75 night threshold and to be able to just

Instantly increase credit when you need it and then drop it back down afterwards. It was great. Yeah, that's awesome That's awesome keep in mind that you'll only be able to move credit line from one consumer card to another consumer card or one business card to another business card. Can't move back and forth between business and consumer. And that's pretty standard with most of the banks. All right. Next up, Capital One Spark Cash is out with a new welcome offer.

What's up with that? Yeah, nice offer on the Spark Cash Business Card. You got $1,500 in cash back after $15,000 in spend in three months. So it's a hefty spend amount. But the $95 annual fee is waived first year on this card. And like several of Capital One's cards, you earn 2x on all spend, so 2% back on all spend with this card.

So after you've spent the $15,000 to meet the minimum spend, you'll have $1,800 in cash back, which if you have a miles earning card in your family, you can move that cash back to the miles earning card and that's like getting 180,000 miles with that one offer. So that's pretty good. Yeah, it is. It's obviously it's a high spending requirement, but the business platinum spending requirement from Amex and similar welcome offer really, because when you look at the total number of points, business platinum's varied some so there's

been different offers at different times but we've seen 150k quite a bit on 15k spend and that card most purchases only earn 1x so you know most people are only gonna end up with about 165k after the spending requirement on the Amex business platinum whereas with this one you end up with potentially a few more miles and the ability to redeem it for cash back if you prefer at one cent per point easily. So yeah, I like that it gives you options anyway. We spend more on my wife's Capital One Spark cash card than we do on her Venture X card because we can always move the cash back to miles later if we want miles.

Keeping them as cash back gives us the option for easy cash if we want to redeem that for cash. Now, obviously, if you've got a Capital One miles card, you could just make a travel purchase and then erase it at one cent per mile. So it's not like you couldn't achieve something similar, but sometimes you just need or want cash for one reason or another. So I prefer the flexibility of having either.

So now whether or not that makes sense for everybody, that's going to vary wildly, especially for $95 a year for a card that earns 2% back. You can get a consumer card with no annual fee that earns 2% back. So it kind of depends on your use case and business needs. So otherwise, though, not a bad offer, not a bad offer, considering that it's a decent card. All right, let's talk about what crazy thing, what crazy thing did Rakuten do this week? Rakuten, of course, popular shopping portal offers cash back or the

opportunity to earn American Express membership rewards points. And so we love it. A lot of people love it because instead of earning 10% cash back, you can be earning, for example, 10 membership rewards points per dollar spent. And Rakuten often has good payouts and they're very reliable. It tends to be one of the portals that very reliably tracks your purchases and quite quickly at that. So we've talked a lot about it and how much we like it over the last few years.

However, there's been a recent spree of Rakuten closing accounts and it's been really weird and it's even hit us at the frequent Mylar team. Tim's account got shut down for too many, quote, ineligible orders, which as it turned out, were orders he had placed through Dell. The Dell had ultimately canceled. And so Rakuten had shut down his account for too many that Dell marked ineligible. But of course, it was marked ineligible because they didn't ship the orders.

And so he went back and forth with Rakuten and eventually did get his account reinstated. Different situation but my account also got suspended. I wasn't able to log in. I had to reach out to support and they were curious about my referrals because we include our referral links and posts and they wanted to know how I was picking up referrals. And once you know we talked that out then they reinstated my account and just reminded me that, excuse me, you can't post referrals on like anonymous sites like Reddit or something like that.

I don't know why. I didn't have like, I have far more referrals than probably most people listening to this, but I didn't have some wild number of referrals. Yeah, I mean, you'd probably be surprised that my account got shut down if you knew how many, I can't tell you off the top of my head how many it was, but it was like 10 or 20 referrals I had had recently.

It wasn't like I had hundreds and thousands of referrals. It was a much smaller amount than I might have thought. I don't know what was up with that. But anyway, there were other people that also reported getting their Rakuten accounts shut down. So that's kind of weird and disconcerting. And I don't know what's up with that because that kind of came out of nowhere. That wasn't something that I ever remember being a recurring issue with

Rakuten, so a little odd there. Yeah, it's unfortunate. I mean, I have no doubt that they need to police things because, uh, they have very generous refer a friend offers, uh, frequently. And so I'm sure a lot of people are creating fake accounts and referring themselves basically over and over through a chain and getting all that cash back. And so when they suspect something foul like that is going on, totally makes sense to shut down people.

But in these cases, these are accounts that have been going for years. And there hasn't been any fraudulent activity. So whatever their, you know, fraud detector dial is set to 11 and they need to dial it back a little bit. Yeah, well, that's the thing because it's not like I had when I say 10 or 20, that probably sounds like a lot of referrals to most people, but I've had that pattern for years of, you know, somewhere around that many referrals.

It's not like it was out of the blue so yeah it's just weird but anyway yeah so something to keep in mind be aware of and if you're placing orders you know if you're doing something placing a lot of orders Dell for instance tends to cancel orders when people place too many in a short period of time and so if you think that there's a chance that Dell is going to cancel your order if you have a reasonable reason to suspect that now if you're listening to this and this is all news to you probably not a problem for you but if you got a reasonable expectation that your orders are going to get cancelled you might want to tread lightly on Rakuten because it seems like that algorithm like Greg said has turned

higher than it ever had been so there you go all right on to mattress running no mattress cycling the numbers this week so mattress cycling cycling, what's that about? All right, so Hyatt is out with a promo that where they're offering up to 16,000 bonus points on stays. So we're going to talk about how that can be used for mattress running, but then we're going to throw in some cycling and show how we can make it even better. Let's start with the mattress running part of all this. The new promo is that as long as you register and stay by September 7th at a Hyatt Place, Hyatt House, or Hyatt Studios, you'll get bonus points if you stay three nights, five nights, or eight nights.

The amount of bonus points improve as you do more nights. So let's just focus on the eight nights. If you stay eight nights, you'll earn 16,000 bonus points total. So that's 2,000 bonus points for every night that you stay if you do exactly eight nights. So if you think about this from a mattress run point of view, and again, for people who aren't familiar with mattress runs, it's where you book a hotel because you want to earn points or more often you want to earn elite status with the hotel. And so the cheaper you can do your stays in order to earn nights that are required for elite status, the better. In this case, required for lead status, the better. In this case, you're getting 2,000 bonus points per night

for eight nights at Hyatt's. If you could find category one off-peak hotels that are during the promotion period, then you could book those for 3,00 Hyatt points per night and you'd be getting back 2000 Hyatt points per night. Again, if you do exactly eight of these. So for a total of 1500 points per night is your cost to mattress run there. You can make it a little bit better depending on where you are in the elite status hunt because at 20 and 30 milestone at 20 and 30 nights Hyatt offers milestone rewards you know once you've spent 20

or again at 30 nights within a calendar year at Hyatt hotels they order offer milestone rewards and one of the options at each of those levels is what's called a 2K next day award, which awards 2000 bonus points after your next day at certain brands. But those brands include Hyatt Place, Hyatt House and Hyatt Studios. So you can get about, let's say up to 4,000 more points because of that.

So that's another what 500 points per night back. So let me temporarily stop there and just ask Nick just based on what you just heard. Is that mattress run worthy? I mean, it depends on which how close is that going to get you to 40 nights is really is that going to make the difference between getting to at least 40 nights for the year and if it is and I know Greg was just talking about 20 and 30 nights, but I'm saying if you mattress run an extra eight nights now or 10 nights or whatever it might be. And that by the end of the year is going to be what puts you over the top for 40. Then, yeah, I think so, because your net cost per night is really low. And the benefits at 40 include a couple of guest of honor awards or at least a guest of honor award.

And that to me is really valuable. It would give globalist benefits for a stay sometime next year. So if you value that anyway, yes, then I think it may end a sweet upgrade award. You're free and sweet upgrade. That's right. That's right. So and both of those can be really valuable. So if it's going to make a difference and getting to 40 or 50 or 60, all of those, those milestone levels with Hyatt have enough things that actually really only gets better as you

get to 60. If it's going to make the difference, I'm getting to 60 nights. Then yeah, I think it's definitely worth it. But if it's not going to make a difference, if you're not going to hit at least 40, if you're only going to get to 30, then I don't know, I'm much less. I don't think so. If you're only going to get to 30. Yeah, I agree with that. And that I think is in general true with Hyatt promotions that, I mean, you'd have to be doing crazy well with a mattress run to make it worth getting to the 30 night level. Because there's just not many benefits at that level.

And so, yeah, I totally agree with that. All right, let's change this to mattress cycling now. We've talked before about how Hyatt offers 100 bonus points per day that you stay in a participating hotel and use their Peloton machine for at least 20 minutes. Well, currently they are offering 500 points per cycle rather than a 100 as a promotion through August 5th. And they also expanded how many properties are participating.

And there, I looked briefly and there are plenty of Hyatt place type of hotels participating. So with 500 per night, I mean, per workout, and you could do up to 10 workouts per month, that means you could get 500 for every one of these eight nights that you're doing for this mattress run. So that's another 500 back if you just sweat a little bit each day. So now we're down to a thousand points per night of cost, not even counting whether or not you get those two case next day awards,

which would bring it down to as few as 500 points per night for this whole mattress run cycle run thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I don't know. Cause you end up needing 10 nights, which overshoots the promo. So I don't like to get from 20 to 30. So yeah, I mean, you're accounting for that sort of messier in terms of how much it costs per night, because if you're going to hit both the 20 and 30 night things, then you'd have to be at 19 nights now. So you'd be spending 11 nights during the promotion, but only earning the 16,000 points for based on the eight nights. You know what I'm saying? You're paying for three more nights.

Like if you're at 19 now to get both the 20 night milestone benefit and the 30 night milestone benefit, you're going to need 11 nights. Oh, well, not really. If you're already over to already, you might've already earned the first, the first one milestone benefit. And you know, that's good for six months or something. And, um, 90 days, but yes. Well, you have to pick it.

You have to pick it within 90 days, but then yes, maybe it is valid for six months after that, yes. Yeah, so you could have it for almost, what, three quarters of a year since you earned the 20. So it's possible you've already earned both actually, theoretically, before you started all this. Anyway, so. All right, true. Yeah.

Yeah, a few. I mean, then it's great. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a great deal. If you value Hyatt Elite Nights, it's a great Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a great deal If you value Hyatt elite Knights, it's great deal You know easy easy breezy if it's gonna make a difference if you're already gonna get to 60 anyway, then it's not worth it I could points but if you're you know, I say 60 I guess even after 60 You could earn another sweet upgrade every 10 nights or 10,000 points, right? So I guess

Depending on you're gonna earn, it is worth it for the right milestones. I would not be doing it just to earn the 20 or 30 night milestones, but if you're going after 40, 50, 60, 70, then by all means, mattress run this one. All right, very good. All right, let's talk about being bonvoyed,

this week being bonvoyed by World of Hyatt. So while we just talked about all the reasons to mattress run the current World of Hyatt promotion, we've also got some bad news and it's not really Hyatt's fault necessarily here. But what happened was Hyatt closed the deal to buy Plyer Resorts, which is a company that owns a whole bunch of all-inclusives around the Caribbean. And so they closed that deal just a couple of days ago before we published this podcast. And those properties that Ply owns, so if you're not familiar with the hotel industry, generally speaking, some sort of an ownership group owns a hotel and then they contract

out the management with one of these major chains. So one ownership group might have properties in several different chains. And that's what's going on here. So Playa had some popular properties like the Hilton Rose Hall, uh, the Hilton La Romana, the Wyndham ultra Punta Cana, Wyndham ultra Samana and Dominican Republic. Uh, there's a Kimpton, I think, Kimpton trace Rio somewhere in Mexico. So they had properties in a number of different chains, Hilton, Wyndham, Hyatt,

or no, I had rather Hilton, Wyndham, IHG. And what happened was they closed the deal in the middle of this week and immediately canceled all existing award bookings for people that had booked through one of those other programs. So if you had a booking with your Hilton points or your Windom points or your IHG points at one of these properties that just got sold to Hyatt, it got canceled with like no notice. There are people, there was somebody on Reddit that's checking in for their honeymoon this weekend and their stages got canceled. No remedy, no reaccommodation, nothing.

So yeah, that really stinks that apparently, I mean, I put it on the ownership group because obviously the ownership group made the decision here because hi, it's probably not going to reimburse them for those existing stays. And they're probably not going to get reimbursed by Hilton or Wyndham. They at least didn't negotiate that out. And so they decided to just not honor any of those stays. And that's, to me, that's crazy. That is crazy. I mean, that shouldn't even be legal. I wouldn't think, you know, you have this, yeah, you have this booking that says you're confirmed and

this room and wow, wow, that's, yeah, that's awful.. Yeah, so it is it is awful. And you know, along those lines, when you said that I was recently looking into this because of you may have seen what happened at La Meridia in Maldives, they had offered a great rate. And then they emailed out people who had reservations got a week or two ago, and basically said, hey, you need to write us back within 24 hours with your flight information and the names of the people in the room, or we're going to cancel your

reservation. And it certainly felt like they were trying to just cancel You know go back on this great rate that they'd offered months ago out of the middle of nowhere Like an email out of the blue in the middle of you know, three months later So and then when I was doing research about that situation I did come across a comment somewhere from someone who said they had something like what's happening with this Hyatt Playa thing a while back at a property somewhere in Mexico, and they just emailed the property and said, is this legal? Does this violate any of the local consumer protection laws in whatever country it was? And they said the property never wrote back and honored the reservation. So I don't know, you know, who knows?

I don't know what protections exist, but maybe some do in some of these countries and you won't know if you don't push back and try. So, uh, you know, I, I wouldn't have a ton of faith, but at the same time, who knows, cause it does seem nutty that people have flights and everything else booked. And again, like this happened on, I think think June 11th middle of the week on Wednesday overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday and people checking in like a couple of days later had their reservations cancelled just seems crazy so yeah unfortunate yeah yeah and at the very least they should be booking you somewhere else it's kind of like when you get walked you know so so you've made a reservation at hotel and the hotel ends up being sold out or for whatever reason then

They don't have room for you. They will usually put you up somewhere else and and pay for it and Yeah, several people reported Reimburse whatever you paid for the yep. Yep And several people report reaching out to both individual properties and Hilton specifically and being told sorry nothing we can do We'll give you there actually one per a couple wheels that they got ten or fifteen thousand points in compensation from Hilton but of course that Pails in comparison to what it's gonna cost you to book a last-minute hotel somewhere else to to accommodate the flight, right?

Yeah, yeah All right, so that stinks but JetBlue is also getting in the act of bonvoying us. Yeah. So JetBlue is restricting access to Mint seats, Mint award space to partner programs. So we talked a bunch on the show over the last year or two about how you could book JetBlue Mint through Qatar Airways Avios. And often availability was quite good. I mean, you'd sometimes see five, six, eight, nine seats available and very frequently at least a couple anyway. So that was great for a while. You could book through Qatar Airways Avios or Etihad Guest but over the last month or so

they have basically gotten rid of almost all mint award space that was available to Qatar and Etihad Guest. This is not entirely surprising because they are going to be launching this partnership with United in the very near future. And I had predicted that award availability would probably largely dry up when that happened. But I think what really happened here is that JetBlue was using a cash fair inventory bucket to populate awards.

And so the short version of the story is it was I fairs if you had looked at ITA matrix for the fair class I if there were seats available with cash in that fair bucket then they would typically be available to be booked with miles through Qatar Airways obvious or a tad guest and that probably doesn't make a ton of sense for JetBlue because if they think they can sell those it would you know for cash it would make more sense to sell them for cash instead what they've done is created a different inventory bucket a for awards and now you can't easily search that so there's there's no easy way to look for that now and there's far far less award space

available so unfortunately that's the way we expected things would go, but that doesn't make it any better. Yeah. So JetBlue partnering with United, I mean, I know you predicted the award space would reduce, but that was because of the idea that all these people with United miles would book it up. Instead, what is really happening is JetBlue of the idea that all these people with United miles would book it up instead

what is really happening is JetBlue is acting like United and not releasing business class awards space to many partners so they're getting ready for the partnership in that way when the partnership with United launches if United has more access to that fair bucket I wouldn't be surprised if this was created for that purpose in the long run, but you're right. It's not the reason why I predicted that space would dry up, but maybe this is a step in preparation of creating more award availability for United, which I mean, maybe that'll be a good deal for people with a lot of United miles, who knows? Or maybe they just want to much man toward space at all, which is also probably not

unlikely, unfortunately. So I think that's more likely. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Awards points and more. We've updated our reasonable redemption value process.

And so our reasonable redemption values, of course, are the values that we think you can reasonably expect to get with any particular points, whether they're miles or hotel points, we think you should be able to get this amount or more. Now we don't base those values on sort of maximizing. We base those values on what we think is the reasonable amount you can expect. And certainly if you work to maximize, you can do better. But we have significantly changed up the process. So why don't you talk about that? Yeah, I think we talked about this before. So I'm just going to go over this briefly, but we have more data now. We're using Gondola as a hotel award search tool, and they've generously provided us

with a user interface to be able to see their backend data, at least as far as the things like median point values, across a whole bunch of different hotel chains and an unbelievable amount of data. So this is great because we were able to, we used to do a very labor intensive manual process to try to come up with these reasonable redemption values for hotels. And now we can do it in minutes using Gondola's data. So thank you so much to Gondola. I think we reported before about IHG, how using this process barely touched our previous RRV value.

It went from 0.62 down to 0.61. So barely worth even noticing any difference. But now we also have Hyatt and Marriott. So Marriott didn't change at all. It went from 0.76 to 0.76, which is kind of unbelievable actually, but there you go. A bigger change is with Hyatt, which went from 1.7 to 1.8.

But interestingly, the 1.8 now includes Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties, which by design have lower redemption value with Hyatt points than many of the other brands with Hyatt. And so it's interesting that even with including that data for the first time, our reasonable redemption value for Hyatt went up a little bit. And so probably the biggest difference is that the Ghanela data includes international data, which before we were just doing United States. And of course they have many, many more data points.

So we were kind of undervaluing Hyatt before, to the extent that that goes. And so now I think that's a good correction. Yeah, because if you took out Mr. and Mrs. Smith, we would expect the reasonable redemption value to be a little bit higher yet with Hyatt because of course, even higher. Yeah. And you can see some of those numbers in our post about Hyatt's, what are Hyatt points

worth to see specifically what the RV is without Mr. and Mrs. Smith, for example. We are eagerly waiting for Gondola to add SLH, Small Luxury Hotels of the World properties to their database before we update our Hilton values. As it stands now, without SLH, Hilton values are going down from what we had predicted before, or had calculated before. Very good, all right, well, we will see what happens there.

All right. I want to go through some quick highlights awards points and more type stuff from my recent trip to Europe. So I just got back yesterday from two and a half weeks in Europe with eight people. So it was quite a large trip. A bunch of family members joined us and I just wanted to hit some quick highlights that had some, I think some useful tidbits perhaps for, for people. So first up.

I used to hi at sweet upgrade at the Grand Hyatt in Athens. And the reason that this is notable is because the standard room at the Grand Hyatt Athens did not accommodate four people. And of course, my immediate family is two adults and two kids, my sons are seven and four. And so the standard room wouldn't accommodate us. However, the standard suite, which is the grand suite with one king bed, does accommodate two adults and two kids. It's got to pull out sofa and you could book it for four people on the website,

at least with two adults and two kids anyway. So anyway, I booked a standard room and then I applied a suite upgrade award. And then at some point after that, I logged into the app and pulled up the chat and chatted with Hyatt and just asked to add my two kids to the reservation. So that changed the reservation to be for two adults and two kids because the room I was in now the Grand Suite King did accommodate four people.

I bring that up because people often ask about ways to accommodate multiple family members or you know accommodate a family of four at properties in Europe. And this is a technique I've used before. So that was a way to get four people in a single room. I want to mention the Grand Hyatt Athens is kind of so so you'll see my my review of it. It's worth it for the points but there's pluses and minuses to the property and location everything

else. I just wanted to more broadly say that that worked for me yet again. And while we're speaking about chat perhaps even more interestingly is that I was able to use chat to apply guest of honor awards and this was a major pain point. So I had booked all the rooms. I tend to do that for my family. I manage all of the reservations and things and as I said we had eight people so we had my family of four and then two adult couples that were each going to be in their own rooms also. So I needed three total rooms.

So I made all the reservations in my account. And then at some point, I called Hyatt to gift two of those reservations to other family members, one to my wife so she'd get the elite credit, even though someone else was going to stay in the room, and one to my mother-in-law. So I called Hyatt to do that. And on the call, I explained I wanted

to gift the reservation, for example, to my wife. And that was no problem. They could do that. And then I said, I have my wife here with me. She'd like to apply a guest of honor award that's in her account to the stay. And Hyatt insisted that it couldn't be done. Because the points were coming from my account,

she could not apply her guest of honor award to it. And I said, that's, I know that's not right. I've done it before. It's definitely possible to do. And so the representative called the supervisor came back, said, Nope, supervisor said, definitely can't be done because the points are coming from your account. We can't pull a guest of honor award from her account. I said, okay, but the reservation is now in her name. It's got her Hyatt number on it,

blah, blah, blah. And they insisted, no, it can't be done. And so I asked about what about just transferring the points to her account? Is that something they could help me do on the phone instantly? No, you need to do the form, which takes a week. And I didn't have that much time, blah, blah, blah. So I eventually spoke with a supervisor myself, who again was adamant that it's impossible to do this. And so I said, OK, thank you very much and hung up, figuring I would call back and speak with someone else. But I was calling internationally. And so I said, okay, thank you very much. And, and hung up figuring I would call back and speak with someone else,

but I was calling internationally. And so that was kind of annoying. I'd already been on the phone a while. I said, you know, let me pull up chat. I pulled up the Hyatt app, logged into my wife's account on a spare phone. And I pulled up chat support and asked to apply her guest of honor award to an existing reservation, gave it the confirmation number, literally took about 35 seconds. It was like, boom, done. Easy breezy. Once I got to a person, took a few minutes to get to a person. Once I got to a person, no problem at all. Easily be done. So, uh, and I did the same thing with my mother-in-law's reservation, gifted one

to her, again, was able to chat. I did one chat through the app and one through the website chat function just cause I wanted to test and make sure it was possible with both and it was super easy. So chat to apply those much easier. I mean, it also is just easier in general than calling somebody and having to deal with that when you can just kind of do it in the background. So I was thrilled to be able to do that quickly. When I mentioned I earned a lot in cash back from Capital One shopping during this trip, more than $1,000 altogether. I tabulated it this morning. It was more than a thousand bucks on various things. Again, I was booking for eight people, so it's not like, you know, the costs were high because there were a lot of different things to book.

But that included things like 30 percent back at rentalcars.com. With that 30 percent back, I often found that rentalcars.com had better prices. Their prices were roughly comparable to everybody else. When we factor it in the 30%, they were significantly better. And I actually got more than 30%. I got something like 33 or 34 on all of those similar with Priceline. It said 25% back. I actually got like 27% back towards rental cars through Priceline 30% back on

Viator, Viator, however you say it for a boat tour. We did 30 30% back at Kluk for Coliseum tickets. So you got to book your Coliseum tickets and that's kind of a pain, that process, booking tickets for the Coliseum in Rome, because if you want to visit the Coliseum, they only release tickets something like 30 days in advance and it's at like a specific time of day and apparently they get scooped up pretty quickly so I had read that it's kind of a pain, you got to get up in the middle of the night if you're in the US and time it out to get the tickets So I booked through Kluge because there were a number of vendors through Kluge that I'm sure just have bots set up to buy The tickets for you. So that took some of the difficulty out and we got 30% back

So it was a little a couple of dollars more per ticket than it would have been booking directly through the Coliseum website Because surely that operator wants to make a little bit of profit for whatever bot they're running to scoop up the tickets but with a 30% back it was still a great deal so that worked out well when things didn't track automatically which people complain about all the time with Capital One shopping sometimes things just don't seem to track I have now found that canceling and rebooking when it comes to travel anyway, is a better technique. I'll cancel and rebook and see if it shows up and oftentimes that second time for whatever reason

it does seem to track. So that has seemed to work for me, at least on this trip it did several times. So whether that's going to be broadly applicable, I don't know. But if you book a rental car through like Priceline and it doesn't show up after a couple of days, maybe cancel and rebook it if rates haven't changed and see if that one shows up after a couple of days. So weird, but interesting. Sadly, my redemption capital and shopping still stink. We've reported on the fact that Capital One pulled a lot of the best redemption options, but a lot of the best gift cards and we keep getting comments on the post from people that

say that the good gift card redemption options are back for them. Looking at my Capital One shopping and they still aren't back for me. So I have a pretty limited set of redemption options. So while I'm pretty excited at the percentage I got back, I'm not very excited about my current redemption options. I'm just sitting over here hopeful that better ones come back at some point. I still do have eBay and I've got like some stuff like Macy's that I could probably use and I would value it enough to feel like I still got a good deal at 25 or 30% back but uh and Expedia global hotel card but I'm missing a lot of the ones that I would like to have like hotels.com

so hopefully those will come back. So that was all that last thing I don't remember if I mentioned this on a previous show or not but on the way to Europe my wife's in-flight headphones didn't work and there was some like buzz in them. We were flying Air France business class and for whatever reason it was buzzing and they brought her a new set of headphones to see if that would work and it didn't work and she was kind of bummed but we weren't like we didn't make a big stink out of it or anything. We didn't ask for any compensation. She was just kind of bummed because she likes to fall asleep to the sound of something on the TV And so there wasn't anything else they could do there were no open seats

They said we could switch seats, but of course we'd unpacked all of our stuff. We said nah, it's all right Whatever. We'll we'll live and so they came over offering compensation and we said, okay, you know, I guess so I'm certainly not gonna say no in that case It stinks that it didn't work And so they asked we'd rather have a voucher that be valid for year or miles. And I didn't even ask how much the voucher would be for because I figured we might not use that. So I said, ah, miles. And they just tap some buttons in the iPad and it came up showing 44,000 miles was the

compensation for that. I was pretty surprised by 44,000 miles. I thought I had to be wrong, but it showed it on the screen. I thought maybe that's going to be my balance after they add some miles because I had some existing miles, but no, it was 44,000 miles that we got. In fact, they were in my account before we landed. So that was pretty cool. And a bunch of readers posted that in our frequent Mylar insiders Facebook group things from Air France for non-functioning in flight entertainment. And I mentioned that not because I want everybody to go after compensation for you know the smallest of problems but more so because I've had

situation where I just didn't even say anything because I was like ah whatever I'll just go to sleep and not not even mention it but it was well worth having mentioned it in this case so so I'm glad yeah yeah mention it to the flight center worked out well all right all right All right. So that's great. So make sure to mention it when things go wrong, but do not, do not break things in order to get compensation because that's going to impact everybody after you and not to mention that's just unfair to Air France. Um, so please don't do that. Absolutely agree with that.

I thought it was just really nice. I thought it was a mark of good service. They were particularly apologetic about it and very nice about it. So I was pleasantly not surprised even. I was happy with the service we got on both of our Air France flights on this trip. So that was good. All right, let's get into this week's main event. Main event time predicting the Sapphire business card.

So we don't know anything about this. Chase in their Sapphire like online account has teased showing a business card, but nothing else. So, and there was a thing saying coming this summer. So that's all we know business card coming the summer seems So that's all we know. Business card coming this summer seems to be affiliated with Sapphire, which is different. Like Chase's cards so far that have been similar to Sapphire cards have been ink cards, not Sapphire cards. So we think this means there is a Sapphire business card

coming. A lot of people are predicting that it's going to be something like a Sapphire reserve card since the Sapphire reserve happens to be totally refreshing itself this summer as well. So it's a good bet that there might be a Sapphire reserve equivalent, but on the business side. there might be a Sapphire Reserve equivalent, but on the business side. We're going to, we're gonna try to predict what this business card is gonna look like, but first let's cover quickly what we think we know

about the Sapphire Reserve consumer card, because that'll help inform what our guesses are about the business card. Through various leaks and things, here's what we think we know. That the details about the Sapphire Reserve card will be announced June 17th, so that's really soon. That the actual changes may go live as soon as June 21st. And for complete details about that, check our blog. We have posts about what the full rumors are. And of course, once the actual information is announced,

we'll of course cover that in even more detail. But here's what the rumor mill says is gonna happen to the Sapphire Reserve. First of all, as we all knew was coming, let's welcome to coupon world. Just like Chase did with their United card lineup, they raised annual fees and added lots of coupons, lots of rebates for various things. That's what we're looking at here. So we're looking at an annual fee increasing from $5.50 to $7.95. I'll talk about the coupons in a minute, but first the earning categories are expected to change. Currently, you get, when you book through Chase Travel,

you get a 10X for hotels and cars and 5X for flights. We're looking at 8X for all of that going forward. So it gets better for flights, but worse for hotels and cars. The biggest change for most people will be where it changes from 3X on all travel to 4X for flights and hotels and 1X for all other travel. So that's going to be a big blow, especially if people spend a lot on things like cruises. If this is true, the Sapphire Reserve will no longer be a good option for that. 3X dining will remain the same

and then 1X everywhere else remains the same. Okay, coupons. So it looks like some of the current coupons will stay. So $25 per month DoorDash credits. Now, if you remember, those are broken up into Piddly, 10 and 10 and 5 or something like that. And free DashPass, that remains $10 per month Lyft discount that will remain.

Before I downgraded my Sapphire Reserve card, I had a chance to use that once and it worked really well. But it was a discount, not a credit. So you can't use it to buy Lyft credit for later kind of thing. The new coupons that they're adding, they're saying $10 per month Peloton credit, $250 twice annual edit credit. The edit is Chase's version of fine hotels and resorts.

So you're looking at every six months getting $250 there. $150 twice annual dining credit via Sapphire Reserve Tables. So what that is, it's a version of Open Table that's restricted to just these really high end restaurants that Chase supports somehow through Sapphire Reserve tables. And as long as you, you know, I don't know if it's just dining there or if you have to actually pay through Sapphire Reserve tables in order to get that credit. If it's a ladder, that would be really unfortunate.

I haven't used the Sapphire Reserve tables, but I thought that the way it worked and I could be wrong reason I said I thought it was talk was I Thought it was restaurants anyway like the ones listed on talk where you have to pay you have to prepay like you're gonna go to the French Laundry or you want to go to Alinea in Chicago you prepay When you make your reservation, so I assumed that it was that type of situation. We don't know that The old the old thing was like that, where you get 10X by booking through Chase dining or something like that. This is different.

So we don't know if it's the same way or not. We'll see. Another new coupon is $150 twice annual StubHub credit. And then $250 a year, I guess, of Apple TV and Apple Music credit. There's also some things if you spend $75,000 in a year, you get $500 Southwest credit, Southwest A-list status, IHD diamond status, and $250 the shops credit.

I had to look up what the shops was, and it's a new chase thing where they curate expensive products and let you buy them for too much probably. How nice of them, how nice of them. So what do you think about all of that real quick? Like what are your thoughts? Good, bad, ugly?

So one of the things you might have noticed that I didn't say was anything about the current $300 travel credit. We think that that's gone. And that's a real shame if that's the case. If that's not the case, then I think that the increase in annual fee is certainly more than made up for for most people with these various credits, just because any one of these credits you may or may not use. But I think chances are good that there's so many that chances are good. There's something here you do a lot like buying stuff through stub hub or you have apple tv or whatever it is there's probably a few things in here that you actually do and can value all those credits but overall i hate this idea of moving to all

these coupons looking at my personal situation I actually do think there's a good chance that I'll use enough of these to make up for the annual fee. So if I want to keep the Sapphire Reserve, it's not that it would be a big win, but it would let me keep it for no net after rebate cost. And so it might be a keeper. But the way I'm looking at this right now is like, if you have the separate reserve now, you won't have to pay the new annual fee until your next annual fee comes due. So wait and see, do these credits work for you or not? The other thing about the travel spend, like losing the 3X on all travel. At first, I was like really like bummed about that. But the truth is that where I spend the most on travel

is flights and hotels. And so for that to go up to 4X is probably a good thing. I have other cards that can earn 3X for other travel like the US Bank Altitude Reserve or if you have the Inc. Business Preferred, but we're going to get to that some more soon, or you have the MX Green. I don't have that one, but there are several cards where you can earn 3X for your other travel stuff if you have any of those. Yep. Yep. Yeah. You know, I looked at this and I felt very bitter because I hate the

couponification of things. And so I really hate that. And I hate the name, the edit. Like who came up with that? I don't understand. Like that doesn doesn't tell me anything. I like it really bothers me. I don't know why, but at least when they had chase luxury hotel collection, you knew what it was, right? Or MX, find hotels and resorts. It's not like unclear, you know, the edit by chase. Like, what does that mean? I hate that bothers me, but whatever. And I also hate that now when I need to look at a hotel, I've got to look at Amex, find hotels and resorts, and I've got to look at Chase, and I've got to look at points, and I've got to look at, you know, like there's just too many things I gotta look at. I want to look in one place and be able to compare my options, and so I hate having to do that for a hotel. So I don't like it. On the flip side, I would probably use all of those credits, I think. So almost all of them.

I wouldn't use the Peloton credit, but I'd use almost all the rest of them. And we don't currently have Apple TV Plus, for instance, or use Apple Music. So that's not something I'm spending money on. Now I look at it and I'm bitter about the couponification of it, but I have to admit the coupons probably work

for a lot of people. So yeah, I'm bitter though. Yeah. Yeah. I will say though that our posts about what we think is coming, vast majority of commenters say I'm out, you know, that, yeah, the reaction to most people is like, forget it. It's just not worth it. Yeah.

I mean, I can imagine that reaction. That makes sense. And we should mention on that note if that's you like Greg said chill out you don't need to cancel right away because you're not going to pay the new fee until your next annual fee is due and you're not going to send a message to chase by canceling your card right away so uh so i wouldn't do that and particularly since many of these are rumored to be twice annual credits you might assume my guess that you get it once between like January and July and December.

We don't know whether that'll be the case, but if it is, and if these changes take effect June 21st, then be sure to use those twice annual credits before June 30th, if that's the way it works out. My wife's renewal is in September and better be sure, we're definitely gonna make sure to use them in June and use them again after July, even if we're gonna cancel the

Card, but I want to make sure to get all of those while we can so Jump on it. Even if you don't think you're gonna keep it, right? Right now Caution one thing I do think that those credits will be available to you in that situation But I will I do want to remind you that when the Sapphire preferred card changed a little bit and added the $50 hotel credit They actually made it so that that credit did not kick in for current users until their next like Annual fee came due which I found so crazy because it's not even that compelling of a credit That's what they did.

So maybe forget everything I just said, who knows? Well, no, I don't think they're gonna do that again. It's my bet, but we'll see, we'll see. All right, back to the business card now. So now we know all about the Sapphire Reserve card. There's a lot more on our blog about it. So please go there for questions and answers to all that kind of stuff.

But let's take the big question mark. This business card, the biggest question I have is this, is it really a Sapphire Reserve business card or much less exciting but I actually think in some ways more probable. Is it a refresh and rebranding of the ink business preferred card, which is Chase's ninety five dollar ink card? Before I say why, I think that might be more probable. Nick, do you have an immediate reaction to that? Yeah, I think it stinks, but I think it's probably the more likely scenario. I think you're right.

I think that card, you would have to, if you were going to enter a reserve business card, I think you would need a Sapphire preferred business card. It's kind of confusing to have the ink business preferred branding on one card and Sapphire reserve branding on the other. So it almost makes more sense to me

that they would have to rebrand that first before they launch a reserve card. So unfortunate, and also I'm guessing that the change, so on the Sapphire Reserve card, we're talking about one of the rumored changes is the 4X flights and hotels book directly with the airlines and hotels and 1X on all other travel. So my guess there is that Chase wants to show airlines and hotels that their cardholders are gonna spend spend a lot of money at their airlines and hotels

for whatever reason and for whatever reason they don't care about that same influence with with Expedia or Priceline or Holland America or whatever else. And so maybe that costs them more money for one reason or another. So I think it's more likely that we see the Inc. Business Preferred go from offering what it offers 3x on all travel right now, right? So we're gonna see the change on that to 3x flights and hotels booked directly with airlines Yeah, I think it's likely that I think it's likely that it's gonna be an ink business or an ink sapphire Or maybe just a chase business sapphire Preferred rather than reserve referred business or an ink sapphire or maybe just a chase business sapphire preferred

rather than reserve. Preferred. Right, right and and maybe a sapphire business sapphire reserve is coming in the future but yeah yeah I think I think the 3x travel is the thing that forces their hand because you know well well that's if they didn't change the ink business preferred right now, then everybody looking at an increased annual fee for the Sapphire Reserve and losing 3X for all travel, all of the podcasters and blogs are gonna be saying, well, you can still get 3X travel over here with a $95 card. For $95, yeah. Yep. And so I don't think the Sapphire team wants to lose all those signups and,

and retentions to the business side for that reason. I think it's very, very likely that we're going to be seeing the ink business preferred card become the most popular one. And so I think that's a good thing. And I think that's a good thing. And I think that's a good thing. And I think that's a good thing. And I think that's a good thing. And I think it's very, very likely that we're going to be seeing the ink business preferred card become couponized, just like the rest of the world.

The annual fee will go up. The earning categories will change. So we won't see 3X travel anymore. We'll probably see something more akin to what the Sapphire Reserve predictions are with travel. And then there'll be miscellaneous coupons, exactly like they did with the United cards. So the United Explorer and the United Business card both went up from 95 to 150 annual fees. I expect the same thing here probably, although I can imagine them going up to 250 or more as well if they had enough coupons.

And yeah, that's almost certainly what's coming, I think. I think you're right. I would like it to be a sapphire reserve business I think people have wanted a premium business card for a long time out of chase and I I think like Greg said Probably see that happen at some point in the future But I think the first step has to be reprinting the current one to try to make them match on both sides I think that you know, they have the ink business unlimited Which closely mirrors the freedom unlimited. So I think it just makes sense that they would do that on the business side. So yeah, and I want to be clear that we're

making predictions here, even on the Sapphire reserve. I mean, we've got, there's been a lot of information that's come out that, you know, seems to come from, uh, places that people think are reliable and who knows? I mean, none of this has been confirmed. This is all conjecture at this point, but we think it's reasonably likely that the things we're guessing on the Sapphire Reserve are based on decent intel and we don't have any key information on the business side either. We're just making up what we think is likely, but yeah, I think you're right.

I think you're very likely to be right. I think we will see a Sapphire Reserve business over under on a year. Do you think it'll be coming within a year that we'll see a Sapphire Reserve business card? You know, I predicted a Sapphire Reserve, like an Inc business reserve about eight years ago, I think it was, because it was just sort of like necessary to fill out the matrix. They had no fee cards on both the personal and business side that earn 5X for different things. Then they had the unlimited cards, that the Inc. Unlimited and the Freedom Unlimited

that both earn 1.5X everywhere. Then they had the Sapphire Preferred and the Inc. Business Preferred that were very similar. Then they had the Sapphire Preferred and the Inc Business Preferred that were very similar. Then they had the Sapphire Reserve sitting out there and I just figured they have to. They have to add a business reserve card. Why wouldn't they? But they didn't. And so why would things be different now? So as much as, I mean, the logic is still the same, but for whatever kept them from doing it before, I'm gonna say over, I guess. Little lost on what the question was exactly. But I'm gonna say it's gonna be not gonna happen.

Yeah, well, there'll be under over a year before we see a new business reserve, yeah. I mean, I think it's also not impossible that we could see both. I mean, it could be that they refresh the line and we see both think business preferred get rebranded to a Sapphire preferred business and they launch a Sapphire reserve business. I mean, that's not impossible. We could see that come. Unfortunately, I think you're right. They probably will increase the annual fee and that stinks. I hate this

move to increase fees and increase couponization. It's really starting to become annoying. And you know, frankly, the banks probably don't mind that we're annoyed by it because they probably don't Want a lot of people like us that have a million cards and have to juggle all these coupons They want to encourage people to focus on one card so that they're using it for their everywhere else spend at a poor rate And so by coupon izing them they do make it difficult to juggle lots of cards and that's Wouldn't be surprised if that's somewhat by design. So, so I think you're right. I think that'll happen. Unfortunately, that we'll get the Sapphire. Yeah. And, you know, and I think you're right that it's, there's a good chance that they'll

do both like that. But so I think, I think it's more likely they would refresh, they would introduce, if they introduce this, the Sapphire Reserve business at all, I think they'll almost certainly do the Sapphire preferred business, the Inc business preferred refresh rebranding at the same time. It just seems to me extremely improbable that they'll just do the reserve version of it.

Okay, so here's one other thing that just occurred to me extremely improbable that they'll just do the reserve version of it. Okay. So here's one other thing that just occurred to me. Instacart credits. So you remember Chase rolled out Instacart credits to almost all of their cards, but including the fee-free ink cards, but not the ink business preferred. And I found that really weird at the time. But as I'm thinking about it now, if they're about to launch the Sapphire business preferred, the rebranding of this, they can claim the Instacart credit.

They can put in the Instacart credits and claim that's a new credit that you're getting to make up for the new annual fee. Gosh, Greg the Freak with Mylar, he knows what he's talking about. Yep. Yeah, you're right. I think he nailed it. I think you nailed it. I think that everybody who's had their wishful thinking on the Sapphire Reserve business may get it. I mean, it may come out,

but I think almost certainly you're right. Inc business preferred, I would bet the farm on the fact that that gets rebranded to a Sapphire preferred business and either first or at the same time. Yeah. All right. Moving on. So I plucked out some key questions.

Steven had a post about the ink business. I'm sorry, Sapphire business rumor, and it was loaded with questions. I picked out a bunch of them to try to answer somewhat a rapid fire style. I don't think we have to get into details on all of these. So let's go over them one at a time. What will the welcome offer be? What do you think? If this is the Sapphire Reserve business and if it has a similar $800 annual fee,

I'm going to guess 150. And that's a little bold because Chase hasn't gone over 100 on most of the things, but they've done 120 in the Inc. Business Preferred before. And I think that without 150, you can't reasonably compete with the MX Business Platinum and the Capital One business cards. So I think it'll be 150. They're not gonna,

I don't think they're gonna rock the world with 200K. I think 150 is my bet. Yeah, Nick is my bet. Yeah. Nick read my mind. 150K if it's a Sapphire Reserve business. 120K if it's the Ink business, if it's the rebranding of Ink business preferred. Annual fee, if it's the Sapphire Reserve equivalent,

will be the same $7.95 as the consumer. If it's the rebranding of the current ink business preferred I think oh boy I'm gonna go with $150 and keep my fingers crossed that's not gonna be more than that. I'll let you keep your fingers crossed I'm gonna say 199 I think we're gonna see it okay a $200 card 250 seems too much but 199 seems like a business owner probably is gonna be like whatever it's another hundred dollars So maybe maybe yeah, I almost feel like 250 is more likely than 195, but My fingers crossed to him. All right

What else what's next? Well, will you be able to refer from existing business cards? So if you've got an ink card right now, are you going to be able to refer to whatever this new Sapphire business card business is? Oh, boy. I'm going to say no, because it's going to be in this new family of Sapphire business cards instead of ink cards. I got no idea.

So I'm just going to defer to you on that. Totally, yes. Yeah. Let's actually skip when will it be launched. We have no idea. Summer. It'll be summer. Well, actually, let me ask you one thing about that. Do you think when will be launched. We have no idea. Summer.

It'll be summer. Well, actually, let me ask you one thing about that. Do you think it'll be launched exactly with the Sapphire Reserve consumer changes? Well, you know, it's funny. The Sapphire Reserve consumer changes go live June 21st. Now it's been a few years since I've been a student, but I'm pretty sure. Isn't that the first day of summer? June 21st.

So I don't know. I think this might happen June 21st. I think maybe it'll be like a welcome to summer. Here you go. So I'm going to I'm going to go ahead and be bold and I'm going to guess June 21st though. I think that is bold because it's kind of it would be surprising if something so big didn't get rumored a bit more ahead of its launch. But June 21st, final answer. Lock it in, Regis. I think that seems reasonable to me. Will there be family language regarding the welcome offer, meaning will you be disallowed from getting a welcome bonus

for the Sapphire business card if you currently have a Sapphire card or currently have an ink card? I'm not really sure what the family language would be, but do you think there'll be any? I'm going to say no, because they haven't done that with ink cards in the past. And so I think on the business side, that is less of a thing for them. So I'm going to say no, I don't think so. Yeah.

Will it be a credit or charge card? I mean, I would have automatically said credit if you hadn't asked the question, but I guess, you know, Capital One has a charge card or two out now, the premium Amex business cards are charge cards. Jace does have the ink business premiere. That's a charge card. So I guess it could be a charge card. I'm gonna say. Really? Nah, it'll be a credit card. 100%. 100%, wow, strong, okay. 100%.

Will Chase's 524 rule be enforced, meaning that you won't be able to sign up and get the welcome bonus if you've opened five or more consumer cards in the past 24 months? Yeah, but maybe not for the first couple of days. I don't know, we often see the first couple of days. I don't know. We often see the first weeks of a new offer. We see what seems to be a liberalization of the rules. And so I think there's a chance that for the first couple of weeks, people may slide through

even being over 524. I don't know when they like flip a switch to turn that off, but I'm going to guess long term. Yes, it will be. I agree long long term it will I think there's a very good chance that while they're promoting it as a new option with a new annual fee that they will want as many people joining it as possible so they'll turn that off. Earning rates and let's not actually even talk about all the earning rates but what's going to happen with travel? I have no idea. I'm gonna let you predict it. Go ahead.

All right. So I think that the travel category is going to match what the Sapphire Reserve predictions are with 4X airfare and hotels, and then drop to 1X for all other. Will the benefits be couponified? Yes, we don't have to discuss that, obviously. Almost certainly.

There's just no, there's no world in which Chase launches any card or rebrands any card and doesn't add a bunch of coupons to it. I agree. Wait, quick question on the changes to the Sapphire, the potential for the Sapphire Reserve business. Does the rumored new Sapphire Reserve still include priority pass?

The rumors are silent on that. My assumption is that still stays there. But the other thing that is sort of is unknown is will we still be able to redeem for 1.5 cents per point value through the Chase Travel Portal. One rumor is that there will be ongoing opportunities, sort of random targeted opportunities to get 2 cents per point value, but it's unclear whether 1.5 will be the floor anymore. I would bet if they launch a business version, yes, that that would continue.

And the consumer version, I have no idea. It's harder to predict. And yeah, we'll certainly see coupons. So assuming that we're right on some of the things that we just sort of predicted, will you find this new Sapphire? Well, either one. If they rebrand the ink business preferred to a Sapphire preferred business and or launch a Sapphire reserve business, are either of those cards you think going to be worth staying under 524 to get.

It's so hard to say, you know, so if it's the Sapphire reserve equivalent, I could definitely see wanting that instead of the Sapphire reserve consumer card, it won't add to your 524 count, for example, and it might have some different coupons. And so then that'll, in fact, it almost certainly will. And so then it would just be a matter of which coupons work better for what you need. And it'll probably have some slightly different earning rates, too, like having some like, you know, shipping, advertising, bonus category, for example. So I don't know, I'm not super excited about any of

these. Like none of them are like, wow, that's going to be amazing. But having another opportunity for 100,000, 120,000, 150,000 point welcome offer, whatever it's going to be, is really nice with Chase. And so I think if you're under 524 right now and you're on the fence of whether sign up for some other cards that are going to put you over, I would wait a bit. I mean, unless it's something, unless that other opportunity is so good, I'd wait a bit and see what these offers are going to be. And, and, uh, it would have been very concerning getting in on the Hawaiian cards or Hawaiian card while you still can, because we

assume that those might go away very soon. I mean, maybe as soon as June 30th and Hawaiian miles, of course, can be moved over to Alaska. So that has made both the Hawaiian business and Hawaiian consumer cards appealing. And some people have been targeted with email offers for 85K on that. If that were gonna put you over 524, would you go ahead and apply for that by June 30th

because we think it might go away? Or would you wait and hope that it doesn't go away and that we find out more about this? What do you think? If that's important to you to get the Hawaiian card, yeah, I mean, that's an opportunity that's definitely going away, whereas getting these 100k opportunities with Chase, 100k plus opportunities with Chase doesn't happen all that often, but it does happen. So, you know,

that's something that you'll probably have a chance at in the future. So, yeah. Now, if you've at in the future. So yeah, now if you've already have a Hawaiian card in the household, I hope that instead of worrying about signing up for Hawaiian cards, more Hawaiian cards, you've looked into signing up for, for example, Amex business cards that are in membership rewards and you've already earned them. And then I would say, make sure to transfer however many And then I would say, make sure to transfer however many Alaska miles you want to Hawaiian now. And that becomes Alaska miles. And then you're good to go. Then you can do that without endangering your 524 status. Agreed. Agreed. Okay, great. Fantastic. So we'll see what happens. We don't know yet. We'll find out what happens probably very soon, maybe even by the time you listen to this.

So again, check out the blog equal miler.com. All right. Let's move very quickly to this week's short question of the week. Question of the week is this Greg, we've heard you guys talk about capital one miles and major league baseball tickets. So, well, we've talked about this before. You can use 5,000 miles a ticket for some capital one cardholder, exclusive seats for

Major League Baseball games. Very tough to get those. But my question for you is, can you use cash to get the same tickets? And if you do, how much does it cost per ticket? This was a softball that you threw up, which is funny given that this is about baseball. So a reader wrote in with that answer and it turns out the answer is actually in Nick's post about all of this, but I didn't actually, I guess, read it carefully enough to know this, but now I do.

If you have a Capital One card that earns cash back, you can use those cash rewards. Like so for example, the saver card, you could use those cash rewards to pay for those same tickets for only $40 in cash back. So that's a better deal than the 5,000 miles with a miles earning card, which is worth at least $50 of points. So I'd much rather keep 5,000 miles and use $40 of points. And, you know, so I'd rather have I'd much rather keep 50, 5000 miles

and use $40 cash back. Yeah, you know, this is something I haven't highlighted well. It's come up before. And the reason I haven't highlighted it well is because I didn't have a card that had enough cash back in it because this only works if you have. Well, first of all, the business cards don't get access to these Capital One entertainment deals like the cardholder exclusive seats and so we have a spark cash business card

so we've got a bunch of cash back on that but we can't use that cash back to buy the Major League Baseball tickets to buy the Major League Baseball tickets you need a consumer card so either you need a consumer miles running card like a venture card or venture one card or a consumer cash back card like the saver card or quicksilver card And I haven't had one of those at the time when tickets have dropped to redeem cash back on that side and you can't move miles to cash back. So it's something that I haven't really focused on, but it's true if you have a saver card or other older cash back card from Capital One and you've got a bunch of cash back, then yeah, you can book

the cardholder exclusive seats for $40 a seat. Now, to be clear, you'll want to cardholder exclusive seats for $40 a seat. Now to be clear, you'll want to go to the post we have about Capital One miles for baseball tickets because they have a partnership with vivid seats and they sell like all the seats in the stadium and most of them at really poor value, whether you're using cash rewards or miles, it's only the four cardholder exclusive seats for each game that are a good deal. They're usually very close to the field in some parks,

some markets where tickets are more expensive. Those tickets can sometimes be $200 a piece tickets or $300 a piece tickets for 5,000 miles or $40 in cash back. But it's only those four for every game. And the day that they go available, they go within like an hour or two or three. Sometimes some of the smaller market teams will last for the rest of the night. But but if you want to go to like a Yankees game or Dodgers game or some other game in

a major market, then you're gonna have to jump on it immediately. And so the best way to do that, because people ask me from time to time, how do I find out when these become live? You could obsessively check the Capital One Entertainment site, which I've done and still I almost never find it quicker than somebody comments on the post to say that it's available. So you can subscribe to the comments on the post. So when you comment on our post about it, you have an option to subscribe to follow up comments or I think we have a little checkbox.

You can check and enter your email account in order to get follow up comments and in the days following when they go live you'll get a million comments from people saying oh I couldn't get tickets I can't get tickets it's impossible to get tickets but then like after that first week is gone now it's been more than a week since the last round was released you can probably subscribe to the comments and it's likely that the next time somebody comments on that post will probably be to say that they're live or maybe they'll be one or two superfluous comments between now and then. But that's the fastest way that I've usually been notified. Somebody will comment and say, hey, the next batch of tickets is available. I also intentionally keep the dates from previous

years when the tickets were released in that post so you can get an idea of about when last year they released them because they released those tickets two months at a time so they recently did the was it June in July I think or was it May and June I can't remember now so the next two months whatever two months those are will be released I don't know and June when they were released last year and that should give you a rough idea of when maybe they'll get released this year it's not always on the same date but that'll at least help you and subscribe to the comments, like I said. All right. If you've enjoyed this episode and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week,

go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Facebook group, FrequentMilerInsiders, and wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give us a thumbs up, like this video, leave your feedback. We always appreciate that. And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a comment for the giant mailbag, you can send that too. Send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye everybody. Hi, I'm David Brody, co-host of the Travel in 10 podcast. Together, myself and my co-host Tim Johnson have traveled over 150 countries around the

world and all seven continents. Now we're sharing our favorite places, some of our best tips and experiences from all around the world in just 10 minutes on Travel in 10. Join us at boyescape.com.