Frequent Miler on the Air - Roll your own airline elite status | Ep221 | 9-23-23

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

You don't need airline elite status to get elite-like treatment. This week, we discuss how to get the perks without the loyalty and how to think about the costs associated if you decide to stay on that hamster wheel. Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ 00:00 Intro 01:42 Giant Mailbag 04:47 What crazy thing . . . did Amex do this week? 06:46 Mattress running the numbers: Aeroplan cardholders can get 4th night free with points https://frequentmiler.com/aeroplan-offering-4th-night-free-on-hotel-stays-but-its-very-poor-value/ 09:55 Card Talk: U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve card https://frequentmiler.com/usbar/ https://frequentmiler.com/ultra-premium-credit-card-travel-insurance/ 22:35 Award Talk 22:37 Choice Privileges sweet spot awards https://frequentmiler.com/excellent-new-set-of-choice-privileges-sweet-spot-rewards-for-stays-through-11-30/ https://frequentmiler.com/a-sweet-spot-hotel-and-a-rookie-mistake/ 25:27 Greg finds an award not on the search tools 28:21 Finnair via Avios 32:02 Main Event: Roll your own airline elite status 32:30 Basic run-down of earning status through flight or credit card spend https://frequentmiler.com/earn-elite-status-aa-vs-delta-vs-united/ 37:48 Do we need elite status at all? How can we be treated elite? 57:53 Why might you actually want airline elite status? 1:04:45 Are the benefits of loyalty worth it? Who should pursue it? 1:09:36 Question of the Week: I accidentally purchased $6500 in United miles while booking an award. I can ask them to reverse the purchase, but is it worth the risk of the ticket getting canceled? Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did Citi do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, roll your own airline elite status. All on your own, huh?

Everybody rolling their own out there today. We are going to show people how you can roll your own, huh? Everybody rolling their own out there today. We are going to show people how you can roll your own, why it might be a better way to go than earning lead status directly from airlines, and why in some cases you might actually be better off by getting lead status from the airlines. But we'll discuss all that and more with the main event. First, a brief intro. I'm Greg Davis Keene, and I'm here with, as always, with Nicholas Reyes. And we are both the hosts of this show, as well as primary authors of Frequent Miler, the blog. And a reminder that you can find today's show and outline and timestamps in the show notes of the podcast or video. So you can jump ahead to any section you want if you'd like to.

First, you know, while we're reminding people of things, Greg, I'm going to also remind you that if you like this video, you learn something interesting, you find it valuable. Don't forget to hit like, subscribe or leave a comment or a review wherever it is you're listening or watching. Thank you. Go ahead, Greg. I always forget that. I always forget to beg for reviews and likes and all that. I don't. It's okay. I don't mind groveling, Greg. I'll handle that. Forget when I said first. Second, let's jump into the giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Scott. And Scott wrote, actually quite a while ago, but it's time to get it on the site.

He says, love the site and the podcast. I've had the Built card for about a year now and have been paying my rent through Built using their non-credit card payment feature. My landlord accepts credit cards, but charges a fee. So Bilt has a way of letting you pay your landlord with Bilt, but without any fees or even to pay landlords that don't accept credit cards at all. He says, you seem a little uncertain

how this worked on a previous podcast. Bilt does not connect to your bank account to pay your rent. Instead, they provide you with an account and routing number to give to your landlord. And then the rental charge appears as any other charge would on your Bilt credit card statement due whenever your credit card bill is due. One thing that's important for people to know, you have to use the B built credit card five times throughout the month, not counting rent, in order to keep the points you earn on rent. I didn't realize this and had my points clawed back one month. Hope this helps clarify how the card works for renters. Oh, that's all good information.

And I think it's, you know, for a second there, I thought you talked a little too fast when you said you could use built even if your landlord doesn't take a credit card. But then you went into the fact that, yeah, they'll give you the ACH information. So it's pretty easy. I know quite a few people who rent whose landlords don't take a card, but are still able to use the built card. So that's nice. And the five transactions per month minimum is definitely an important caveat to mention, you got to remember to use it. And of course, we would recommend using it on the first of the month because on rent day, you'll earn double points. So you'll earn 2x on ordinary purchases other than rent and you can earn 6x on dining, for instance. So it's worth spending on the first of the month and not just going out to eat necessarily, but maybe you don't have plans

to go out on the first, but you know you're going to go out on the 12th and you know where you're going to go. You can go to that restaurant and probably buy a gift card and earn your 6X. So be smart about that and pick up your five transactions at good return on your spend. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And a little side bonus info is that even though it's not officially allowed, a lot of people have reported success paying HOA fees the same way as if the HOA is a landlord. And so you can do that as well and earn points on paying HOA fees, maybe. And I'm only saying maybe because it is not a promised feature of the card, but a lot of people reported success doing that. Do note, you can only do one or the other.

Like you can't pay multiple landlords. You can't pay a landlord and an HOA fee or whatever. So you can only do one per month of that sort of thing. Very good. Okay, excellent. So that is our giant mailbag. I think that brings us next to what's crazy thing. I'm jumping ahead.

Aren't I? What crazy thing did MX do this week? Yeah. MX. We, we heard this from, from several people that who have Hilton cards where you can spend your way to a free night with Hilton,

with various Hilton cards. And they logged into their account and saw something very interesting. The display said, earn a free night reward. Enjoy a free night reward after you spend 999... Wait, I'm just going to read the digits.

999-999-, 999.99 on your card by December 31st. And then below that was a spend tracker. It said zero spend so far. One billion dollars to go. Greg, you didn't do that right. You didn't do that right

for the folks on YouTube. There you go. There you go. Now, if you're listening you i'm sure you can imagine what that looked like uh once we had once we had it the right way so well done well done yeah sorry for messing up the initial introduction of it anyway so obviously you do not have to spend 1 billion dollars to get a free night with a hilton card nor do we recommend doing so um you could probably earn much better rewards on some other cards by spending a billion, a billion dollars.

Preston Pyshko 1 billion dollars. Right, right. You probably could. And in fact, we've talked about the Aeroplan card where you could do pretty well on a million dollars spent. So for a billion, you could, I mean, you could get a whole bunch of people, unlimited flights or buy one, get one. Yeah, okay.

Never mind. All right. A little glitch in the matrix there. That's all. All right. So I got us all discombobulated here because I jumped ahead on our outline. But since we just talked about the hotel card, let's continue on this path, Greg, even though I threw things out of order and I'll put things back, I promise. Because we just talked about spending for hotels.

Let's talk about mattress running the numbers. That's the natural next piece here. So mattress running the numbers this week. Aeroplan is out with a new promotion to get the fourth night free on hotel stays when you book through Aeroplan with Aeroplan points. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. This is a new cardholder benefit. So for Chase Aeroplane cardholders, you've been able to book hotels for a while now with through Aeroplane using their points and not get very good value doing that.

And now if you have the Aeroplane credit card, you can get that fourth night free. So you'll get a little bit less bad value by booking through Arrowplan. What are we talking about? How much? How less bad? Yeah. Well, Stephen ran the numbers and the best he found was that after accounting for the fourth night free, he found a situation where he could get 1.06 cents per point value. So slightly over a penny per point value. Usually, he saw less than a penny per point value. And this is after getting 25% off. Yeah, yeah. So he points out, I think he makes a really great point in the post, which is that if you really want to use your Aeroplan points to book hotel stays, don't forget that the Aeroplan credit card from Chase has a feature that lets you redeem points for travel, like cash out your points for travel purchases that you've already made and get 1.25 cents per point value. Now, there are limits to that and everything, but the point is you could just book your hotel stays, whatever the best way is, and pay with your airplane card and get at least 1.25 on that amount of spend if that's what you prefer. Of course, we think a much better use is to find valuable

award flights and book them that way because you can often get really, really outsized value that way. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't consider redeeming aeroplane points at 1.25 cents. However, also worth adding to what Greg said there is not only can you get far better value that way, and can you also, like he said, book directly with the hotel or whatever it is you want to do? However, it's best for you to book. But on top of that, you don't have to stay in four night increments either in order to get the best value.

You stay one night and and use your points and get one point two five cents per point in value. So being pigeonholed into a fourth night free for far less value just doesn't make any sense at all. I looked into airplane hotels during our three cars, three continents trip also because I wanted to see if I could find anything that would make sense. And yeah, just like Steven showed it, all I found was horrible value almost across the board. So not something worth doing, but good to mention that. So you know that this is not a mattress run situation. Don't use your points that way. All right. Not a good use of Aeroplan points.

All right. Speaking of points though, and good uses of points and booking direct and getting good value out of your points. Look at how I segued that, Greg. Didn't I make it seem like this was supposed to happen? We're going to talk next about card talk. This week's card talk is the U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve card. So this is a card that I just recently got, but you've had for years, right? And it's been a player in your wallet, right? It has, absolutely. All right, let's get into the basic details of the Altitude Reserve card. It's kind of marketed as a premium card, and it does have a high sticker price of $400 a year, But it gives you back $325 for spend on travel or dining every year. So the net cost after $325 of travel or dining spend is only $75.

So it actually comes in cheaper than the vast majority of travel cards out there, most of which start at around $95. It has no foreign transaction fee. And where it gets a little more exciting, it earns three points per dollar for all travel and three points per dollar for all mobile wallet spend. So that's like when you're using your phone, like with Apple Pay or Samsung Pay to pay in person for things or on the phone when you're checking out an order and it has that Apple Pay or Samsung Pay or whatever option, you could click there and pay that way. You get three points per dollar for all of that spend. So it doesn't matter whether you're in a grocery store or a restaurant or this or that or the other, you're just getting 3X. I love that. 1X everywhere else. So if you use the card for regular spend and it's not travel

and it's not a mobile wallet, you could get one point per dollar. You also get eight priority pass passes per year that you could use in a number of ways. You could use them all for yourself. So eight different visits to priority passes, pass lounges or restaurants or whatever. Or you could use some for a guest. So let's say you go with a family of four, then including yourself, then all of you could get into Priority Pass Lounge twice a year, basically, with those eight passes. It has decent travel protections. It has primary car coverage. It has a six-hour trip delay. It even has emergency evacuation coverage, only up to $10,000.

So that sort of barely has it, but it still has emergency evacuation coverage only up to $10,000. So that sort of barely has it, but it still has something there. Let me jump in on the travel protection real quick, because this is one area'll be able to, you know, as you'll find out in a second, get good value out of those points. But when I looked up our, our, what are we titled as the ultra premium credit card travel protections page, I always go to that to check what the travel protections are going to be before I use one of my ultra premium cards to book. And one of the things I noticed was that trip cancellation and interruption on the altitude reserve was significantly less than everybody else.

Whereas a lot of the different benefits are pretty equal. This is one that was a lot different. It was a maximum of $2,000 per person per trip with a max of 2000 per trip. So trip cancellation interruption only covers up to $2,000, which if you're traveling with a family, like I just last week was talking about a hotel stay that I was booking that

was $2,000 just for the hotel. And that's it. That would have maxed out coverage if I had used the altitude reserve for that purchase. So, uh, so that's one thing that has made me a little bit hesitant. I'm fine with using it on smaller trips, but I'm bigger international trips. I'm a little, little bit more hesitant to use this use this for specifically the trip cancellation and interruption benefit. That's a fantastic point. Yep. Okay. And then moving on to other parts of the card, how to use the points you earn. First of all, you could just straight up redeem the points for one

cent each, but that's boring. What you want to do is get 1.5 cents per point value. And there's two ways to do that. You can book travel through the U.S. Bank travel portal and you get 1.5 cents per point value that way. A way I prefer is that they have something called real-time mobile rewards. And what that is, is you have to sign up for it. And when you make travel purchases that qualify, and you'll have to look into the details of what qualifies, but when you make qualifying purchases, you get a text message saying, do you want to redeem this many points for that purchase and you type back the word redeem and boom they they uh take your points at 1.5 cents per point value um i love to use that for things like uber lyft and and so on because

what what's really nice is is like often with with these uh cards cards and rewards programs, to get great value, you have to accumulate a lot of points before you can get really good value. In this case, even a $100 Uber ride costs, what's the math, about 6k somewhere in that range right a little over 6k points so so not very many uh points to cover that ride so uh i really enjoy that feature yeah i love it i i feel like that's that's been something that i'm enjoying and i'm not even redeeming my points yet i'm kind of saving them up i don't know what for uh but like i just like getting the text message it's kind of fun it's, there it is. I could redeem these for one and a half cents each. And it's so easy. You do have to sign up for it. And you mentioned, and I didn't double check this, but I think you mentioned that you also might need to set like minimums in terms

of how many, like what kind of purchases of purchases you're, you're interested in. When I signed up and this was a long time ago, it let me specify what kind of purchases I wanted to get alerts for. And, uh, the idea is that I only want to get alerts for travel purchases that were, because those are the only ones where you get 1.5 cents per point value. You don't want to get alerted every time you shop at a grocery store saying, hey, you could redeem your points for this purchase because you'll only get one cent per point for those kind of purchases. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I just recently ran into that because I walked out of the grocery store and got a text message asking if I wanted to redeem my points, but it was only at one cent per point, so I wouldn't have done that. I love this card because the annual fee, like Greg said, really feels low to me, even though it's a big number to begin with at the 400. There's not a year that's going to pass that I'm not going to spend $325 combined between restaurant and travel. And in fact, within a week of getting the card, I think I had spent $325 between dining and travel. So very, very, very easy for me to use that $325. And so it very much feels like a $75 net fee to me.

And it comes with a decent number of benefits, good travel protection. I mean, all the other pieces of the travel protection are pretty on par with the other ultra premium cards. I was just a little disappointed with the trip cancellation coverage. I thought that was low compared to its competitors. So that was the one piece that was a little bit disappointing to me. But I love the fact that you could do your Ubers and things like that. But what I'm saving up my points for, as I said, I'm going to make this, I mentioned this on a podcast recently, my new car rental card. I've long used the Ritz card for car rentals or the Sapphire Reserve, then a little

bit of VentureX. But this is going to become my new car rental card because there's no other good way to redeem points for car rentals. Usually car rentals cost far more when you book through a credit card portal. With the Altitude Reserve, I should be able to book direct, use whatever codes I have access to, click through a shopping portal, blah, blah, blah, and then redeem my points at one and a half cents per point when I get the text message. So this is definitely going to be my new car rental focused or the points anyway, I'm going to look at as my car rental points. And it's very easy to accumulate. Everybody takes mobile payments these days. I mean, even restaurants I've been to recently have had opportunities to pay with mobile payments. Right, right. And one caution there, when you're trying to earn your $325, you can't earn that through mobile wallet pay. So when you use your Apple Pay or whatever, it doesn't count as a travel purchase or a restaurant purchase. It counts as a mobile wallet purchase.

That's good to know. purchase. So just something to keep in mind. So rental cars are perfect because usually you have to keep your rental car, you have to keep your credit card number in your rental car account, like your Avis or whatever account. And they just use that and they'll charge directly and you don't use your mobile wallet payment at all. Probably true for most big travel purchases, airfare and things where you pay directly with a credit card, not with, with, uh, your mobile wallet, but, um, just something to keep in mind. Um, all right. So, so Nick likes it. I, I, I want to say a few more things about why I like this card. I already mentioned real-time mobile rewards.

I love that um the the other thing is is it's the best card to use to pay for x y or z so if someone comes to me and says i shop at costco a lot what's the best card to use oh well they take apple pay use uh the the altitude reserve hamill said sapphire reserve and got tongue twisted trying to fix it and you name it if it's a place especially in person it's probably the

best choice for that purchase with a few exceptions the other thing that I love about this card is using it internationally. So when I go to Europe, for example, I hate, uh, using a credit card directly, um, because American credit cards, they, they're like, oh, uh, they run it and then they're like, oh, you've got a sign.

Then they go looking around for, for a pen. And, and it's really annoying. If you use your Apple Pay, none of that happens. And if you're using Apple Pay all the time anyway, might as well use the Altitude Reserve. Just get 3x everywhere for all your international spend. It's just so handy. You don't even have to think about it. I use it a whole bunch. I use Google pay because I'm an Android guy in Europe just recently all over the place. Like you said, funny, funny story on that. I got home and so I just opened the altitude reserve right before a trip to Europe, went to Europe, use it all over Europe, got home. And I got a letter in the mail saying, Hey, you know, you recently opened this card.

We see that your home address is in like Belgium or Denmark, or they pick one of the countries that I was in. And I just want to let you know that we understand that you live there. And if that isn't right, give us a call. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's really funny. I called the U.S. Bank and I was like, no, I don't live in Europe. I just I went to Europe and they said, oh, well, if you don't set a travel notification,

if you travel within the first 30 days and you haven't set a travel notification, then the system automatically thinks you live there. And I said, well, I did set a travel notification, actually, in this case. And the guy looked up my account. He said, no, it says you're in the US. You're OK. And he said, don't worry about it. Basically, throw it away. The next day, I got a letter in the mail saying, you recently opened an altitude reserve and we see that you live in the United States. So like they updated my address to the United States with the second letter that came the next day. So yeah, so I am in the US for US bank apparently, but if you're going to get it and go on an international trip right away, set that travel notification before you do because otherwise I could see there being a headache there. I was concerned immediately. I was like, oh no, are they going to shut down my account? Because they think I

don't live in the US or something. But it turned out it was no big deal. Well, maybe if you want to move to Belgium or wherever, you should do next trick. And they'll just understand. When they ask you to prove that you can live there, you just show them the US bank. The US bank says I live here. Come on. All right. All right.

Good card. Good card. Definitely one worth considering. Okay. So then I think that brings us to award talk. So let's talk about award talk quickly here. We've got a Choice Privileges promo out this week. They've got extra sweet, sweet spot rewards through November 30th. What's

going on here, Craig? Yeah. So Choice regularly comes out with what they call sweet spot rewards, which are basically a list of hotels where they're offering you to book it for fewer points than usual for the set of hotels. And Stephen noted that this particular selection seems just especially nice, that they have a lot of hotels in very desirable places. And he noted, you can go to his post and check that out, but he noted some places that he was particularly fond of. I'm going to mention that Traverse City here in Michigan has, has a nice choice property and that is on the list. I noticed there's one in, in Charleston, South Carolina as well. I mean,

so they really do have popular places where you could go. That doesn't say it doesn't necessarily mean the hotels themselves are great, but you can go to these places and enjoy the town anyway, regardless of the quality of the hotel. I've heard really good things, though, about the one in Traverse City, so I'll say that.

Lastly, don't forget, if you have the City Premier card or the City Prestige card, you can transfer points one to two to choice. So it becomes an especially good deal to book these properties during the sale. Very good. All right. And we should probably also, I'm going to link to it in the show notes, but we're going to have to double check and see if we're all up to date on the numbers. But we should also probably remind people that if you don't have enough points and you, if you don't have points to transfer from City, if you don't have a City Premier you if you don't have points to transfer from

Citi, if you don't have a Citi Premier, don't transfer over from Amex membership rewards or at least not many points, because at least as far as I know, the buying points through a points and cash booking still works. I'll have to double check that. And like I said, I will link to our post about that in the show notes. The short story is if you make a cash and points type of reservation for 6,000 points plus some amount of cash and you cancel it afterwards, you'll get points back at a favorable rate. So essentially, it's a way of indirectly buying choice points for less than

a penny a point. And that makes more sense than transferring over lots of membership rewards points. So I'll link to that and try and update that and republish that at some point, because I feel like that's something that's a tip worth repeating for people who are newly considering choice these last couple of years because of the good transfers from Citi. But of course, there are lots of people out there that don't have that Citi Premier card. So we'll make sure we link to that. All right. So that's one of our award talk pieces for this week. We also have something else from you, Greg. So you tell me what went on with your award searches as of late.

So, you know, we've talked a lot about new award search tools that are coming out fast and furiously. And there's some really good ones. I've really come to rely on one called PointsYeah, which is really fast and flexible. And also Seats.Aero are my two favorites that I turn to again and again these days. But on some searches that I've been doing, I decided sort of on a whim to check United directly. And I found some flights that worked for me that neither of these tools found at all. And I'm pretty sure that other tools weren't showing these as well either, but I didn't do my homework to make sure. But the point is, these tools are great, but it is worth sometimes checking directly with the airlines where you

have miles and seeing what's available because you might find things that aren't showing up through the tools. So then my question is, so how often? How do you know when you're supposed to check for the thing that you don't know is there. Yeah. I'd say whenever you hit a wall and the tools aren't finding something that's really good, then go check some other places and see what you could find directly with United, directly with Aeroplan, directly with American, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I've run into that too. Actually, lately, there were a couple of times where there were awards that didn't show up on the popular search tools that I was able to find. And so for me, the answer to that question is, well, when I'm pretty locked into a trip for one reason or

another, maybe I've got a few pieces of the trip booked. And so my dates are pretty set now. And so I have to find something within a small range of dates. Then I start to, I'll start my searches with the major tools. But if I'm still not finding anything like Greg said, if I'm running into the wall there, then I start to poke around a little bit and see, well, are they sure? Is it definitely not there anywhere? And you got to be careful because even just, for instance, I've relied quite a bit on the Air Canada site to search, but it doesn't always show things that might be available via United or Avianca LifeMiles. So you gotta be careful not to be too reliant on, on one, uh, you know, one, one search tool, whatever that might be.

Yeah. One more example I should mention, um, neither of the tools I mentioned, uh, right now support British Airways Avios, I don't think. And I think it was about a month ago or so, I found some great award space flying cutter that was available through British Airways, but not through American Airlines, which is what those tools do support. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you brought up British Airways because another piece of award talk that I wanted to mention this week is I was looking to book some Finnair flights. And Finnair, of course, we've talked about recently is joining the Avios program next year. So next year, they're going to start using Avios as their award currency.

Right now, they still have their own independent Finnair Plus Points currency. But anyway, the short version of my story on that is that I found some Finnair flights that were available to book with British Airways Avios that were not available to book with American Airlines miles. So it seems that British Airways, at least in some cases, has access to more flights, more of the Finnair flights, more award space on Finnair flights, I should say, than American Airlines does. So worth checking with British Airways. And like Greg said, if you're using a tool that doesn't search Avios, then you may want to double check with Avios through the British Airways website, especially if you happen to be looking for Finnair flights. And speaking of Finnair flights, I bought some points in the point sale for the Finnair Plus points because I've got a couple of flights I'm going to need to book on Finnair. And in that process, as I was searching around for flights with Finnair. And in that process, as I was searching

around for flights with Finnair, another thing I stumbled on that I never really thought about, and unfortunately, the sale on Finnair points is now over. That ended on September 18th. But I wanted to bring this up just in case they put their points on sale really at an attractive price again before they join Avios. And that is that Finnair seems to have quite a bit more award space on their own flights than they release to partners, which is something that's common. And so that shouldn't be a shock in and of itself. They charged 95,000 points one way from Helsinki to New York, but I found quite a few days with four seats available. So that's a big difference over what you'll find usually via American or British airways.

And at 95,000 points one way, that doesn't necessarily sound like a slamming deal until you consider the fact that their points were on sale for less than seven tenths of a cent per point. So that came out to about $650 worth of points if you had purchased the points for a one way business class ticket plus tax, which departing Finland is pretty cheap, 30 or 40 bucks or something. So it wasn't a lot of money in taxes departing Finland. So it could have been a really cheap way to buy business class and with quite a bit more availability. Now, that's not to say there

was availability every day on every flight and for multiple passengers. It wasn't that way, but there was quite a bit more availability on their own business class long haul flights than I found via other airlines. Yeah. Yeah. That's great to know. And I'm realizing for people who are kind of new to this, it might seem obvious that of course you should use an airline's own miles to fly that airline. And we are seeing more and more cases like this where using an airline's own miles is the best way, usually because there's more space available. But usually it costs more miles to do that than booking with certain partners because other partners have better award charts even for flying their partners. And it's a great example of that, because if those flights were available to American Airlines, American Airlines would only charge 57,500 miles one way versus 95,000 if you booked via Finnair. So much better deal to book via American Airlines if the flights are available to American Airlines. However, in this case, they weren't. And then even if they were,

you might have preferred to have bought the Finnair Plus points because they were on sale so cheaply. Even though it was a lot of points, it was $650 one way for business class from Europe to the U.S. That would be an excellent deal. That's super cheap. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, that's something worth keeping in mind for the future. And I wanted to include that in our award talk. So, all right.

I think that brings us to this week's main event. Today's main event. Roll your own airline elite status. All right. So I posted this past week a summary of comparing American Airlines to Delta to United, their requirements for earning elite status. And it's kind of mind boggling how much spend is required to be considered elite with these airlines, because all three of them have moved to sort of different ways of saying, we care about you if you spend a lot with us. And, you know, I'm not going to go over all the numbers, but let me just say, if you earn elite status entirely through flying with the airline, then you can measure like how much spend is required to get to each level. And so all four airlines have four tiers of elite status.

And so just get the first tier, the lowest tier of elite status. Depending on which airline you go with, you have to spend between $4,000 and $8,000 in a year with that airline on flights for yourself. Like it doesn't count the amount you spend to fly your family somewhere. It doesn't matter to them at all for some reason. What matters is how much you're spending for yourself. To get So $4,000 to $8,000 for that. To get to top tier, you're looking at $18,000 to $35,000 of spend with that airline. So that's a lot of money. That's a lot of money to devote to one airline. Now, there is another option, which is all the airlines allow you to earn status through credit card spend. And if you're doing it entirely through credit card spend, the first tier would cost you between, it would cost you $40,000 of spend on credit cards with American Airlines, $60,000 with Delta, and $120,000 with United. Wow. That's a lot of spend.

I mean, inflation's painful these days, I guess. Yeah, yeah. That's true. I mean, you could say it's not as much spend as it used to be, I suppose, based on inflation. And the same thing could be said to some extent about the increases in the amount of spend required for elite tiers, because goodness knows we've seen plane tickets go up in price over these last couple of years, right? Absolutely true. Absolutely true. Now, that was just first tier status. Top tier, American Airlines, you're just talking about $200,000 spend. Delta, $350,000 spend.

Woo! Is that all? And United. United, unless you have a special presidential card, you can't really get to top tier with spend. But if you did have that card, $576,000. Just a half mil. $576,000. A little over a half mil. $576,000. A little over a half mil.

Why not? Why not? If you put all of that on a single credit card, then United ought to give you the world for putting all of those charges on just one card instead of doing a little bit better for return on your spend. Yeah. But it's a lot. You've got to spend a lot. A lot, a lot of money. The overall, if you, if you don't care which airline you're loyal to and but, and you have

access to all three American airlines is, is really by far the easiest turn status because it has good numbers, both for the amount of airline spend you need and the amount of credit card spend you need. And you could do a little of both, but also they provide so many other ways to earn elite qualifying loyalty points. So you really can shop through portals. You can rent a car directly from a rental car company and opt to earn American Airlines miles. And those will become loyalty points as well.

So there's so many ways that you can earn with American that aren't included with Delta and United. So they are really just by far the easiest to get status. I'm a little nervous about how much easier it is to get status with American than it is with competitors these days. Because my goodness, now, especially after the Delta changes, it's just like so salient how much easier it is to get elite status with American. Yeah, I feel like either they're going to have to change something or they're going to appeal to so many people. Now, I should say, I don't always worry. A lot of times people are like, oh, man, they're just giving away elite status. Everybody's going to be elite. And I

often say I'm not too worried about the people that get elite status that aren't going to fly. Like I have elite status with American Airlines and I haven't stopped anybody from getting an upgrade this year. So, you know, don't worry about it. I'm saying I'm not flying American. So even though I've got the easy status, it's not necessarily a problem for everyone. However, at some point, I guess you're probably going to get to the point where there's easy enough elite status to get. And certainly in some markets where that elite, the value of that elite status might start to dip a little bit, depending on what matters to you. But but at any rate right now, yeah, American is just head and shoulders far easier than everybody else.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, even with American Airlines though, it's not a light amount of effort or spend investment to get to elite status or certainly not to get to a high level elite status it's uh quite a bit so it's worth considering do we need that at all what what's what's an alternative what what if we if we really like uh you know getting the we we really like elite status because we get for free to be able to select preferred seats. We get free upgrades to

the sort of economy plus comfort plus, depending on what airline you fly, they have different names and you for free get a chance of an upgrade to first class. So, you know, maybe we like all the, all that good treatment. What, you know, what's the alternative? And, and I think there's good alternatives. Yeah, I mean, I agree. And as someone who never chased airline elite status in the first place, I've got to say that the alternatives have always seemed pretty good to me. And I think they're just seeming better than before, even now, because you can earn a lot more points per dollar spent by being strategic and then using your points or

your cash back to buy the flights that you want in the cabins that you want to fly in and probably, I think, do better than chasing after elite status with irrational decisions. So let's talk about the alternatives. So, I mean, I said, mentioned you could earn better. And so if you're just strategic with which credit cards you use, you can easily earn two to five X on everything. I mean, two X everywhere is easy. There's plenty of two X everywhere cards on the market these days. And bonus categories going up to five X are quite common, three X, four X, five X. So very easy to do on average, better than two points per dollar on all spend versus if you're using an airline credit card, the vast majority of your spend would probably be at one X. So you can earn quite a few transferable points and transferable points are valuable, of course, because you can take advantage of

the right sweet spots. And then of course you can fly elite without having to be elite, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and first of all, you know, you don't have to be elite with an airline to get into their clubs. If you want to get into a airport lounge, you don't need elite status. In fact, most elite status doesn't get you there until you get to a very high level. And even then you often get your choice of like this benefit or that benefit where one of those choices is getting into the club. Um, but with, with the right credit cards, you can get into a priority pass. You could get into specific airline lounges with the right cards and so on. Delta is making that a little bit harder to get into their own clubs, own clubs in an unlimited way, but still you could get a certain number of visits

each year to Delta. And just get those cards and get the card that makes sense for you. So if you fly out of a American hub, you may want the American executive card because that gets you into the AA lounge, for example. But if there's a good priority pass lounge where you fly out of, maybe that'll be better for you. And we talked earlier in the show that US Bank Altitude Reserve gives you eight priority pass visits per year. There's plenty of other good options that give you unlimited priority pass per year. So let's just start there that you don't need a lease test at all to get into airline clubs. And then if what you care about is flying in premium cabins, consider rather than hoping for an upgrade, consider doing things like using your miles. So you're earning transferable points if you're doing this correctly. How about transferring points to an airline program when you see a good deal on flying

business or first class or even premium economy? We talked about how United appears to be a good deal these days for flying premium economy to Europe, for example. You can also just choose to just buy premium airfare from the get-go, whatever it is you want. And by not being loyal to just one airline, you can look for the best deal on flying first class. And you're going to see a huge variation if you open up to flying whatever airline rather than the one that you had previously been loyal to. And then you have options with your points to sort of pay less because there are cards like the Altitude Reserve that'll give you one and a half cents per point value

for paying with points or the Sapphire Reserve. Same thing if you pay through Chase's portal. Even the American Express Business Platinum card will give you a little over one and a half cents per point value for certain flights that you pay for with points. So all of those are great ways of basically saying you can just pay for those flights from the get-go,

do some comparison shopping, get the best deal, and then use the best way to pay so that you're overall getting an excellent deal. And you know what? Those upgrades then are confirmed at the time of booking. Right, and on the itinerary that you want and you're going to earn miles on them. And that's another consideration too.

You will. That will potentially get you closer to them. And that's another consideration too. You will. That will potentially get you closer to elite status if that's what you want or even focus on whatever redeemable currency gives you the best deal in terms of where you credit that flight. And you can always find the best places to credit at wheretocredit.com.

That's a good resource or a resource that I use anyway to figure out which airlines will offer which points for your paid flights. And it's worth looking at that, even if apart from this whole elite status thing, sometimes you'll just find that you can pay fewer points than the cost of an award ticket by buying a paid ticket on, again, like Greg said, some other airline you may not have initially considered. I was recently pretty surprised. I was looking at flights to Europe, and I was looking for a family member to fly to Vienna. Take a wild guess, Greg, the cheapest premium economy fare from New York to Vienna that I... Well, I'm sorry. You know what? I'll

take that back. From New York to London, the cheapest premium economy fare was how much? This is round trip or one way? Nope, one way. One way. Cheapest premium economy, premium economy, $600. $251. North Atlantic, which Steven Pepper has written about. And so it's a little different than other premium economies. But essentially, if you're able to use Chase Points, which Greg has shown, I'm not sure if they show up in the portal in their premium economy or not, but Greg has shown before how you could use Chase Points

to book Norwegian flights that didn't show up through the portal, or at least at rates that didn't show up. So you may be able to call Chase and book that. And if you're able to do that at one and a half cents per point, you're talking 17,000 points one way. And this actually started because I looked up an economy one way from New York to Vienna, and it was two separate tickets through London Gatwick on North Atlantic and Wizz Air that came up. It was $151, $141, something like that, to fly one way by putting those two separate tickets together. Wait, wait, wait. What was the best deal on a, on a major carrier? On a major carrier was a bit more. Yeah. I can't remember off the top of my head. It was definitely not. And in terms of a premium economy, I just pulled up a New York to London and on a regular

carrier, if you want to consider Iberia, I guess, 600 bucks or so, uh, for similar, that's what I guessed. Right. Yeah. And that is, yeah, that is or so for similar. That's what I guessed, right? Yeah, that is. Yeah, that is exactly what you got. So you're pretty close on there. Yeah, but again, you know, if you look outside the box, you may do a little bit better. If you were just to look at, you know, say United, then you'd be looking at over a thousand dollars one way.

And so when you're able to get outside of the box a little bit and consider some other options, you may find that this is a better sandbox to play in, that you could buy tickets that cost far less rather than chasing elite status. You know, and domestically, even Spirit. So, you know, let's say you're used to flying Delta, American United, whatever. And I bet you, you will often find that the cost of buying your way into the equivalent of comfort plus economy plus is probably around the same price as buying Spirit's big front seat, which the big front seat is more like flying first class on those airlines domestically. Now you don't get all the bells and whistles of the drinks and everything, but the seat

is like a true first class seat. And so I think that's worth considering as well. Yeah. And so when you get yourself out of the box anyway of chasing elite status, you'll find that there are some opportunities like these that we're talking about to do pretty well using your points to buy paid fares on airlines that maybe you wouldn't have considered initially, but that may provide an experience that matches what you need. So that's pretty good. And then, of course, if you don't have enough points to cover the charges, you buy airfare using a card that bonuses travel. And depending on which card you use, you may earn anywhere from 3x on travel to 5x, perhaps on flights that are booked directly through an airline or through the credit card portal, et cetera. So you can earn a decent return when you're buying cash tickets.

Yep. Yep. I I used to chase Delta diamond status all the time for the global upgrade certificates because we would often fly to Europe. We'd want to fly business class, but we'd book economy, use the global upgrades to upgrade to business class. Okay. So that's one way of flying business class to Europe, for example, and I fly out of Detroit. So what I've been finding lately is that with Air France, if I want to fly Air France rather than Delta business class to Europe, Air France is frequently charging 140,000 points round trip. Now that's not a particularly like great redemption. This is just an ordinary redemption. And so it's frequently available. Now they do charge about $500 in taxes and fees.

So if you think of the 140,000 points as like 140,000 pennies, we're saying it's like spending about $1,900 round trip for a business class flight, which is pretty darn good considering that the Detroit market is not particularly competitive with the cost of flights. So flying like main cabin or certainly like comfort plus round trip to Paris is usually going to cost you that same 1900 or more, somewhere in that range anyway. And, you know, so you're getting it for about 1900. And the round trip cash costs, if you if you wanted to book business class from the get-go, you're talking about up to $8,000. I've seen sort of a minimum of $3,000 when it's really cheap, but usually higher than that and as much as $8,000 round trip. So this is not an overwhelming example.

It's not like, wow, that's amazing, but you're getting really solid value. And again, not having to worry about like, oh, all right, I did all this work to get Delta Diamond status. Now I have these four upgrade certificates. How am I going to use them before they expire? And what if there's three people traveling? Does that mean I upgrade three people one direction and one person returning? And so there's all kinds of issues that none of that comes up if you just say, oh, forget all that. I'm just going to book business class using the best award price I can find.

Yeah, you know, and you don't have to wait and worry if it's going to clear or not. You know, I know sometimes you had those upgrades clear like at the gate, right? You know, so you're not clear at all. Not clear at all. Yeah. And you're facing the prospect, right? Or not clear at all. Or not clear at all, yeah. And you're facing the prospect of flying an economy on a long flight. Right. You have enough miles that you, or could have enough miles if you followed a spending strategy to earn as many miles as possible to fly business class from the get-go without worrying about it. And I love your Air France example there because you didn't pick a sweet spot there to compare

against. That's not like the best price to Europe. That's a widely available price to Europe. It's pretty easy to find. So that's a great example of one where you could easily amass the points. And Air France is a perfect example because they're transfer partners with just about everybody, right? I mean, they transfer partners with almost everyone and they offer frequent transfer bonuses. So that 140K could be significantly less, again, at like the average everyday ho-hum price, not at the, oh, wow, we found 41,000 points one way in business class from New York to Paris next year, which we wrote about recently. But that was like, you know, narrow during certain dates and locations or whatever. Actually not that narrow, but narrow during the time of year anyway, whereas this 140K is pretty easy. So we're not talking about cherry picking the

best award here, just with a decent, okay, pretty good award, you can do much better. And think about the spend. I mean, think about this, because if you're averaging even just two transferable miles per dollar spent, you're talking about $70,000 in spend to have that round-trip business class confirmed at booking. And probably less than that because, one, you're probably earning better than 2x for your spend because a lot of your spend is earning 3x or 4x or five X as well. Um, and as Nick said before the transfer bonuses. So as long as you catch, uh, the opportunity when it's available to get like 25% or 30% bonus transferring your points to air France flying blue miles, you can do really, really well. And we should say that one credit card welcome bonus could probably get two people there

round trip, uh, or I'm sorry, one person round, rather get you a round trip business class just with one bonus. So you don't necessarily have to spend 70 grand at 2x. I mean, that's an example I pulled out of the air to compare against those numbers we were talking about earlier when we said, you know, just to get the lowest level of elite status, we were talking about 40,000 spend, and that's not going to get you any of those upgrades. So if you need top tier status, you're talking about, what would we say, 200, 350,000, 576,000 dollars worth of spend to hope that you get these upgrade certificates that might clear versus much less spent. Right. And think about it. If you had spent 70,000 on a Delta credit card, you know, you probably now have about 73,000 redeemable miles because maybe you did a tiny bit in bonus categories where you're getting 2x instead of 1x.

And those points could be used for maybe, maybe $1,000 worth of travel on Delta. And we're talking about, as I said before, $3,000 to $8,000 worth of travel. Yeah, absolutely. So I think it makes a lot more sense to be putting that spend towards transferable currencies. All right. So let's talk about the cost of earning elite status. Tell me what you think about that. I mean, whether or not it's worth it, but of course, how do we have to think about the cost? Because there's definitely a cost involved in being loyal to a particular airline. Yeah. Yeah. So what happens when you're loyal to an airline, you're often paying more for more expensive flights to stay on your carrier of choice,

because you're not looking at how much do the competitors charge to get you where you want to go. And I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad decision because maybe you are getting better treatment, you're getting better product. But the point is, it is costing you more. There's more out of pocket for that. You know, and that difference can be especially big when the competitors are having like an award, there's really good award prices flying with competing miles or there's a good flight sale available through a competitor. It just increases the sort of the cost of staying with your one airline because you're giving up all these great opportunities. The other thing that happens a lot, people get near the end of the year and they realize that they're not going to earn the level of status that they wanted or they're close to a level of status that they'd really like. And so they do things like say, oh, I'm going to fly

to X, Y, or Z. That'll be far enough or that'll be expensive enough. These days it's about expense to get to that next level of status. And so now you're talking about a whole level of spend that wouldn't have happened at all probably without that situation. With Delta and United, their elite qualifying years are both calendar year. And so that means people are often booking last minute in December for holiday time travel that's already extra expensive. And so they're doing that in order to earn status. And it's just not, well, it's expensive. Let's just say that. Yeah, yeah, it costs you.

It costs you something. These loyalty programs are designed to make you make irrational decisions. And people get extra irrational at that time of year, I feel like, because they are chasing that status. And like you said, prices are already high. And so there's a definite cost involved. It doesn't matter who you're loyal to. There's definite cost involved in being loyal to one airline rather than shopping around and being a free agent, because it's very rare that one

airline is going to always be the best price. So you're going to be choosing an airline over the price at least some of the time and spending more than you quote unquote should or could. The other category of where it costs you is opportunity cost. And we mentioned this already in the show, but I think it bears repeating. If you're putting your spend on a airline credit card, then you're missing out on better rewards with other cards. So as we, as we talked about, we prefer transferable points cards. We prefer cards that earn minimum of two points per dollar and usually three points per dollar or more in, in a lot of different categories of spend. And so with those cards, you're going to be earning many more points. And if they're transferable points, those points are

more valuable than, you know, sticking with just a single airline where you're stuck with just that airline's value, which varies by airline and situation. But with transferable points, you could take advantage of whatever airline they can transfer to to get the best value for each situation. So much, much better to do that. So all of that's kept me away from airline elite status for a long time, because usually if I'm flying internationally, I'm flying on an award ticket in business class. So I know I'm going to get that experience that I want. I'm not relying on elite status. And so because I booked in business class, I've already got the priority check in and those kinds of things. So I've always done that. But you, by contrast, Greg, have long had airline elite status.

And so far, we sound like we've been really down on airline elite status, saying that you don't need it. You can do all these other things to get it. But I think maybe we should talk about, well, why might you actually want airline elite status instead? Why might you throw away all of the great advice that you and I have just dispensed here? Why would you want airline elite status to begin with? Yeah, because there actually is some really good stuff that could come your

way. So for example, better customer service. When I had Delta diamond status and during the pandemic is an exception, but in most cases you call Delta, they pick up the phone within seconds. There's someone friendly who knows what they're doing, who can help me with whatever the issue is. And so that's a real benefit. It's very hard to quantify the value of it, but when you need it, boy, is that great. Oh, it is. I mean, anybody who's spent a couple hours on hold for Air Canada Aeroplan over the last year or two can imagine what the value of that is. Although I have to say that I had last time I spent a lot of time on hold with Air Canada Aeroplan, I had, I forget what it's called, 75K status with them. Didn't help me to get through somehow.

I don't understand why. So they might be an exception or maybe Delta is an exception in doing that right. I'm not really sure. Hard to say. The other thing, another thing status could help you with is during irregular operations, there's some kind of storm that's caused your flight to get canceled or delayed. They're more likely to help you faster and better if you have high level elite status to get to where you need to go in a timely way. There are better options for things like same day changes.

So most airlines will let you, once you reach a certain level of elite status, make free same-day changes to your flights. And in some cases, they're sort of rule breakers. So for example, Delta will usually let people same-day change to an earlier flight, but if you have a level of status, you could even same-day change for free to a later flight, things like that, that become possible. And those things, depending on your situation, can be really handy both for when you suddenly need a change, but also can save you a lot of money because you could book a time that's cheaper but not preferable to you if you're willing to gamble on the ability to same day change to the time you prefer um you do get uh with with certain levels of leads as free upgrades uh to

preferred seating um and economy plus comfort plus that type of thing um and so in a way that could save you money because you could, you can always just buy, if you're not, if you don't really care that much about first class, you could always just buy a main cabin economy and, uh, get seated and, um, slightly better seats. Um, and, uh, free upgrades. You have elite stats, free upgrades to first class, at least for regional flights is, uh, always possible. So that can be really good.

At very high levels of elite status, you can talk about things like system-wide upgrades, where you can buy an economy flight, international flight, and upgrade to business class. So if you can work it correctly, finding that availability for the upgrades is not going to be easy. Um, but if you can, if you can make it work and it is possible sometimes, um, then you can get tremendous value from that. And, um, another thing I want to point out is that having alliance status. So status with like one world or a star alliance, or to a lesser extent, extent sky team, uh, can be valuable. So, um, you know, for example, if you have gold star alliance status, you could get into business class lounges anytime flying star alliance.

Uh, so even if you're flying economy and, um, one world, even better, better. You can get access at a low level of status. You could get access to business class lounges worldwide when flying economy, but even better once you have Emerald status with one world, you could get into first class lounges, whether you're flying economy or business class. So that can be super valuable in the right situations. Yeah. And some of those other types of like a priority check-in, for instance, that's something I don't worry about much usually because like I said, when I'm flying internationally, it's usually in a premium cabin where I'm going to have priority check-in. But one place where I found this to be nice and useful is when flying around within Europe, because within Europe, I'm not normally bothering with business

class since it's the same seats as economy, just with the middle seat blocked. So if I'm visiting more than one country in Europe, it's not uncommon for me to fly economy between countries in Europe. And then not having to stand in the long check-in line is actually something I value quite a bit. So that's a situation where I think sometimes having elite status will be nice because you'll be able to skip through that. And also for the baggage allowance, because on the cheapest fares within Europe, you often these days don't get a baggage allowance if you're buying a cheap cash fare. But if you have elite status in the right, you know, the right program, the right system, then you may get extra checked baggage or some free checked baggage anyway. So those are things that I think can be nice in terms of alliance status beyond just the lounge access. Lounge access is good, too. But I like some of those

other perks that come with alliance status also. Yeah, actually, great point. And I made use of that several years ago as well, and it can really be nice. So yeah, getting into faster lines sometimes can be a... Under certain circumstances can be a great benefit of elite status when you're flying. And it usually is only relevant when you're flying economy, right? Right, right, right. Yeah. If you're flying business class, then you probably are getting it anyway. So yeah. Yeah, definitely. That's why I brought up Europe as a particular example, because that's a place where I feel like probably there's enough readers that may go and visit two countries, for instance, and maybe you'll fly economy in between them. So that's a time when

I find that particularly useful because I'm more likely to be flying economy, I think, within Europe than most other international places where I'm on an award ticket anyway. And nice as a family traveler to have access to that because with young kids, standing in a long line is not fun. So that's always nice to be able to skip to the front of the line. So there are some advantages of having elite status. There are some benefits, some reasons why you might want it. Now, are those benefits worth it in terms of all the things we talked about before? Is it worth the additional expense of staying loyal to one airline? Is it worth giving up the 2x to 5x you could be earning everywhere in transferable currencies rather than spending

on an airline credit card, for instance. What do you think? Is elite status worth it? Are those advantages we just talked about worth ignoring the rest of the advice? Yeah, here's what I think is that you have to be flying a lot for those advantages to make up for the high cost of getting elite status. So I think that for people who fly weekly, you know, probably because they're doing it for work or whatever, they're probably going to earn elite status anyway from all that flying, but it might even be worth it for them to do some extra credit card spend or whatever to get the next level because they're flying enough to really get a lot of use out of all those perks we talked about. And so the more you use them, the more valuable they'd be. But I think for people who fly occasionally and mostly for leisure um you know i i just think that uh you're you're much better off

finding the best way to book premium cabins um directly with miles or with cash uh or with points where you pay with points type of thing any of those three options um are good when you could find the good deals on those premium cabins. Just book them from the get-go and sort of take all of your savings by not chasing status and apply towards the cost of your flights. Yeah. We talked about this probably, or maybe if we didn't, we probably should have then. So imagine that Delta scenario where you got to spend $350,000 you figured on a credit card to earn top tier Delta status, right? So if you were instead to spend that on, throw all the rest of the advice from today's show out the window and say, you know what?

I just want it to be really simple. I want to use one card and you can get Bank of America platinum honor status so that your premium rewards card or your unlimited cash rewards card earns 2.625% back. So 2.625% back on $350,000 spend, that'd be $9,187.50. Now that's not going to be enough to buy multiple of those $8,000 business class tickets that Greg talked about. But it is enough probably to buy the points for quite a few of them because we frequently see points go on sale. That's another thing. If you're not committed to traveling all the time in premium cabins, or you're not committed to traveling internationally all the time, then domestically,

that's going to cover quite a few domestic flights up front, potentially, if you're planning in advance. So even at a base level where you're not even trying potentially, if you're planning in advance. So even at a base level where you're not even trying to maximize, you're still going to stick with one credit card. You're still likely to come out ahead or close to it just by a cashback strategy and using that cash to buy the flights you want and keeping the rest of the cash to do whatever else it is you want to do with it, rather than pigeonholing that into one airline currency with a very fixed value. At the very least, it makes it very clear what the cost is. If you're talking about points that with Delta are worth maybe a little bit more than one cent each,

then you're talking about losing about half that. So it's going to cost you around $4,500 anyway, in terms of the lost potential earnings, if you were to do all of that at 1x on a Delta card versus doing it at 2.625% cashback. So there's quite a high cost in terms of just comparing against straight up cashback with zero effort at learning about category bonuses at all. Right, right, right. Yeah. All right. So I think then I think Greg's totally right. I fly weekly for work. Those elite status benefits matter more to you because you're going to use them very frequently. But then of course, you're going to be close anyway. So for those of us that are leisure travelers, definitely for me for years, the approach has been to mostly ignore

airline elite status. I've only had American elite status because of the loyalty point games, because it's kind of fun. It's not really that I needed it. And the other airline elite statuses I've had have just been from status matches. So I've not earned airline elite status from straight up actual regular requirements ever. It's all been from matches or, or like I said, the loyalty point game, because I'm able to replicate most of that stuff with my miles. So I'm totally happy to do what I'm doing in that realm. All right. I think that brings us my friends to this week's question of the week that wraps us up for the main event, right? Yep. So this week's question of the week was a little bit long, but I thought this was a good one for a warning. And unfortunately, we're not going to have a great answer for this person, but it's a good one for Ashu to share with everyone out there.

So Ashu writes in and says, I have another question for you here. I guess we're in with the previous question said one to two weeks back, United opened a word space to India for a few hours only. I was able to book four return business class tickets between Indianapolis and Delhi during peak travel season when even an economy return flight would be $2,500 a person. I needed 640,000 United miles for this. I had 375,000 miles and I transferred the other 265,000 ultimate rewards from Chase. I was over the moon with a big win. However, after a couple of days, I noticed a charge for $6,584 from United, besides the booking fees. Upon checking the account activity, I realized that United had purchased the missing miles when I booked these tickets. While I could see the transferred miles

on United's website, probably the system took a few seconds to notice and just assumed that he didn't have enough miles in his account. He was out of the house transacting on the phone in a hurry, etc. So contacted United to ask if the miles purchased could be reversed, and they submitted a request. And I don't know exactly what's happened with that yet. Or actually, it didn't submit the request because they said it seems like there's a risk that if they do that, the tickets could get canceled. If they reverse the purchase, maybe the tickets will get canceled altogether because these were award tickets and they might not go back into inventory. So two pieces here. First of all, is there anything you can do in that case, do you think? Do you think it's likely that United would reverse the charges? And if they would agree to do that,

what would you do in this case where you accidentally purchased the miles during checkout, which is certainly worth a warning because that's easy to do. Most of these programs will offer you the chance to buy the missing miles during checkout. And if you transfer miles from a transfer partner over to your loyalty account, you, in most cases, maybe not all, but in a lot of cases, you're gonna wanna at least sign out and sign back in because oftentimes you'll need to do that

in order for the system to recognize that the miles have been transferred over even when it's an instant transfer. It's not 100% always the case, but I can totally see how this happened because frequently it won't realize you have the miles available for at least until a sign out and a sign back in. Sometimes it takes four or five or six minutes. In this case, our reader was in a hurry to book to get this done because he wasn't sure if this availability was going to last. So now he's looking at absorbing the cost of the

$6,500 in purchased miles or risking contacting United and saying, hey, can you reverse the mileage purchase and use these other miles in my account? What would you do there, Craig? Yeah. Yeah. First, I just want to say, I'm sorry this happened. This is one of those things that could happen so easily. And in any of us, that could happen so easily. Um, and in any of us, it could happen to, if you're, especially in that situation, you're excited about that award. You don't want to risk, you don't want to risk losing it because someone else might grab it before you, you book it. So you're kind of in a hurry and, and you're doing it all on your phone. So you, it's hard to read everything that's on the screen. So you just press OK.

Yeah, that's that's the irony is that I've noticed that United is one of the only ones that does refresh, at least on the desktop. When I do a transfer and refreshes without logging out and back in. But, you know, this situation could be different because it's on the phone. He could have already had the the the the word in his like sort of checkout screen or whatever. So it's probably not going to reprice even if it knew that you had more miles at that point. So what would I do? I think I would risk it. I would just sort of make clear that in this, what do you call it, if they're going to open a case, a ticket or whatever, that I would stress that they put into the ticket, like, do not cancel this award, you know, under any circumstances, use, use the miles that were transferred in to pay for it. Um, and I would, uh, I would then, you know, hope that that works out. And I think it probably, I, you know, if they could reverse it at all, which I don't know, but, um, I think that if they could, that you'd probably keep your flight is my guess. That's that. That's a really good, good question. It's tough. I don't know.

I was leaning the other way from Greg. I was leaning towards. So if this trip is a trip, you're definitely going to take one way or another. And you were looking at paying the twenty five hundred dollars a passenger and you were looking at four passengers. So you were already considering spending ten,000 on this trip. I think I would be hesitant because I think there's just too much of a chance that the system cancels out the tickets when the miles get pulled away. And that the, I don't know, you know, I say that and I was going to say too much of a chance

it's not worth it. You're already saving $3,500 and you're flying in business instead of economy. So I would probably just chalk it up as an expensive lesson if you already had the $3,500 and you're flying in business instead of economy. So I would probably just chalk it up as an expensive lesson if you already had the $10,000 that you were planning on spending on this trip anyway. But as I said that, I thought to myself, one thing that we know is that airlines have the ability to force open space on their own flights. And so I don't know exactly how that works with dynamic pricing, but we know that if United canceled the Newark to Delhi route, for instance, which is never going to happen, but if they canceled that route altogether, they would have the ability to open space on some other

like Chicago to Delhi for you. They could make that happen. So I guess actually the more I talk it out, I agree with Greg. I think it's worth submitting and taking a shot at this because they probably can do it. And as long as there's notes in the system and everything's in writing in terms of the fact that you're not looking to cancel this, you're just looking to use the miles from your account and cancel the mileage purchase, then I think that probably United has the power to make it right. It just might take some headache to get there. But but yeah, I think it's probably worth it for sixty five hundred dollars. There you go. There you go. So so I talk Nick into risking all your mile, all your flights. Right. Right. Good luck. Right. So so if it doesn't

work out, then you just blame Greg for convincing me. All right. Greg. Yeah. All right. Unfortunately, we're out of time for today. So we got to let you guys go. If you enjoyed today's episode and you would like to come back and see us again next week. First of all, welcome back. Come on back. Don't forget to like subscribe, all of those things. But if you want our emails in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe again. That's frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Follow us on all the various social media. We're on Instagram. We're on Facebook. We have our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where people are constantly asking and answering questions all day, every day. So please join us there. And again, wherever you're listening or

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