Frequent Miler on the Air - Should we stop overlooking Spirit? | Ep126 | 11-27-21

Episode Date: November 27, 2021

This week we discuss whether we should stop ignoring Spirit Airlines and start booking that Big Front Seat everywhere we go (domestically). 01:09 Giant Mailbag & Confession Time https://frequentmiler.com/10-years-of-frequent-miler/ 5:12 What crazy thing...did American Express do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/maximizing-value-from-amex-multi-referrals/ 09:05 Mattress Running the Numbers: Should we mattress run the stacking Wyndham promotions? https://frequentmiler.com/wyndham-earn-25-gift-card-when-staying-2-nights-earn-twice-stack-with-other-offers/ https://frequentmiler.com/wyndham-earn-10000-bonus-points-when-booking-2-night-weekday-stays-check-in-sun-wed/ https://frequentmiler.com/wyndham-rewards-stay-4-nights-get-7500-bonus-points-limit-2-bonuses/ 18:46 Main Event: Should we stop overlooking Spirit? https://frequentmiler.com/delta-vs-spirit-on-gregs-mind/ 1:00:25 Post Roast: How do you refer someone to the fantastic Resy Platinum offer? 1:04:40 Question of the Week: What are your thoughts about Amazon pulling Visa in the UK? Might that happen here? Will battles like this lead to a reduction in rewards from credit cards? Subscribe to our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event is brought to you post-Thanksgiving. We're in the Thanksgiving spirit. So we're going to talk about, should we stop overlooking Spirit Airlines? Spirit Airlines, what you should be thankful for this year. Or is that just the tryptophan talking? I don't know. I'm not sure.

I'm not sure that spirit and thanks are what many people expect to hear. But they are a legitimate option for flying around the country. And we're going to ask the question, have we been ignoring them too long? Maybe we have. I don't know. Maybe not only us, but more importantly,

has the rest of the community been ignoring them too long also? We'll talk about it. We'll discuss. We'll talk about it. We'll discuss. We will. All right. Giant mailbag time.

Yes. Drag it out. Giant mailbag. Today's giant mailbag is a combination mail and confession time. So all the good things wrapped up in one. Oh, yeah. All right. Let's get it going. Okay. So you may or may not remember that I posted a 10-year retrospective celebrating 10 years

of blogging as Frequent Miler. I recall something about that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And in that post, I said that September 11th of 2011 was when the blog started. That was like my favorite part because it was awesome because that meant that we spent the 10-year anniversary in the Maldives, arriving in the Maldives, arriving in style for the 10th

anniversary. We talked about that last week, how we got off the plane and I was asked, can I carry your giant mailbag? And we thought, wow, that is just hilarious and a fantastic way to inadvertently celebrate the 10-year anniversary. But Kim wrote in the comments of that blog post, September 3rd, 1st, 11th, question mark? After listening to the podcast, I wanted to go back in time to find out when i might have started reading this blog in doing so i found the initial post was dated september 3rd nick hopefully greg will do a better job in determining the actual day you started with the blog and she says that because nick's five-year anniversary is coming up in January.

I am not going to say which day. Good, you shouldn't. You don't want to get back-checked twice, like week to week here, right? Yeah. Kim did a smiley face and said, I'm curious how Greg came up with the 9-11-11 as the date, though.

Congrats on whenever the 10th anniversary occurred. Greg got fact-checked. He got fact-checked trying to report fake news on our show. And I had to, of course, go check out, was Kim right about this? And yes, in fact, September 3rd, 2011

was when I wrote an introduction, just a little paragraph introducing the blog. But my first blog post was September 4th, 2011. Neither one of those was September 11th. But, you know, so I kind of think of September 4th as probably the right answer. Maybe because that was the first day I had real posts. Either way, I was wrong. Either way. Either way. The moral of the first day I had real posts either, either way. I was either way, either way, either way. The moral of the story is I hope that Kim is someone who applied for the job because that's an example of the kind of research you got to be able to do.

That's very true. That's very true. So, you know, hopefully she did apply the September 11th where I got that. Obviously there's the famous date might've gotten stuck in my mind, but equally possible. I may have remembered that September of 2011 was when the blog started. And so I sort of might've coded that in my head as September 11. You know what I mean? A forgivable mistake, but Kim's not going to be the one to forgive you for it. That's all I'm going to say. What's not forgivable is that I didn't do the simple work of checking my memory. But Kim did. Kim took care of it for you.

She did, but I'd prefer to have someone doing that before it actually publishes next time and before I talk about it on the podcast. Come on. Truth be told, I didn't go to fact check Greg either on that before I published it. So I'm, I'm a little disappointed in myself. I haven't found that before Kim did. So nicely done. Come on, Nick, you know, you're working with an elderly guy here. I know I should have been checking your work. Not what, what it used to be. And even when it used to be, it was bad memory back then. So yeah. All right. So September of 2011, from now on is what we're going to talk about when Frequent Miler began. Thank you, Kim. Well done. Well done. All right. So let's talk

about crazy thing. What crazy thing did American Express do this week? Right. What did American Express do? Well, you know, so American Express has had this plus four referral offer. And we've been talking a lot about this last week show is all about it. We've written some posts about it. It's an amazing deal. And a lot of people ask us questions, by the way, a lot of people ask, how do you get a referral for it if you don't have a second player? And I've been telling people, you know, that's part of the value and making connections with other people who are into the hobby. You're not probably going to convince your friends who have no interest in credit cards to open up Amex cards through your affiliate links. But, you know, in a normal world, you go to these meetups, you meet people face to face, you make friends who are interested in the hobby and in the same situation as you without a second player.

And then, you know, you trade links and blah, blah, blah. But that's not the crazy thing. The crazy thing is that American Express has this ability to refer people to almost any Amex card. So if you've got an Amex card that earns membership rewards points, for instance, let's say you have the, I don't know, the Amex gold card, you can generate a referral link for the Amex platinum card or the everyday card or the Hilton card or the Delta card or this or that, except in some situations, we found that there are some Amex cards that cannot create a link specifically for the Marriott business card. Now the luxury card should be easy to make.

Now, you know what? As soon as I said that, I realized I should have stopped somewhere else first and said, if you have a co-branded card, like a Hilton card or a Delta card or a Marriott card, you can only refer to other cards in the same co-brand. So if you've got one that's maybe a Hilton card, you can only refer to other Hilton cards. But if you've got like the Amex gold card that earns 4X dining and 4X US supermarkets, you can refer to the Hilton cards or the Delta cards or the whatever, whatever cards, except the Marriott business card. And it's only some, like I found Blue Business Plus links in general cannot refer to the Marriott business card.

The Hilton business card is fair game. All the Delta business cards are fine, but not the Marriott business card. What's up with that, Greg? Right, right. So weird, so weird. It's one of those things, I mean, it's such a niche little problem.

If you happen to have just the Blue Business Plus or that's where you want to trigger the referral offer and you have a friend that wants to sign up for that. The Marriott business card specifically. Then you're in trouble. Then you're in trouble. Weird. What a weird, and something you never want to notice

if not for the fact that we're bloggers. And so obviously we're going through our different links and stuff and trying to set them up to put them on our best offers page. And this is one where we probably don't even have the referral link in there. So I just, but I happened to notice where I was like, oh, that's so weird. There's one fewer business card on this one. Right, right, right.

You know, another weird thing going on with referrals, some people are reporting that they're not able to refer from their platinum card, which is so bizarre. They're able to refer from other MX cards, but not from their platinum card. I don't, I have no idea what's going on there. That's seems even more mysterious than this Marriott Bonvoy thing. It does. It's weird. And both my wife and I have the platinum card and we both are able to refer people from it. I don't, so I don't, I don't know. And my wife has two of them, two personals in the business and, and she can refer from all of them. So I don't know what's going on, but you're right. We've gotten a few reports from people who are unable to generate referrals from their platinum card. So, so there's some, some weirdness there. It's not enough weirdness to not take advantage

of it while you can, but definitely weird. What are you doing? Amex? I don't get it. I don't get it. No idea what the explanation is. You know, we don't want to poke that bear. They're doing a good thing with referrals in general. So, you know, if you have a couple of little idiosyncrasies, we'll live with it. We'll accept that. We'll accept your idiosyncrasies the same way we accept that Greg doesn't know what day the blog started. So that's right. Elderly guy here. Excuse. All right. So then we talked about the crazy thing let's talk about mattress running the numbers this week we've got let's wind them up for mattress running the numbers windham rewards greg i know you're excited about windham rewards you're a windham rewards

credit card holder right i am i am so should we business earner card? Well, so there's like three different promos that are overlapping with Wyndham. So this sounds legitimately interesting to me. You're just going to give it away right up front and say that it sounds interesting, huh? Well, I'm just saying it sounds interesting. Before doing math, you've got a promo to get a $25 gift card with a two night stay. And you can do that up to twice. A Wyndham gift card? No.

So we look that up and it's not a Wyndham gift card. You have your choice of an Amazon gift card, a, what is it? Shell or BP. Yeah. So, so you, you actually have a valuable gift card. You're not stuck staying at a Wyndham again. They're not going to stick you with that. If you've done this, you've already done your two or four nights.

You did your time. You don't need to come back. God forbid they're going to make you do more. God forbid we give you a reason to come back. Makes a lot of sense. A lot of sense, Wyndham. We, Josh. Wyndham, if you're listening, we don't mean to hurt your feelings.

No, no. I mean, Wyndham. We, Josh. Wyndham, if you're listening, we don't mean to hurt your feelings. No, no. I mean, it's great. It's wonderful. It's just bizarre that you would give people gift cards for things other than Wyndham. Right. So another really good promo is you get 10K points with a two-night stay, right? And you can do that up to twice as well. So those overlap nicely. And then there's a, a promo that by itself sounds awful,

which is you get 7,500 points for a four night stay. Um, but it doesn't have to be a single stay. So you can actually overlap all of these three and stay four nights over at least two stays. And you'll, you should be able to get all four of these promos, all three of these promos, all three of the promos. So you need two, two nights days. Now there's a, I think also on the 10,000 point promo, I think there's the, the requirement to check in on a weekday. I think you have to check in like Sunday through Wednesday or something like that. So you need two, two nights days that check in like Sunday through Wednesday and the period

of time when these three promotions overlap runs until like January 14th because they each have different end dates. But they all overlap until January 14th. So two two-night stays and you'd end up with two 10,000-point bonuses, a 7,500-point bonus, and a $25 gift card. Not bad. Two $25 gift cards. Two $25 gift cards, $50 in gift cards. Holy moly. So that averages to 6,875 points per night and well, $12.50 in gift cards per night as well. Right. Right. So is that mattress room now, before you answer that, should also mention that if you are actually going to do this and you do have the Wyndham business visa card, which the business card is the one we both talk about the most because it's

got eight exit gas stations, which in an ordinary world is a fantastic return to gas stations. So that's a great card and it gives you diamond status. So it's a great card to have. And if you have that, then you're going to earn 8X at Wyndham properties also on that, on whatever amount you're paying for your paid nights. Plus you should probably be able to link it up to Wyndham or rather to Visa Savings Edge for 4% back from that. Visa Savings Edge is a program for business cards, business visa cards. It's like a card link thing where you register your card with it. And then you a card linked thing where you register your card with it. And then you get these statement credits when you happen to spend money at the included

merchants and Wyndham is one of them. So you get 4% back on whatever it is you spend on your card if you link it up to Visa Savings Edge. So you get that 4%, the 8X, and then everything else you're talking about was 6,000, what'd you say? 6,000. 6,875 points per night. Plus $12.50 per night. Is that mattress run worthy? Is it worth booking a cheap Wyndham to just to check in two times for two nights each just for the points, Greg, what do you think? Yeah. I mean, let's just do sort of the back of the envelope type of math here. Let's, let's round up to 7,000 points per night, assuming that the, you're earning extra points for the stay itself and

with the credit card or whatever, just make it easy. So 7,000 points. And let's just say we like Wyndham points for a penny each. You might not, but that's 70 bucks worth of points per night plus 1250 and gift cards uh so you're about eight you know over 80 dollars in value that's not even adding in the visa savings edge and uh if you went through a portal you know there's other opportunities needs to be booked in the app so i don't know for sure that a portal will say but whatever i mean yeah yes so there might be some other opportunities maybe you're working on a sign-up bonus maybe lots of other things you could be doing that kind of help yourself out, I guess. So not bad. I mean, that's pretty much just for me. If you're looking to earn extra Wyndham points, I mean, if you think about it, if you're planning to use those Wyndham points for our favorite redemption, we're going to do Vacasa vacation rentals, right?

You're getting, how many points did we say in total? Like over 27,500 points. That's enough. If you do have the points from the credit card and points from the credit card. And if you have the credit card, you get a 10% discount on rewards. So those 27,000, that's enough for a two night stay in a one bedroom vacation rental. It could be a huge vacation rental, one that costs quite a bit of money. That's pretty nice. I kind of like it. I kind of like it.

Yeah. I mean, I'm sitting here looking on my phone next to, if you're watching this on video, you saw me looking off screen probably because I'm sitting here looking right now. I'm like, you know, I, this might be mattress or let me see what's nearby because, so you're talking about $80 worth of points back and we're valuing those relatively low at one cent each. Cause you could book vacation rentals. And we're talking about the Casa that are worth way more than, than the value that we're using right now. So I'm just trying to get an idea. And I see windowndham properties around me without even sorting them by price yet. $53.09 a night, $53.30 a night, $54 a night.

And I'm not at home. So for those that know that I live in the middle of nowhere, I know there aren't that many Wyndham properties where I live at home. But I'm seeing plenty of places near me where I could book a two-night stay for pretty cheap. And I mean, this, yeah, I may have to book one of these when I get off this before this thing publishes and you guys will all pick

up all the Wyndham properties. You know, I'm probably not going to bother with this just because, you know, it's a fair amount of work to make sure you get it all and to check into the hotels. But, you know, that's because I have a bunch of Wyndham points from having signed up for my wife and I each signed up for the Wyndham, uh, card, the Wyndham business card. And, you know, I did the Wyndham portal deal, you know, back when, and so, so I'm not, I'm not eager to get more points right now. Plus now that city allows transfers to Wyndham, I have that as, as an opportunity to get them when I need them. But if I was in a position where it's like I'm looking, you know, if I didn't have many points and I'm and I have real vacasa, you know, plans, not even concrete plans, but just sort of intentions like I know that it's likely I'm going to do it.

I think it'd be totally worth it. Yeah. You know, actually what I'm looking at this, the reason that I'm looking at this now off the side of my camera here is because we were just talking with friends like two weeks ago about trying to this spring plan something with friends that have kids the same ages as ours. We said, Oh, you know, we should plan to get like an Airbnb somewhere and go somewhere for a few days together, like a little vacation. And, uh, and I, I brought up to my And, uh, and I, I brought up to my wife, this, you know, whole Wyndham thing and these friends of ours don't play the points game at all. So I'm not going to get them to sign up for a Wyndham credit card and all this,

that cause that's not, if they were going to play the game, that's not where I would start. Uh, but I look at this and I say, well, you know what? I could generate points really cheaply and they'd be thrilled to pay, you know, not very much, you know, less than a penny a point. You know, if they're paying a hundred bucks a night, then they're, they're going to be thrilled with that. Especially if we can get a nice big vacation rental with a few bedrooms. So, uh, so I I'm, I'm thinking I might just do this just to generate the points to not use my own points and get my friends a good deal too.

So there you go. And, and, you know, and boy, you know, I feel like even if you, you don't need to stay in these Wyndham hotels, if you have little kids and they would have fun, like playing in the, in the pool or whatever that's there, you know, you could get some value out of the stay as well. Yeah. All the better. For sure. Yeah, totally. I, and I knew a lot of people when I was younger and didn't have kids that were older and had kids and they do exactly that kind of thing where they book a hotel for the day just to go and play in the pool. And I can totally see that now. In fact, we checked into a hotel Friday night and we went

to go check out the pool just because we were curious. It was a Ritz property. We were just kind of curious. And my son was right away like, do we have our bathing suits? And my wife was like, well, no, we didn't bring them. And he was all disappointed. And I was like, yeah, you know, that would have been a good idea next time. Yeah. Yeah. You're a really bad parent. I am. I'm a horrible parent. What can I say? All right. So mattress run worthy. Yes. The moral of the story is yes, this is probably mattress run worthy. If you've got a good use for the points. It's kind of fun when the stars align for something like this, you know, where it actually makes sense to check in a hotel just for the points. Just for the points. Pretty cool.

Yeah. So I'm going to find myself a cheap, dirty Wyndham property somewhere nearby where I don't actually have to stay in a place and make this happen. So, all right, that's good. We're done with mattress running the numbers. Let's move on to this week's main event. The main event. Which is?

Spirit. Spirit. Should we stop overlooking spirit? So for years, for years, I avoided flying spirit at all. I'd heard such bad things. I literally do not think I ever flew spirit until about a month ago. I mean, I understand. I watch the news now and then. I get it. But I mean, you know, I booked, I booked the Spirit flight. I did because it was not just by far the cheapest option, but it was, it was the one that had pretty much the only option I had that didn't involve more connections that, that got me to,

to my destination at the time I needed to be there. And so the timing was right. And the experience turned out to be great. I had sprung for a big front seat. And the first leg, I flew Detroit to Fort Lauderdale on my own. It was a beautiful new airplane and great experience. Everything was on time. Flight attendants were super nice. And then the next leg, I flew with you. And that was a very nice flight too, despite us having to be together. Got an upgrade. Got an upgrade. Got to sit next to me.

That's a good upgrade for you that time. So, and I only flew the Fort Lauderdale onward and then back to Fort Lauderdale. But again, big front seat on the way there. I flew with you in the big front seat. And I'm going to go on record here and say that I think the big front seat is the best domestic first business class product that isn't lie flat. If you're not going to lie flat in terms of the seat, the seat itself, I mean, it's comfortable. It's huge. It is comfortable, but I mean, it doesn't recline.

Oh, okay. All right. If reclining is important to you, yes, I suppose that's a problem. And it doesn't have in-flight entertainment. Do you use the in-flight entertainment? Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I can't remember. You know why I can't remember the last time I used in-flight entertainment? Because you didn't have it. Because I fly Southwest. That's why. Because there's never any in-flight entertainment. So I take that for granted. I bring my own in-flight entertainment. So I mean, I always just travel with stuff on my phone that I want to watch, unless I'm flying an international business or

first. And then I do tend to watch a movie in a longer flight like that. But anyway. All right. So you're going to contest that. I'm going to say it's comfortable. That's what I want. I want space and plushness. And that's what you get. And then on the way back, because I have spirit gold status, which we'll talk more about status in a minute, I got a free exit row seat. So didn't cost me anything, got an exit row seat. Nobody ended up in the seat next to me, empty seat next to me, because who's who flying spirit wants to pay for the exit row. So, was just me and one other person in our exit row. And that was great too. Plenty of leg room. So it was okay. Might not always be okay, but what do you think? So let's start with the experience of flying Spirit. I know that there are people out there

that think, oh, Spirit is horrible. Spirit is bad. I should never fly Spirit, blah, blah, blah. Is it remarkably worse than anything else? You know, we don't have a lot of experience, obviously, from these few times we just mentioned, but I didn't experience any of the things that people complain about. The flight attendants were easily as good, if not better, than those I've encountered on any other airline. And the other passengers, there weren't unruly passengers. There weren't more kids screaming than on other flights. There was none of that.

Maybe we got lucky. I don't know. But I thought the experience was really good. Yes, you have to pay for individual things. So if it really upsets you to have to pay a few dollars for a drink or a snack instead of getting the very basics of that kind of thing for free, then yeah, that's not great. On the other hand, I thought the snack selection, the paid snack selection was better than the free snack selection you'd get even in first class when they bring around a basket, like, like in Delta, for example. Now that's not as good as when they bring a meal on, you know, in first class, but by compared to the snack selection, it was, it was good.

Yeah. You know, I've, I've only flown spirit a couple of times now. I'd flown it once before, I think this trip that I did with you and then I flew that trip with you. So I, you know, I've been on, I don't know, three or four spirit legs ever, but my experience with it has been exactly the same. Flight attendants have been friendly on all the flights that I've been on. That's not something I can say for any of the other airlines that I've flown domestically. You know, I mean, I've definitely had good flight attendants, but I've had bad flight attendants with everybody. I'm sure it is with Spirit. I'm sure it is too. Yeah. But I mean, that's always going to be a gamble. The other passengers you're flying with is always going to be a gamble. So I don't, I haven't found it to be any different. And, and, you know, I see the news stories about the fights that break out and this and that

sometimes from time to time, but I also look at how many flights there are every single day. My, my fam, I have family in Myrtle beach. So I'm visiting right now. I'm in Myrtle beach now in the flight path to the airport goes over their house. And I, I don't even know how many flights spirit has in and out of day, but I feel like there's a yellow plane passing over the house, like every three or four minutes all day long. And there just can't possibly be enough fights in the air for every one of them to have a bad experience. So, uh, so I, I feel like your chances of that

type of thing are almost equally low, no matter who you're flying, you know, it could be crazy stuff that happens on any flight. So it hasn't happened to me in my experiences. So I feel like that's not a big worry for me, but, um, and, and price is good usually. Right. I mean, if you only need to fly, that's where they really stand out for most people is man, it's cheap. Right. Right. Now, one thing I don't like about that, I mean, yes, it's cheap. I like everything about being cheap, but, but the, the, the fact that you have to pay, even if you just want to carry on a bag. So, so you have a personal item that's free. So that's like, you know, a small backpack, a handbag type of thing. But if you want, you know, typical sized airplane carry on or, you know know rolling bag type of thing they're going to charge you unless you

have gold status and you know and then then it gets into this whole thing of like well first of all it may or may not be cheaper once you add in the cost of bags compared to other airlines that's something you have to kind of work out and it depends on the flight whether it is or not um but depending on how cheap you are, I guess, then, then you get into this whole, like sort of almost stressful situation of like, how do I bring everything I want to bring in my, in my personal bag instead of Scotty vest type vest jacket things, you know, or there's a couple other brands out there that make similar type stuff. You stuff all your chargers and electronics in your jacket and then, you know, put your clothes

in your bag. Right, Craig? You absolutely could do that. There's a popular video that's gone around about using a pillowcase as a extra item, because even if you have a personal item, no one's going to tell you, oh, you can't bring on that pillow. And so there's a lot of tricks like that. There you go. But, you know. Then it might get tedious. Right, right. I almost feel like if you're going to decide that spirit, if you fly a lot domestically and you're going to decide that Spirit is a good option for you.

You ought to maybe be thinking about gold status, no? You really should. And there were some other things that came to mind too about the fact that Spirit has, I think, the youngest fleet in the sky. So it's relatively new planes most of the time. And I think their on-time performance has been at or near the top. So they do have some positives going for them on top of the negatives. But yeah, I think their on-time performance has been at or near the top. So they do have some positives going for them on top of the negatives. But yeah, I think the loyalty program is actually pretty interesting. They revamped the whole program earlier this year. And I think that if you have any shot of flying a moderate amount, yeah, it gets pretty interesting.

So Spirit has two levels. Spirit has two levels in their elite program, silver and gold. And they each have pretty reasonable spending requirements. So basically you're going to have to spend $2,000 on spirit in order to get the silver requirement or 5,000 on spirit flights and bags and all the rest of that to reach gold status. And gold status is really where it's at gold status. Also, by the way, can be had through credit card spend. If you get their credit card and spend $50,000 on the credit card in a calendar year, you get automatic gold status or you'll earn enough status points anyway for gold status. And you can mix and match and spend some money on Spirit Flights and then do some spending

on the credit card and not do the whole 50K spend on the credit card. You can mix and match that. And as you get status, you earn more points. So you actually earn more spirit points based on what you spend on all of the incidentals. So in the beginning, when you're paying for your carry-on bag and your check bag and stuff like that, you're going to earn more spirit points per dollar on all that. Once you get to gold status and you get the free carry-on and a free check bag, not bad. I mean, not amazing compared to other airlines, but not bad. That'll save you money because then all of a sudden that, you know, $29 ticket is really $29 because you get a free carry on and a free check bag. You're not going to earn fewer

spirit points, ironically, on your flights because you won't earn the points on those, you know, ancillary things. But right, right. But there are other you get a free snack on board to free snack and drink, free snack and drink on board, free flight flex. And you get a free snack on board too. Free snack and drink. Free snack and drink on board. Free flight flex. So you get one free change with gold status rather, with spirit gold status.

And so you get the free in-flight beverage, the free seat selection also. So you get free seat selection excluding the big front seat. You can pick any other seat on the plane, including the exit rows with gold status. You just can't excluding the big front seat. You can pick any other seat on the plane, including the exit rows with gold status. You just can't pick the big front seat for free and you don't get any big front seat discount. So you're still going to pay whatever the price is. But when you pay for the big front seat, you're getting a lot more points for that because you're

gold. You are. If you get gold status, you're going to earn eight spirit points per dollar on the base fair and 16 spirit points per dollar on your ancillary stuff like big front seats. So you'll end up with a lot more points. I mean, compared to where the base level is on that, you're in a ton of points and not bad. But also by the way, get your whatever priority security,

you know, and the airports that have that. And obviously the priority check-in, which for Spirit, probably not a bad benefit to have to be able to skip the line and not have to stand there when the fight breaks out, right? That's right. And another thing about the big front seat is that even with the cost of the big front seat, which is often more than the cost of the ticket itself, but even with those two combined, you may find that the total is cheaper than paying for an economy flight on another airline. And I had that exact situation when I booked, when I did my experiment.

Can we talk about my experiment briefly? Yeah, well, let's talk about the experiment. And then there's a couple more things I want to mention about gold status too, but let's talk about the experiment. And then there's a couple more things I want to mention about gold status, too. But let of other airlines regionally. And so I originally booked Delta both ways from Detroit to Denver and back, but I decided let's do an experiment. Let's see, let's compare apples to apples and book Delta outbound. And I knew that I could use an upgrade instrument. So I'd, I would be able to compare Delta first to Spirit, a big front seat. So I booked a Delta outbound and I booked Spirit for the return. And I, and, and I paid for a big front seat and the, and this is a good example of the total cost for Denver to Detroit on Spirit with the big front seat was less than the total cost. It was actually

quite a bit less than the total cost of Delta in economy for Denver to Detroit. Now that's not including paying for bags because I have Spirit gold status thanks to us being bloggers and Spirit giving it to us. So that's kind of cheating. But if I had paid for a check bag, it would still have been cheaper than Delta economy. So, you know, that's pretty amazing. That is, that is. So another thing I wanted to mention about Spirit and Spirit status

is when you have gold status or when you have the credit card, you can create a points pool. And this is great for people who are into family travel, people who travel with other folks, or even if you travel for business with other people that aren't interested in miles and points, I guess, because you could pool the points together. So I think of it from a family perspective, because obviously I often travel with my wife and two kids. So if I'm paying for four tickets, I can be earning 8X spirit points on the base fare and 16X

on whatever incidentals we have. Because the unfortunate thing about gold status that we haven't mentioned yet is that your free checked bag does not transfer to anybody else. And your free seat selection does not transfer to anybody else. So unlike other airlines where you might get free bags for everybody or free seat selection for everybody, that's not the case with Spirit. So I would still have to pay for those things. However, the points that I earn for paying for them could all get pulled together with mine. And I think as a family traveler, that's a great benefit because it means that you can earn points from everybody's flight that you can put together to get at least one ticket for free on the next trip. Right? Yeah. No, I, you know, that's, that's the type of thing I wish all airlines would do. Um, you know, most big hotel chains have made it

possible to, uh, maybe not most, but a number of them have made it possible to share points for free one way or another, either through a points pool or just moving points to another person. But that's not common with airlines, at least not yet. So I love seeing this. Who's Done It Air Canada has introduced that in north america um in in england you've got british airways has a points pool and virgin atlantic i think they require um at least silver status now to do a pool but um but it's none of the one of the middle eastern carriers i think allows it emirates or yeah i don't remember which, but yeah, it's not common. We haven't seen it with like American Delta, United. None of them have looked and have offered that. Not even Southwest and JetBlue and some of the ones that you might think of as

having some more customer-friendly policies to try to appeal for one reason or another. I mean, Spirit is the leader. I got to give them. They are the leader on that, right? I mean, it's something that- Yeah. I mean, I think Hawaiian offers a way to move points if you have a credit card or something. Oh, yeah, there is something. Yeah, so I'm not sure leader, but they're definitely in the right direction. The right direction.

On that part, yes. So, I mean, and if you travel with a family, I think that's good because you can pull the points together. If you travel alone, then spirit gold status is probably good enough. It's not going to be great, but the free snack and drink, the selection, as you said, of snacks was decent. If you're going to be able to get spirit gold status, it was a decent selection of snacks and drinks to pick from.

And they were super friendly about it. I got a hot chocolate on one of my flights and, and they brought me the hot chocolate mix and the water, you know, hot water and the hot chocolate mix. And they said, just put half of the hot chocolate mix in there because it doesn't all fit otherwise. So they said, put half of it in there. And then as soon as you finish it, just, you know, raise your hand, flag me down and I'll come back with more hot water for you. So, you know, they, they were proactive about that, which again, I mean, that's not a huge deal, but that's, you got to do it yourself for the price of one, two, I didn't have to even ask for it. I got two and they proactively told me, listen,

I'll help you get two. So that's just not something I typically expect these days. It's, I mean, it's silly. It's a sad, sad story said, but it is, but true. Yeah. I mean, you just don't get, I like most of the time I fly Southwest and they're like, okay, yeah, there might be turbulence. So, you know, we're not going to do the snack service on this flight. They never mentioned that there might be turbulence on a flight on the other side of the country somewhere. Don't bother doing this drink service. Uh, like 80% of the time. It seems on my Southwest flights these days. So,

so I was pleasantly surprised. Moral of the story. I was pleasantly surprised. Now, I don't know. Are the points worth anything? Is it going to be worth having spirit points? That's questionable.

I don't know. I haven't, I've only had them now for like a month. Yeah. And that's kind of a crucial question for anyone who might consider spending their way to gold status. I don't think for anyone it makes sense probably to spend the full $50,000 to get gold status. But if you're flying enough where you can get halfway there through flying, then I think it's reasonable to ask the question of, should I spend that much?

Should I spend $25,000 in a year on the Spirit credit card to get gold status? $50,000 if you want to just spend, but $25,000 plus whatever you spend, if that's what you're talking about. It's $50,000 if you're going to spend just on the card. No, I know. That's why I said $25,000,

because if you're flying enough to do the other half, to get the other half of the elite status through flying, then it might make sense to consider spending as much as $25,000 or so. I'm just making up a number. Yeah, you're making up a number. That makes sense. to have to know how much is the value of the points I'm earning from the spend on the credit card? Or am I throwing out the ability to earn, for example, 2% cash back with the city double cash or some card like that? So there's a real opportunity cost if the points aren't worth much. But a couple of things to keep in mind that Spirit changed with the program. If you remember the old program, the frustration for me in the old program was that points expired three months after you earned them. So you had three months to use them and they were gone. Or I think you keep them alive

with activity every three months. But I had some points I must have earned from a shopping portal thing or something. And then I found myself constantly trying to make another purchase through the Spirit portal to keep my 600 points alive or whatever. And that was just ridiculous. And eventually they all expired on me. But now they don't expire as long as you earn or redeem once per year. So that's not as good as Delta that doesn't have their points expire at all or Southwest, I think, doesn't have their points expire at all anymore. But it's much better than it used to be. Once a year, earn or redeem. I can live with that. And if you have the credit card, then the points don't expire as long as your credit card remains active. So that's an easy way to keep the points valid. And the

redemptions start at 2,500 points. So you can redeem for a flight in some cases with just 2,500 points. So, I mean, that's below even what you'll find from a web special with anybody else, right? That's true. On the other hand, they do have flights that cost about 10 bucks. Right. It costs less than anybody else will charge you. So it kind of makes sense. But yeah, I mean, I wouldn't expect to get monster value out of the points. And I think we'd probably need to do a deeper dive though. I think the moral of the story here is that it might be worth it more so than we thought. So now what are the problems? If you fly spirit, you do have some problems potentially. And when I ask, what are the problems with flying spirit? I know there's like a large majority of the audience. It's like, I mean, how much time do

you have? But what are the problems? Or a lot of people will say no problem because I won't fly them. Because I won't fly Spirit, yeah. You know, I think that's short-sighted. I hear people say that, and I think that's so short-sighted because, you know, I haven't flown Spirit very much, and I hadn't flown them just because they had never been convenient in the situations that I needed. Now, if I lived in Detroit, like Greg does, where they've got like a billion nonstop flights, I think I would certainly be taking a look at them because, you know, a lot of things vary from one airline to another. I've had bad experiences on every domestic U.S.

airline. I've had lots of good experiences, too, on every domestic U.S. airline. So, you know, I don't usually try to pick my airline based on the anomaly news story that made the news because it's an anomaly. I don't pick or not pick a flight because of that. So I think it's short-sighted to just count them out because it's like, oh, there's spirit. Have your nose up in the air about spirit, I think anyway, because that big front seat is comfortable and it's cheaper than flying economy. How low? I mean, I would love to just be two seats instead of three, right? Exactly. I mean, so with any of the major carriers, most of us who fly those carriers a lot are playing this game of getting elite status and buying coach and hoping for an upgrade and waiting at the gate, checking the upgrade list to see if

you're going to make it in the first class. Spending a quarter of a million dollars a year on Delta credit cards to have diamond status. Whereas you could spend less than the coach ticket on Spirit and just book that big front seat from the get-go. And you're good to go. And as Nick said, out of some airports, Detroit, for example, they have a great route network. It's not as good as Delta's, but it is better than United and American Airlines out of Detroit combined. Combined. It's crazy. It's crazy, isn't it? I mean, I'm constantly surprised too at their route network out of other airports. Myrtle Beach is one that's a very small airport. It's in mind because this is where I am now, but Spirit by far serves the most destinations of any airline from

this particular small airport. And that's notable to me because Myrtle Beach is a place if you've never driven to Myrtle Beach, I wouldn't expect you to be familiar with the fact that there's no major highway to get here. So you end up on back roads, basically any way you're driving to get here. And so it's not a super convenient place to get to for a lot of people anyway. So flying is not bad if you wanted to come to this area. And Spirit is by far the airline that serves this airport the most. And this is not the only airport like that. So we've talked about a number of good things about Spirit. So I have two questions. Number one, is Spirit paying you for this, Greg? And number two, what's wrong with

Spirit? Yeah. No, Spirit's obviously not paying us anything for this, and we are going to talk about the downside. So what we've gotten out of the way are a lot of the perceived downsides don't, at least in they're not real first. Um, one that depending on who you are, it might be trivial. It might not be, it's not trivial to me is just the fact that somehow they didn't get the memo. When the memo went around all the airlines saying we have to offer free changes and free cancellations to everybody. Where was spirit? They missed it. I misseddelivered. They're like, no, the program is called Free Spirit. Nothing is actually free. You can sign up for free. You can sign up for free. That's, Hawaiian, JetBlue, but not Spirit. And Southwest has had that for a while, I guess, or maybe ever.

As long as I can remember anyway. You know, and it's hard because, you know, at least for me, I'm almost always rethinking plans. And so just sort of not having the ability to freely make those changes when I want to is unfortunate. Again, you did mention that gold status gives you one free change. And I took advantage of that last month. I had, I don't know why I had done this, but I had originally booked a round trip flight to our destination. I had, I had on spirit, but I don't know why I had booked round trip instead of two one ways, but I had, and I had found out later that some of the timing was different from what I expected and Delta was better for the return. So what I actually did is I took advantage of that free

change and I just changed the return to a time when it was dirt cheap, like even, you know, way, way cheaper than what I had purchased. So, you know, I don't know what the end result was, but basically they gave me a whole bunch of credits back, um, by making that one free change, uh, using my, using my gold status. So that was nice, but still, you know, I'd used up my one free change, you know? Yeah. Well, you know, and I, I made one, one change on that too. Same thing. I changed the return flight on mine and I had paid for the big front seat originally, but then of course, with the new flight that I picked, it ended up being more expensive. So my credit didn't cover the big front seat and the new ones. That's why

I ended up flying exit row one way, which I thought was actually not bad. Cause then it gave me a comparison point for big front seat versus exit row. And I was like, ah, you know, either way, it's fine. I was happy with the exit row to plenty of leg room, but that's definitely a downside. I couldn't just get the same. It's not like booking first class in the sense that, you know, if I had booked a Delta first class flight and I was looking to change to another flight and maybe I'd be able to get first class if there's availability for that seat again. Whereas in this case, it was, you know, there was no availability or there was availability, but it was just too expensive. Gotcha. Gotcha. Um, okay. So now let's get to the real bad stuff. Now Spirit has a good on-time

performance record. They're better than most of the domestics, not as good as like Delta and Hawaiian, but still very good. So that's impressive. But as with any airline, things don't always go as planned and flights do get delayed. Flights do get canceled. Bad stuff happens. Spirit does not have an inner line agreement with the other airlines. So when bad things happen on American, United, Delta, if they can't reaccommodate you on another one of their flights, they can actually pay the other airline for your ticket and put you on there. Spirit doesn't have that option. They also don't have the route network that some of these others have. So, you know, for example, on this experiment that I mentioned before, going to Denver and back,

the flight, the Spirit flight from Denver was massively, massively delayed. I proactively booked a Delta flight instead and got and got home, um, in plenty of time, but, uh, it would have been, it would have been about seven hours late. I would have gotten in at about two in the morning if, uh, if I had stayed on spirit because there was nothing they could do there. There weren't other flights they could have put me on. They couldn't have, they couldn't have put me on the Delta flight. Um, if you really absolutely need to get to where you need to go, there's more risk in booking

Spirit than some of the other ones. It's totally true. And it's not that you can't get delayed or canceled with other airlines. It's just there are more backup plans. There's more flights each day, or they could fly you someplace else to find a new connection for you, whereas Spirit is typically not going to have that capability. So it's not set up to be able to clean up the mess when there's a problem. And for that reason, I feel like Spirit makes more sense as what it's probably positioned to be a more leisure-based airline in the sense that if you've got to be somewhere for business,

if I have to be somewhere to speak at a conference or something, I'm probably generally not going to pick Spirit. Or maybe I am because I have so many miles that I could always clean up the mess on my own and get to where I need to be if Spirit breaks somehow. But I would think that generally speaking for a business traveler, it would be tough to make that decision unless you're going to constantly fly in the day before, you know, if you're going to give yourself plenty of buffer zone in case something goes wrong. So that's kind of a bummer, kind of a downside on spirit. However, these days it's not as bad as it once was because now everybody's got those free changes and cancellations. So no matter who I'm flying, I'm booking a backup flight because I

can. So, I mean, we talked about that when we did our trip, our Guck trip recently that I flew to DC on United, but I had a backup flight booked on Southwest and I almost forgot to cancel it. But thank goodness at the last minute, I did remember to cancel the backup flight, though I didn't cancel it until I was on the ground in DC and made sure that I was getting to where I was going. Because, you know, I could do that with a free cancellation or change. And now that you can do that with so many other airlines, it would be pretty easy. It would have been easy for you right off the bat. I don't know if you did this at the beginning to book the backup flight on Delta. I did. I ended up paying quite a few more miles on Delta than I would have if I had booked it originally as a backup. But it's something that

didn't occur to me because coming back from this trip, I didn't have to be home at a certain time. It's just that I didn't want to come home at two in the morning. Yeah. It wasn't a specific time. It was just sometime before 2 a.m. I also didn't want to sit around the airport indefinitely because it's one of those that all airlines do. There's a priority pass things, right? They keep incrementally moving your departure time forward. So you're supposed to stick around the airport all this time. And no, at least at the time I looked in Denver, there was a priority pass restaurant, but not a lounge. I could have gone to another terminal to do the Amex Centurion Lounge, thanks to having a platinum card.

The Centurion Lounge has this rule about you can enter. It has to be within three hours of your departure. I don't know what happens. Scheduled departure or? Right, right, right. If it's scheduled, what if my scheduled departure has already come and gone? That's a good question. You should have done that at least for science right there, just to let us know. The Spirit Flyers with the platinum card would know in the future. But so, all right. So that sunk. You had to cancel the Spirit Flight. with the platinum card would know in the future. But so, all right.

So that sunk. You had to cancel the Spirit flight. You flew Delta home. It's too bad that that happened. And I know since Spirit has horrible customer service, they must have just taken all of your money and not flown you, right? Yeah, you'd think so. And I thought that's what was going to happen.

But I had booked both of, my son was with me. And I had booked our flights at different times. And so his was booked completely separately from mine. And while I was waiting for the Delta flight to return home, I messaged, I text messaged Spirit. That seems to be their preferred way of doing customer support these days, which is fine with me. I kind of preferred that over, you know,

being on hold on the phone forever. And I had, there were some, there were some bumps in that whole process. Like I got different people initially and it wasn't, wasn't really resolved, but I was looking for whether we could get a refund. And, and in one of those messages, I actually sent it on behalf of my son. So they believed me to be him. I mean, that's the record locator I put in and everything. And the initial thing about a refund was they were going to be granting a $10 refund per person. Which I assume your tickets were more expensive than $10. Yeah. But, you know, so his with the big front seat was about $112.

And but then I just wrote back. I said, really, even when the flight is, I think I said something like nine hours late. At that point, that's what I was kind of guessing it was going to end up being. It ended up being more like seven, but still. And to my surprise, she wrote back saying, oh, let me look into that. Okay, I looked into that and we're going to refund the entire amount back to the, can you do the same for my father's ticket? And I gave the PNR for my ticket. And she came back and said, yep. But he booked with credits. Remember I mentioned how I had extra credits from changing that other flight last month?

That's how I used for this flight. And so they refunded my credits. So, you know, that was amazing. I don't expect that on any airline. And got that on Spirit. Plenty of readers have said they weren't so lucky when dealing with Spirit. So your mileage may vary. But I specifically mentioned the thing about my son here because I want to dispel any belief that I got special treatment because I'm a blogger or

even because I had gold status. Neither one is the case with my son. They had no reason to know we're connected. There's no one in the customer service that knows anything about me or my son. So I don't believe for a second it had anything to do with any of that. I think that they were just providing good customer service for my son once he pushed back a little bit. And it wasn't a lot, but just a little bit. It was just a little bit. And I think that that goes to show a couple of things. First of all, that obviously there's some flexibility there that whatever you're told

the first time isn't always the be all and end all. And that's just a generally applicable rule, right? That whatever you're told at first is not always the final answer. And then, you know, and then beyond that, that, you know, being nice and being reasonable often gets you better results. So rather than texting back and saying, you know, I can't believe that this is horrible service. I'm never going to fly Spirit again. Instead, you text back, really, even when the flight is canceled by nine hours? And, and look at that, you got somebody because of that reaction, I'm never going to fly Spirit again. Instead, you text back, really? Even when the flight is canceled by nine hours? And look at that. You got somebody, because of that reaction, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe it was because you had a reasonable question

as a follow-up. That person was like, well, I don't know, maybe. And then they looked into something and figured out, oh yeah, I can give a refund. And that's great because you were canceling a flight that was delayed. The flight wasn't canceled yet. So you were proactively canceling your reservation and you ended up with a refund on the credit card. Yeah, that's the big one, right? So I don't actually have to fly Spirit with that credit, which is great. I mean, not because I can't fly spirit, but obviously it's much more flexible that way. There's no time limit on that. There is a time limit on my, on my credits, on my account,

because there was before and there is, there is now, you know, and we also, I need to mention another thing. This was all kind of weird, but the reason I found out this flight was delayed was not because I got any kind of message, hey, your flight's going to be delayed. But I got a apology email early in the morning that said, we're sorry about your experience on a recent flight. Here's a $40, I forget how much it was, $50, I think, voucher. And it was each of us got one of these emails for a future flight for up to three months from now. And so that made me start wondering, well, what was the bad experience I had recently? What happened in the back of the plane? I didn't see a fight. What fight?

So, you know, I found that interesting in two ways. You know, one is it's kind of too bad. Spirit's not unusual in not proactively telling people when the writing's on the wall. I've had really good luck, not on all flights, but sometimes when Delta has been delayed of them actually letting me know way in advance and enough so that I don't even have to go to the airport to find out that it's delayed. Whereas, you know, on the extreme other end, American Airlines, they keep insisting it's going to be on time, or at least I've had this experience until, you know, we're about to board. And then they're like, oh, it's moved back 20 minutes when anyone, you know, they probably know that the airplane that we need to get on is three hours away. Right. Okay. It'd be 20 minutes delayed. And they keep telling you, don't leave the gate area because it could, we could board anytime. Yeah. So, so spirit, you know, didn't,

wasn't as productive as Delta, but, but they have some weird, you know, compensation thing going on that knew about this and, and what, you know, had, and, and, and sent out this apology before sending out the, Oh, Hey, your flight's going to be delayed, which is just kind of bizarre, but it's a combination of good and, and, and not so good. I mean, the automated, the automated nature of giving you a credit, that's nice. Cause you got that in addition to the refund, right? I did. I mean, I haven't checked to make sure that those credits are still valid. And they also gave us each $7 of food credits,

which I didn't have an opportunity to use. Get yourself some pretzels at Annie Ann's or something maybe. Right, right. Maybe, maybe if you're lucky. Not very much with that. But yeah, well, I mean, nice to do something. It was a lot of, you know, there,

there were several things that they proactively offered and that's worth mentioning because that's not what people expect from spirit. And I think that spirit has been trying hard to change their image. And I think that they've been getting from what I've heard and read, I think they've been getting a lot better than their, their image. Like, you know, the popular image of them hasn't caught up to where they're actually at. I think that's very true. I think that's very true.

And that's been my experience the few times that I've flown Spirit. And I'm glad to see that because I want good competition. And one of the things that years before I became a blogger, I was very involved in buying and reselling stuff. And so Slick Deals was a website I constantly used. And anytime there was a deal posted about something at Sears or Radio Shack, I remember Radio Shack back in the day, people would always be like, oh my goodness, I can't wait until they go out of business. And I was like, no, I don't want to go out of business. I want Best Buy to have some competition. I want somebody pushing the deals in my favor. So I'm rooting for the small guys to stay there too, or to build up and move and put pressure on everybody else.

So I'm rooting for spirit to do well, because that means everybody else has to do something to compete. So I, you know, I, I think that that's another good thing going for the competition here. So three chairs, the spirit and the ways that they are advancing things. And it's not as bad as perhaps we might think based on, again, that popular image that is almost always going to be portrayed on a very small percentage of what actually happens, I think so. Right, right. So, you know, I guess to wrap it all up, I mean, if you're willing to deal with baggage fees or you're willing to,

you know, go for gold status and you're willing to deal with the uncertainty of actually getting to where you want to go, it's not going to happen often. But when it does, there's a little less they can do. There's less they can do than other airlines. Then I think it's a great opportunity to get to fly upfront in comfort domestically for, and it's not just domestically, but near domestic also.

They have some flights to some other nearby countries. And in comfort and without playing all those hoping for an upgrade games that you have to do with some other airlines. Yeah. And that I think is really where the value lies for a lot of people that there is no game there. And if you're going to play the game, you really don't have to spend that much money. The credit card, 50,000 might sound like a lot, but the $5,000 that you have to spend in order to get gold status, you're talking about $416 a month on flights. I mean, don't get me wrong. I don't spend that much on flights every month, but that's not a lot of money to end up getting free bags and free

carry-ons and all the rest of that. So I think it's a reasonable hurdle to have to cross for people who do travel somewhat regularly. So, right. Yep. All right. Yeah. Indeed. All right. So there we go. So let's move on then from the main event to this week's post-roast. Do you have a post-roast? I don't know. I do. Okay, go ahead. You don't have a post-roast?

Should I be roasting the fact that you wrote about Delta and Spirit? Yeah, probably. All right. So you've... I'll do mine. Kim did it for me. Thanks, Kim. Yes, she did.

So you've written a number of times recently about how great the plus four referral offer is with Amex. What you haven't written about is how to refer someone to the fantastic resi platinum card offer where the person who gets referred can earn 125,000 points plus 15 points per dollar on dining and small business purchases. So why haven't you explained how to do that? So true. So, and I'm laughing because I'm going to give the answer to it, but it's actually a good, a good roast, a good piece of feedback. So, because you can't, that's why I haven't written about it because you can't. The only way you can get that offer is to go through the Rezzy link. So we call it the Rezzy Platinum offer all the time when we're writing about it, but it's not

a Rezzy Platinum card. It's just the Platinum card. And it just so happens that Rezzy's got the best link. There is no referral link that has the same offer. The referral offer varies somewhat actually, depending on the card you refer from. And it can be almost as good. The best referral offers for the 125,000 points in 10X restaurants and small businesses. But if you want the 15X restaurants worldwide in US small businesses, you have to go through Rezzy to get it. There's no way to get referral credit if somebody wants to open that. So you can't do it. But it's a good point that I probably should make that a more prominent feature in any post about this because we we always get that question. That's right. It's a fair question. Everybody wants to know it.

I mean, duh, obviously I should have included that. So, right. Right. So if you've been wondering, if you're in, if you're in two player mode, you can't refer your player to, to, to that offer, but you could each sign up for that offer if you wanted to. And you can refer each other to some other card from that platinum card once you get it. Unless you're one of the few unfortunate ones who don't have referrals from the platinum card, which is possible. I guess it's possible. Yeah. I mean, I've only heard that from a few people and I don't know if there were people who opened it recently or not. I'm not sure, but I opened mine recently and it still shows. I don't know. Anyway, yes. And to add to that point, because people, like I said at the beginning of ask, how do you pick up referrals?

That's a great example where each person opens the Resi Platinum on their own and then they refer each other for some other card that probably has a low spending requirement. So you don't have to worry about dedicating very much spend to it. So you can trigger the 4X bonus on that spend that you're going to be doing on the platinum card anyway. And you stand to earn so many points that like, for example, the business green rewards card that I opened that has a 25,000 point signup bonus on 3K spend. So relatively easy to meet it. Or if you don't meet it, so what? You get your 4X and your 25K spend on the platinum card from easy to meet it. Or if you don't meet it, so what you get your four X and your 25 K spend on the platinum card from which you referred it, you're going to get a hundred thousand points there. So even if you just don't even bother meeting the spend for the business

screen rewards, you just say, whatever, I don't have enough capacity to spend that much. Still, you could have player to open it. All they have to do is open it through your link in order to trigger the plus four. They don't actually have to meet the spending requirements. So, you know, that might be worth it if you can't fathom doing enough spend. Right, right. Pretty soon it's going to be all academic. You have to actually get your refer, your refer e person you refer to get approved by by December 1st.

So not much time. Got to hop on here. Got to hop on here. But but worthwhile. All right. So good, time. Got to hop on it here. Got to hop on it here. But worthwhile. All right. So good roast. You cannot refer to that. So there's your answer, folks.

No way to do it. All right. Sort of snuck in a question of the week in a way. Well, you know, and it's not the only one because the gold card also similar. The best offer on the gold card is through Rezzy also. We haven't really mentioned that very much because the platinum card steals all the thunder, but the best gold offer is also through Rezzy. It's like 75,000 points and 20% back at restaurants

on up to, I don't know, up to $250 back or whatever. So that's the best offer on the gold card too. But anyway, all right. So good, good roast there. I'm going to move us forward to the actual question of the week this week because this one is a kind of a fun one. Jason writes and emails and says,

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on Amazon pulling visa in the UK. I don't know if you heard about this, but Amazon announced they're not going to accept visa anymore in the UK because the fees are too high. So just wondering if you had any thoughts on Amazon pulling visa in the UK and maybe potentially doing so in the US.

Can you see battles like this akin to carriage fees and TV networks where they pull their shows becoming more and more common in the future? I don't know if you've noticed that before, but where sometimes my in-laws are on direct TV and every now and then one affiliate or another pulls out and then they can't get NBC or CBI or whatever it might be. So if merchants begin capping fees, I can see maybe this leading to a reduction in rewards from credit cards. So what do you think? Do you think there's any likelihood that Amazon stops taking Visa in the US if Visa is charging them a bunch of money?

They've obviously made that decision in the UK. Do you think there's any danger of that happening here? And then do you think that this type of battle will lead to a reduction in credit card rewards? It's a great question. I mean, I don't know the answers to either, obviously. It's just guessing. Just looking for speculation. You know, I totally can imagine that in the U.S., Amazon is such a huge part of Visa's revenue, just because they do such ginormous business that they have to pull a lot of weight. And I can imagine that Visa might have been less willing to back down when it was about the UK business, just because

that's a smaller, it has to be a much smaller business, I imagine. But in the US, I have to think that Visa is going to drop their rates for Amazon, not in general across the board. So if that's true, or maybe it's already happened for all I know, Amazon probably already gets great rates. Then the question is, because Visa's earning less and the banks are earning less as a result as well, does that mean they're going to reduce rewards? And I mean, I don't think that that's likely to happen because of one retailer, despite how huge this one retailer is.

But it's something, I guess, to maybe look out into the, I'd say distant future to worry about. I can't imagine that happening in the next year or two because everything's been going the other way. The rewards have been getting bigger and bigger. And so for any bank to compete, to continue to compete while also pulling back on rewards, that would be a big step. And it's not the right environment for them to do that. No. Yeah. I mean, I, it is interesting because I do see where the question is coming from and it makes some sense that if fees get competed down too low, that how could they afford to continue to do it? But I think the point you made there at the end

is exactly it. You can't possibly compete for customers in this environment without a generous rewards earning or offering of some sort. I mean, yeah, there's lots of small local banks that have credit cards that don't offer very much or don't offer anything. And I guess they survive, but they're not going to compete on the level of a Chase or an Amex or a Citi because they don't offer enough. And so I can't see that disappearing. And if it does, like you said, distant future, because I think it would have to be like a slow tapering off. And where we're at right now with, I mean, I've written about these Amex things with the referral bonuses. I get so many cards in my wallet now that are earning 8, 10, 12, 16 X right now on certain amounts of spend that, you know,

the pullback from there to a point where, you know, you're looking at one X or something like that is, is quite a distance and all the new cards have been offering better and better multipliers on different categories. So, uh, so yeah, I think we're safe for a while, safe for a while, hopefully, hopefully. All right. Very good. Well, if you've enjoyed what we've been talking about today, you'd like to get our email list, go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Find us on social media. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group. And wherever you're listening or watching this show, make sure that you hit subscribe,

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