Frequent Miler on the Air - Strategizing Hilton cards, credits, and free nights | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep255 | 5-17-24

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Hilton's SLH partnership is stirring up some excitement over Hilton, even for people like Greg who haven't bothered with Hilton cards for awhile, so this week we're discussing Hilton credit cards, credits, and free nights. (02:07) - We forgot about Qpoints last week... (Mail Bag) (05:10) - Citi Strata Premier (Card Talk) (10:33) - Citi accidentally made Strata Premier details public (Crazy Thing) (11:56) - Citi accidentally published FAQ showing that it may be possible to upgrade to Prestige card (Crazy Thing) (14:10) - Earn Delta MQDs on hotel bookings & car rentals (Mattress Running the Numbers) (16:58) - AutoCamp now bookable with Hilton points Main Event: Strategizing Hilton credit cards (20:40) - Hilton is the only major hotel program with easy to get, uncapped free night certificates (28:28) - Read about the Hilton Honors American Express Card here: https://frequentmiler.com/AmxHilton/#Goto (28:40) - Read about the Hilton Honors American Express Business Card here: https://frequentmiler.com/AmxHiltonBiz/#Goto (29:19) - Read about the Hilton Honors American Express Surpass Card here: https://frequentmiler.com/hilton-honors-american-express-surpass-card/#Goto (30:00) - Read about the Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card here: https://frequentmiler.com/AmxHiltonAspire/#Goto (31:18) - Earning free nights (43:51) - Earning rebates to keep cards net free (51:22) - Greg's strategy (1:01:00) - Nick's thoughts (1:05:01) - Is booking anything better than booking nothing? (Question of the week)

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 Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, strategizing Hilton cards, credits, and free nights. I've been more excited than ever recently since we found out that Hilton was going to be not only taking over a relationship with small luxury hotels in the world, but actually making it like a full-fledged sort of member of the program in a way, because you're going to be able to use not just points to book these SLH properties, but also your free night certificates. And you're also going to get,

theoretically, at least they told us you're going to get some benefits if you have elite status when you stay at these properties. And so I'm really excited about what's coming. And it's made me think about Hilton credit cards. And I haven't had a Hilton credit card for a long time. And so suddenly I'm like, I'm in the market for them. And so we're going to talk about strategies for like what cards make sense to have. If you have, how do you earn credits on them? So they don't cost you too much. And what's a good strategy for getting free nights, ringing those free nights out of those Hilton cards. I love this because I've been talking up the Hilton Aspire card for years and years and questioning why Greg doesn't have this card. It's,

I mean, it's one of the most no brainer cards out there. And now finally, it pushed him over the edge into the, you know, into the realm of saying, OK, you know what, I do need to have that. And that's, you know, that's the power of the SLH partnership really here, I think. But but it's useful for lots of other things, too, even if SLH isn't your thing. And we'll get back to that in a little bit. But first, don't forget that the timestamps are going to be in the show notes. So if you want to jump ahead to a specific segment or you want to come back to something, just expand the show notes wherever you're watching this

and you'll see those timestamps. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget, like this. Give us a thumbs up, leave us a positive review, give us a comment and tell us what you think about what we said, what we got right, what we got wrong, what we could do differently. We always love to hear from you. Well, with that out of the way, let's drag out

this week's giant mailbag. Today's giant mail is on the topic of what we got wrong. So last week, like I said, tell us about what we got wrong. First, first, we're going to tell ourselves what we got wrong, which is last week in the, I think it was the mattress running the numbers segment. We talked about using the cardless card, the new cutter card. The cardless guitar card. Yeah, there you go. It automatically gives you gold status the first year. And then we talked about how much spend you'd have to put on it to keep gold status thereafter. But we forgot that the first year it also comes with a bunch of Q points, which makes earning gold status for year two, not as hard as it'll be for year three and onward. So really what we talked about was only

relevant to year three and onward. But now here comes the giant mail. Gary from View from the Wing sent in his giant mail and I shortened it because it'd be too long to... We already have shows that go well over an hour and I don't want to read the whole thing. But Gary points out, he says, regarding requalifying for Cutter Gold status, I haven't seen anything about waiving the Cutter Airways flight requirement for status. To be clear, I have not explicitly asked whether the requirement is waived for credit card customers, but I have seen nothing to suggest that it does. So he points to the website where I had gotten all the information for the show about how many Q points you need to get gold status and everything, but I hadn't noticed a little paragraph near the top that said, in addition to the below tier qualification and retention criteria, you will need to have earned at least 20% of your Q points or have flown four sectors

within 12 months prior to retention or eight sectors within 24 months prior to retention on flights either marketed or operated by Qatar Airways. So a short way of saying that is, it sounds like you actually have to fly on Qatar and earn Q points through those flights to some degree in order to retain gold status, even if you have the card, unless there's some exception for cardholders, which we don't know about.

Interesting. So not as easy as $67,500 in dining spend. You also need to earn some some cute points from flying. Yeah. Yeah. Shucks. But here's here's the good news. I think we also mentioned or I don't remember if we mentioned on the show, but the other way of earning gold status with the card is to buy really expensive Qatar Airways tickets. And so if you buy one round trip that has a total of four segments, then that combination gets you gold. So there you go. Good as gold. All right. Very good. Thanks for that. We appreciate that. Yeah, thanks, Gary. Thanks a lot, Gary. Yeah. Meant it more legitimately than that, Greg.

All right, for this week's Card Talk, we have the Citi Strata Premier Card, which is now out and available for new applicants. And so the Citi Strata Premier Card looks very similar to the Citi Premier Card, but adds Strata to it, right? Yeah, adds Strata and then also a dash of 3x for EV charging, some travel protections, and they've made permanent the ability to get 10x points for hotels, car rentals, and attractions booked through City Travel. Other than that, it's identical to what the City Premier was before. And in fact, if you had the City Premier and log into your account now, you'll see you now have the strata premier. They automatically converted everybody because it really is the same card. It is. And so, and so if you're interested in getting the card as a

new applicant, it needs to have been 48 months since you last earned the welcome bonus. So if you're an existing premier card that premier card holder now an existing strata premier card holder, if it's been more than 48 months since you earned your welcome bonus on that card then you could apply again for a strata premier even if you still currently have one and if you have closed your strata premier again still you're able to apply as long as it's been 48 months since you earned the bonus it doesn't matter when you opened your previous premier card or when you closed your previous premier card it matters when you earned the bonus Premier card or when you closed your previous Premier card.

It matters when you earned the bonus, which will usually be with the statement when the statement cuts from the period where you have met the spending requirement. So you may have to go back and figure out when that was, if you can, and count 48 months from there, and then you'd be eligible to sign up as a new cardholder. Yeah. And theoretically, if you signed up for the Premier recently and haven't earned the bonus yet, you should be eligible as well, right? So that's the Strata Premier.

Most of this, well, actually, we should talk quickly, I think, about the travel protections because that was a big ad, right? The fact that the Premier card was missing travel protections for years seemed really confusing for me. They used to have them and then they got rid of all the travel protections, which made very little sense on a travel card that bonuses airfare and hotel purchases to not have any travel protections. So they added some, although I'm kind of lukewarm on the travel protections, because as Miles Ernenberg pointed out, they've got really pretty poor travel protections comparatively compared to others that have them. The trip

delay coverage is up to $500, but it's only $500 period. Whereas other cards, I think it's $500 per traveler. Maybe if I remember correctly, it's round trip only, and you have to have paid in full with your card. So again, that just makes it a little bit more restrictive. If you had a different card, you would be able to book one way. I'm pretty sure that they used to allow you to pay in part with points and with rewards. And it doesn't explicitly say that, that I saw in the terms for a trip delay. And trip cancellation interruption, I mean, that's not bad up to 5k coverage, but again, round trip only, and you have to pay in full. Lost or damaged luggage, I don't think there's a round trip only and you have to pay in full lost or damaged luggage i don't think there's a round trip requirement there but and that gives you up to 3k coverage unless you're

nick then you only get 2k coverage if you're nick or anyone else who's who lives in new york state then the coverage is limited to 2k for some reason wow wow that's boom boom not that i really usually have more than two they,000 worth of stuff in my luggage. They call that the Nick Claus. Get out of here, New Yorkers. We know you got some expensive clothes. That's on you. So I don't usually check more than $2,000 worth of stuff anyway. So I'm not too concerned about that part of it. But the rental car coverage is secondary coverage, right? Well, when you're within the United States anyway, which is primary overseas, I think, right? Yeah, exactly.

Which is true of most, if not all, secondary coverages. I don't know. But yeah, outside of the U.S., you'll get primary coverage. But within the U.S., it's secondary. Now, you must pay in full, but there is sort of a minor loophole listed in there. I'm going to just quote this and people can figure it out. It says, if the eligible renter rents the rental vehicle at a reduced cost because of his or her participation in a coupon program, such as a rental company promotion discount or an airline mileage points program, the entire transaction must be reserved and charged to your covered card, and at least

one full day of rental must be billed to your covered card. So I don't know. I think that means like, let's say you book through American Airlines and use miles to pay for the rental, which is not a bad idea. Yeah, it's a bad idea usually. But let's just imagine there was some kind of deal where it made sense. I think as long as you left one day of that rental as cash and paid with your card for it, then you'd be covered according to this. Yeah, maybe more like a situation I would consider a little bit more would be like a national executive free day or a Hertz free day. You'd want to make sure you have at least one paid day along with your free day or free days. Yep. Yeah. And by the way, for anybody who's like secondary, primary, what does that mean?

Secondary coverage means that your personal car insurance would have to pay up first if they cover rental cars before the credit card insurance would pay up. So if it's secondary CDW, then like this is, then your personal insurance would have to cover you first as long as they cover that. And obviously, if they don't, then it'll go to your credit card. But there are other cards that offer primary CDW where it wouldn't go to your personal car insurance. All right, that's the Citi Premier.

So that brings us to what crazy thing did Citi do this week? Welcome back, Citi. You're in for a double header of Citi craziness. What crazy thing did Citi not do this week is the question all right so we're pulling out just two crazy things that city did this past week first of all we we talked earlier in the show about the strata card is finally launched it actually came out earlier than expected but it got really details about the the Strata Premier got released even earlier than it was officially available, but it was Citi's fault.

It was on Citi's website that some people were able to see the full details. And so that got released to all the, you know, all the blogs picked it up, including ours. And we listed what the details were of the Strata Premier directly from Citi again. And so Citi got mad at all of us bloggers. I guess they didn't like the fact that they published the details on their site. Yeah, right. Or that we did after they did. Right. They don't, it didn't make any sense, but they got mad at us. They shut down most, most blogs affiliate links. So yeah, just like most other blogs now, we do not have Citi affiliate links at the moment, which is a shame.

And, but okay, so that was one, one crazy thing Citi did. Another crazy thing is that when the product became really available on Sunday, the website, the landing page for it had a frequently asked question section at the bottom. And it showed that it might be possible to upgrade to the old prestige card. There was a whole question about, can I upgrade to the prestige card? And it said, call the number on your back of your card to find out if you're eligible. So it surely indicated that it should be possible, at least for some people to upgrade to the prestige card. And that's notable because prestige card hasn't been available new for many years and hasn't been available for product changes for that time either. So we published a post about it saying, hey, it looks like it might be possible or might be possible soon, if not now, to do this upgrade. And so Citi reached out to us

and asked us to fix our post because it had incorrect information because their page was a mistake. That FAQ was a mistake. So surely then, if that's the case, they had fixed their page before they asked you to fix our page. Surely, right? Yeah. You would think that they might have asked their own people to fix their page even before asking us to fix it. Even before that. Yeah. But no, prior to recording the show, theirq is still there it's still wrong there you go is your post updated what's that is your post updated to take that my post is updated yeah well they had you on their team yeah that's what they needed that's what they needed apparently

yeah much harder to fix their site than i would have realized. So yes, that's a crazy thing. So the double header city, just knocking it out of the park left and right. It was also kind of ironic that city was asking us for a favor to change our post after pulling away our affiliate links so that it all was just ironic. Yeah. Several days of craziness. Yes. Yes.

Thanks for that. Thanks for making an appearance and making the intro still relevant. Keeping the intro relevant. Thank you, Citi. All right. So let's move on to this week's Mattress Running the Numbers. So for Mattress Running the Numbers this week, we've got the ability to earn Delta Medallion qualifying dollars on hotel bookings and car rentals.

The whole Delta Medallion MQD thing is more up your alley than mine, Greg. So how does this work? Yeah. So MQDs are what you need to earn in order to get Delta Elite status. Normally, you earn Medallion Qualifying Dollars by buying flights. And the amount you pay, not counting taxes and fees, is the number of Medallion Qualifying Dollars you get. And then you could get Elite status. So like 5,000ds is silver status 10 000 is gold and so on and so with this promotion booking car rentals and hotels also gives you mqds and so what's kind of interesting there as an approach is that normally with delta like only the traveler you you only get MQDs for your own

travel, not for the rest of your family. Like if you bought flights for your whole family, they would each get their own MQDs for those flights. But with this, you're going to be getting MQDs for yourself, you know, even if you're booking cars for whoever, if you're booking hotels for whoever. So that's kind of unusual for Delta. But really, it's not necessarily the best way to go about trying to earn Delta Elite status, because you might not get the best deals through these sites, especially with car rentals. I think the hotels tend to be roughly, it's like hotels.com behind the scenes. And I think it's going to be roughly the same as you'll see elsewhere for those prices. But the reason I want to talk about this is that if you have a Delta Platinum or Reserve card, then you

get somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 per year in hotel rebates when you book through Delta Stays. And I say somewhere in the neighborhood because it depends exactly which card you have and whether it's business or personal, but it ranges from, I think, $150 to $250, those credits. And so anyway, so I want to point out that this is a nice, easy way. If you have a hotel stay coming up,

why not book it through Delta Stays, get your credit, get some MQDs as well, and nice double dip. Yeah, there you go. That is a good double dip for cardholders that are looking to use their credit and need the MQDs. So if you're chasing Delta Elite status, that's good to know. I mean, it's also good to know if you've got a family member maybe that doesn't care about hotel points or is booking an independent place and doesn't mind if you book and pay for it and they pay you back kind of a thing, you might be able to pick up some MQDs that way, I guess. So yeah, yeah, absolutely. Really good, really good opportunity for some people, I would think, to pick up quite a few MQDs. All right. That's Matt just running the

numbers. Award Talk is up next. So for Award Talk, we've got Hilton's new partnership with AutoCamp. And this looks really cool. It's finally launched. Only one property is available so far. The AutoCamp Cape Cod property is available right now. But it's expected that in the next couple of weeks, and I get the sense that it's truly coming soon, in the next couple of weeks, we'll see all the other AutoCamp properties come live. They've got one in Yosemite, one in Zion, one in Joshua Tree. So there's going to be all sorts of cool looking places to book AutoCamp.

So what is AutoCamp and why is this interesting? Well, AutoCamp are campgrounds and it's Airstream campers on campgrounds. So they have actually also luxury tents and cabins and some other things. But as a standard room award, you can book a night in an Airstream. And so obviously, if you're not familiar with that, that's the type of a camper that's a higher end camper. So you can book an Airstream for 70,000 points a night right now. It's usually 70,000 points a night at the Auto Camp Cape Cod. Obviously, the pricing may differ when the other properties come live. But the nice thing

is that that Airstream is a standard room award. Now, they do have some premium Airstreams that are not standard room awards. So I think it varies some. But anyway, you can get yourself a few nights at a campground there. They're going to have soon campgrounds also in the Catskills and Asheville and a bunch of other places, too. And you get some Hilton Elite benefits. So that was I was actually a little bit surprised that there are going to be any benefits at all, because I was picturing a campground where it wouldn't be possible to have benefits. But these campgrounds actually on second glance here look pretty nice. They usually have a large clubhouse. I think the one in Cape Cod,

they said is something like 8,100 square feet. It's two levels. And so they have a market in there and they have like a small restaurant type of a space. Unfortunately, the restaurant is not going to be part of your elite benefits exactly, but you may still be interested. Silver members will get two eco-friendly waters for whatever that's worth. Gold members, which is probably of more interest for more people, gold members will get one bundle of firewood per stay and the two eco-friendly waters and a space available upgrade. So maybe you'll end up getting one of those premium airstreams, I guess. And diamond members get that, the bundle of firewood per stay and the eco-friendly waters. And they also get a s'mores kit and also, of course, a space available upgrade.

I think I probably already mentioned that. So Diamond members get themselves the s'mores kit and the bundle of firewood, which I looked it up at the property in Cape Cod. Bundle of firewood, it looks like it's 20 bucks. The s'mores kit is 15. So 35-ish dollar value. Is it worth that much?

You could go to the grocery store and buy stuff for s'mores for less than 15 bucks, probably. I have no idea what a bundle of firewood goes for at places offsite, but I think those are kind of nice benefits. A little disappointing if you'd prefer to have breakfast in their restaurant. Although I looked at the prices of like a breakfast sandwich and I imagine you're kind of coming out ahead dollar wise if you value the s'mores kit and the firewood at what they say the retail price is. So it's actually, I think not a terrible trade. If I'm going to go camping, I'd kind of like the firewood and the s'mores kit.

I don't know. What do you think about all this, Greg? Is this exciting? Is it interesting? Why or why not? I find it very exciting. So originally when I first heard of this, AutoCamp, I think it's a terrible name. It is.

To me, the name sounds very low end, but it's not. When you go in and look at the pictures and everything and the prices, you see this is high end stuff. This is glamping. And the locations are phenomenal. They're right out to these national parks and things that you're not usually going to be able to get anywhere nice using points. So now we have a chance to go stay right by Zion and in the Catskills and in all these different locations that look amazing and use Hilton points to do it.

And the Hilton elite benefits, they're not exciting, but I think it's cool that you're getting something above what a regular, you know, what most people sign up. You know, most people who book the AutoCamp not through Hilton won't get these things. So that's pretty cool. And yeah, so these are standard trying it out for sure. Yeah, these are standard room awards. So you obviously be able to use points. Also night certificates if you have free night certificates now the value for points varies weekends in the summertime were pretty expensive and so the value for points was pretty good i mean we found around 0.82 cents per point which is i don't know better than the new

but you can buy them for you can buy them for half a cent each pretty often so that's pretty good there were other times where it was a little bit less than half a cent per point in value. It just depends on weekend, weekday, in the middle of the high season, not in the middle of the high season. So I think this is really cool because we've often said, like my wife and I are very interested in camping, but we're terrible campers. We're just not good at it. And the whole tent camping thing isn't good for me. I was at an event last night where somebody said that someone in their family says, you know, I'm not outdoorsy, I'm outsidey. And I feel like that kind of captures that, right? I like to be outside and whatnot. I'm not outdoorsy enough to camp. We've talked about a travel trailer. We talked about it during the pandemic. We're talking

about buying one and using that because our kids love to be outside and just want to play in the woods. So that seems like a great idea. But then, you know, obviously the financial commitment to buy something like that is high. Airstream, I just looked it up. Airstream started at like 54 grand and they go up significantly from there. And so, I mean, it's a high cost of entry just to get into it. If you want to try it out, this, this, I could use some Hilton points now and try it out and see, do we like this?

Is this fun? Is this something we would want to do in the future? I don't know, but for 70,000 Hilton points, I could find out. I'll tell you what, I had a chance to see one of these Airstreams in person. It was, it was like a model one, but that they use in their actual campgrounds. It's really nice. I mean, you have, you have like a King, I think it's a King bed or maybe a queen bed, but you have, you have your bedroom. And then I, then the living room area, I assume that's a king bed or maybe a queen bed, but you have your bedroom and then the living room area. I assume that's where the kids could sleep because I did see, for example, for families that are interested, I tested booking for people, two adults and two kids, and it let me book into a

standard room that way. So I'm assuming that's the layout. Nice bathroom. And, you know, so it it really looks nice. And then, of course, they have a nice setup outside the airstream with the chairs and the fire pit and everything. So I that to me, that's that's my style of camping. Yeah, it's all set up for you. You get a bundle of fire agree. So I think that's why I find it exciting. It's not going to be the highest value for Hilton points ever, but in many cases, it's a reasonable value. And some of these places are places that we've wanted to go. I mean, we've wanted to go to Joshua tree. We've, we drove through a little bit of Zion once, but how cool would it be to stay in a, in an airstream there? So I'm excited for when those come live. I imagine we'll probably try and book one or a couple of them maybe, because I think there's going to be four in California. So there's a whole bunch out there. And so I think this is exciting and unique. It's different. Nobody else has this.

So I give Hilton some credit for having a really unique partnership with this AutoCamp thing. Right. And I don't give AutoCamp any credit for their terrible name. I totally agree. That does not stream Airstream quality to me. Maybe we'll have better chance of finding, you know, Airstreams available because people won't think

to fuck AutoCamp. Yeah, that would be great. That'd be great. I would know. All right. That brings us to this week's main event. Main event time,

strategizing Hilton credit cards. As I said at the outset, I am in the market for Hilton credit cards. So I actually had a note to myself, a to-do item to myself to figure out what is my strategy going to be. And part of it, which I'm not going to be discussing here is like, it was like getting rid of some Delta cards to make room for Hilton cards and stuff. But I'm going to talk just about the Hilton card side of things. And the reason that I wanted, I want to get into the Hilton credit card arena is, I mean, the stuff with AutoCamp is great, but that's not the main thing. The main thing is the news that Hilton is partnering with Small Luxury Hotels of the World, SLH, and that they're going to allow fifth night free bookings. They're going to allow free night certificates to be used

at these hotels. And that's really exciting now that Hyatt does not have that partnership anymore. And they, in my mind, bungled the Mr. and Mrs. Smith deal. And also beyond that, I've also seen Hilton over time has more and more been rolling out like luxury high-end properties. And so a combination of SLH plus their new properties that are on the higher end makes Hilton a lot more attractive to me than it ever was before and makes those free night certificates, which are have no cap to them more exciting than ever before. And remember that Hilton, at least as far as I can think of, I think is the only major hotel program that makes it easy to earn uncapped free night certificates. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I want to caveat that with what uncapped means. Uncapped means no limit,

but they still can only be used for a standard room award, which gets a little confusing for people who aren't very familiar with Hilton, because Hilton will let you book any room at a particular hotel for a million points. But you can only book the ones that say standard room award, not premium room award. So with the free night certificates. Still, that's not clearly limiting because every property has some standard rooms. standard room award, not premium room award. So with the free night certificates, still, that's not clearly limiting because every property has some standard rooms, just it's a matter of how many and high season, low season, et cetera, in terms of how hard or easy it is to find them. But it's exciting because even the highest of end places, we see sometimes the availability to book rooms for a standard award rate. And even though Hilton has no award chart, that's the point that Greg's making here.

There's no official limit in terms of the number of points that a property can charge for a standard room award. You can still use one of these free night certificates, no matter how much they say a standard room costs. And so, you know, historically, the Hilton, when they had a free night or rather when they had an award chart, the top end of the award chart was 95,000 points per night. But we now see there's at least one property in the world charging 150,000 points per night for a standard room. And you can still use your free night certificate for that property. So, so yeah, I, nobody else has something like that or comparable to that at all, really. I

mean, not even close. So I guess the closest thing is Hyatt. Yeah, but that's. Yeah, Hyatt has their new ultimate free night award. But the only way to get one is spend 150 nights to earn 150 nights in a calendar year at Hyatt hotels. And then you get one. You get one and you can't use it for Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties. You can't use it for Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties. You can't use it for the boutique properties. Whereas you're going to be able to use these for SLH and AutoCamp and literally almost every Hilton property in the world. There's some like timeshare type properties that are excluded, but they don't exclude

like the Waldorf Astoria and the Maldives or other high-end places like that. So pretty cool. I'm excited about that. So what are the different ways to get the free night certificates? We should of $15,000 spend. And again, it's $60,000 spend this year. But any spend after June 30th doesn't count towards that. So this is an opportunity that's ending very, very soon as we record this. And in mid-May, not much time left for that. But a cool thing about that is it does

earn 5x everywhere on up to $100,000 spend. So all that spend towards those free nights will earn five points per dollar, which is pretty good. Then you've got the Surpass card, which is a $150 card. This one earns a free night with $15,000 spend. And it also earns six points per dollars at US restaurants, gas stations, and US grocery stores. So if you spend your 15K in those categories, you earn a lot of points that way, and 3X everywhere else. And it also has $50 per quarter of Hilton credits. I should have mentioned business card at $60 per quarter of Hilton credits, meaning any spend at Hilton hotels, you get up to $50 back with a surpass card and up to $60 back with the business card.

And we'll talk a bit later about how to earn those. And then lastly, the Aspire card, $550 annual fee. You get an annual free night automatically. No spend required. But you could also get additional free nights with 30k spend and 60k spend. This one doesn't have as useful general purpose categories of spend bonuses. Like grocery spend for the Surpass card is nice. Getting 6X for that. But this one, it has a few categories with higher spend bonuses, but it's harder to spend a lot in these categories. Like 14X for any spend at Hilton hotels. That's fantastic. But how much are you

going to spend at Hilton hotels? Then 7X at US restaurants and flights booked directly with airlines or with mxtravel.com and select rental car companies. You also get with the Aspire card up to $400 in Hilton resort credit per membership year, $200 per half year. This is different from the other Hilton credits we mentioned because this is only at resorts. So it's actually spent at resorts, not at all Hilton hotels. And then $200 flight credit broken up $50 per quarter. And this is any spend towards airfare or any spend with airlines, you'll get up to $50 back per quarter. And so those are the cards. And let's talk about earning free nights. You want to take this, Nick? Well, I can certainly start us out. So I actually was

starting to run some more numbers in my head as we were talking about this. But let's talk about, first of all, you have a short-term opportunity. And so let's get this one out of the way because this is one that you'll either need to jump on right now or you can ignore this one. And that is that, as Greg said, the Hilton business card, which is a $195 Amex card, and it's a $195 annual fee, has a short-term cool opportunity because they've revamped the card entirely, got rid of all the bonus categories except for the Hilton bonus category. And instead, now the card just offers a flat 5X everywhere. And we'll talk about that in a second a little bit more. But it offers a flat 5X on all purchases. And as Greg mentioned, through June 30th, you can get a free night certificate with $15,000 in spend.

Or if you do $60,000 in spend, you can get an additional free night certificate. So if you have a bunch of spend to do between now and the end of June, you could get this card. And if you spent $15,000 on it, you get five points per dollar. So you'd end up with 75,000 points and a free night certificate. Again, you have to complete the spend before June 30th, 2024 to get the free night certificate. After that, you'll only get the 75,000 points. So if you're going to do the 15K spend, now is the time. Or at 60K spend, you'd end up with 300,000 points plus two free night certificates. So I mean, that could be a huge value potentially, although I say that and I don't know, what do you think is 5x? Like, well, but the free night certificate is clearly worth it. Let's, let's, I guess let's

pause there and say free night certificates can clearly be worth it if you're going to use them well. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think spending 15K, if you have this card, is almost a no brainer. I mean, because so all right, if you think about it without the free night, earning five points per dollar, you know, let's say Hilton points are worth half a cent each, then it's like getting two and a half percent back on the spend, which is not bad. It's not great. Like sometimes you can do better. But when you throw in that uncapped free night, I mean, depending on how you end up using it, it could be very, very valuable. And so that makes that 15K of spend, I think, definitely worth doing if you

can handle it. 60K, I mean, that's a lot of spend. So I don't know that I would necessarily encourage that. Yeah. And I mean, I guess at 40K, you'd end up with Hilton Diamond status. So if you really want the s'mores, then I guess, you know, you could do that. But yeah, the 60K spend does seem a bit rich for my blood on that one. There are other things I would rather do with that level of spend. But the 15K. I didn't factor in free s'mores into my calculations. You should have. That's a $15 value if you're going to pay the full price.

But I want to actually quantify this a little bit. So the free night certificate, we have a complicated formula for how to value it. But to keep the math really simple, let's say that you use your free night certificate for a night that would cost $450. That'd be easy with one of the auto camps on a weekend, probably plenty of SLH properties or the higher end Hilton that you use your free night certificate for a night that would cost $450. That'd be easy with one of the auto camps on a weekend, probably plenty SLH properties or the higher end Hilton properties. It'd probably be not difficult to use it on a $450 night. So, or significantly more, but at 450, that's 3% of $15,000 spend. And so we said before you could look at it, we could argue the minutiae here, but you look at it as like two and a half percent back and we value the points at half a cent each.

So between that two and a half percent and the three percent in the value of the certificate, I mean, at five and a half, that 15K spend is you're getting a pretty good return on the 15K spend. And obviously, if you use a three night certificate for a lot more value, it could be more value, more valuable anyway. Maybe the Hilton points aren't worth half a cent to you. So just up or down as you see fit. But the bottom line is that's a good return on 15K spend if you're at all excited about using Hilton points and free night certificates. Yeah. Yep.

Yep. So that's the business card. As we said over and over, that's a short-term opportunity. The surpass card, though, that's an ongoing thing. You can get this card and what is it, $150 annual fee. And as I said before, 15K spend in a calendar year gets you a free night certificate. And since you can earn 6X at grocery stores, guest stations, and restaurants, it's not far-fetched that you can spend all 15K in those categories. You would get a total of 90,000 points for that 15K spend plus that free night. So that's a pretty darn good return. It is. It is because then you're

looking at effectively almost two free nights at 90,000 points. Most of the higher end properties still top out at 95,000 points. There's a few that are 120 or 150K, but there are plenty that are 95,000. I stayed at the Conrad downtown, New York downtown this week, and I paid 90,000 Hilton points and the cash rate was like $1,000 in the time that I booked. So 90,000 points would have gotten me that room for free. So combine that with a free night certificate and you got yourself two nights. So yeah, I think that's a pretty good return, a pretty good way to earn an annual free night certificate with the Surpass card, especially because like you said, those 6X categories be pretty easy for a lot of people to spend 15K in those. But then if you don't really want to have

to spend anything at all, there's also the Aspire card to consider. Well, I shouldn't say anything at all. You're going to have to spend $550 on the annual fee, but you end up getting an automatic free night every year on top of the other Aspire card benefits. So we mentioned already before that it comes with a number of other benefits. So that's good. But then you could also spend and earn a free night. What do you think about that? Yeah. So you could spend $30,000 or $60,000 to get either one or two free nights each year on the card, in addition to the one that you get automatically.

So here's the math I did. It's very similar to what Nick did earlier, but I did mine based on points. So if we imagine that a free night certificate is worth 90,000 points to you now, that's very, very generous. Cause that's, that's like points. Points are way better than free night certificates because you get fifth night free on award bookings with, with points. There's no expiration on them. Whereas certificates expire after a year, you don't get fifth night free when you use them. But if you know you're going to be using it and getting 90,000 points or better value from it,

I pick that number because it's very easy math. Because if you value the certificates at 90,000 points, then 30,000 spend means you're getting three points per dollar on top of what the card earns normally. That's why I did that. So I guess you could equally say the free night's worth 60,000 points. That probably would have been a better one, but let's just go with the 90,000. So the very high end, 90,000. Then the Aspire card in sort of regular non-bonus category. So most of your spend is going to be earning three points per dollar. So if you spend $30,000 and earn three points per dollar, but you also get the free night certificate worth 90,000 points, that's like another three points per dollar. So it's a total of six points per dollar that you're earning sort of. And with Hilton points worth about half a cent each, then you're talking about like 3% back on this otherwise unbonused category spend.

I mean, that's as a general thing, earning 3% back everywhere is great, but all those caveats about free nights, right? So I would prefer to have, like we've talked before about how we can get 2.62% cash back using Bank of America and all kinds of stuff there. But I'd rather have 2.62% cash back, actual cash back, and be able to buy Hilton points than, and I'd be able to buy a little over five Hilton points per dollar rather than do this and get certificate that combined is worth close to six points per dollar. That's just me. Yeah. I've never considered doing the 30K spend on the Aspire card before, so I don't think that I would do it either for the same reasons. I can pretty easily buy five points per dollar essentially with that Bank of America card with the 2.62% cash back. So I'm dubious as

to whether or not it's worth it. So I mean, obviously I have above average flexibility to travel. And so if I knew that I was going to try to make a trip happen to the Maldives next year, or something like that, where I knew that the free night certificate I was going to use for 120 or 150K, so to speak, worth of value, I may be more inclined to consider the 30K spend. But that's still a gamble because you've got to find the availability. But if you have the flexibility, on the other hand, where you're like, well, whenever I find it, I'm going to make that trip happen, then it could potentially be worth the gamble. I also think it'll depend where the SLH properties end up, because if the SLH

properties end up at a level where it would cost you significantly more to buy enough points, again, if they end up at that 120 or 150K level, then a free night certificate may become more appealing. So I think we'll kind of have to see how that shakes out. But what I think is interesting, I started to do some mental math in my head beforehand, is considering whether you're better off spending at five. In general, once you've factored out the free night certificates, are you going to be better off long term, like the free, easy free night certificates or the cheap ones? Are you going to be better off spending for five points per dollar on the Hilton business

card or spending more for another free night certificate on the Aspire, for instance. So there's some interesting math to be done there, I think. But I'll agree with you that I don't think it's probably worth it. Going back to the automatic free night certificate on the Aspire card, I do want to mention, I don't know if we mentioned this before, but that you get that every year, including the year that you get approved, whereas a number of other hotel credit cards make you wait until after your first anniversary to get your first free night certificate. The Aspire card is different. When you get approved, you'll get your free night certificate like eight to 12 weeks after you get approved or something of that sort. So if you're

interested in getting the card, know that you will get that free night certificate the first year. You do need to consider that, though. Also, if you're trying to line it up in your household, because we're going to talk about strategy here. If you know, if one, one player already has an Aspire card, the other player needs to consider when to apply in order to kind of line up your free night certificates. And you have to factor in that eight to 12 ish weeks that you're gonna have to wait to get the first one. Yeah. Does the, does the next year's also come like 52 weeks after the first one? Or would it be 52 weeks after approval? You know, that's a really good question because I know that the certificate comes on the same

day or like within two days anyway, every year. But I don't know going back to the second certificate essentially is what you really need to know in that case. And I don't know going back. I'd have to, maybe I can go back through records and answer that question later. So hopefully we'll add that in the show notes. So if you're listening to this and you're like, hmm, I wonder about that, then check the show notes because hopefully I'll have an answer if I can go back through my records

and figure out when we first open an Aspire card. I guess we should mention that the reason that's so important is if you're going to be getting multiple free night certificates from different cards, having their expiration dates line up pretty close to each other is really useful because if you're trying to plan, you know, let's say you're trying to plan a stay out in, you know, next February and you have one that expires in January and the other one expires in March, you're going to have to... Now, you can call Hilton and try to get them to extend the one that expires in January, but it's so much easier if you don't have to do that and they just expire around the same time. It's much easier planning. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that

kind of covers your free night certificates from each of the cards, business card, short term opportunities or pass card. 15 K spend gets you a free night certificate, Aspire card. You get a free night certificate every year. And in bringing this up to Hilton, by the way, why they're getting rid of the free night certificate on the business card. One thing that they did mention was, you know, different things for different types of people. If you want a free night certificate, you can get the Aspire card and you can still have the business card. And so that's, of course, we're going to talk about kind of combining forces there for free night certificates in a few minutes. But before we get to that, let's talk about, we didn't discuss yet the fact that these

cards all have various rebates or we did, but we didn't really talk about how to take advantage of those rebates to make the cards as close to free as they can be. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these cards are somewhat unique in that all three of the ones that have annual fees, it's possible for them to be essentially free after rebate. And what's kind of cool is it's not that hard too. So take the business card, for example, $195 annual fee, but every quarter you get up to $60 back on Hilton spend. And I'll tell you a secret is that people have found that buying Hilton gift cards online triggers these rebates.

Now, they don't have them in $60 increments, but if you just bought a $50 one once every quarter, you'd get back $200. And so you'd have $200 in Hilton gift cards to spend at actual Hilton stays, but you'd have more than the annual feedback right there. And of course, you could get the full $60 back if you actually go to a Hilton property and spend money there. Or you can buy $75 worth of gift cards and 60 of it's going to get rebated and you're going to be $15 into the gift card. Do that as well. Yeah. Lots of different options there. So yeah, I actually used this, uh, my, my business card to pay for parking. I stayed at the counter at New York downtown and decided, Oh, you know what? I'll just pay for parking and charge it to my room. So, uh, so that, that worked out pretty well. But that's not the only credit to use.

What else do we have? So the Surpass, $150 annual fee and $50 per quarter credit. So again, you could buy a gift card every quarter, get a total of $200 back, and that well more than pays back the $150 annual fee. And then you've got the Aspire card, which is, you know, that card is, what, $550 annual fee, but you can get up to $400 back in Hilton Resort credit, plus up to $200 back in flight credit. So for a total of $600 back is possible with the Aspire card. Let's talk about the resort credit first. So that's done semi-annually. So it's kind of fun. Well, I don't know if fun is the right word, but you have to remember each of these credits have different periodicities when they have to be used. Periodicities.

Interesting word choice there, Anson. So the resort credit, you could get $200 back January through end of June and then another $200 back July through the end of December. So what are some of the ways, Nick, that you've gotten these credits back? Because this is similar to the credit they used to have that was used to be what 250 for the whole year but now it's yeah now it's split up and yeah yeah split up into two so i mean obviously any charges to your roommate or participating resort will count and you should look up the list of resorts and kind of compare it to wherever it is you're going because you'll be surprised sometimes some places that don't look like a resort are listed in the resorts and

and other times places that have resort in the a resort are listed in the resorts. And other times places that have resort in the name aren't considered resorts for the purposes of the credit. So you really have to be kind of careful with that. But some of the ways that I've found have triggered it is, first of all, booking a resort that charges a deposit because some places will charge a one night deposit when you book a room. So if you book a room far into the future, they'll charge you for one night now. And if that one night is more than $200, well, boom, you'll get your $200 credit back. And so, you know, that could be a really easy way to use it for a future stay. And of course, obviously, if your plans change later on, then probably you'll

get a refund when you cancel that stay. So that's potentially one option. You could also just ask the hotel to prepay part of your stay. So if you have one option. You could also just ask the hotel to prepay part of your stay. So if you have an actual stay planned at a resort or you have a stay booked at a resort, you can ask if you can prepay some of it. I wrote a post about this years ago about reaching out to one of the hotels in the Maldives, I guess, and asking if you could make a deposit towards the cost of the room. I don't know if it'll work at that property anymore because I wrote about it a long time ago and probably enough people emailed them that maybe they still do that or maybe they don't. So you might have to try a different place. But I bet if you reach out and say, hey, listen, I'm interested in making a partial deposit towards

my stay, most hotels will probably be happy to take some of your money in advance. Now, not all hotels. I have heard of some people getting pushback from some, but ask a different place then. So that's that's a potential option. Or then this is one that I don't have direct experience with, but a reader reported at some point that they had a Hilton resort near them and near home. And so they were able to go and go to the front desk and ask the front desk to open a house account for them. And I haven't done this, like I said, myself before, but we did have a reader who reported that it works, that they can actually create a house account that you can charge to that essentially works like a room folio without a room. So that

way you can go to the restaurant on site and charge your meal to your house account and then go to the front desk and settle the charge there instead of paying directly at the restaurant. And because you'd be paying at the front desk, it should get credited as part of the resort credit. So those are some of the options for the Hilton resort credit. Right, right. So not as easy as the other two cards, but not too bad. Then you've got the $200 flight credit, $50 per quarter. Literally like any spend with major airlines, you'll get your $50 back. And you could do things like you could add $50 to your United Travel Bank. You could buy a freely changeable ticket. Just about all airlines these days, at least US-based airlines, let you make changes for free as long as you don't buy a basic economy ticket. And so you could do something like, you know, quarter one, buy cheapest ticket you could

find, let's say a $75 ticket and you get $50 back. And then the next quarter, you could change it to one that costs $50 more than that and pay the difference with your Hilton card and so on and so on. And keep building up your credit basically over time with that airline until you actually spend it. I mean, obviously you want to, it's not going to be any use to you unless you actually fly that airline. Like I'm not going to, like, I don't, I don't fly United enough, at least on paid fares to want to build up my United travel bank. So I'm not going to do that. But I fly Delta 50 bucks. So it works out pretty well. I mean, there are lots of other things, of course, that you could spend the money on with an airline too. But I find that pretty easy, particularly because we fly Southwest

a lot and Greg flies Delta a lot. Pretty easy to use those. So I mean, really, that becomes a pretty good deal because if you're able to kind of bank up those flight credits at $200 a year, and if you're able to make the resort credits work, then that free night certificate starts to taste like gravy to me. So that's, you know, a pretty, pretty good deal. Plus you get diamond status too. I mean, it's, you know, you get the smores. There's some other perks with, with that Aspire card. Yeah. All right. Are we ready to talk about my plan? So thanks to the show, thanks to outlining all the card features and everything, I was able to develop my plan. And I'd actually started the first part of my plan before. So the first part of my plan,

I already knew I was going to do, which is my wife and I both signed up, applied for, and were approved for the Hilton business card. So there was a really good welcome offer. It might still be going on. I don't know. And we got approved. And our plan is to try to finish the 15K of spend towards the free night, towards the end of June. So not going to wait till the last day in case I mess up. But try to get that last little bit late in June to try to make those free nights when we get them last as long as possible because we don't have immediate need for them. But it was an immediate need to do this because the business cards aren't going to have this feature anymore.

So this is great because we're going to earn 5x on all that spend plus the welcome bonuses plus those free nights. And Hilton allows you to pool points together. So I can put all the points together in one big pool to book hotel stays with points as well. So that's all good news. The Aspire card. So my wife and I each are going to cancel one of our Delta cards. We each have two Delta cards currently. We'll each cancel one because Amex will let you have up to five credit cards. It'll let you have more charge cards or pay over time cards. Pay over time cards, right? Pay over time cards. We get in trouble if we call them charge cards, you know, that's what they are. But they'll let you have more pay over time cards like the platinum card or the gold card or the green card. No.

Yeah. Green card's weird. But the credit cards like the Marriott cards, Delta cards, Hilton cards are all credit cards. Everyday cards are credit cards. And blue cards are credit cards. So you can only have up to five of those. So we need to each kill a Delta card and then we should be able to pick up an Aspire card if we get approved. Now, what Nick was saying about it might take eight weeks to get the first certificate. It's kind of

interesting because I don't know how long it'll take with those Hilton business cards after we meet the spin to get our first certificates. It's pretty quick. So Nick says that's quick. So I really want to start this whole Aspire process really soon then to hope that the free night certificates are anywhere close to lining up. So I've got to end this show right now and start applying. It's pretty, yeah, those certificates come pretty quick. I'm going to see if I can,

I can't remember if I've used mine yet or not. I haven't. So, yeah, mine is almost exactly when I completed that spend. So very soon, within a few days, I think, after I completed the 15K spend. Yeah. So I'm going to go back in time and apply for the Aspire cards a few weeks ago. Anyway, by doing what I just mentioned, we'll have a total of four free night certificates

because two each. And then we could use them at some luxury property somewhere in the world. And while we're there, at least $200 each of our Hilton resort credit can be spent just at the resort because we can just charge stuff to our room and that shouldn't be any problem at all using up you know $200 each of that and probably to get the

other $200 rebates in the off six months I'll probably book resorts that have that require deposits or whatever and then I'm thinking that after a year with the business cards it's not going to make sense for me to have those business cards anymore. I'm not interested in earning 5X. It's a nice-ish feature, but I already talked about that. I don't value getting 5X Hilton points per dollar for my spend. So what I'm thinking is we will drop those business cards after a full year has gone by and then apply for the surpass cards. But we have time to apply for the surpass cards.

I think I'll let some time go where we will only have two certificates next year, right, from the Aspire card. card and then we'll sign up for the surpass cards at some point and then try to time our 15k spend on the surpass cards to match up with when the free nights appear on our aspire card each year so so so basically if this all works then i'll have four we'll have four certificates to spend basically this coming 12 months, two to spend the next 12 months, and then four thereafter as long as we keep spending 15K on each of those surpassed cards going forward. So that's my plan. What do you think? I think that's a pretty good plan. I mean, especially if you're going to use these for good value. I think that the shortcomings of free night certificates that we mentioned are important to consider,

the fact that they expire in a year and use them or lose them. So the value tied up in them is on the clock. So that comes with a number of problems. It's important to say that the only problem is not, or there is not only one problem. It's very easy to think that the main problem is the expiration date, but that causes other problems. Like you run into a situation where you say, oh, well, there's this night that's 70,000 points that's coming up where the cash rate is really expensive. The points rate's only 70,000. I could use the free night certificate here. Ooh, but should I hold on to it and see if I have a better use later on and come into that

analysis paralysis. So it's hard. Yeah. I guess one of the things I should have mentioned is that the other piece of my plan, it's pretty vague at this point, but I feel like my wife and I are getting better at pre-planning travel around, around free stuff. So like we have a spreadsheet of like all the free stuff we've got to use up each year and, or each quarter, each month, each whatever. And, and so we'll look and say, okay, we've got these, these four nights. When do we have time free? We were thinking about going to the Maldives or to, you know, wherever, to Bali or something. And so then we'll say, oh, is this a good fit for using those? And so by doing that more in advance, you know, even if the free night, even if the award availability isn't there, then as long as I know that's our rough plan,

I can watch for, I could set alerts and watch for space to open up once I know what we're doing. And so that's part of my plan too, is to actually have a plan for the free nights each year and use it that way. Yeah. And so I think that that affects the way you plan travel. And whether you like that or dislike that, you have to be aware of it. That's going to be kind of the case. It's going to influence where you travel and when. And so you may say, well, I really want to go to Warsaw this year. And Warsaw doesn't have any high-end Hilton. I don't know. Maybe they do. I'm just making it up. Maybe they don't have any high-end

Hilton property. So it's not a good fit for the free night certificate. Are you willing to say, you know what, I'll do that in another year because I have these four free night certificates now that I can use at, you know, Waldorf Astoria and the Maldives or whatever it might be. So if you're willing to kind of do that and plan your travel around it a little bit, yeah, sure. You can look at wherever you're going and see if there's something that makes sense. But on the flip side, you may be in a situation where instead you have to say, OK, well, it hasn't made sense for any of the trips we had in mind. So what other trips might we be willing to take this year so that we can leverage these to good value? Although I think it's going to get a lot easier as SLH

comes in, not because SLH had so many properties, but because they had so many highly desirable properties where you may be interested in kind of planning a trip around getting to a specific destination where they have an incredible place to stay. We'll have to see what, you know, which ones actually sign up for the Hilton, you know, the Hilton partnership. And, but hopefully that will be true. And, and, you know, for, for my wife and I, I don't think it'd be so much about like, oh no, we won't go to Warsaw. I think it'd be more like, when can we fit in another trip? Well, yes, but that's not the case for most people. You're right.

You're right. I mean, me too, but I understand that most people probably don't have that flexibility. But if you do have the flexibility, then I think free night certificates becoming really exciting. I think that that's why people like us get excited about this because we've got the ability to be able to plan travel around that. So if you're in that situation, you're retired, you work remotely, then I think free night certificates become a lot more valuable because the sky does kind of feel like the limit. You're going to have a world's worth of opportunities to

use them. So then it becomes a lot more interesting. And so I'm more excited about Hilton free night certificates now. And I do want to answer the question that I semi-answered before when we were talking about how soon after you meet the spend on one of these spend-based ones, do the certificates actually post? So I actually went back and looked up my statements from last year so I could see based on the expiration date of my certificate and when I met the 15K spend. So I met the 15K spend on October 12th and three days later, my free night certificate posted on the business card. So, so there you have it only took a few days for the free night certificate show up after spend. So keep that in mind,

if you're doing the 15 K spend, whether it's for the business card, or I'm sure the surpass card probably posts on a similar timeline. Once you hit that 15 K spend, you should get your free night pretty quick. Whereas on the flip side with the aspire card, it does take a quite a bit of time, a couple of months before it posts after you get approved for it. So keep that in mind. So for me, what's my approach? We've had kind of a scattershot approach on the Hilton cards. So, I mean, we both opened Aspire cards years and years ago because it's such a no-brainer card.

Very easy to get good value out of the free night certificates every year. And we've not had trouble getting value out of the other ancillary benefits on the card. I opened the Hilton business card last year because there was a good welcome bonus. Speaking of a good welcome bonus, Greg mentioned that there is a limited time welcome bonus, an increased welcome bonus on the business card right now that expires June 5th. So if you're interested in getting the business card and doing the spend by June 30th to get your free night certificate, know that that increased welcome bonus is scheduled to end June 5th. So if you want, that's June 5th, 2024, if you're listening to this in the future. So if you want that, so you can take advantage of the short-term opportunity to spend, then might as

well get your extra points and get that card relatively soon. So I got that card last year for an increased welcome offer. And I fully intend I did the spend last year in order to get a free night certificate fully intended to do the spend this year for a free night certificate. And then I figured I would probably drop the card at renewal. And then of course, they upped the timeline on me. So I had to finish the 15k spend more quickly, I'm almost there. So now it's a matter of like Greg kind of deciding when I want to hit that 15 K where I want the expiration date to be, you know, kind of massaging that into the exactly the right situation. So I haven't yet met the 15 K spend, but I will before the end of June. Now, my wife doesn't have a Hilton business card, and she probably ought to get one if we could easily meet the 15K spend. Now, my opportunities for spend have changed significantly

in very recent times. So I have to think about whether or not I want to commit 15K in such a small window to that card. And I'm not sure whether or not I can easily enough do it in that time period. So we may not end up getting another one, which will be kind of a bummer because it seems like a good opportunity, especially because we did my wife's Aspire card certificate just posted a couple of weeks ago. So getting another free night certificate with an expiration of around a year from now could be pretty useful. So it's something we're going to have to think about in terms of whether or not we want to go for one more. In the future, I feel like I need to do some more math here in

terms of determining the best way to go about earning Hilton points and free night certificates and how to value those. Because I don't really feel like I'm confident enough yet to say what we're going to do in the future for our free night certificates beyond the Aspire free one. Because the one certainly from spend on the Surpass card is interesting. Though I think I need to compare that more carefully against just getting 5X and not locking myself into 15K spend with the business card.

Because the business card is easy to kind of make fee free kind of i said and that's the stretch because i don't really value the hilton gift cards at full face value i wouldn't spend that money at hilton necessarily you know without the gift cards so so anyway so i don't know i need to consider that more carefully but i like greg's strategy i think it's smart i think it makes a lot of sense i think for a lot of people it's a really good strategy if you're willing to use those free night certificates at top or near top tier places. If you're going to use the free night certificates at a place that only costs like 50,000 points, well, I mean, you could have spent 10 or $11,000 on the business card and gotten more return out of your spend, I guess. So, you know, or I don't know. You can run the math on that where the numbers are break even. I'm not sure.

Anyway, it's interesting. It's exciting. I think this whole new Hilton honors with AutoCamp and SLH is interesting. We'll see where it goes. Yeah. That brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week comes in from Jen. So Jen has a question about she's she summed it up is booking anything better than nothing.

And and that, I think, doesn't quite say the whole bit here. But I want to jump around and sort of concisify her questions. So she said, listening to the podcast, I've often heard you say you book award travel for a trip that you need to take, even if it's not perfect. And then you keep an eye out for a better deal or something more perfect. So I just recently did this for my brother's wedding in Ireland this fall. We're a family of four and I was keen to be in business class. I booked transatlantic flights to Dublin on JetBlue via Qatar. The redemption was just okay. So I'm guessing she did the 74,000 obvious one way, didn't get in with that very short-term window where it was even better. Then later found availability on Aer Lingus for 50,000 one way. I'm not sure. I haven't seen how to book that for 50K exactly, but let's go with

it for a second. So 50K, same dates, four business class seats available, but all of her Avios were tied up with the JetBlue flight that she had booked through Qatar. She called Qatar to ask, okay, well, how soon will the Avios redeposit? If she cancels the JetBlue flight, how soon are they going to redeposit so she could try to book the new Aer Lingus flight that would work out? And she was told different things by different representatives. One saying it'd take up to 28 days. Another one who said it would come back within 24 hours. Somebody else said that it'd be instant. But ultimately, she says, I did not feel comfortable losing the original flights with no backup plan. The representatives weren't inspiring any confidence. So the question is,

is it really better to book something that's not perfect and not a great redemption and wait for a better redemption when it might be impossible to get that better redemption because your points are already locked up in the first one? So what do you think? Are there particular programs that if you please go over the programs you're familiar with, explain which ones are better than others for booking your flexible award? What do you think, Greg? I mean, I think this is an interesting question. Which programs are good for this and which aren't? It's a really good question and a really good realistic scenario because it brings real life into this, which is, I don't know about you, but it's easy for me to forget that people don't have an endless supply of transferable points.

Because if I was in that situation and if I was worried about would my Avios come back in time to book this, I would probably just transfer more points over to Avios and then book it. Now, in this case, Cutter is instant, at least in my experience, when you cancel. So I think she- Well, unfortunately,

I did some research and found that it varies. So it depends because it goes into a queue to get canceled. And so I actually found a number of different data points, somebody who got their points back within about an hour, another person who said it was four or five hours, another person who it took a couple of weeks and somebody else who said it was like going on three months and they were still going back and forth and trying to get the rest back. And those were all

within the last couple of years. So I don't think it's definitively instant. I think it could be. Right, right, right, right. Yeah. And so that's interesting too. And that's kind of like, you know, American Airlines kind of like that, right? You know, sometimes they come back immediately. Sometimes you have to realize that it didn't come back at all and call them and get it back. I'd say usually it comes back right away, I think. Usually it does. But I had one recently that didn't and I didn't want to waste the time to call in. So it was months before I finally called in and they did give them back to me.

But yeah, every now and then it's not instant. Or even in that case, actually, well, no, I had a different situation where they did come back instantly, but then I couldn't use them to book right away online. Like, even though they were back in the balance, the website didn't seem to recognize that I had those miles. And so I still had to call bookings and they were able to do it over the phone. But but it highlights the point that this is variable. Right. There are some times when maybe they won't come back right away when you cancel. There are probably some programs where they do, though. I mean, so, yeah, is there like a best i mean american yes american usually the miles come back right away when you cancel but i'm not always yeah i would guess that united is really good at that uh you know it's the same my experience but how would i know for

sure that there aren't exceptions there and i think delta is pretty good with it but you know yeah yeah i don't know a good so if you don good... So if you don't have a big balance of points in either other programs or transferable points so that you can cover both, I think that's a great question of whether... Does it make sense to do a... An unideal booking, sort of. Yeah, to do an unideal booking if it might lock you out of the good one when it comes along. I don't know, what would you do? An alternative, I guess, would be to book in an economy-paid trip that's fully refundable and then hope that your ideal, something better anyway, that something really good that you'd be happy with comes along.

But that's risky too. Yeah, you know, in this specific situation, Jen said she was going for her brother's wedding. If I didn't have the points to also book the JetBlue Award, I wouldn't chance canceling the Qatar Award that you already have ticketed on JetBlue. You've got an award ticket. It's an important life event. You can't miss it. You're going to have to be there one way or

another. I'd probably leave this one alone. If it's me and I'm flexible and it doesn't matter when I go to Dublin, really, then I would probably have taken a chance at it after I did some searches and looked around. It sounds like chat reps, if you get a chat rep that's willing to process it, can process the cancellation more quickly with Qatar. But it sounds like chat reps, if you get a chat rep that's willing to process it, can process the cancellation more quickly with Qatar. But it sounds like they're not always willing to do that. So I don't know what the secret sauce is in terms of having that happen to get the points back closer to instantly. I would probably take that chance because it'd be a pretty big savings in points. I mean, based on what she had said, talking about 24,000

point difference. Again, I'm not sure exactly where she was talking about booking for 50 K because I know how you could do it for 45 with Alaska. I'm not exactly sure what it was that she was looking at there, but at any rate, if she was going to save 24,000 points per passenger times four, that's a hundred thousand points. So, you know, if it was something flexible, then I'd probably cancel and hope for the best. But I wouldn't want to do that for an important event, because what if, A, the points don't come back right away? B, what if the Aer Lingus space turned out to be Phantom space? I don't think they have issues with Phantom Awards space. But in general, when we're talking about this as a more general thing, that's a risk. What if you cancel? And then the things that you thought you

could book, you couldn't really book. And now you've already lost, which you've canceled too. So I think that this is all part of an argument for why you really want to do the best you can to diversify and have a wide range of different types of points, even points that you may not think you need. You know, like maybe you don't think you need American Airlines miles, but they're really useful in this kind of a situation because then you can use them to book something that, you know, you'd be able to cancel later on if you find a better opportunity and you know you'll get those points back eventually one way or another and it won't cost you anything. But in gen-specific circumstances, I would just stick with the itinerary she had.

Totally agree. Stick with it. Yep. All right. Yeah, but great question and a good one to probably dig into more in terms of trying to figure out which programs are reliably instant redeposit versus which are variable in terms of how long they take. I think that's probably an interesting question to dig into a little bit. Anyway, thank you, Jen, for that good question. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today's episode and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list, follow us on all the various social media and wherever

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