Frequent Miler on the Air - Rocking Cyber Monday | Ep74 | 11-28-20

Episode Date: November 28, 2020

0:27 Reader feedback: The opposite of the "joy of free" is "the pain of fees". 6:11 What crazy thing did Citi do this week? First up: ThankYou points devaluation https://frequentmiler.com/citi-devalues-thankyou-points-transfers-to-shop-your-way-lose-20-bonus/ 12:04 Next crazy thing: Amex hides away 10x earnings on Platinum card. 14:17 link: https://frequentmiler.com/yes-your-new-platinum-card-is-earning-10x-where-appropriate/ 16:59 What crazy thing triple header! What happened to Delta this week? 21:10 Mattress running the numbers: Choice promo for 2K / 5K points for 2 or 3 night stays https://frequentmiler.com/choice-hotels-promo-stay-2-nights-earn-2000-points-stay-3-nights-earn-5000-points/ 23:32 Rocking Cyber Monday: Avoid the stress, beware the hype https://frequentmiler.com/amazon-discount-with-membership-rewards-points/ https://frequentmiler.com/awesome-amex-offer-get-8-points-per-dollar-at-amazon/ https://frequentmiler.com/awesome-amex-offer-get-8-points-per-dollar-at-amazon/ https://frequentmiler.com/targeted-3x-10x-chase-spending-offers-on-a-plethora-of-cards/ https://frequentmiler.com/citi-cards-5-back-for-online-shopping-november-24-30/ 51:41 Post Roast Feeling thankful: https://frequentmiler.com/feeling-thankful-in-2020/ 57:00 Question of the Week: Can you take back a suite night award and then get a do-over on the upgrade request? Should you? Music credit: Annie Yoder Don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a comment!

Frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event rocking cyber monday we're going to get into the deals what are we doing to really get the most out of these these crazy deals that are going on and how are we kind of dealing with the overwhelming onslaught of all these opportunities. Boom, yeah. First, of course, we have the giant mailbag. And today, we've got mail from a reader via email. Again, I don't know whether he wanted this to be published, so I'm not going to say his name. But the reader says he has the Bank of America Re rewards card with the 75% reward tier. So that brings his cash back to 2.625% for all his spend. Great deal on that card, yep.

And, yep, so you have to have the Bank of America premier rewards card, and you have to have platinum honors with Bank of America to get that 75% bump, and that brings the total cash back to a whopping 2.62%. Anyway, he says, my county's tax assessor's office allows me to charge the property tax on credit card with a 2.35% fee. So in essence, by paying my property tax with this credit card, I'm getting a whopping 0.27% cash back. Right. That's it. That's earning a little bit. I mean, paying something is going to pay already. He earns a little bit back. Not a bad. That's right. Right. Right. And he says one would think I would be

happy. Right. But he had a hard time or I should read in his words. I had a hard time pulling the trigger. Well, objectively, I know that I will come out ahead with the payment. There's just a constant guilt of seeing myself paying over a hundred dollars in fees. I did pay the bill with credit card in the end, but nevertheless, it was a revealing insight into my fear of fees, somewhat similar to your discovery of joy of free. Interesting. Yeah. I thought this was very yeah interesting and kind of insightful that that it's it's almost the the flip side of the joy of free so the joy of free is where you know uh there's there's an extra benefit to rewarding yourself by by getting things you want whether it's travel or, by using points because it feels free.

And there's some extra sort of happiness you get out of getting something free as opposed to paying for it. So I've talked about before how even if you could redeem your points for cash and then use cash to buy the same thing it might not feel as free then that way and so there's there's there's this intangible benefit to to free that that's out there now here's the flip side is is the the the fear of fees uh which which is the opposite side of the joy of free we just got free the fear of fees right right right so it side of the joy of free. The joy of free, the fear of fees. Right, right, right.

So it's like the pain of fee. Right, right. So, you know, even though paying with the credit card in this case, he's getting more back than he's paying, it's painful to pay a fee. And that's kind of interesting. I don't personally have the pain of fees. Like, if I know I'm getting back more than the fee, especially as cashback.

I feel like that's the qualifier here. As cashback, I think the pain is non-existent for me in that case either, because I'm physically getting that money right back. When it's points and you're saying, well, okay, I'm going to get points that are worth well more, even when they're well more than the fee, then I can get it. I get that there's still that pain point of, well, yeah, but I'm paying for the points. I'm paying extra, more than I need to pay. And that goes counterintuitive to what we generally recommend. I mean, the whole idea here, the whole game is to pay less and to not pay fees whenever you can. So even if you're getting more value than the fee, yeah, that's an interesting point that there's still that intangible thing,

like you said, that intangible pain in this case of knowing that you could have paid less out of pocket. Right, right, right. So I'm curious, anyone else listening out there, what do you think? Do you have a pain in fees, even when you know you're getting back more than the fee by paying with a credit card? I know it's true because people, so this 100k platinum offer that's been widely available, I know that there are people who have hesitated on it because of the $550 annual fee that you have to pay up front, which is a big barrier. I mean, it's not a little bit of money. We're not talking about a small amount. That's a huge amount of money to lay out out front. And so I think even people in many cases

that know that the welcome bonus and the benefits outweigh that fee, that's still a significant pain point. If they waived the fee the first year and dropped to the bonus in half, I bet you way more people would apply for the card. Right. I mean, cause lots of people just find that pain point too much to bear. And I, I get it. I, it's an interesting psychological game. I mean, these marketing people have definitely spent some time studying the psychology of these things to kind of try to make us make bad decisions. And this game is of course,

trying to beat them at their own game, right? So we're trying to outsmart them. And in this case, you did outsmart them if you paid with that bank of America premium rewards card, because you ended up with more cash in your pocket than you started with. So. Right, right. So you made the right choice and it just was a little painful to do it. And I get that. That's, that's, that's right. Well which was like unprecedented. And this week we have a double header. So I mean like five crazy things in two weeks.

It's like, we've had a crazy couple of weeks. So what crazy thing did City do this week, Greg? Yeah. So City, I don't even know if it was this week, but we certainly didn't cover it. We certainly didn't cover it last week in the show. City, the one like sort of big thing city thank you points had going for it recently that that fit with the needs of pandemic times was this automatic 20 boost you get when you transfer thank you points to shop your waypoints

so you would get like for every dollar of thank you points you get a dollar 20 of shop your way points so you would get like for every dollar of thank you points you get a dollar 20 of shop your way points didn't used to be interesting but became interesting when shop your way had gift cards and let you redeem those points for gift cards so what did city do they were like oh just i didn't know we had this this bonus here, but I've been reading Frequent Miler, and we've got to stop that. So without notice, they just blanket changed it. Evil deal killer you. You know, the one consolation is that Shop Your Way also kind of killed the benefit

by dropping all the useful gift cards. Not all of them, but a dropping all the useful gift cards not all of them but a lot of the useful gift cards from their uh from their so they made sure it was good and dead right this is definitely totally gone now for the time being anyway because you you wouldn't want to do this at one cent each right no there yeah i mean that would be crazy i mean you'd be trading in one cent of thank you points which you could always get gift cards directly for that value from from city for one cent worth of shop your way points which sometimes have value depending on what's in stock on their gift card thing and that comes and goes right it would be crazy that'd be crazy and especially

right and especially uh well i was just going to say that i think it's monday right uh for cyber monday city is doing a 20 discount i think which went on their gift cards well we don't know yet is whether it's going to be all of the gift cards i did see that the doctor credit published a rumor that it was only going to be like four or five brands. So we don't, we don't yet know what's going to be on sale on Monday. So maybe it'll be useful. Maybe it won't, but it's worth logging into thankyou.com. And the point here is that there's no sense in transferring over to shop your way because generally speaking, you could redeem for the same gift cards via the thank you portal at the same value. And maybe you'll get lucky and they'll run a sale like cyber Monday, and maybe you'll get a chance to get a better deal

on a gift card that matters to you. So no point in doing shop your way now. Unless they offer a transfer bonus. Maybe that's their game. They're going to offer a 20% transfer bonus. So shop your way. I look forward to writing that headline. 20% transfer bonus, stop your way rewards.

Right. So we've talked about how Chase has upped their game during the pandemic by adding the pay yourself back feature that's really super useful during the pandemic because you could use points at full value to get stuff you actually want. And it doesn't have to be limited to travel. And we've said, and now, you know, thanks to this whole shop your way thing,

there was a path to do the same with Citi. And we complained that Amex hadn't added anything along those lines. Well, Citi decided they wanted to be more with Amex than with Chase. You're right. You're right. That was too crazy even for us. Yeah, enough compliments. Let's get out of this you know the funny

thing is so amex hasn't done any way for you to use your points for stuff like that's what you're saying there's a great opportunity to use points for stuff with uh with chase but not really with amex although amex does regularly offer those deals through amazon where you use one membership rewards point you have decent discount i got targeted 50 off this sure up to 60 bucks off so that was a nice one but right so that's always a one right exactly one point and not no use at all for the rest of your points but uh but so they do occasionally do that and they have increased offers i mean we've seen some great offers on some of the mx cards in the last couple of months city on the other hand the only thing they had going for them was this shop your way

thing they haven't increased the was this Shop Your Way thing. They haven't increased the offer, I don't think, on any of their credit cards. They added, you know what, I'll give them this. They added the 5% back

for this week. The 5% deal is a good deal. For six days, they added 5% back up to $500. So that's it. I mean, apart from that, they really haven't done very much.

So it'd be nice to see them get with the program and just offer something exciting, Sidney. Right, right. So it is very interesting. So Amex's view seems to be like, let's throw points at people like crazy, get them excited about the program,

but don't make it easier to redeem our points. It's sort of like they'll redeem their points someday. Chase went the other way. They do have some things to be able to earn our points. It's sort of like they'll redeem their points someday. Chase went the other way. They do have some things to be able to earn more points, but they haven't done a full-on onslaught the way Amex has, in my opinion. Citi's been mostly sitting out. Yeah, Citi's totally been sitting out.

Chase has upped those ink bonuses to 75K on the fee-free cards. They've done the 5x on amazon on a whole slew of cards on up to 1500 a month this month and next month the 2x grocery on the sapphire preferred 3x on the sapphire reserve i mean i feel like they've they've done quite a bit in terms of trying to encourage spend and reward people for using their cards kind of get their cards to the top of wallet uh but yeah city just isn just isn't competing. Hello, Citi. And Capital One, if there was ever a window

to get in, I mean, come on. Chance to grab a headline from Citi if you're listening. Capital One. Okay. All right. So that brings us, I think, then, to Mattress Run. Oh, no, no, no. I'm sorry. We were at a double header. That was half the double header. Right, right. What's

the other head of this, of this Zafod Beeblebrox double header going on? So the other crazy thing this week is I wrote a post about Amex. And so we just mentioned the platinum card offer, the a hundred K offer 75. It depends on which sign up for and where you sign up for it. But the best deal is a hundred or 125 K plus 10x for six months at US supermarkets and US gas stations. So I mean, like eye popping return 10x on groceries, we'll get 10x on nobody gets 10x on groceries. This is crazy. So it's been something really exciting to talk about.

But we keep getting complaints from readers who are saying none of my purchases are coding at 10x. And when they look at those transactions, when you go to your transaction history, they're right. It looks like you're only earning one X. You are actually earning the 10x, but Amex has like hidden it away in a corner somewhere where it's hard to find A and then B, where you need a PhD in math to figure out how they did the equation in order to come up with a number of points that they did. And C, if you make a lot of purchases, you're going to have a heck of a time trying to make sure that of which purchase are in 10 X. You don't have to go back and reverse engineer the math on all of it.

It's a pain. Right, right. No, I know it's, it's kind of crazy. At the same time, at least there is a way to see it. And, and I'm glad you wrote that post because so, you know, some people in response to my post about bending Amex's lifetime rule where I said I got approved for the signup bonus? And you could do what I did, which was quickly spend five grand, which in retrospect was dumb because what I've told people since is there's a much easier way, which is spend a dollar or two at a grocery store or gas station, see if you're getting the 10X and then you know you're eligible. But unless you know the trick for how to see the 10X, you can't actually do that. So

that's great. That's a great resource. So it'll be up here somewhere above me. Hopefully you can be able to click in order to go to the post if you're interested. Also, of course, always links in the show notes. So you can see the show notes, see the link. So yeah, you got to go into your membership rewards balance. And I can tell you all about how to do it right now, except if you're not looking at it right now, you're probably going to still have a hard time finding it later on. So you got to get in there to the membership rewards earning section and you'll see it. Yeah. I mean, that's useful to know too.

If you have referred someone and you want to know whether you got credit for that referral, following the same path that Nick lays out in this post will get you to the place where you'd see the bonus points. And where you could, out of a dropdown, if you wanted to look at just one of your cards, you could select the card that you want to look at and see how many points perhaps you earn on referrals on that particular card. If you want to know whether you maxed it out, maybe you referred a bunch of people and you weren't sure whether or not you hit it or you posted it on social media, et cetera,

and you're looking to see, then you can see which cards have gotten points that way too. So it is a good place to know about. And then in terms of the math, it seems, and I don't know if I laid this out in the post itself well enough. I know it was addressed in the comments, but the numbers look a little funny

because what they're doing is giving you one X on your initial purchase and they're rounding up in cases where there's a fraction of a point. But then what they're doing is they're determining 10 X based on the actual purchase price, not the rounded amount and the actual purchase price, the 10 X and giving you whatever it is you need to make up in order to get to that number from the rounded amount they already gave you. So it's not even like you're going to look at it and be like, oh yeah, that's 9x this purchase price or 9x the number of points that posted. It's like, it's not going to add up.

So it's really kind of, but the points are there. Points are there. So basically they round up up figure out your 1x then they they figure out 10x all together and subtract out the 1x you got right and say here's your 9x exactly what they do which which sounds like it would be simple in practice but because they're rounding up initially it just makes the numbers harder to follow yeah if you weren't thinking about sure how they rounded so because you can't just look at your purchase and multiply by nine

to see if it matches the bonus it's close yeah it's gonna be off by a little bit i think that's what was throwing people and especially if you go to the comments anyway you'll see yeah there was some confusion over but it's not 9x this and it's not you know 10x that blah blah and you and if you made multiple purchases on the same day you're gonna have to split all those up and do the math on each of those separately. The bonus points might all post together, I think, but the initial purchases post separately and they round each one of those up.

So it just makes it even more confusing. So I just realized I'm gonna turn this into a triple header. Oh, we're gonna get even crazier. Two weeks in a row with a triple header. So this crazy thing has nothing to do with credit cards. This is a airline. So the airline in the U.S. that is known for never canceling flights, best on-time performance, always good customer service.

So you flew Spirit, huh? What did they do this week during the holidays? What did Delta do this week? They canceled something like 25% of their flights. Why did they cancel 25% of their flights on like the busiest travel week of the year? No one really knows. There's all kinds of speculation on the internet about what's going on. The Delta reps won't, you know, they have their sort of, you know, the way they talk around things without really saying anything. And so who knows, but my wife and I got caught up. Yeah. So I didn't realize that there was a larger conspiracy at play here that there were many, many flights canceled. Yeah. I assume it was just like a one-off thing. Right. No,

a lot of flights. No, no, no. It turned out. Yeah. So, so we, you know, we had a, we had a trip where we were it was sort of a work vacation trip and, and it ended us up in Florida where we were flying home on Thanksgiving Day. This had nothing to do with travel for Thanksgiving. It just happened to line up. And we woke up Thursday morning to see texts and emails from Delta saying, your flight's been canceled, and we've rebooked you on a flight with a five over five hour layover in Atlanta. And you're not used to that. I mean, that doesn't, Greg the frequent miler doesn't fly that way. If it was, see if it was American airlines from a few years ago,

I would have been surprised only because we got the email in advance. It's not, we didn't, we weren't told while lined up at the at the gate but but yeah but with delta that was i mean what a curveball to throw you there huh so yeah yeah and and i don't know why the computers always pick like the worst routing when they reroute you but you know i called and got us rebooked on another flight with a 45 minute layover at jfk and so we ended up only you know it took us three hours longer to get home so not not a big deal but wow you know for delta to pick the i mean they had to pick the worst possible weekend to decide to just melt down and there's no weather problems that i'm aware of you

know is there the speculation that there was some exposure and pilots that weren't able to to fly perhaps yeah i mean there's a lot of speculation like some is that maybe maybe uh people were calling in sick rather than striking maybe maybe they messed up big time as far as they thought they had the pilots they needed but those pilots weren't didn't have the hours needed to to fly those the particular planes that were available a lot of a lot of different speculation but i don't know very interesting so so sorry for all the people out there whose travel was disrupted this weekend. Right. Yeah, I feel really bad.

You know, I have to assume a lot of people missed whatever plans they had for Thanksgiving. And so that's really sad. Fortunately for us, we had planned our immediate family. We're not doing an extended family thing, but our immediate family was planning to do Friday, Thanksgiving anyway. So it didn't really make too big of a difference for us, fortunately. But yeah, it had to have hurt a lot of people. Yeah, nicely done. You don't get bad-mouthed on this show very often, Delta.

So not for their performance, right? It's, you know, maybe for their sky miles, but come on. All right, so then, magic ring of numbers. So the latest hotel promotion that came out this week, I think, was from Choice Privileges. So Choice Privileges has a promo going, and the deal is you stay two consecutive nights, you get 2,000 bonus points. You stay stay two consecutive nights you get 2 000 bonus points

you stay three consecutive nights you get 5 000 points now i just said bonus points but i don't actually think it's bonus points let me back that up i think you stay two nights and you get at least 2 000 points you stay three consecutive nights you get at least 5 000 points the choice promos are always such that they don't stack with what you earn from the promotion. Greg just fell asleep. Well, come on, Greg. If you can pick up 2,000 points, 5,000 points. So, all right. So, would this be mattress run worthy?

So, you got to ask yourself, all right. So, you got to spend at least 40 bucks a night in order to earn points with choice privileges. So, okay. $240 nights, 80 buck investment, right? $80 investment gets you 2000 points or $120 investment gets you 5,000 points. So, so let's say you're going to do the 120 go big for the 5,000 points.

You're paying basically 2.4 cents a point. So as long as you redeem for more than 2.4 cents a point, you're good, right? Mattress run. Hello. Right? Yeah, you do that. I mean, you're good, right? Badgers run, hello, right? Yeah, you do that, Nick.

I mean, you go to Europe, you can redeem those points for, you know, Scandinavia. So, yeah. I mean, first of all, I think Choice sells their points outright for something like 1.25. So that would be totally insane. And of course, most people

who listen to us frequently know that you could do the cash and points trick. If you have some choice points, you could book a cash and points day and then cancel it and buy points for, I don't remember exactly, 0.75, somewhere in that range. So yeah, this is a sort of a doozy of a- A doozy of a drowsy. Yeah, yeah, this is a sort of a doozy of a – A doozy of a drowsy. A head promo.

Yeah. Yeah, because, I mean, three-quarters of a cent per point, 2,000 points, you're going to get, what, $15 worth of points if you stay two consecutive nights. And if you stay three consecutive nights, they're going to give you – I mean, I don't know. I can't do the math that fast enough in my head. Seven – not much. Not much. Not much.

Not enough. Let's move on. Not enough. Two thumbs down, right? Not worth it. All right. So then that brings us to the main event. Rocking Cyber Monday.

Yes. Rocking Cyber Monday. So, yeah. So you've been keeping up to date a post of all the great deals for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all the things in between, right? Yeah. So, you know, that causes me a lot of stress. I'm sorry, Greg. Sorry to add to your anxiety and stress. I mean, I have to think that there's a lot of people out there feeling the same way that there's this sort of fear of missing out.

But at the same time, like, I don't want to spend the time dealing with this, making sure I'm getting the best deal, like taking advantage of all these deals. And then there's like, if I do buy stuff, am I just buying stuff because the deal's there and I wouldn't have bought it anyway? So it's not really a deal. Just giving your money away, right? $100 goes out the window for $150 thing that you don't want. Totally true. One of my favorite things about being on this side

of the deals, like writing about them, is that I don't end up getting enough time to buy many of them because I'm constantly looking for the next one to add to the post and checking out which ones are still alive and blah, blah, blah. So I don't get nearly as much time to actually shop and buy stuff as I used to. Like last night, the night before we recorded this,

I was up late trying to buy some of the things that I just knew we had to buy. And I literally was like falling asleep on my keyboard. Like I hit it more than once. So just trying to get that done in that short brief window of time that I had for that. And then, you know, the rest of the time that I spend on this is going to be writing about it.

So I don't have to have my head exposed. No, that's. It is. But for you and everybody else, it's not. Yeah. So, I mean, it's tough because there's so many deals. Right. And like you said, key point there.

Right. If you're buying something just because it's a deal, you're not getting a deal at all. So you've got to find the stuff that's relevant to you. So how do you make sense of all this? There's a lot going on. deals, credit card offers and everything and saying, which ones do I really care about? Which ones are like so good or so relevant to me that I ought to pay attention to this one and sort of then, and just forget about all those. Like, yes, I could say $5 a year or whatever, but it's just too much. And, you know, you got to pick the ones where the savings are significant. At least this is, you know, again, this is my way of dealing with the onslaught and keeping myself sane, preventing my brain from exploding is by basically, you know, trying to erase that

fear of missing out and just saying that little thing where I, where I can get, you know, Hulu for a few dollars less each month by doing whatever it is that the blog tells me to do, um, is probably not a big enough win for me to, to, to spend all my time. So, so I need to focus on the ones that are big wins. And, you know, like, for example, if I had T-Mobile, I'd be very excited about that T-Mobile deal where you could add a line for free. I mean, that seems like... Oh, and it is.

And the other day, if you did it at Costco earlier this week, then you could add a free line for no cost and get a $200 Costco gift card. So it's just like they're paying you 200 bucks in order to get the free line. So I mean, no brainer, right? Super simple.

You go in, walk out and it's a rebate. So you have to wait a few weeks in order to get it, but you get that. And if you poured in a line with T-Mobile, you get another a hundred bucks. So if you went and did that and poured it in a line that you bought on eBay for like four bucks,

you'd walk out essentially $300 ahead of where you walked in. Of course, I actually did do that because I was near costco and i walked out saying if i knew how long it was going to take when i walked in the door it wasn't worth two hundred dollars i would have stayed at home and just taken the hundred for putting in a line myself been happy with that but uh so you never know sometimes those things work sometimes you get the fear of missing out and you're like you know oh man nick wrote about this awesome deal at T-Mobile. I left $200 on the table and then the flip side, I did get that and I'm not as excited as I wanted to be when I walked in the

door. That's for sure. Because I mean, I was in there for gosh, almost two and a half hours altogether. So. So, so I had a similar experience from home, which was, so Rakuten was offering, I think it was 16% for Saks Fifth Avenue. And, you know, I have, I right now have two platinum cards that have the $50 credits. I also have a nearly $50 Saks gift card. And I was like, I need to spend all this while it's 16X, which, you know, I'm getting membership rewards.

So it's worth more than 16 to me and my wife and i spent hours like figuring out exactly what to get and whether or not we can split the charge across two credit cards online because they had a deal where if you spend 150, you get a $75 promo gift card. And so it was like, oh, I have almost $150 to spend, but there was no way to spend it all in one purchase online. And so it's like, do I bother calling? Anyway, so we spent hours and hours in it. And at the end of it, I'm like, it could have possibly be worth it. I spent about 15 minutes looking at that specific deal because I thought to say, even I only had the one $50 credit to use, but I thought to myself, all right, well, so I'm going to spend 50 bucks and get 50 back.

I could spend another a hundred and end up with a $75 coupon. Basically it's a $75 gift cards worth 75 bucks for like a week or something like that or two weeks it's very short term exactly um but then i did the math and i was like all right so i could lay out a hundred dollars and end up with 225 dollars worth of sack stuff i guess is what it was the big 100 out of my pocket for 220 and and that sounded pretty good i mean yeah i was like oh that's pretty decent and i looked at the stuff and again, and I was like, wait a second, I'm hunting for what to buy for $50. This is ridiculous. I don't need, there's not $225 worth of stuff that I need at Saks. Yes, it might be a great deal. No, I don't need it. And I'm just searching for stuff just to buy stuff. So I gave that about 15

or 20 minutes and I was like, all right, wait a second. This is dumb. I need to, I need to walk away. But you know, it's tough because we each get wrapped up in different things. I mean, that's a great example of how Greg got wrapped up in that one. And I didn't, I got wrapped up in the T-Mobile thing and he was kind of like, oh man, wish I had T-Mobile to take advantage of that one. So, so what do you do? How do you keep all this straight? Cause I mean, right now there's so many bonuses too. That's the other thing, right? I mean, you got all these different bonuses. If you're going to shop at Amazon, you can use membership rewards point in order to get a discount. Maybe you could use one of many different chase cards to earn 5X on your purchase. You get the city cards that are

offering 5% back on top of the rewards. We've got lots of people who've opened a new credit card. Maybe you got a new in cash for the 75K offer, a new platinum for the 100K, whatever the case may be. You're probably working on a spending offer too. Oh my goodness. Like my wife keeps asking me, what card do I use for this purchase? What card do I use for that purchase? And it's like, it takes me 15 minutes just to make sure, okay, is the offer loaded to this card? You know, is this the card that's getting the best return? Should I do five points on this card or three points on that? Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I don't know a good solid way, but when there's, when there's something that's too good to pass up, like you're getting, um, 20% back or more at Amazon. Um, what I usually try to do if I see

that I'm qualified for that offer is, I mean, if I happen to know that I'm going to buy stuff at Amazon that's sold by Amazon, so it meets all the qualifications, you know, I'll go ahead and use it for that. But otherwise, I try to find a third-party gift card that I know that I can use and just get the discount right off the bat. And so, you know, as soon as I find that I'm eligible, just try to get this whole deal off the table, say, okay, great. I just saved 20% on hotels.com or Netflix, you know, although now I'm, I'm like paid up on my Netflix subscription for the next three years, but, but you know, that kind of thing will, will think, is a good way to kind of just get it off the ticket pile. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a smart strategy.

See, I tend to not do that, and I should probably, because I think that's a really good strategy. Like Greg said, I think the key point in all of what he said there was to get it off of the to-do pile, to be like, okay, I don't need to hunt for a reason to use that or a thing to use it on or a thing to justify buying because I'm getting X amount of dollars off. Just use it on something that you know you're going to spend the money at. Amazon's got tons of third-party gift cards. I mean, you mentioned Netflix or whatever, and you look through the list and there's tons. There's grocery stores. If you live in a Safeway, at least, I don't know, it's been a while since I looked at Safeway. They used to carry Safeway cards. So if you live somewhere where Safeway's your grocery store, I mean, easy money there then, right?

Because that's groceries you know you're going to buy groceries. So look for something like that that you know you're going to use. Watch out for those gift cards where you're like, you know, am I really going to go to Chipotle for, you know, $150 worth of burritos? I mean, someday, yeah, probably. Am I going to use it real soon? I don't know. So think about that a little bit, but especially this week too, though, when there are gift card deals and you can stack the gift card deals with that discount, if it's a place, you know, you're going to use. Yeah. I think

that's a good strategy that I should probably follow because I'm on the flip side over here thinking like, okay, I've got the $60 to spend to make something cheap enough to justify buying it. So which thing is it going to be like, who's going to get the gift that's worth $60 more than what I spent on it. So. But I mean, I think gifting, I think that is an important other piece of the strategy that that's worth doing. And I, I struggle with this, but you know, the holidays are coming up where, where I'm going to be buying presents for a lot of people. If I could just motivate myself to do it now, act like Christmas is tomorrow and so I've got to buy this stuff now, then it would be a really good time to do so because lots of stuff's on sale. We have all these promos and all of it stacks.

So the credit card promos stack with the Amazon discounts and the sales. Right, and a lot of things are in sale everywhere. So a lot of those things, like, for example, the Apple AirPods that I wrote about the other day or the Apple Watches or different Google devices, the Google Home stuff, a lot of those things that are kind of standardized and pricing everywhere are all on sale, like for the same price, basically, each of the different stores. So then it comes down to where can you stack

the best discount deal? And that's multifaceted because you've got things like those pay with points to get a discount at Amazon. But then if you aren't eligible for that or you've already used that, then it comes down to, okay, so where can you use a shopping portal? Where can you potentially use a coupon? And where do you earn the most on your credit card? So, I mean, that gets tough to manage. And then you got, if you got a Discover card, then you got to think about, okay, well, I can redeem Discover Cash for a gift card. Or if

you're not doing that, I mean, my wife wanted to order a bunch of stuff last night and I was about to order it. And I said, you know what? what i could order it through or i could order gift cards through the united mileage plus app and earn some extra miles per dollar on top of what i'm earning on the credit card by you know by buying those cards you're just adding right so then i'd walk back in and be like hey on any chance you're gonna you know return any of this because if you are i don't want to deal with the gift cards but like i'm pretty sure you're going to keep any of this? Because if you are, I don't want to deal with the gift cards, but I'm pretty sure you're going to keep this stuff and I want to get some more miles per dollar.

And of course, she was like, oh, I don't know. Use the credit card. Stop it. Ridiculous. You're getting ridiculous here. Another two miles per dollar doesn't really matter. And she's right, but it's hard to leave that, you know, on the table, so to speak. It is. It is. But there's just so much. Yeah. I don't know that, you know, there's so many, so many things going on and I think you just have to pick which ones

you care enough about to, to pursue and, and, and try not to let it bother you. So what matters to you the most in terms of, so if we just look at credit card stuff, right? So obviously the pay with points, AMX, if you're eligible for the, those discounts, like 20%, 30%, 50% at Amazon, you definitely want to use that. Like, there's no question. Like do that now. Definitely forget about everything else. Right. Go get that. Right. Okay. Buy your gift cards, get that done. So that's done. Now what matters? I mean,

you got five X at Amazon on a slew of different chase cards. You got 5% for online purchases on just about every city card right now you know but they have different caps right the city cards it's up to five hundred dollars spend the chase cars it's up to fifteen hundred dollars a month i think so fifteen hundred in november fifteen hundred in december and then i know that you probably have opened a card at some point i guess you did your your spending requirement requirement already. How do you prioritize? Yeah. But you also have the Amex offer. Oh, right. The plus eight, you know, getting the plus eight membership.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. What matters? So that's the only one I can, I can answer right now, which is I have that. I loaded that to my Amex everyday preferred, which, you know, needs 30 purchases a month to get to earn extra points. And so I set up a, um, auto load, uh, every day, uh, up until the end of the year, uh, to, uh, load to my Amazon account. And, and even though, uh, uh, Amex doesn't, doesn't like you buying gift cards, and this is sort of technically like that, I don't think Amex is likely to claw back or withhold bonus points for Amazon. Unlikely. Very unlikely.

It's just, yeah. Very unlikely. That's a great idea. And, you know, that's a great point because here I am writing about these deals, buying stuff, bought a bunch of stuff on Amazon already, totally forgot about the eight points per dollar, like the membership rewards, extra eight points. Because I mentally had that earmark that, okay, I haven't actually, I told you, I haven't used my discount for pay with points yet. And so I kind of mentally had it earmarked that I'm going to stack those and use that, the points for the discount for the, I'm going to save $60 on something and I'll get that eight points per dollar on that purchase was my thought because that's capped at what $375

and spent I think something like it's hard to keep all this exactly that sounds very precise so I think that's what it is I think so so I was like okay well that'll kind of fit that should probably eat up most of you know the spend for for whatever it is I'm going to buy. But it is difficult. Here's the thing, though. Or do you prioritize the ones that are ending really soon? So that one, I believe, goes until the end of the year. So you have plenty of time to use that one.

Whereas the Citi ones are only for a week and the Chase ones are per month. So if you want that. So now here's the question. If you're going to buy something that's 500 bucks and you're going to buy it on Amazon, let's say, which do you pick? Do you take 5% back on a Citi card or do you take five points per dollar on one of the many Chase cards? And if so, which one? Because you've got a chance for five points per dollar Marriott points,

five IHG points per dollar, five whatever the co-brands are in general. They're all offering basically five. Five United Miles, five Southwest points. Yeah. Well, so don't forget that Citi's also giving you whatever the normal earnings are, plus whatever promotional things you're signed up for.

So, you know, if you're using your prestige card and you haven't yet used the 5X online earnings thing, then you're getting both 5X rewards plus 5% back. And that would be, I think, a no-brainer to go with that. In my case, I've got the AT&T Access More card that earns 3X online. It's been working for 3x at Amazon. And I also have a plus two points per dollar retention offer on that card. So I'm earning 5x on that card at Amazon. Plus I'll get 5% back. So for me, that's an easy.

So then is that good enough that you just go buy gift cards with that? Because, I mean, you did that with the Annex Pay With Points. You're like, oh, I'll find a gift card that's worth it to me that I know I'm going to use. I mean, this is a similar scenario, right? You're going to save $25 plus five points per dollar. So even if you only value that at 1% each, you're talking 10%, $50. Right. It's a little it's a yeah a little different so uh of all the gift cards i

could get that i would be most sure of using amazon itself so i would i i will consider just loading up uh all of that on to my amazon account as credit, you know, and, and then, then I could use it, you know, for whatever on Amazon and, and even later buy third party gift cards if I need them. So that I think so. I think it's, I think it's good enough for that. It's not, it's not 20%. It's worth a little more than 10%. Right. And you can, you can, it's worth a little bit more than 10%. So the overall dollar figure might be more savings than the $20 that you stand to save with the 20% discount. Right. I mean, cause you stand to save $50 on $500 spent, right? More or less it gets a little murky because then you're talking about how much you value the thank you points. So in that case, I would, I would agree though. I think probably loading up your

Amazon balance would make sense. Maybe that's what I should have done with mine but I actually used mine to purchase stuff I spent almost exactly $500 on the AT&T card already and now I'm working on other cards but I'm doing shopping not just for me but for family members too so so yeah so did you come to the same conclusion that the Citi deal was better for you than a 5X offer? Well, so in my case, what I did was I used the Citi offer for stuff that wasn't from Amazon. So still online. Oh, right, because it's just online purchases. I'll save the Amazon bonuses.

I'll use the Chase cards for the Amazon bonuses and should be using the MX card for that. Also, because the Citi card would work all sorts of online purchases, and I'm buying lots of stuff from other places for people too. Now, the gamble there is that, for example, one of the things I bought last night was sheets from this Puffy Mattress company. I bought some sheets when they were on a great deal that Dr. Credit posted a while back. I really liked them. They were really nice. of course, they're doing a Black Friday sale, 15% off, blah, blah, blah. So I bought them, but I have no idea whether, you know, puffy.com or whatever the, I don't know if that's exactly the, don't type that into your web browser and then blame me if it doesn't go to Puffy Mattress. I have no idea. I remember the URL,

but whatever it is, Puffy Mattress, right, right. It's definitely going to be an X-rated website that you just let people take. Anyway, so Puffy Mattress, I bought the sheets, but I don't know. Is it really going to code 3X? That's hard because the AT&T Access More card is very unpredictable. Some online merchants code at 3X and some just don't, even though they probably should. So there's a little bit of gamble involved there. I hope that I'll get the 3X and the 5%. I'll be a little disappointed if I don't get one, but the 5% still is probably good enough. I mean, really, realistically, 5% on top of your credit card rewards is pretty good return. So that's very, so I can't complain too much, even if that happens. So yeah, but I definitely have been running into that issue where also I've wanted to make sure, oh, my wife wanted to buy something on Amazon. And so I said, okay, I'm going to give her one of her cards, one of her chase cards that's earning

five points per dollar. And I wanted to give her the Marriott card because I wanted Marriott points because we've talked about before how I like the opportunity to earn Marriott points at a reasonable clip, because there aren't many things that I'm going to earn Marriott points on. So whenever I can take advantage of an opportunity where I don't feel bad about myself for collecting Marriott points, like, all right, let's go ahead and do that. So I was going to give her the Marriott card. And I took it out and I was like, wait a second. I don't know for sure whether or not I registered this for the five X.

So then I get to go to frequent milMiler and type in the Chase 3x to 10x to try to find the post. So as I'm doing that, I'm like, oh, but wait a second. I know that I registered her Southwest card for the 5x because I bought something else and got the 5x on it because I bought something at Walmart and got 5x on it in my local Walmart because it coded as grocery or Walmart. I don't know, whatever it was that got the 5x. So I knew I had that and I said, okay, well that synced up. And then I said, well, duh, I should of course be using the Southwest card. Those points are worth penny and a half towards airfares. That's like a seven and a half percent return. What was I even thinking with this Marriott card? And so I gave her the Southwest card to make her purchase. But, but constantly thinking about that stuff,

it does make it a little bit difficult to sit back and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner and relax a little bit. So I think though, our post tries to lay out deals that are worthwhile. So we have a post for all the Cyber Monday deals, Black Friday, Cyber Monday deals, that lays out deals that we think are worth taking a look at probably for one reason or another, either because there's stuff you might want, or because they're gift card opportunities that are worth it. And then we have a separate post of like the spending offers to maximize. And so you can kind of look through that separate post and see, okay, I don't have these cards, so I can ignore that part. I do have these cards and kind of earmark the ones that you want to make sure that you use. So I think that doing that ahead of time before you start shopping,

figuring out what it is you think you're going to use, maybe that reduces some of the anxiety and stress, hopefully a little bit. Yeah. So, you know, one thing I'm reminded of when we're talking about all this is a lunch I had years ago. I had just recently become a blogger, started Frequent Miler,

had the opportunity to go to a conference called like Blog World or something like that. And I met, among other people, the author of Deals We Like. And she and I, and a couple of other people were at lunch and back then the Sapphire preferred was the big thing. Cause it got two X for, for dining and travel. And so, you know, we're all whipping out our, our Sapphire cards. And it turned out that the, the restaurant, I guess, didn't take credit cards, but, but anyway, the, you know, at first we're all like rumbling about it, but, but she's like, you know, you're talking about, this was like a $10. You're talking about 20, 20, 30 cents, 40 cents.

Like you want to really get generous about the value of the points. Yeah. So, and, and so, you know, that really meant a lot. Help me like look at things a little differently and say, yeah, these little things. Yeah. If you could, if you can make it a habit of picking the right one, it'll add up over time for sure but uh you know don't sweat it when when you miss out on the little thing like like it it's i would i would hate for someone to get right all their credit card picks right now for the shopping

season but miss out on like the uh platinum 100k offer because they were too busy figuring out whether you use a convoy card or totally true and actually what I was thinking about as you were talking about that was how I don't worry about gas like lots of people worry about this station is five cents a gallon less than that station well I don't worry about that because I'm like well I want to fill out 20 20 gallons so if I save a nickel a gallon it's a dollar I mean I don't I don't worry about that win because it's not not big enough to me. And so it's the same kind of thing here. And what I thought of as you were talking about it was I need to get my wife on the phone again with Chase, because I know that some people on a second round of calls got some of those retention offers. And so I I've

been meaning to have her call again and I've forgotten. And I think about that and I'm like, all right, in one phone call in 20 minutes, which Greg already talked about last week was longer than he needed to spend. He walked away with $575. That's going to like dwarf whatever I'm going to save over the next couple of days, probably. So like in one phone call, don't get so caught up in these deals that you don't make that call because you know, those are, those ones are the ones that matter. These small ones, I don't worry too much about. And in fact, when it comes to the Black Friday, Cyber Monday stuff, I write about all the deals because I want people to know about what's going on and save money where they want to save money

and feel excited about that joy of free, so to speak. But personally, I buy a lot less for me these days during this time. What I actually focus on in terms of my shopping is websites where I know there's very rarely a discount the rest of the year, like places that sell things and you can only get them direct. Like I mentioned those puffy mattresses, the puffy sheets, the sheets from the puffy mattress company, because I haven't found them at any other stores. They're not on any shopping portals. There's no coupons. So like, this is it. I was waiting for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, figuring that that's

probably the only time I'm going to get a discount on that particular product and sure enough boom there comes the first discount i've seen since i bought the first set anyway so i was like all right well great so i'm gonna hop on those kind of things so i look for that stuff and don't worry about the rest yep similarly like local shops uh often have gift card deals for themselves, you know, for their own shop. If you shop at these places, you know, I know my local market, which is not a national chain, is doing a Cyber Monday deal where you get these bonus cards by buying gift cards. And I'll see what happens if I use my Hamex Platinum with that. But, you know, those things are great because you're actually helping out the local merchant and getting a deal that'll last you, you know. That's a great point.

That's a great point. My wife had a massage recently and was going to buy a gift card from the masseuse for a future visit or for family. I don't remember what it was. But the masseuse had told her that, actually, I'm going to run a gift card deal during this Black Friday, Cyber Monday time kind of a thing and explain what it was. And when my wife told me, I was like, oh, well, I mean, we should probably just stock up on a year's worth of massages then when that comes around, because it was a significant chunk. I mean, she's already well-priced, a good deal.

And I thought, oh, this is terrific. We're going to save a bunch of money on that. So yeah, totally agree. That's a great opportunity. And I had actually forgotten she mentioned it. So now I'm glad you said this, because when you get done recording today, I'm going to remind her to make that phone call so that, you know, we can, again, like you said, support a local business and save a bunch of money on something that we would ordinarily spend money on and, and, and also get to save a decent chunk. So I look for those things now. I don't look as much at each individual deal, especially these days, apart from maybe the Apple products, most things like, you know, your Amazon Echoes and your Google whatevers are going to go on sale probably two or three more times between now and the holidays. So I don't feel the same FOMO, the same fear of missing out that I used to,

because I'm so used to seeing the cycles of these deals. They do tend to come around again. So it's probably not your only chance. This year, a lot of those things came around during Prime Day just like a month ago. And here they are again. And with people mostly shopping online, and obviously, I would assume spending less money this year than in past years, I imagine there's going to be more competition than usual and we'll continue to see sales. So yeah, don't get caught up in that fear of missing out. Make sure you're using a card that earns something decent, but also make sure you're not so focused on saving an extra 5 cents here, 50 cents there that you forget to save the two or $300 when you can.

Right. Good advice. All right. So that brings us, I think, to post roast. And I'm not going to roast myself. So Greg was on vacation this week. He came back and he wrote about the Wentworth Mansion in Charleston, which looked pretty interesting. I have looked at that as a redemption before. I have nothing to roast there except for the fact that the pictures took forever to load on my phone.

I tried to pull it up this morning, which I don't know if it was my phone or if it was high-resolution images. For some reason, it just took forever for those pictures to load. gonna roast you on that and that's it i'll have to double check my uh wordpress uh mobile settings to see if they're uploading at high res instead of medium i didn't double um most likely it's i think i think it's it's uh t-mobile signing up so many uhobile. Signing up so many. You're fratting so many free lines. You're throttling your service. Could be, could be. So yeah, no post roast for me really.

All right. Well, all right. So you wrote a post for Thanksgiving. I did. for Thanksgiving and you, you, you erroneously described me as a nice guy and claimed that my online personality, uh, as a nice guy was, was, you know, more than true in real life. And you know, perfectly well that that's, that's a lie that, that I'm actually a hard ass jerk in real life so much so that it was hard for him to even figure out how to say that he was like he's a trained cat assassin so you know only only everyone knew i do i do yeah right so um yeah i'm a cat killer so you know

i think you should tell the truth well thank you thank you thank you very much for that also so actually no it was it was a great post i really loved reading it and and um i really loved the reader comments as well or were really really touching and it and, and I really loved the reader comments as well, or were really, really touching. It was really nice to see that. Yeah. And thank you. It's a great place to work. Frequent miler is an awesome place to work. I'm thankful for the site. I was thankful for the site and I, I didn't include this. And I, in hindsight, I kind of felt like, how did I not also include this?

I've long been thankful for the site because it saved me tons of money over the years. And, and, and some readers have said before that, oh, you've saved me a bunch of money on this or that. But FrequentMiler saved me that same amount of money too on those things because I wasn't paying attention to that stuff before I started reading the site. So I'm just as thankful that FrequentMiler exists beyond everything else. Right. Meanwhile, you've cost me all kinds of money. Because you write about deals and then like about to me deals. And then my wife likes to me and we have to go buy more to me and

take no responsibility for that. You got to rein things in and get no responsibility there. So, yeah, we said no, no fear of missing out. Come on, practice what you preach. That's right. So, and let me just say, I'm very thankful for having you on the team. I'm very thankful for the team. I think we have a great time together in our weekly meetings and just as a group,

all work well together. And I'm very thankful for that. And I'm thankful for this podcast too. I've been really having fun with it and we get all kinds of great feedback and thankful to everybody who gives us great feedback or any kind of feedback. And I've started recently realizing that when people ask me what I do for a living for the last 10 years, I've been saying I'm a blogger and then I have to kind of explain that. But now I'm thinking, is that really it? I mean, we're podcasters.

We're, I don't know what you call it with the video aspect, but YouTubers, podcasters, bloggers, vloggers. Yeah, vlogger, there you go. So we're all of that. Multimedia extraordinaires. So yeah, I'm thankful that there are people. So we're all of that. Multimedia extraordinaires. So yeah. Yeah. So I'm thankful that there are people that are interested in all this stuff. So thank you for staying interested in sharing it with friends.

I mean, I constantly hear from people say that they share the site with friends or the podcast or this or that with friends. And so you find people that might be interested in it. Thank you. I appreciate that. It's certainly been, you know, 2020 has been a crazy year. And I've been very thankful throughout the craziness of the year, that things in my life have been less crazy, because everything at Frequent Miler has been, you know, the kind of the normal flow for us. So

it's been easy to just work and focus and pay attention to that and get less caught up in the craziness. Similar to the way we talked about getting caught up in the craziness of Black Friday, getting caught up in the craziness of 2020 can certainly get overwhelming. So I've been thankful to be less focused on that. Thanks to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And thanks to everybody who's supported us and has made the blog come out of its steep decline, which many businesses did during the pandemic.

But we're now running back near, you know, near pre pandemic rates. So that's amazing. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Okay. So we thank you all. All right. All right. Let's get to questions. Let's get a little bit more challenging here. And I say a little bit more challenging, only a little bit more challenging this week with the question of the week, but a good question on the last that I didn't know the answer to. So I, and I think you probably will.

So Anthony and our frequent miler insiders asks question about sweet night awards. Okay. So this is Marriott sweet night awards. And that's why I asked you because I figured you would probably have a good handle on how these work and the Marriott. I just used one. Marriott sweet night awards. Maybe he doesn't know if you hit 50 nights at Marriott, then I just used one. The Marriott Suite Night Awards for anybody who doesn't know, if you hit 50 nights at Marriott, then you get five Suite Night Awards that you can apply. And the way these work is that you apply them in advance, but then they don't start searching. We've talked about this before. They don't start searching for availability until five days before you check in.

And then if the suite that you want is available, then theoretically you get upgraded to it, right? And if it's not available, they keep checking right up until the day before check-in, I think. More or less got it, right? So the question is, I only selected one option for the suite I wanted, the governor's suite for the Aruba Marriott Stellaris next week. If it gets denied five days before, if it doesn't get it at that five-day window, he says, can I submit another request and include the lesser suite, the junior

suite, and see if that gets approved? Or can you only try once? Can you just try to apply the suite upgrade once? So Marriott lets you pick the suites that you want, right? So can you like withdraw it and say, okay, you know, I mean, if he does nothing, it's going to keep trying every day. So it's not like you get an email saying it was denied. You get an email saying we're going to keep trying. And what I don't know off the top of my head is how easy it is to cancel a request. Can you just go online and cancel it? But I would think that at the very least, you should be able to call and cancel that request. And then you could probably go back into your account and re-issue

that upgrade request. And I happen to know that you can issue upgrade requests last minute, because here's what happened to me just last week, which is I had a one night stay at a Marriott. I had, I booked it through fine hotels and resorts in order to get the $100 property credit. And I had requested a suite upgrade. As time got closer, I got an email from the property saying, let us know if there's anything you need, if you have any questions. So I wrote back saying, what can, asking, what can the credit be used for? I was hoping I could use it for parking and for the destination fee. Found out you could only use it for dining and the reviews of the restaurants at this hotel were not that great. So I wasn't too interested in using it for dining. So, okay. So I looked at the rates at that point

for booking other ways I found I could save. Yeah. I don't remember exactly how much, let's say it was like 70 bucks, but even if it was only 50 bucks, I was like saving 50 bucks in order. I wouldn't get a hundred bucks, but it was a hundred bucks I didn't actually want. So, so I thought that was a good deal to spend less and not get this, this kind of useless credit. So, so I did that and, and, and then on, so I canceled the old one, made the new reservation, applied the suite, a suite upgrade.

And the next day, so this is the day i'm checking in i get a email first that says your suite upgrade request has been denied and that turned out was from the the booking that i care for them to deny that and a a minute later, your suite upgrade request has been approved. So you were able to resubmit one on the same property, right? So, you know, very indirectly, I resubmitted one by canceling and rebooking. Now I'm really wondering whether, you know, was the first suite upgrade, you know, not approved because I canceled it, which would make sense, or do they have it coded wrong where the later requests are getting priority over newer requests? I mean, yeah, over, sorry, the more recent requests getting priority

over the older requests, which is the opposite of how it should work. It should work that the earlier you're requested, the higher priority you get, but I don't know that that's true. That's so strange. That's, yeah. Who knows? I mean, there's all sorts of different stuff that could be going on there. I also wondered for a moment, do you know, like when they send the email, can you tell which reservation, you probably should tell which reservation number it's under. Cause I was going to say, do you know, like when they send the email, can you tell which reservation, you probably should tell which reservation number it's under. Because I was going to say, do you know that? Yeah.

Yeah, we checked the, I checked the reservation number. Yeah. That makes sense then. Yeah. Yeah. So we don't know. The answer to Anthony's question is, we don't know for sure, but probably, probably. I'm pretty sure.

You can resubmit it with a different suite type. Although, I mean, the other thing you could do is just wait. And so I guess it depends on how badly you want the suite, right? Because what I was going to say is you could just wait and keep the one for the presidential suite or whatever it is, the suite that you really wanted. Keep that on there and let them keep searching every day. Now, if the state is next week, I would take a look and see if that room is available. Let's start there. Is the room available for any of the days? Because it's not available for any of the days to reserve. And what are the chances of that clearing? Very, very low. Whoever's

got it reserved has to cancel, right? So if it's available for like three out of your four days or something, well, okay, then maybe it's worth hanging on and waiting and seeing. But the worst case scenario is it's not going to clear and you get there at check-in and ask if there are any suites and say, well, I did try to apply a suite upgrade. I have these suite upgrade awards available. Can I get a suite now? Because you can apply those right at check-in, right? You've had that happen before, or at least I know I've heard of people using that as a bargaining chip, right? It's more of a, yeah, it's more of the hotel's discretion. When I've used it at the hotel, it's been more like they recognize that I had tried to apply one. And so they sort of escalated the priority of giving me a discretionary upgrade. So it didn't end up that

I lost the upgrade certificate when they did that that because it wasn't really, you know, it wasn't really using the certificate. It was more just in their minds, I think. You know, I don't think there's anything formal about it, but in their minds. Yeah. And so I guess that's why I said it depends on how much of a priority the suite is to you, because I've heard that same type of story from other people before where they say it's always good to have one as a bargaining chip to mention that you've got this suite upgrade award or you tried to apply this suite upgrade award and it didn't get applied.

Because yeah, then I think it won't hurt your chances of getting a discretionary upgrade at the desk. Now, if you like that property, has a reputation for not upgrading people or you really want a suite and you're willing to take that lower end suite if you don't get the high one right off the bat, then it might make sense to go and do exactly what you're saying, cancel your request and resubmit, saying that you'd take it.

Yeah. Now, back to what I was saying before, it's supposed to work that the earlier you put in the request, the higher priority your request will have. If it in fact works that way, there's a downside to doing this. That's true. So there's a lot of strategy to be had with these sweet upgrades. There is. With everybody having them now.

And the problem is we don't have any like real data. You know, we have these anecdotes like I was telling. And so we don't really know what works and what doesn't. And it's hard to ever know that because of the way that these work. And there just seems to be so much gray area. I think that even with a lot of data points, it would be hard to know because it would still vary from property to

property quite a bit and how they do it. So long story short, best of luck to you, Anthony. We don't know. We don't know. So that was our question of the week. Like usual. We're guessing. We're grasping at straws here,

Anthony. What do you want? Wait, I should, I should just record a standard answer to the question of the week. That's like, I don't know. That's a good question.

There's a lot of gray area in this game. A lot of those things that are like, how good is your social engineering? You know, that's where a lot of these come out. You know what's sad is people come to us for advice. Keep coming. Keep coming for advice.

Don't listen to this guy. Listen to him. He's being too modest again. We don't know what we're talking about. We can't answer a simple question. All right. So that, my friends, I think brings us to the end, to the goodbye song for the day.

So I want to thank you guys for being here with us, just like we thanked you earlier. If you'd like to hear more about what we're talking about, you want to get alerted of our posts, know what deals are going on, blah, blah, blah, follow us on social media, all those things. You want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe

to get on our email list. So you can see all the posts and follow us on social media. We promise no shortage of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Bye, everybody. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you Thank you.