Frequent Miler on the Air - Sweet-spot awards courtesy of Japan Airlines | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep325 | 9-26-25

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

In this episode, we'll talk about how Citi is showering us with transfer bonuses, then we'll talk about the incredible uses for Japan Airlines miles. Now that Capital One is making transfers available to Japan Airlines (in addition to Bilt, which has already been offering this), it's worth talking about what you can do with those miles!Giant Mailbag(01:42) - "I'm a YUGE fan of ya'll. I'm an Army National Guard member that puts in just enough active duty time to get Servicemembers Civil Relief Act benefits (waived annual fees). So I have so many luxury cards I get FAR more value from the cards than I do from my Guard paycheck.Ya'll have been a key factor in deciding to stay in the National Guard, so 'Thank You For Your Service'."100K Vacay Challenge Update(04:06) - By the time this airs, Greg will be heading to his destination for his Benchmark Trip. As a reminder, he's setting the bar for the rest of the challengers with a trip showcasing how far 100K Chase Ultimate Rewards points can go. (Once he's back, Tim, Nick, and Stephen will attempt to match or outdo his trip with alternate transferable points currencies.) Read more about that here!Card News(09:34) - Spirit Travel More credit card holders now get 2 free checked bags (Read more about this update here)(11:11) - Amex will exclude gift cards from Hilton credits starting in 2026(12:28) - Southwest debit card (Read more about the Southwest debit card here)Read the View from the Wing article here.Awards, Points, and More(14:42) - Air France / KLM Promo: Earn 10,000 bonus Flying Blue miles when flying from the US to any destination served by Air France or KLM.(18:16) - Avianca LifeMiles Award Sale(20:19) - Transfer bonuses(24:50) - Rove Miles transfer bonus (Use our referral link here.)(27:25) - Capital One added transfer partners and also has some transfer bonusesMain Event: Sweet-spot awards courtesy of Japan Airlines(30:18) - How to get JAL milesLearn more about the Best Uses of Japan Airlines Mileage Bank Miles here(32:01) - The Bad News(33:05) - Japan Airlines Mileage Bank 36-month hard expiration policy(34:30) - Family restrictions on award redemption(35:58) - Carrier-imposed surcharges(36:19) - JAL Mileage Bank awards can not be changed (but they can be cancelled for a reasonable fee)(36:56) - Best uses of Japan Airlines Mileage Bank(42:54) - Japan Airlines partner awardsQuestion of the Week(1:10:20) - Buying points isn't usually a good value unless you have a specific redemption in mind, but what about Atmos for 1.66 cents per point? (Especially with Rove miles?)Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, City is going to be showering us with transfer bonuses, and we'll talk about incredible uses of Japan Airlines miles. Frequent miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, Sweet Spot Awards, courtesy of Japan Airlines. So for a little while now, built rewards has offered one-to-one transfers to Japan Airlines. But now, Capital One is making transfers available to Japan Airlines as well. Not quite one-to-one, but still, that makes it an exciting new world to go into and to investigate.

And Nick has been diving into their award charts and discovering some really awesome things. about what you could do with Japan Airlines miles. That'll be the topic of today's main event. Yeah, you know, it's been a lot of fun diving into it a little bit. I had long heard about the positives with Japan Airlines Mileage Bank. And for years, there was just no easy way to get the miles. But I knew that people, some people still did transfer Marriott points to Japan Airlines Mileage Bank because the values were so good. And I've long known that, but I hadn't really dug into it much until Capital One added them as a transfer partner. And I'm really pleasantly surprised by what I've seen. We'll get more into that further into today's show. But for now,

don't forget that if you want to jump ahead to that or you want to come back to something later on, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. So just expand the show description to find that. That's also where you'll find links to more information about all the various things that we're talking about today. Wherever you're watching, you're listening, don't forget to like this. Give it a thumbs up. Leave us some stars for a review. Leave us a comment. We always appreciate hearing from you. Now let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Zach. Zach writes, I'm a huge fan of y'all.

I'm an Army Navy Guard member that puts in just enough active duty time to get Scra benefits, which is service member Civil Relief Act, and he gets from that waived annual fees. So some credit card companies, including American Express, will waive the annual fees if you're in active duty military. So he goes on to say, so I have so many luxury cards, I get far more value from the cards than I do from my guard paycheck. Y'all have been a key factor in deciding to stay in the National Guard. So thank you for your service. Oh, that's terrific. Well, thank you, first of all.

Thank you for the true service. But glad we're helpful. I'm glad that we're helping you play the game and win. And how smart? I mean, how smart is that if you're certainly, you know, if you're an active duty military person, take advantage of. the chance to get all these things. I mean, you look at all the coupons that just got added on the MX Platinum card. And if you're able to get all of those coupons every year without paying the annual fee, I mean, my goodness, I can see where you're going with that, Zach. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, and Zach goes on to say, also, funny story, my kids have been so used to business class flights that when we were flying out to Hawaii with my extended family and economy, got everybody's tickets on points. I had this exchange with my eight-year-old son. Are we flying in the front of the plane? Me. No, we're flying in the back in the regular seats. Son, sniffle, sniffle. Am I being punished?

Me, comforts him. We're flying regular so we can sit next to your cousins. Son, I'm fine sitting by myself in the front. Oh, that's terrific. I can totally picture my older son saying that. So I totally pictured my son as I was hearing that whole thing there. So, yeah, you know, it's fun. It's fun being able to live that.

kind of lifestyle. I mean, you know, pretty wild what you get to do with miles and points. But good to, you know, every now and then travel like a, like, you know, normal person, right? I mean, I think that's a lot of fun too. And so good, good. I'm glad your son's having a good time. Glad your son's enjoying the fruits of your labor. And so thank you very much for sharing this. Yeah, thanks, Zach. That was a fun email. Yeah. All right. Now it's time for our 100K K-VaK frequent miler challenge update. Things are heating up. I don't know if you've been watching on Instagram, but if you haven't yet been, you should be, because as this podcast releases, Greg, you're somewhere, right? I am somewhere. So, you know, we're recording this before my

trips began. My trip began tomorrow as I'm recording this, but yesterday as you're listening, if you listen to the show right away, I left on Thursday, September 25th. And, um, I flew eastward. I am not going. Because he doesn't want me to know yet. I am not going to to divulge on the show where I ended up. So you're going to have to check on Instagram. Actually, on the blog, I'll be doing daily updates.

So I should have done at least one update by the time this is released, if not too. And you'll see where I am. reminder, I'm doing kind of the benchmark trip. So I have 100,000 chase points and $1,000 to build a vacation. And so I've just started off that vacation. And the idea is when I'm back, the three competitors for 100K vacay are going to take off on their trips. And the judges, me and carry are going to evaluate each component of each person's trip compared to components of my trip compared to the benchmark trip and and so yeah each of them is going to be trying to prove that they can do more with their individual points either amex membership wards capital one miles

or city thank you points they each have a hundred each one has a different one of those and a hundred thousand of them uh to use for their vacations and They're going to be trying to prove that they can do more than I can do with my chase points. But hopefully by the time you're listening to this, I've checked in to my first hotel. And hopefully I'm enjoying a really great vacation in a place that Nick has been known to say it surprised him how great of a destination it was. So I'll leave Nick with that wondering. Oh, I have a good guess. but I'm going to keep it quiet.

So we'll see. Yeah, I'm excited. So again, if you're not following on Instagram that you should be because it's fun to watch the stories. So if you're not an Instagram user, if you get on Instagram and you follow Frequent Miler on Instagram and then you click on the profile picture, essentially for Frequent Miler, that's where you can follow along with the individual stories. And of course, there will also be reals there.

Like Greg said, we're going to have daily updates. And there's a few things you should keep in mind date wise. So Greg's trip is kicking off this Thursday, September 20th. And then he'll be coming back, I think, on Tuesday, September 30th, right? And then on Wednesday, October 1st, there's going to be a live check-in, a live kickoff event at 9 p.m. on YouTube. There'll be a link right on the homepage of the blog of Frequemiler.com for you to join us on YouTube on October 1st at 9 p.m. Eastern. That's going to be kind of our kickoff event where we're going to discuss Greg's trip. And then Stephen and Tim and I will, of course, be either already travel.

or getting ready to travel. That kicks off the travel window for us. And we've got through the following Wednesday when we have our final check-in to run our vacation. We're going to have another live YouTube event on Saturday, October 4th. So you'll want to tune into that as well so that you can find out where we are and what we're doing on our 100K vacay vacations. Again, each of us get 100,000 transferable points and $1,000 to put together the most incredible vacation that we possibly can. so it's going to be a lot of fun like i said follow us on instagram but like gregg said also we're going to have daily journal updates on the blog so as gregg travels you can follow each day on the blog with where he is and what he's doing and how his vacation is going and then of course starting

october first or second when the rest of us kick off you're going to follow those journal updates from stephen and tim and i as well so there's going to be a lot of content coming out and hopefully we're going to be showing off some cool sweet spots with various transferable currencies so whether you've got Capital One Miles or MX membership rewards points or Chase points, whatever it is you have. If you're tuning in and paying attention, hopefully you're going to find some sweet spots that you say, oh, wow, I could do that too. So I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Are you excited, Greg?

I am very excited, but I want to hear your guess. There's no reason for you to keep your guests private. I think there's a Hyatt Regency in Cotaur Montenegro. That's going to be my guest. You go to the Hyatt Regency in Cotor Montenegro, and you check out. It's a beautiful coastline, amazing spot there. So that's my guess, but I don't know because there's another one in mind, too, that although I don't know the chase out. That's one that pops into my mind because I know that there's a nice looking Hyatt Regency there.

But we're going to see. You're going to have to tune in and find out. Am I right? Am I wrong? Did he go somewhere else? Because there are quite a few places that I have found surprising. So it's kind of tough to narrow it down. So we'll see.

We'll see, too, if you get online now and check out Freakomiler.com and check us out on Instagram. All right. Card News. Let's talk about this week's card news. Spirit travel more credit card holders now get two free checked bags. So that's pretty surprising given the fact that Spirit is obviously a lower cost carrier. And so there haven't been many benefits like that. They make a lot of money on selling all of those various ancillary stuff. But you need to know that that benefit only applies to the primary card holder. So it's not

like some airlines where you get a checked bag for you and six or seven companions. It's only the two free check bags for the primary card holder, but still, that's a pretty good benefit, right? Yeah, it's a good benefit. So if, you know, Spirit stays in business long enough for you to take advantage of your two free, free check bags, that will be a great cardholder benefit. So good, good on them. Truly, it is, though, because I mean, the cost to check bags is oftentimes as much or more than the cost of the ticket. So, I mean, that's a pretty good deal. And who needs status with Spirit when you get the two free check bags, which is perhaps the questionable part of that decision on their part, I guess, because part of the advantage of having the card is being able

to spend towards status. So you get some of that stuff for free. But who needs that when you get two bags for free? Anyway, that's a side thing anyway. So I think it's pretty cool. Also, keep in mind that primary card holders have the ability to pull points, to create a points pool. And so you could pull points with the rest of your family if you've got the card. So the card has a couple of good benefits. So if Spirit does stay in business and they meet your needs, I think there's a pretty good money saver to be had there. That's not our only card news this week, though. We also have Amex out with some bad news that, I don't know, I expect it for a long time.

So I can't get too upset about it. Amex has now said that they will exclude gift cards from the Hilton credits starting in 2026. And effectively, this has already been around for almost a year when Amex initially launched some quarterly credits on the MX Business Platinum cards and the Hilton business card. They had these quarterly credits and it was possible to go to like By Hilton Gifts.com or something like that. Don't quote me on the exact URL and buy gift cards each quarter and then kind of stack up your credits. But they ran out of plastic, I think last December and keep saying that,

oh, gift cards are going to come back soon. Gift cards are going to come back soon. And I think anybody who's reasonable is probably expected that if and when they ever came back, it was going to somehow be excluded. Yeah. Yeah, it's not a surprise at all. So I think this is just paving the way for them to be able to bring back those gift cards without, you know, giving free Hilton stays basically to, or Hilton credit to cardholders. I added one more bit of card news that I forgot to put in the outline before, which is that

there's information now out about Southwest is going to be introducing a debit card and I'm not I didn't add it because I find that debit card particularly interesting but I thought it was super cool Stephen our own Stephen Pepper managed to find a kind of hidden a landing page for this card in order to dig up all the information about it before it was ready to be actually launched. So check out his post if you're interested, but it sounds like a kind of, uh, okay. I mean, I don't know. There's, there's, it's, it's a rewards debit card, which is unusual these days. So that's something to, well, yeah, it's unusual these days, but starting to expand. You know, remember that Windham launched a debit card at some point over

the last year, I think, and Spirit announced that this fall they're going to be launching a debit card. And I think it's issued by the same, uh, same folks as the, the, the, who's going to be issuing the Southwest debit card. So we're seeing some more of that. I think we're just trying to capture another segment of the market. You know, it's going to be mostly irrelevant for listeners of this show because you'll do better with other rewards credit cards. But there are some things that perhaps you can only pay with a debit card or maybe some ways to play that and turn it into some additional rewards. Yeah.

I'm going to mention that. View from the Wing had a very interesting article about this debit card coming out. Not so much about the debit card that I found interesting, but about how some. Some banks can earn money from debit cards, whereas others can't. So it has to do with the size of the bank and some other factors as to whether you can earn you as the bank can earn interchange fees when people make debit payments. And so Southwest found a bank that could do that, and that's why they're able to offer rewards on these purchases.

So that's very interesting. We'll add that a link to that view from the WAN. the article in here if we can find it. And it could certainly be useful for something like tax payments if you don't want to have to pay the fee to pay by credit card. Perhaps the math would work out. I didn't even do the math to see, but it might. Yep, yep.

All right, let's talk about awards points and more. We've got a few pieces of awards points and more out. Air France, KLM is out with a promotion to earn 10,000 bonus flying blue miles when you fly from the U.S. to any destination served by Air France or KLM. You just have to book an economy class ticket on Air France or KLM by October 7th for travel between now and March 31st of 2026. I think it's just cash like revenue fares. That was my read of the promotion as well. So I'm pretty sure that's the case.

And at least one segment has to be from the U.S. to either Paris or Amsterdam, which if you're booking a flight from the United States on one of those airlines, probably you're going on because maybe there's a couple of options in the Caribbean, maybe that you're. you could do. I think Miami to Guadalupe is a route that Air France serves that wouldn't touch Paris. Isn't there that Fifth Freedom Air France flight to across a Pacific to Oh, right, to Tahiti. Also that. Yeah. Yeah. There is. You're right. Right, right. So I actually think that their headline of this offer is incorrect when it says when flying from the U.S. to any destination served by Air France or KLM, that is not a correct description on this. It's true. almost any almost any there are a couple because yeah there's the

flight from Miami to Guadalupe and there's the flight from Los Angeles to to Papayette Tahiti yeah you're right there are a couple so there you go there you have it and actually there are some other fifth freedom flights too I last I knew I think KALM still has Santiago to Buenos Aires I mean I think there's there's a few different Fifth Freedom routes that so it isn't true you're right the headline is kind of misleading but anyway 10,000 bonus

miles certainly is a nice return particularly if you find an inexpensive fare. I didn't see anything that was excluding basic economy fairs, if they have those. So I know you found a pretty good fair on one of the routes. Yeah, you know, I poked around on Google flights to see what was the cheapest qualifying fare I could find. And ironically, most of the cheapest, I was looking at roundtrip, because assuming I was kind of looking at like, would you want to build a little vacation in Europe around this? And I found some cheaper ones, but even though I had restricted Google flights to Air France and KLM, it was showing Delta flights, which were sometimes cheaper than Air France and KLM flights, like to Dublin, for example.

But what I found, just one example, is JFK to Rome round trip for $440, where the outbound is on Air France, the return is on Delta. And as long as that would qualify, because you have that. that one segment, uh, from the U.S. to, to, uh, Paris. Oh, because the outbound was on, uh, was Air France. Yeah. Yeah. So that's interesting because I didn't even pay attention to that initially, but it does say, I think that at least one segment has to be from the U.S. to Paris or Amsterdam. So it was Dublin, or if it was Delta on the outbound, that would be a problem. Yeah. That's the point you were making with the Dublin flight. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Well, so 440. I mean, is that

mileage run worthy? Would you? to pay $440 during 10,000 flying blue lands? Not even close. No. No. But if you want to go to Europe anyway,

it's a nice return. I mean, 10,000 miles at a value of 1.3 cents per mile, it'd be like what, $130 worth of miles. And you might value the miles more or less than that. But it's a nice return. Just not worth a mileage run.

Yeah. Next up, we've got Avianca Life Miles has an award sale on its own flights for travel from now through December 15. 2025, but you got to book by September 29th. So there's not a lot of time after this show publishes to be able to book this. But it is valid for both economy and business class and valid for Life Miles members with an address in the United States, which by the way, the Air France

KLM Flying Blue promotion also required having your registered address in the United States. It was something that was open to U.S. members. So same thing here with Life Miles. And so you can get some decently good deals here too, right? Yeah. So, you know, I just looked at one particular one from D.C. to Santiago, Chile, which is a long flight. You get that in business class for 46,200 life miles. I think that's a good deal. I don't know what their normal price is for that. 60, I think.

I'm pretty sure 60, if I remember correctly. That's a pretty good discount then if that's the case. And then you'd get a further discount if you have Life Miles Plus where you get that additional, what is it, 10% off? That's right. You get 10% off. And then also, beyond that, don't forget that there is. currently a transfer bonus from city thank you rewards to avianca life miles a 25% transfer bonus. So it costs you even fewer points from city. So yeah, I mean, there's definitely some good deals

to be had there. And don't sleep on economy. I don't know if this one is valid for economy or not. I didn't actually look into this one very much. But just recently, I had reported on economy class JFK to Santiago, something like 12,000 Avianca Life Miles. And that's before the 10% discount with a Life Miles Plus membership. I don't know if that particular route is on sale here or not, but if, I mean, if it is, potentially. Yeah, you'd probably get it for lesson free. They probably pay you life miles to fly it during the sale. So would that be mileage runworthy, Greg? If they were paying you in life miles, would you take the trip? Sure. Okay, good. Good to know. Good to know. All right. So that's our life miles sale.

Let's see. Anything else in award news here? What else we have? We've got some new transfer bonuses out this week. City, man, City is slamming it on the transfer bonuses lately, right? It's just one after another. They really are. You know, we did that show where we talked about how we were all affected with the, with the latest team challenge, 100KVK, with what transfer bonuses had come out. And we remarked on that show that city transfer bonuses were much stronger than we predicted when we launched the challenge. Well, City has not slowed down. at all and in fact is maybe sped up since we recorded that show this is insane um we have uh four as we're recording this uh four active transfer bonuses from city to to discuss um and who knows

maybe by the time the show publishes it'll be more but um right now you could get a 40% transfer bonus through October 15th transferring to Qatar Avios. Now that's on the Qatar side. So you won't see the transfer bonus right away. That takes a bit before the 40% is added. The city now has a 50% transfer bonus bonus to Turkish airlines through October 18th. 50%. That's astounding. It is, but I think Greg probably saw my hands up to be like, caution, caution, danger, Will Robinson, or whatever that was. I never saw that thing. But anyway, so yes, it could be a great deal. And in the post, I wrote some situations where it could be. And in the post, I mentioned that Turkish can be notoriously difficult to deal with. And that, you know, for a long time, there wasn't a button to submit payment on the checkout page. And they fixed that. Well, guess what? They've unfixed that. But to be clear, that's for partner awards, right? Well, I don't know for sure if it's only partner awards. I didn't look at Turkish awards, but I did hear from several readers who said that they just can't check out online for Turkish partner awards.

Like the pay now button is gone. Now, I did hear from one reader who said that they were able to use PayPal and the page erred out, but they still received the ticket. But then, you know, of course, I heard from another reader who hadn't been able to submit payment and called. And, of course, the phone agent said, you know, you can't book United flights with Turkish miles. And so, you know, it's a difficult program to work with. So you need to know the limitations with Turkish. If you understand the program and you understand the difficulties and you're willing to kind of, you know, have some adventure in your life, then there's some great deals to be had. There's no doubt.

But if this is like your first time ever using Turkish, I just caution you that you should probably read up a little bit on the program before you dive in. Yeah. No, that's 100% true. You know, I look at it personally as like, well, you know, maybe if I have opportunity to book the Detroit to Istanbul Turkish Airlines flight in business class, it might be, that might be a good way to get the Turkish miles needed for that because they, I think they open up a lot more space to their own members than they do for partner award bookings. Yeah, and, you know, the one reader that I heard from the used PayPal, they booked a flight to Hawaii. So, you know, you're talking, what, 7,000, less than 7,000 points each way to and from Hawaii. If you can find it and you can actually get it to book, that's a phenomenal deal, too, you know, but it's not as easy. That's a partner, yeah.

Yeah, yep, yep. All right. All right. Moving on, City also has a 30% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic through October 18th, and a 25% transfer bonus to Avianca Life Miles, also through October 18th. So, man, city's just killing it. They really are. They really are. Well done to them.

And where are you, Amex? I mean, my goodness. Amex has given up the crown on transfer bonuses, and I don't know why. Now, one thing that I've noticed lately, by the way, about the city transfer bonuses, Greg said, well, who knows? Maybe they'll launch another one by the time this releases, and I don't know. Maybe they will. But one thing I've noticed lately is they seem to release these transfer bonuses on Sundays, which is really interesting because Sunday is not a day. Obviously, when people are going to cover it.

know why they're doing it that way, but the last several transfer bonuses I've specifically noticed have been on Sundays. So that's, you know, take that for what it's worth. All right, Rove Miles also is out with a transfer bonus. So Rove Miles, you may remember, is a platform for booking hotel stays and booking flights and then earning transferable miles on them. And so Rov Miles doesn't have a credit card. It's just a like a shopping portal, travel portal, booking type of an engine that allows you to earn miles. And sometimes quite a few. I mean, we talked about it, I think, on the show. Sometimes you can earn 10, 20, even 30 transferable miles per dollar or more in some situations for booking hotels and not quite as much for booking flights, but still you can earn

a return on booking flights as well. And then you can theoretically also search for opportunities to transfer your miles through the row of miles platform. I haven't found that as useful as the earning of miles. And they have a shopping portal as well. You can click through and earn miles when you're buying stuff so they have a pretty interesting set of transfer partners some of them are partners that you know and love from lots of other programs and a fewer ones that you wouldn't otherwise necessarily have access to so it's kind of an interesting program and more interesting now is that they have a 20% transfer bonus going to air france klm flying blue through october 22nd and also a 20% transfer bonus going to fin air plus through December 31st of 2025 so those are two

sweet spots that, you know, looking a little bit better yet right now with the 20% transfer bonus. Obviously, Air France, KLM Flying Blue can be useful. And Finare is an entry point to Obios. Yeah, I mean, that's what I was going to add, that even if you don't want Fin Air Avios, if you move them to Fin Air, you could then move them from Fin Air to British Airways or one of the other Avios program to where you do want them. Although, I will remind you that Fin Air Avios has some interesting hotel partnerships that are worth the look. If you haven't ever read my post about booking Scandinavian hotels with Finare Avios, there are some opportunities to get fantastic deals for very few obios. Now, you do have

to pay. You'll need to come out of pocket some, but you could use very few obios and get a really good discount on hotels in Scandinavia. So that's worth a look if you're planning a trip to Scandinavia. Finnair has that kind of unique thing there where you can get great value for your obvious when you're booking hotels. Yeah, that's a really cool, cool find. And also, I should note that if you sign up for Rov Miles, which is free with our referral link, you'll get a thousand Rov Miles just for signing up. So might as well. It's at Freakromiler.com forward slash go forward slash rove miles, all one word. Very good. And then last but at least, Capital One is out with a transfer bonus.

I mean, we should probably mention Capital One has added a couple of transfer partners as well here, because they added this week one to two transfers to I prefer the hotel program. That's not a transfer bonus. That's just the normal ratio. Now keep in mind, of course, city transfers one to four to I prefer, which is the loyalty program of preferred hotels. So capital one is only one to two, but then in the flip side, their base earning rate is 2x everywhere.

So it depends on how you earn most of your miles and points and what kind of spend you're putting on the card as to whether that'll be appealing to you or not. but that's a cool ad anyway. They also added Qatar Airways Avios, which is not particularly exciting since they already had access to Avios with other programs, although, as we just heard, City is offering a transfer bonus to Qatar that actually, it's not really City offering, it's Qatar offering it for select partners so we can hope that maybe Capital One will make it into that sometime in the future. But for now, Capital One has also added Japan Airlines as a transfer partner, and there is a 30%

transfer bonus from Capital One Miles to Japan. Airlines mileage bank going from September 23rd through October 22nd. So this is another one that ends October 22nd. Seems to be a magic date for some of these end dates on transfer bonuses, it seems. But anyway, so that's a pretty good deal. With that bonus, you're getting, is it exactly one-to-one or about one-to-one? It's not. So the normal transfer is going to be a thousand, capital one miles become 750 Japan Airlines miles and with that 30%

transfer bonus you get just shy of a thousand Japan Airlines miles from each thousand Capital One miles which is really annoying because if you want to book an award that's an even number of thousand

miles and you're getting them off Capital One you're going to have to kick in an extra thousand right or No I don't know I don't think so Capital One allows transfers in much smaller increments. I was just going to check because a lot of programs you could do in increments of 100 miles. I don't know for sure whether that's true with Japan Airlines Mileage Bank or not. But so you may be able to kind of thread the needle.

It is annoying. It's annoying because you have to do more math. Right, right. So, you know, if they, I don't understand what. If they had made it a 33.33% transfer bonus, then it would be an even one-to-one and it would have been less irksome. but there you go. That's what they did.

So whatever. Very good. And so, of course, we're talking about them offering this transfer bonus. Now, during ordinary times,

again, the transfer ratio is not one to one. It's going to be almost one to one until October 22nd, though. And that's interesting because Japan Airlines has some pretty cool sweet spots, right? They do.

Let's get into today's main event. Today's main event, Sweet Spot Awards, courtesy of Japan Airlines. So as we just said, Capital One has added Japan Airlines as a transfer partner. So you can transfer your Capital One miles normally 1,000, Capital One miles to become 750 Japan Airlines miles. Built already had one-to-one transfers from built rewards to Japan Airlines. Marriott has three-to-one transfers, or if you transfer,

in blocks of 60,000 Marriott points, you end up with 25,000 Japan Airlines miles for each 60,000 Marriott points. So that's a little bit better than 3 to 1. And another way to potentially get miles is Japan Airlines has had U.S.-based credit cards on and off. And so when there is one available to sign up for, you might be able to earn your Japan airline miles that way as well. Those are ways you could get your miles, but until recently, those of us on the frequent mileer team haven't really known much about what you can do with those miles. And I was vaguely aware that there was a devaluation not that long ago, Japan Airlines. So I didn't know would there be any sweet spots left after that devaluation.

And so Nick dug in, spent like all day yesterday diving into the... the program and found a lot of good stuff. Yeah. But why don't you start with the bad stuff so we get that out of the way first? I will start with the bad stuff. You know, it just occurred to me, though, actually, before I hit the bad stuff, that I think there's one other way, potentially, that you might, if you're listening out there, maybe you've got access to this still.

If you had the old Japan era, or not Japan, if you had the old Barclays arrival premier card, I know that that transferred also to, uh, to Japan. Air Airlines, and I think that card still exists. So I don't know if anybody out there still has it, but there you do. That's another way to get Japan Airlines miles. Anyway, but you're right. We got to start with the bad news and then we'll get into the stuff that we're excited about. So the bad news, the downsides of Japan Airlines mileage bank. First of all, they have a hard expiration policy of 36 months. This is one of our least favorite things that an award program can do. And unfortunately, a lot of the ones based in Asia especially have these hard expiration policies. Let's just be a thing in the market there that, has been established for a long time because you see the same thing with Singapore Airlines and A&A and Asia Miles used to have the same policy. So Japan Airlines has a 36-month hard expiration policy. It's a little funny. Your miles will expire at the end of the month, 36 months from the day they were earned. So if you transferred miles to Japan Airlines mileage bank on, say, October 2nd of 2025, they would expire on October 31st of 2026, the end of that month, three, or I'm sorry,

not 2026, three years after that, 2028. So the end of the month in which you transferred three years later. So that stinks because it's a use them or lose them. We don't like that in general with any of these various programs. And I especially don't like it in a program where one of the strengths of Japan Airlines mileage bank is being able to book awards really far in advance, farther than most programs will have access to them. So you might transfer miles today to book a flight for like a year from now. And then things change close to that time. And now you're on the clock. You get two more years to use those miles before they expire. There's no way to extend them. There's no way to bring them back to life after they've expired. So that stinks.

It really does. So would you recommend only transferring on the morning of the first day of a month that has 31 days? Yes, as long as that first day of the month with 31 days is also the day when you've found availability for the flight that you want to book. Right. So that's the only day of the month you should be looking. It's definitely a bummer from the program. Additionally, another restrictive part of the program is that you can only book awards for family members, and they're very specific about which family members qualify.

Now, it's a little bit better than some programs that have family restrictions, but not very. So you could book for your siblings, your parents, your children. children, your grandchildren. You can also book for your in-laws and for your, like, your brother, sister-in-law and their spouse. And obviously, of course, your spouse. So, so you've got a number of family members you can cover. But for instance, a niece or nephew or a cousin or a friend, you're not allowed to book awards for people that fit those descriptions. And I, it's unclear to me how they verify that or when they verify that. It says that if they don't have a matching last name that they

may ask you for verification of the family relationship. And I don't know if they're going to do that right away when you book or they're going to do that, like, you know, at the check-in counter. And I don't know if they do it at all, exactly. Yeah, they may not at all. So I don't know, but know that that's one of the rules. I mean, one thing I know, like, A&A has virtually the same rules. And, you know, I've traveled with someone who was my, your brother-in-law or sister-in-law. right right you know a couple of times before and they never they never checked um but you know

i can't promise that wouldn't happen yeah so it's worth knowing that anyway they also pass on carrier imposed surcharges although that's not necessarily as bad as it sounds but they do have their own surcharges which are fixed their defined amounts that they add i think international awards they had 21 000 japanese yen to those in surcharges which is not horrible but it's still not nothing. So that's a factor to be aware of. And then finally, Japan Airlines Mileage Bank Awards can't be changed. They can be canceled, but you can't change like the date or the routing or even the class of service. If you see first class opens up and you want to upgrade, you can't do that. You have to cancel and then rebook. But the good news is the cancellation fee is pretty cheap. It's

$3,100, which at the time we're recording this, it's only about $21. I think. So it's pretty cheap to cancel an award. It's not free though. So it's not quite as good as some other. programs in that regard, but better than most programs outside of the United States in terms of the cancellation penalty. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it. Okay. All right, let's let's now dig in. So this is your show, Nick. You know, you spent, you spent all day digging, digging in and finding all these things. So as a reward, you get to take over the rest of the show. Well, all day and much of the night, let me tell you, because one of the other downsides that I guess I didn't mention in the post or we didn't mention yet, is that the site doesn't have very easy to use

calendar functionality, particularly when you're searching for partner awards. It's a day-by-day, you know, hunt and pack. And so you can kind of use an award search tool to get an idea of flights that you think should be available, perhaps, but it's kind of a slow process looking for awards. And then particularly when we get to piecing together the multi-partner, multi-stop awards, it's a slow slog figuring that out. So it took a lot of time hunting through and looking at various data points. But there's a lot of good stuff. So first of all, first sweet spot best use thing to keep in mind is that you can book awards really far in advance. Japan Airlines mileage bank allows booking 360 days in advance. Most airline programs offer booking 330 days in advance. So this gives

you an extra month over most programs, which is good because it means you're going to get first dibs on much of that Japan Airlines award space. And so that makes a difference, believe it or not, in finding award space before it becomes available to other partners. So that's nice, also just good for planners, folks who want to be able to plan far in advance. And the thing that goes along with that is that you can access expanded Japan Airlines award space for mileage bank members. They have pretty good award space for their own members. In fact, when I looked at September of next year, about a year out from when I wrote the post,

I found almost daily award availability for four passengers in business class to most American cities for 80,000 miles of passenger. Now, that's not the best deal that they offer. Is this from Tokyo or where? Yeah, from Tokyo, exactly. Yeah, I mean, or I think actually when you were connecting, pricing came up the same as well, if I remember correctly. And I looked at Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, San Diego, Seattle. The only cities that there were more were New York and Boston. So they serve a number of cities in the United States and at 80,000 miles a person. that's a decent price for a business class award surcharges came to about $214 departing Tokyo. I should say taxes in surcharges came to about 214 departing Tokyo so you'd pay less

departing the United States since there'd be less in taxes. So that's a pretty good business class award price. It's not phenomenal at 80K. But the thing is, I was looking at almost daily availability for four passengers at that price. And while there's other programs that offer slightly better pricing, it's hard to find four seats in business class to Asia. It was very surprisingly easy, I thought. Right, right. Yeah, especially, yeah, flights across the Pacific have been notoriously difficult to find in business or first class for quite a while now. So that's a great find.

Now, 80,000, that's not the cheapest possible price, right? That's right. Yeah, the cheapest possible price is actually business class between Japan and the United States. States for just 55,000 miles and the same $214 in taxes and fees. And I did see some days with 55K pricing, even to New York. Now, New York most of the time when I, my search is the dates I searched, most of the dates were 110,000 miles one way in business class from Tokyo to New York. But I found some days where it was 55,000 one way. So if you hunt that out, I mean, that's, that's a phenomenal LTF, 55K and 214 is really good for like a 12 or 13 hour business class flight.

Right, right. Well, you know, even at that 110K, if you think about what you're getting for the, you know, compared to what the cash price would be. Especially some of those flights might have been on their new jets, which the business class on that is supposedly phenomenal. I would love to fly that. So New York all the way to Japan and in that product, 10,000 is not, I mean, it's a lot of points, but, you know, again, compared to the cash rate,

that would still be a great value for your miles. You know, keep in mind if you're transferring from capital one, it's not, except during the transfer bonus, it's not one to one, so it'd be even more capital one miles. But anyway, you know, just talking about the value of Japan Airlines miles in particular, I don't think that's terrible. No, actually, I had the same thought, because I was looking at, trying to come up with the tail end of a trip where we're going to be in Asia for next year, about a year out. And I was looking at it and thinking, well, 110 and we fly nonstop to New York.

And that's pretty convenient. So I had that same thought where I was like, it might be worth the convenience to pay a little bit more there. It's not a fantastic price. But it's, you know, the availability is really the key. And if you're not New York based, 80K to the other cities, if you're going to be positioning home from there anywhere, you're based on the other cities, you know, even better, I think.

And then, yeah, if you find the 55K unicorn redemptions, you know, if they fit your needs and your date, it's great. And you're going to have, again, access to a better shot at that since you get access to 360 days in advance

through Japan Airlines mileage bank. So, you know, I think that that's pretty exciting. If you're an economy class traveler, though, I mean, 27K between the United States and Japan, that's also pretty good.

So, you know, for, as compared to cash prices to fly to Japan, 27K is not bad. You're still going to pay the same 214-ish in taxes and fees. So it's not, and that's, again, departing Japan, departing the United States, it's going to be a little bit less. So the taxes and fees are kind of a bummer,

but at the same time, compared to cash rates to get to Japan, pretty good deal. Then we get into Japan Airlines Partner Awards. And this is pretty interesting because Japan Airlines has partners that I think maybe, maybe I was slightly aware of some of their partners, but I hadn't really paid attention to their partner awards at all. And if you've been on their website before, you probably wouldn't have expected that you could book their partner awards online

because the website is very wonky. And I don't even know how I ended up. I ended up with the same search tool, but different. I don't know how to even explain it. So the award search tool several different times clicking from different places. I came into the same search tool, but it looked different. and sometimes it priced the taxes and fees in Japanese yen and sometimes in U.S. dollars, depending on how it looks.

So it's really wonky. So you probably wouldn't have thought you could even book partner awards online, but you can't. So that's good news. Yeah. It is good news. It is good news. And they have some good rates.

And so that's the even better news. So first of all, Emirates, you can book Emirates business class for both reasonable mileage rates, very reasonable mileage rates in quite a few cases and reasonable surcharges in some cases, or at least reasonable-ish. it depends on the routing that you're looking at. So you may be aware that Emirates has really increased their taxes and fees on most of their awards. And so whether you're booking through Emirates or you're booking through their partners, for the most part, they have high surcharges. Air Canada Aeroplan has awards that don't feature those high surcharges, but they do feature really high mileage prices. So it's not particularly appealing to book those for Air Canada Aeroplane, in my opinion. Japan Airlines, though, still retains access. to Emirates business class award space at good rates. And in some cases, like I said, great surcharge rates. For instance, Milan to New York was, I just almost said, yeah, 60,000, 60,000 miles one way in business class.

And the surcharges on that were like $158. And that's taxes and fees, leaving Milan for New York. So 60K, that's way better. Emirates charges 87,000, I think, at best. and a lot of taxes and fees on top. So they've increased that. So hundreds of dollars. And that changed fairly recently.

So like, you know, last, in May, my wife and I flew used Emirates miles to fly business class, Milan, to JFK. And it was a very reasonable number of taxes. Like, I feel like it was like 120 bucks somewhere in that range, maybe if I'm remembering right. but soon after that they bumped it way up and that's sad because I think if you want to upgrade a first class at the airport like my wife and I did I think you have to book through Emirates from the get-go and then you wouldn't be able to take advantage of this so do this if I'm right about that do this only if you're happy flying business class on emirates yeah and they do I mean I found a fair amount of availability on the A380 where you

maybe happy flying business class on Emirates, but that's a really good point to keep in mind. Australia, Australia to Dubai is like $81 in taxes and fees and 80,000 miles, which is like half of what Emirates charges on the same route and like a tenth of what Emirates charges and taxes and fees. So that was a really good deal. There's other ones out there. Surcharges were a little higher in some cases. When I looked up several different airports in Asia to Dubai, like Bangkok and Singapore. The surcharges, the taxes and fees came to like $410, 450 bucks, something like that. But the mileage rates were really good. There was 42,000 miles one way. So you may not mind paying $400 in change in taxes and fees if you're only paying $42,000 miles for the flight.

So moral of the story, there are some good opportunities with Emirates. If you want to fly Emirates business class, Japan Airlines is worth a look. Cool. Latum. We were all upset that Alaska at most rewards is losing access to Lottom Awards on October 1st, but Japan Airlines still has a partnership with Lottom. And so I looked up, for instance, New York and Miami to Santiago, Chile was 60,000 miles and just the $5.60 in taxes from the United States. So that's, I think, a little bit more than what Alaska charged. I think Alaska from Miami anyway was 50, although I think from New York, it might have been as much, if not more. So, 60K, that's a good deal for business class over a long haul like that. Of course, Greg mentioned earlier that there may be some even better deals through life miles right now for booking on Avianca. But Latam has a nice business class. We flew it on the party of five. And we were all pretty happy with it. Yeah. It was very, very nice, very comfortable. Great service. I really enjoyed it. So Latam, you know, partners with Delta now, right? So do you think Delta charges only 60,000 sky miles?

And, you know, truthfully, I didn't look it up, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that probably they charge a few more miles. Probably a few more. So, yeah, that's one to keep in mind anyway that you still have access to Lottom flights. Now, I did try to look up flights connecting onward to Easter Island, and I didn't find any availability. I spent a lot of time searching for awards. So at some point, I had to just move on to the next thing. But that's something worth keeping in mind that you may be able to book those. flights to East or Island. And of course, Laton flies, you know, down to the southern end of

Chile. There's a lot of places you can go visit with Laton that might be interesting. Next up, book Air France business class without surcharges. Now, you might be saying, wait a second, Japan Airlines is a one world airline and Air France's sky team. And yeah, that's true. But I was very surprised to see that you can book Air France Awards between the United States and Europe through Japan Airlines mileage bank. I had no idea. I think maybe I had some awareness that they had a partnership, but even if I had that awareness, I don't think I would have thought that you could have booked these flights and certainly not without surcharges. Because it doesn't matter who you book Air France KLM through. I thought you still were on the hook for their surcharges, but you're not.

So I looked up, for instance, in the post, I had an example, Orlando to Paris for 60,000 miles and just the $5.60 that you pay departing the United States. I mean, wow. Oh, that was surprising. That's a great fine. That's really interesting. It's such an oddball thing. And, you know, I think we often, so we often see situations where programs, their best deals are for flights on partners that don't touch their home country.

And this qualifies for that, but it even goes a step further. It's flights on a partner, which is a very remote partner. in that, like, they're not part of the same alliance. They're, you know, they're in competing alliances. And so I think sort of the further away, both, you know, both geographically and alliance-wise you get, there's more opportunities for weird pricing to show up. And in this case, the weird pricing is around these lack of surcharges rather than the mileage cost.

Yeah, and I think that probably has something to do with the fact that. like, you know, if an alliance partner's undercutting them significantly on award pricing, you would think that might, you know, annoy them a little bit and cause some friction. Whereas if it's a partner that they don't really view as a competitor necessarily or, you know, it's like it's a competing alliance, but they're not directly competing for the same customer base, you would think, right? So the Air France doesn't probably worry that their core customers are looking at Japan Airlines, right? because they serve different purposes.

Well, here's an example of what you're saying. Like, I heard, and I don't have, you know, concrete evidence of this, but that Virgin Atlantic up their surcharges on Delta Awards when you use Virgin Atlantic Miles to book Delta, because Delta, you know, someone at Delta gave them a call and said, hey, you know, we own part of you. Right, right. Stop that.

So, yeah, that. just sort of supports your theory that like there's air france and and japan airlines are so far removed from each other's not going to be anyone calling the other and saying hey we have leverage over you that they've well yeah and you think that air france is probably not very concerned that their members are also looking at japan airlines because it's not you know not that people don't obviously fly more than one airline but it's different when you've got passengers based in in paris that are traveling to the united states i mean yeah they're going to look at delta also and probably virgin atlantic whereas really good

Japan Airlines isn't on their radar at all for that purpose. So, yeah, I think that that probably is part of it. But yeah, now I should mention availability wasn't incredible in the searches that I did. Of course, I only had so much time to do so many searches. What I did was I went to seats. Arrow and I looked for business class awards that were available to Virgin Atlantic. And they weren't all available to Japan Airlines. I had to kind of hunt and pack until I found one that was also available to Japan Airlines.

So I don't know how easy it'll be to find these overall. But it's worth keeping in mind because it's something that I wouldn't have thought of. And I don't think any of the award search tools, at least as of right now, are showing any Japan Airlines awards at all. They're not. That's correct. They are not. And one thing to watch out for is even if a award tool suddenly announces support for Japan Airlines,

most likely that'll mean searching Japan Airlines for Japan Airlines own flights rather than for partner flights. It's very rare for, when programs have their, their award searches split up in different places for partners and for their own flights, you don't have award tools capable of doing both. Like Turkish is an example. The award tools that support Turkish only look at Turkish's own flights, not at how much it would cost to use Turkish miles to book United or something like that. Yeah. And, you know, that's, That's a really good point that maybe I should have made in the downsides, that it's a little complicated, searching Japan Airlines mileage bank.

So it's going to take you some time to figure out the ins and outs and sort of the quirks of searching. Because, for instance, they've got three different, well, first of all, they have a domestic search tool and an international search tool. And then once you pick international, they've got a search tool for searching Japan Airlines international flights, for searching partner international flights. which is a little confusing, because I'll come back to that in a second. And then for searching one world flights, which is one world partners.

And if you use the one world tool and you look up a flight that's just operated by a single one world partner partner, it's not going to be bookable through that tool. You've got to go through the partner tool if you're going to do that. And then on the partner tool, you have to pick the partner that you want to fly on. So it's really kind of, yeah, it's a challenging search experience. And so that's part of the reason it took me so long to put all this together. So it does take a while to figure all that out. And it's worth mentioning also that when you find a flight in the search results, click all the way through to make sure that it's bookable because there were some that I saw. But then before I got to the final sort of checkout type of a page, it gave me an error saying that that flight wasn't bookable for one reason or another. So I don't know whether you could book those over the phone or not. I'm not exactly sure the deeper quirks there. So but I did find plenty that I could get through to sort of. And also, when searching Japan Airlines own flights, didn't you see there's, there's

somewhere appears that flights are available, but it actually says waitlist only. So you have to kind of watch out for that as well, because that is not going to be bookable right at the moment. So this whole situation is like one in which it makes it more likely that some of these sweet spots we're talking about are going to stick around long term because it's going to be very hard for the masses to take advantage of them because it's so hard to find these awards. On the flip side, obviously, it's hard to find these awards. So whether this is useful to you or not is going to depend on how much you like digging into

these things and are willing to hunt and peck different dates till you find the score and you find that that sweet spot maybe even one that Nick didn't find and then you can dance around the room and cheer once you've got that booked. Right, and there are some that I think should exist but I couldn't find for the purposes of the post and so I didn't include.

A commenter noted that JetBlue flights should be bookable through Japan Airlines mileage bank and they should and for some good prices. I just couldn't find any of them available to be booked so I didn't include that yet. But I do intend to update the post and add even more over time. But it is kind of a long, slow slog that you need to be willing to jump into. Now, probably you, the listener, is not going to be looking for all of the sweet

spots to put into a post. You're going to be looking for a specific one. And so it won't necessarily take you as much time as it kind of sounds like, you know, when we're talking about it being difficult. It's, it's kind of like riding a bike. You got to get the training wheels off. And it's going just take a little bit of repetition to get to that point. And then once you do, it's, it's going to seem relatively intuitive. But let's continue on with a couple other sweet spots here. there's a couple more I want to mention. British Airways. You can book British Airways with very reasonable surcharges

through Japan Airlines Mileage Bank. Now, that's also true through Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, but Japan Airlines Mileage Bank charges slightly fewer miles in some cases. For instance, I looked up New York to London, 42,000 miles one way in business class. And like now, I can't remember the exact total, a little over $200 in taxes and fees. So way less than what you'd pay through most programs

booking British Airways flights, It's 42K business class. That's a great price to London. And even if you continue behind that. It's really astounding. It really. I mean, it is. It's terrific.

And if you continue beyond London, it's still not bad. It was like 60K and I think $280 or so to continue on to Rome, for instance. And of course, since British Airways has high surcharges on their own flights, availability is often pretty easy on British Airways because it discourages a lot of people from booking those British Airways flights. So I often find it's relatively easy to find British Airways business class. award space. And so being able to find it with lower surcharges if you search via Japan Airlines mileage bank is, I think, a nice benefit. Yeah, no, it totally is. Bergen Airways gotten a little

bit harder lately, I think, because they now reserve some of that award space for their own members. And so those aren't bookable with partners. But still, I still think they have a pretty decent amount of ward space, even for partner bookings. Yeah, I mean, just as an example, the first couple of dates I tried searching with British Airways via Japan Airlines Management had availability. I didn't have to look hard at all for that. So now, like you said, may not be always the case. It may not be when you want to go. So I don't know. I don't even remember the dates I used for that off the top of my head. So maybe I picked a low season as it so happened. But anyway, that's one to keep in mind. Now, if the surcharge is there, turn you off a little

bit. There's also good news with American Airlines because you can book American Airlines business class flights to Europe for the same 42,000 miles from the northeast of the United States. And, you know, then you're going to pay just whatever the departure taxes are. So, for instance, I looked up Madrid to New York, 42,000 miles and $48. I mean, that's one of the best deals in business class between Europe and the United States. That is amazing. Yeah. And, you know, if only Asia miles were, you know, easier than they used to be. And it'd be nice if they were easier yet. It would also be really nice if they get rid of that 36-month, you know, because I'd be willing to take advantage of a transfer bonus to Japan Airlines, speculatively, if I knew that those miles would stick around forever. But since they expire after 36 months, hard stop, I'm not going to do that.

Anyway, that's an aside. That's a great fine, 42K. Now, again, as Nick said, that's only between Western Europe and East, Northeast, U.S., that their awards are distance-based, right? And so that's why you're going to pay a lot more if you go from, like, Western U.S. to Eastern Europe or something. Yes, that's true. Their partner awards are distance-based, and so that absolutely is true, and something

to keep in mind. Speaking of distance-based partner awards, I think one of the coolest things that I spent a lot of time trying to explore and it's not as easy as I might have hoped, but it's totally worth it if you're interested in complicated award booking is that you can book really complicated multi-partner awards with multiple stopovers and you can do it right on the website. You don't have to call in. If you were sad that A&A got rid of its round-the-world award chart, be sad no longer because there are some amazing things you can put together with the Japan Airlines website. So you can put together these multi-partner awards and you can

have, if you fly on one world airlines, you can have seven stopovers. It doesn't cost anymore. There's no additional fee or something for a stopover. Of course, you'll pay whatever the taxes are going to be. Some countries will charge you tax if you have a stopover of more than 24 hours. So you know, you may pay taxes and fees and you're going to pay surcharges on some airlines. But those surcharges, as we already said, are usually pretty moderate even on the airlines that have them. So you can put together some wild awards. Now, I'm not sure on all of the routing rules. on some other blogs that had published routing rules, but they didn't all make sense. Some of them seemed a little contradictory to me.

And I ran into some awards that erred out as I was trying to piece them together that seemed like they should work and then didn't. But then I also ran some examples that worked just fine, like Kuala Lumpur to Doha and either Malaysian or guitar, stop over in Doha, then continue on to Casablanca on Qatar as well, stop over in Casablanca for a while, and then continue to New York on Royal Air, moroc and that priced out i think 110 000 points and that one was i think 450 dollars in taxes and fees or so and most of that or at least half of that was surcharges for flying katar so uh you know so if you've avoided that and flew some other airlines you'd pay even less and so that's pretty

comparable to what air kennedy aeroplan plan charges for complicated award routing but you can have up to seven stopovers whereas air kennedy aeroplane you could have one for an additional 5 000 miles you can have seven with uh with japan airlines mileage bank and some of the mileage bands are pretty generous there's a mileage band from 20 to 25,000 miles which you could build a pretty good round the world trip with that much distance and it's 150,000 miles in business class so you're talking seven stops remember seven for 150,000 in business class that's pretty terrific now they don't allow backtracking and I had some trouble like for instance I had looked at flying from Casablanca to Madrid and then Madrid to New York. We're flying from

Doha to Barcelona, Barcelona to Madrid, to New York. And I had trouble with it not pricing out things that showed available on the website. So it is going to take some trial and error. It's not a beginner play at all. But for more advanced users and those interested in these multi-stop awards, I think it's pretty wild. You can do that. Now, if you book the non-one world partners, you can only have three stopovers. So if you're booking like Air France or you're booking on JetBlue or something like that, then you would have presumably just three stopovers on an award. But still, I mean, three stopovers, that's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. So I just looked up the old A&A around the world award chart, which no longer exists anymore, but to fly 25,000 miles

in business class on A&A's old award chart, that was 145,000 miles. And you're saying that you can go, you can do the same distance but for only 150,000, which is pretty much the same thing. Right, right, it's pretty close, yeah. Yeah, the main difference really is that A&A miles were very easily to get because of the one-to-one transfers from MX membership rewards, and MX has done so many things over the years to make points really easy to get. There hasn't been nearly that much easy to get points from,

built in Capital One as Amex, but still, that's really interesting that that, that, that, that, that word chart is, is that good. So it's not specifically designed to be around the world, but you could use it that way, right? You could use it that way. Yeah, exactly. You could book it as a one way. You could book it as a round trip. It's cumulative distance.

It's based on cumulative distance. So you could go all the way around the world. You could book just a round trip and stop in a bunch of places. theoretically, and I read about this on other blogs, but again, had a hard time getting the pricing engine to do it. Theoretically, you could bounce around on American Airlines or Alaska around the United States with, again, up to seven stopovers on an award. So you could put together a whole bunch of domestic flights, too, potentially for really good deals. So, and, you know, in comparison to A&A, you're right, obviously way easier to earn Amex points that you could

have transferred to A&A. But I think that there's some other comparison points where Japan airlines might be a little more appealing. Like, actually, I'll start with. another one that would have been more appealing for A&A. Star Alliance has more members than one world does. So there were more airlines you could fly. But the flip side of that is a lot of the A&A partners, or at least a number of them, had really high surcharges. You know, you got the whole Lufthansa group that has really high surcharges on their awards. And A&A had increased the surcharges on their flights quite a bit. And then there were some United flights randomly that had surcharges too. Whereas here with Japan Airlines, even the worst defenders, the British Airways of

the world, it's only a little over 200 bucks on the flights from the United States to and from Europe. So the surcharges are far more reasonable. And then, of course, there are a number of partners that won't have them at all. I do want to mention with Cathay Pacific, at least, booking British Airways, those really low surcharges are limited to flights from sort of northeast U.S. to London. And so that might be the case here too. I don't think we know yet. yeah that that might be the case although katar airways surcharges were also low on on the routes i checked that were outside of the united states though now that you mentioned that that actually does bring to mind the fact that i mentioned emirates business class

awards but the the flights from dubai to the united states did have high surcharges through japan airlines so dubai and new york for instance and he had i don't know something like $800 in surcharges or $900 and it was it was comparable to what you would pay if you were booking through through Emirates so it's possible yes you're that you're right that there could be higher surcharges on some of those routes it's something that we're going to have to play with but it's kind of fun to have the ability to do that now so right right and you'll you can presumably see that as you're building your your one world award you can see the yes well i tell you the truth I don't know if you could see the taxes and fees until you got to the end of pricing it.

If they showed it as you went, I'm not sure if they showed it as you went. I've come to think of it. It might have on the right hand side. I can't remember. But you do see it anyway before you get to the final booking stage when it actually prices the whole thing out. And there were times, like I said, where it would error out and not price it. But if you get to that page where it prices it out, presumably it's bookable.

And it does actually break down how much is taxes and how much is surcharges. So it doesn't just give you a single. number does give you the single number at the top, but it also splits it out for you without having to expand it and figure out what's what, which I thought was pretty transparent and nice. So, um, so fun tool to play with. And again, you'd have to play separately with the one world tool if you want to book multiple one world airlines, uh, versus the partner award tool. Now the partner award tool, I'm not sure if you can mix multiple of the non one world partners. I didn't see an easy way to do that. So I'm not sure if you can book multiple of the one, non one world

partners. But for instance, on JetBlue, you could theoretically fly from Los Angeles to New York and have a stopover and then New York to Florida and have a stopover and Florida to somewhere in the Caribbean. And so you could potentially put together some pretty interesting ones, even on single partners in some situations or fly to Europe. JetBlue, Transcontinental is supposed to be 42,000 miles in Mint class and same from the northeast of the United States to Europe, though I didn't actually find any of those awards that's why i didn't include it in the post but but theoretically they're out there got it so i didn't realize that what you were saying about the multiple stopovers allowed i thought that was only for the one world awards but you're saying that's true for any of the

you can have three stopovers on the not the one world awards just the the uh individual partner yeah whether i don't even know if i should say individual because i'm not positive it's only if i'm an individual partner but what they call partner awards so if you were flying just one partner that you could have three on the non one world airlines. But if you're doing a one world award, that has to include at least two one world airlines. And then you can have seven stopovers. Got it. So yeah. Yeah. So pretty interesting. I think it's fun to dig into that and take a look at it. If you have a lot of capital one miles and or a lot of built points and a lot of sense of adventure and a desire to fly around the world, you've got some good options. They have some other partners,

by the way, that are not alliance partners. For instance, Bangkok Airways is a partner with Japan Airlines. And so if you're looking to get to Kosovoi or Phuket or some of the other islands there, you've got some additional options to get between Bangkok and those places. So that's worth knowing as well. And there were some other partnerships, too, that I couldn't find availability on Korean, but they partner with Korean as well. So there may be some opportunities there, too.

I did try to find availability on those. things too, but eventually it became a time suck where I had to move on to the next one. And there was enough here that I thought it was certainly worth sharing while we've got that 30% transfer bonus. So we've got a lot of Capital One miles. I think it's worth looking at Japan Airlines. All right. That's so cool.

So that was Japan Airlines sort of 301 rather than 101. So advanced Japan Airlines tricks. So hopefully everybody enjoyed listening to that, even if you don't plan to ever dip your toes into those murky waters. But there's some gems to be found. There's some gems that are worth dipping your toes in for. So come on in. The water's warm. All right.

So I think that brings us to this week's question of the week. And so this week's question of the week, we're going to switch gears a little bit to Alaska Atmos. So a reader wrote in and said that they know buying points is not. usually a good value. And Frequent Miler typically only recommends buying points if you have a specific redemption in mind. However, Reader says I'm currently tempted by the 110% bonus to buy Alaska Atmos rewards. When buying at least 20,000 Atmos rewards points, so you net 42,000 in that case, the price comes to 1.66 cents per point. That's, I think, a little bit higher than our reasonable redemption value for Alaska Miles. But it's,

it's pretty easy to redeem them for more than 1.66 cents in value, especially with partners. And as an aside, you could book Japan Airlines business class, for instance, from I think 60 or 70,000 miles, so even a better rate than what you might find sometimes through Japan Airlines. So there are some good values to be had there. What pushed me toward the edge, though, was seeing that Rove Miles, Reader continues on, is offering 1.6 miles per dollar on Alaska Atmos purchases. So if you go to Rove Miles and their shopping portal, sure enough, they're offering 1.6 transferable miles per dollar spent when buying Alaska Atmos rewards points. So they said, I don't think Frequent Miler has a reasonable redemption value for Rove yet, but it seems easy enough to get one and a half cents per point out of those.

So they said that, you know, if you consider that return, your effective price is even less than 1.6 cents per point, maybe 1.55 cents per point and maybe even lower depending on how you're doing it. So what do you think, Greg? Are you a buyer of miles? I mean, if Alaska is offering miles at 1.66 cents, are you a buyer of Alaska miles? If you're able to kind of pair that with earning Rove miles as you buy them, what do you think? Is it worth buying them? No, I'm not a buyer.

The way I think about these things is even when miles are on sale, I need to see, like, extraordinarily cheap prices, like one center. for me to to buy miles without a plan for how I'm going to use them. Now, if I had, you know, if I was looking at 45,000 mile business class to Europe, which, which I can get from Detroit Airport with Alaska miles, and if I was looking at something like that, that incredible value, and I didn't have those Alaska Atmos miles available to do that, then, yeah, I think it could make sense to do that. And also, assuming I don't have, like, the built points to transfer to Alaska. So there's a lot of, like, sort of caveats there.

Also, do I have, maybe that same flight is 57,500 miles through American Airlines. Do I already have more than enough American Airlines miles to do that? I'd rather use the miles I have than buy new ones. So that's kind of how I think about it. It's so easy to get airline miles by signing up for new cards, by shopping through portals, by referring friends to new cards, things like that, that the idea of like buying miles well over a penny each, you know, over 1.5 cents each, just because I could get a better deal from them is not something I'm going to look to do because I'm getting most of my

miles more like free. Like, it's not free because there's always a, there's, you're always giving up earning like cash back when you shop through a portal or whatever. But, but still, if you see what I mean, it's not like I'm buying them that expensively. And so yeah, that's, that's my approach. What do you think, Nick? Yeah, you know, I'm really glad that you mentioned the ability to book the same flight with other miles that you have because I think that's a major factor probably for us, at least. I look at it and I say there are opportunities where you could get good value. And if you need a specific ticket on a specific route and a specific day that's available

and you don't have other miles to book it, it certainly might make sense to buy those miles. I think if you're able to get that 45K business class, award to Europe that Greg was talking about. That's $747, I think, worth of miles at 1.66 cents a mile or even at 55K. There's some other routes as you'd be able to book. And so then you'd be looking at, I think, a little over $900 worth of miles, which is certainly a good deal. Great deal. Yeah. For a business class flight to Europe. Yeah. Absolutely. That's definitely good. But it's not, it's better than what you would pay for cash, but it's not so good that I feel like I need to go run out and buy the miles, particularly because I think Greg's point nailed it there,

that, okay, maybe I don't have the miles in Alaska to book that 45K or 55K award. But do I have miles in another program where I could book the same award for 65K or even 70K, then I don't necessarily want to part with the cash when I already have these miles that I've earned that I could use. So I'd be in the same boat where I don't think I'd be buying and probably not speculatively. I think some people approach the game differently. And if you're somebody who approaches the game as a cash back person primarily and that cash back is sort of your, you know, your stash of money to use for travel, then this can be a

great way to get a good discount on travel. There's no doubt. But I think Greg and I and certainly many people listen to this show are able to earn a lot of miles and points every year in various programs. So even though they're not Alaska necessarily miles that you're earning in huge quantity, There's enough other types of miles that can book most of Alaska's partner awards that I wouldn't be a buyer either yet without a very specific and immediate use in mind. Also, keep in mind that programs devalue, you know, so if you're buying points speculatively, you don't even have a plan for yet, you don't know when they're going to change the award chart. Now, I don't think Alaska's likely too soon, but at the same time, you know, who's to say?

And so if you're buying now and then two years from now, you still haven't used them and they totally change the value proposition, you certainly may be kicking yourself. So yeah, yeah, I agree with Greg. This is the short way to say all of that. There you go. All right. That's the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed this and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequent myler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media.

Join our frequent miler insider's Facebook group where you can discuss stuff like this all the time. Wherever you're watching or listening again, don't forget to like or give us a thumbs up, leave us your feedback. We always appreciate that. And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a comment that you'd like to be considered for the giant mailbag. You can send that too. Send it to Mailbag at Frequentmyler.com. Bye everybody. our favorite places, some of our best tips and experiences from all around the world in just 10 minutes on Travel & 10. Join us at Voyescape.com. I'm Pauline Fromer. I've spent most of my life

writing, talking, and thinking about travel, not just where to go, but how to go in a way that's meaningful. On the Frommers Travel Show, we explore the trends, people, and ideas shaping how we see the world. If you care about the why, as much as the way, I hope you'll join me. You can find new episodes weekly at voyescape.com.