Frequent Miler on the Air - The Art of Extreme Stackery | Ep231 | 12-2-23

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

Extreme Rewards via Extreme Stacking: Stack portal rewards, category bonuses, and much more to take your shopping to the next level. 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:42 Giant Mailbag 00:02:36 -- Backpack tip 00:03:09 -- Nordic Choice 00:06:00 -- AutoSlash for the win 00:06:52 -- Schwab debit card rocks 00:08:12 -- Open Hotel Alert to the rescue 00:08:57 -- Turkish Airlines: valuable mess 00:10:22 Card Talk: Amex Blue Business Plus 00:16:42 Award Talk: Book Etihad w/ Flying Blue miles 00:22:29 Award Talk: BREAKING NEWS from Hyatt 00:22:57 -- Hyatt's revamped Milestone Rewards 00:37:17 -- New ways to earn Hyatt elite nights 00:40:04 -- Mr & Mrs Smith integration w/ Hyatt 00:50:38 Award Talk: Get the room you really want Nick's way 00:54:47 Main Event: The Art of Extreme Stackery Extreme Rewards via Extreme Stacking See blog post: https://frequentmiler.com/extreme-sta... 01:33:05 Question of the Week: When going for the Companion Pass, should I open the personal or business Southwest card first? Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Mylar on the air starts now. Today's main event, the art of extreme stackery. Extreme rewards via extreme stacking. We're talking stacking credit card bonuses, portals, card-linked offers, and more to get outsized rewards for your shopping. This is always my favorite thing to think about at this time of year, because obviously there are a lot of sales. We're recording this during the holiday shopping season. So a lot of things go on sale, but of, I'm not satisfied with just getting a good price. I want to get a good price and good rewards, whatever I can do to save a little bit

extra. So we're going to talk about lots of different ways to do that today. But before we get into it, I want to remind you, if you enjoy this video or this podcast, wherever you're listening or watching, please don't forget to like it, leave a comment, give us a thumbs up, a few stars, whatever it is you see fit. We always appreciate that. Don't forget to like it, leave a comment, give us a thumbs up, a few stars, whatever it is you see fit. We always appreciate that. Don't forget to subscribe and enable notifications so you can get notified when we post the podcast each weekend. We appreciate that very much. And also remember that we always have the timestamps in the description. So if you expand the description box for the show, you'll find the timestamp so you can jump

right around to wherever it is you want to go. Or if you want to return to something later on, you can find it easily. So check out those timestamps. And also, of course, links to more information about what we talk about are found within those timestamps within the sections where we talk about relevant stuff. So you can check all of that out wherever you're watching or listening. So let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. All right, dragging out the giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Will. And Will's giant mail really is gigantic. In fact, it's so giant that I had to divide it up. And I'm going to be reading one part of it, which I trimmed down. And I might drag out the other part of it on a future episode, but we're going to just start

with the first part and go from there. So Will says, and remember, this is heavily edited to shorten it. Will says, long time fan of Frequent Miler here, just got back from a two month ANA round the world trip and wanted to share some heartfelt thanks for the many trips, tips and tricks I learned from the blog and podcast. So now we're going to get into the individual tips and tricks that he mentions that he learned from Frequent Miler. Starting with the backpack tips were a huge help. I studied the page What's in Greg's Go Everywhere Backpack in the weeks leading up to the trip to emulate the tips. And I even went back and reviewed frequent miler on the air episode one 68 to squeeze out all the tricks I could all in all the tips were super practical.

Nice. Yeah. So, so we, we had talked about, and I had written about like all the things we keep in our, in our kind of to go bags that we take with us everywhere. And there's a lot of super helpful stuff in there. And I'm glad Will found it. Yeah, that's awesome. All right. Next up, Nordic choice via city was a steal. I stayed at a Clarion Collection Hotel in Norway. The free breakfast and evening meal, which is indeed totally satisfying as a full

dinner, plus the one to two city transfer ratio knocked this day out of the park. That's for sure. I mean, especially in Scandinavia, prices can just be so high. And so the ability to book with choice points, just generally speaking, whether you're transferring from city or not, is already a pretty big win for the most part. Even if you're buying your choice privileges points, it's still going to probably be a good deal booking with those. So yeah, if you're transferring city points one to two, it totally is a steal. And anybody who's ever bought dinner in Scandinavia knows that a hotel that includes that also could be a huge savings. And so if you're looking to splurge on a special

meal, you want to go out somewhere really nice one night, well, you can maybe justify that more easily if you eat for free at the hotel the other night or two or whatever the case may be. So that's a great tip. And I'm glad that that worked out well for you. Absolutely. And just a little background on that. You do need the City Premier or the old no longer available prestige card to get that

one to two transfer ratio to choice. And Nordic Choice is no longer called that uh so there was there was sort of a chain in the nordic countries called nordic choice that partners with choice it's not really part of choice uh directly somehow but um you can still book through choice but it's now called that chain is called strawberry so uh not really all that relevant. But if you go looking for Nordic Choice, you'll have to look for your strawberry fields instead. But you will see like the same kind of brands that you see here, like Clarion. Well, Clarion Collection. And then also there's like just Clarion.

And I think Clarion Collection is the one that I think has both free breakfast and free dinner, but also like comfort in and stuff like that. That's in choice privileges, sort of family. Right, right. So if you search for these on choices on like choice.com, you will find these properties, but it's actually might be more helpful to first look at the properties through the strawberry website because they do a great job of showing visually in the search results. If you're searching for hotels in a particular city, it'll show in the search results free dinner or free breakfast and things like that. So all that

information is right there. Easy to see. Very good. Then go to choice.com to book it with your choice points. Okay. I think it's choice to choice.com to book it with your choice points. Okay. I think it's choicehotels.com, by the way. I don't know if choice.com is a website. So just before somebody goes to the wrong place and ends up making bad choices, I want to make sure you choose the right choice. Good correction there.

Okay. Next bullet point he has. Auto slash for the win. Thanks for this great tip. I think I saved $ 60 or $70, maybe more. So that's not a lot of money. But what he's talking about is auto slash is a great tool for finding better car rental rates. So you search around, find the best rate you can, and then plug it into auto slash and they'll email you whenever they find a better rate than

what you found. And they often, often do. Yeah. I'm already regretting the fact that I didn't do that on a trip. I don't know why I made a reservation for a rental in Scandinavia that starts for me tomorrow. And I did it forever ago and I didn't set it up to track. And I have no idea why I probably wasted money. I probably could have saved so much money. That's kicking myself, kicking myself. It's a great tip. You're right. I should read that Frequent Miler blog a little bit more often. Right. Next tip, Schwab debit card rocks. Foreign transaction fees and ATM fees? Forget about it. I confirm that the exchange rates Schwab used were accurate and fair and the fees were indeed credited back. Yeah, that's great. I'm in Vienna right now as we

record this and I've been surprised by the number of places that don't take cards that are cash only. So I've had to take out cash a couple of times already and it's great having a card with no foreign transaction fees and no ATM fees. In my case, I actually use the SoFi card because I have an old account that's grandfathered into not paying ATM fees. But if I didn't use that card, the Schwab debit card would be the next one that I would use for the same reason. Obviously, it's just very convenient to know you're A, going to get a good rate and B, not get ripped off by the ATM, which I think the last ATM I used had a fee of something like six euros and 50 euro cents or whatever. So 650, I mean, that's over $7 for the withdrawal.

So avoiding that alone is nice. So yeah. Absolutely. And there's no fee for the checking account to get the debit card. So you sign up for the Schwab account, get your debit card, and use it for all your international ATM usage. Great option there. Next, Open Hotel Alert to the Rescue. This tool got me into two hotels on this trip that were not originally open in the room types I wanted.

All right, so Open Hotel Alert is a free tool that lets you basically get alerted when a certain room type that you're looking for opens up. So we often use that to find awards, hotel awards, but it can be used for other purposes too. Let's say you really wanted a particular suite or a particular, like, uh, uh, Lakeview or ocean view room or whatever it is, you could set up an alert for, for that kind of thing. And it'll, it'll let you know. So good tip there. And then, uh, finally Turkish airlines, U S domestic redemptions are still a valuable mess. The biggest takeaway is that I got a lot of value

for my Turkish airline miles by booking a long US domestic award at 7.5K per passenger, but not without pulling some teeth. And then he goes into a fairly lengthy story about the hassles that were involved, which we know Turkish can be a bear to work with, but an incredible deal to use. Absolutely. Yeah. And I've told people, don't expect great service from anyone in the customer service field at Turkish because it just doesn't seem to happen. I mean, they're not unfriendly and rude, just not particularly helpful a lot of the times. And I think it's legitimately often just a case of not knowing how to help, I think. I don't know. So yeah, they certainly can be a hassle to deal with. But great deal when you get it. And just about all reports I've heard flying Turkish also

is a pretty good experience. I'm excited to be trying them out pretty soon myself. So we'll see how that goes and how that compares to redeeming Turkish miles. Very cool. All right. So that's the end of the giant mail for today. But as I said, we might drag out Will's mail in the future as well. Excellent. Very good. Great message to get, Will. And I'm glad a lot of those tips have worked out for you. So let's move ahead to card talk. And for this week's card talk, we've got the American Express Blue Business Plus, one of their business cards, possibly one of their best business cards to have, or really one of the best Amex cards to

have long-term, I think, right? Yeah. I was surprised when I was going through our notes that it didn't look like we'd ever covered this card before, because we've certainly talked about it a lot in the past. But it's time. It's absolutely time to cover this one. The Blue Business Plus card has no annual fee. That's one killer feature. And it earns two American Express membership rewards points per dollar on all purchases up to $50,000 per calendar year. Then it earns just one X after that.

Terms apply. I stuck that in there because Amex wants us to always say terms apply when we write things like this. And it's kind of absurd because is there ever a time when terms don't apply? Don't apply? Right. Yeah. No, just all terms are, all bets are off. No terms here. Yeah. I've missed that time.

I don't know when that time is when there are no terms to worry about. Right. Yeah. So that's just kind of silly. But anyway, this was, I think, the first transferable points earning card that earned 2x everywhere and had no annual fee. I mean, that combination is amazing. And yeah, it has a very minor set of perks. So it'll give you an extended warranty up to one year.

It has 90-day purchase protection for items stolen or accidentally damaged for up to $1,000 per incident. And like all Amex cards, it has access to American Express offers, Amex offers, where often you can get great deals and it's worth checking those out. So this is a good card to, when you get good Amex offers to add, this is a good card to add those offers to because in addition to whatever the Amex offer offers you, you'll still be getting the two points per dollar as well. So good combination there.

And the nice thing is that this card, as Greg mentioned, it earns transferable membership rewards points. It has the ability to transfer. You don't need any other Amex cards in order to transfer to partners. Really, this is true, I guess, with all of the cards that earn membership rewards these days. But this is a good card to keep around to keep your membership rewards points alive. So if you've also got a platinum card or a gold card, and there's a chance that someday maybe you'll want to cancel one of those cards and not have to deal with the

annual fee. Well, if you've got a Blue Business Plus that's open, that's going to keep all of your points alive and transferable to all of their partners. So that's why we love this card, because not only does it offer a great return everywhere and have no annual fee, but it keeps your points alive and transferable. And the fact that it does that without an annual fee is great. You paid 700 bucks for your platinum card, got your 150,000 point bonus, don't want the transferable. And the fact that it does that without an annual fee is great. I mean, you paid 700 bucks for your platinum card, got your 150,000 point bonus, don't want the platinum card anymore, get a Blue Business Plus, no annual fee, and you keep those points until you're ready to use them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. I think if you signed up for the

business checking account, as we're talking, there's a 50,000 point offer. I think if you didn't have any Amex cards that have membership rewards, you wouldn't be able to transfer those points. But if you have the Blue Business Plus, then those points become transferable as well. So that's another nice thing about it. And Amex, unlike most other issuers, when you go to cancel, let's say you earned a whole bunch of points on your platinum card, and then you go to cancel your platinum card. You don't have to move your points to the Blue Business Plus in order to keep them alive. It doesn't work that way. You can't move points around.

All the points are collected under your ID or your social security number or whatever. However they uniquely track you, all the points are kept with you. And so as long as you have any card open that earns membership rewards, those points are going to stay around. So yeah. So this is a great one to have. You've definitely considered a credit card, so it's going to count towards the limit of the number of credit cards that Amex will allow you to have. But I think it's worth having. I think most people probably ought to have this. And certainly before you consider canceling your only membership rewards card, whatever

that might be, every now and then someone will say, hey, I'm going to cancel my Amex Platinum card because I don't want to pay the annual fee anymore. Where should I transfer all my points before I cancel it? And I always say, whoa, no, no, no, don't do that. You don't need to offload them to a transfer partner. Instead, just get the Blue Business Plus and then keep them until you're ready to make an award redemption and then transfer them whenever the stars align and you have the award you want and transfer to the program where you're going to book. So definitely, this is one I highly recommend everybody have. Now, the public offer on this is often pretty

weak, but we do see good targeted offers from time to time. And so we write about those when we see them. And if you see one of those posts about targeted offers for this card, then often what it is, is there's a link you'll have to click and log into your account and see if you're targeted. And if it says, we're sorry, this offer is no longer available. Well, that means you weren't targeted for that, unfortunately. But we do see good targeted offers that people are eligible for now and then. Sometimes you'll find it in the Amex offers section on one of your other cards. So it's worth keeping an eye out for that. Yeah. And the other thing you could do is let's say you were targeted for a great referral offer where you'd earn, let's say, 30,000 points by referring someone from your platinum card.

What you could do is find a friend or family member that's interested in this card and refer each other. So you could refer your friend to the Blue Business Plus, even from your platinum card, and they can refer you from whatever card would give them the best bonus. And then you each get both the referral bonuses and whatever the current welcome bonus for this card is. Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Another great way to handle that.

Okay, very good. So that's card talk for this week. We're gonna skip over a couple of segments that we do sometimes and move into award talk. So for this week's award talk, first up, we've got something that, you know, I've been on vacation for a couple of days. I've been out of touch. And I saw this in the notes that Greg put together for the show. And I was like, what? Wait, hold on a second. Did I miss something somewhere? So you can now book Etihad flights with Air France KLM flying blue miles.

You can. Yeah. I haven't done it myself, but I've certainly pulled up awards on their site and found that you can do so. You can also do it the other way. You can book Air France or KLM with Etihad. Actually, I don't know if you could book KLM, but I know you could book Air France with Etihad miles. The award pricing isn't great. So I'm not sure that that would be something you want to do. And booking to fly Etihad with Air France flying blue miles, the prices aren't amazing. But let me give you some examples of pricing. So let's say you want to fly from DC to Abu Dhabi on Etihad. In economy, it's going to cost you 44,500 miles plus 86.50. These are flying blue miles. In business, it'll cost you 87,500 miles plus $186.50. Now, the reason that's not horrible.

I mean, Etihad's a nice product, but compare it to American Airlines where you can book the exact same business class flight for only 70,000 miles. So that's over 17,000 miles fewer and only $7. So that's almost $180 cheaper. It's quite a bit cheaper booking with American. You cannot book Etihad first class yet. I phrased it that way because Air France Flying Blue has started to make partner first class awards available in some cases. And so maybe they'll eventually open it up for first class, but they haven't yet. So let's talk about why this is interesting. I already explained why it's not interesting because American Airlines is better. But there are a few reasons it is interesting. One is that Air Canada, at least

temporarily, or for a while now, hasn't been able to book Etihad Awards. So we lost one major player from being able to book Etihad Awards. And for those who have transferable points, but not necessarily many American Airlines miles or any, then obviously this opens up a way to book these flights because you can transfer from anyone to Air France KLM Flying Blue. blue and uh so if you have if you have points with chase with city with capital one you know etc you can transfer and uh then you can you have access to these awards yeah when you said transfer from anyone i was about to jump in and be like you mean from any transferable currency it's not necessarily yeah another person i want to be clear on that oh yeah thank you yeah you can't you can't transfer from Nick to... Don't get any ideas out there. He's not going to like that at all.

No, no, definitely not. But for many of the transferable currencies, you can do that. Yeah, yeah. And then this is another reason why sometimes you'll see good transfer bonuses to Flying Blue from these transferable points currencies. And this is another reason why it's worth considering, even if you don't necessarily have a plan in place. There's a lot of good award redemption options with Flying Blue, and there's a lot of medium ones, but with

the transfer bonus, they become good deals. So these are just multiple things to keep in mind. And last, I'm going to point out something that it's really, really hard to find Etihad award availability by searching on the Flying Blue website. You have to search day by day, and it's just painful. Yeah. The best way is to use American Airlines, aa.com, and use their calendar tool. Make sure you're looking for nonstop flights

that Etihad flies and restrict the calendar to nonstop flights and then restrict the calendar, for example, to business class, if that's what you're looking for. And then you get a calendar view month by month and you can click through. That was the only way I was able to find examples to find out what the pricing actually was for business class. Economy was easy to find just by pecking around, but business class is pretty scarce.

One of the nice things is that you'll pay fewer miles when there's a transfer bonus, right? So transfer bonuses are going to be, I think, a big positive because with even a 25% transfer bonus, you're looking at paying fewer miles than you would with American Airlines, but you're still paying more in surcharges. So it's not necessarily going to seem like a wildly better redemption still. But again, like you said, much easier to access and probably for most of us, easier to replenish points when you're talking about transferable currencies than American Airlines miles. So I think this is one of those cases where I might consider paying a little bit extra in surcharges and then keeping my American Airlines

miles for other types of redemptions that I can't as easily book for a acceptable deal with other programs. So interesting nonetheless. All right, we're cutting into our pre-recorded show with some breaking news from Hyatt this week. So what's going on with Hyatt? Hyatt broke some crazy stuff. There's some new things. We've got a whole bunch of different things to talk about when it comes to Hyatt this week, right? We really do. We have news about Hyatt's milestone rewards, new ways to earn elite qualifying nights, and there's news about Hyatt's acquisition of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. So some good stuff to talk about. First up, milestone rewards starting in January of 2024.

So coming up very soon. Things are changing. So what are milestone reports? First of all, when you've stayed at Hyatt's 20 nights, 20 qualifying nights, they call them, but basically every night you stay at a Hyatt is a qualifying night in most cases. When you stay at 20 nights, you get your first reward. And under the current program, I think that's a club access award that lets you upgrade your stay to be allowed into a club. Anyway, and every 10 nights after that, you get more rewards. That's how it works today. And it will continue to work that way

in next year, but next year it's going to go up to 150 nights. So it doesn't stop at 100 nights. So for people who live their life on the road, mostly in Hyatt, in Hyatt hotels, that'll be good news. Great. Spend nearly half a year at Hyatt, you're going to get rewarded even more. You will, you will. And good news for everybody along the way is that there are more choices now. So for the most part, they haven't taken anything away, but there is a couple of small exceptions. But in most cases, what they've done is add extra choices. So if you don't like that, if you don't like or want a Club Access award, you could get something else. Almost all rewards are giftable. So this is brand new. You're going to be able to log online, look at your rewards in your account and say, oh, you know what?

I don't know what to do with this Club Access Award. I'm going to give it to Nick. And so you give it to Nick and then he can use it for his day. That's awesome. I think that's long overdue. I think it's great to see that because if you're already a globalist and that first 28 milestone was kind of meaningless and now the ability to give it to somebody, that's awesome. It really is. I mean, I think it makes it just so much more valuable in a way. I can't think of how many times I've booked stays for other people or where because of the way the Hyatt program works today with the guest of honor, I have to use my points to book them if they want, if I want to give them status type things. But if all I wanted to give them is lounge access now, they could book it however they want and I could give them a club access award.

So that's really good news. Also, most of those things will be usable online too. Today, a lot of them you have to call Hyatt to apply them. It's still not going to be true for suite upgrade awards, but for most other things, it'll be doable online, which is great. Okay. Let's talk about, there's some brand new rewards that are coming up. First, I'm just going to mention quickly, find credit. Hyde has this thing called find experiences where you can prepay basically for tours and things. uh haven't getting fine credit as a milestone choice isn't new what's new is they've added a lot more tiers where you could get some fine credit and they've expanded the maximum amount you could get to three hundred dollars um the new brand new is uh 2k next day award which basically means if you take this award uh the next time you stay at a eligible brand which is hyatt place hyatt house captioned

by hyatt or your cove hotels not you are cove your cove right that's how the hyatt people pronounce it something like that or a cove i don't know um anyway you'll get 2 000 points as a bonus on your stay in addition to however many points you'd normally earn for that stay um this one in particular i could see gifting that one to um stephen pepper for example because he stays at high places and houses frequently right i don't know what i would do with that um at the very high end of the chart uh, you have a Miraval Extra Night Award. And so Miraval properties are these all-inclusive wellness spa resorts. And they're very, very expensive with cash.

And they're very expensive with points. They have their own award chart, which is higher than any other types of hotels on Hyatt's award chart. And what this does is it gives you a buy one, get one. So if you take a Miraval Extra Night Award, you can book one night, like one paid or point paid night at a Miraval hotel and add this award on and get two nights. That's nice. And I assume that's going to be usable any time of year, right? Because in the past, we saw them offer that sometimes as a limited time promotion at a specific time of year, but this will be something you could use whenever it's convenient for you, right? Exactly. So I'm sort of excited about this award because I do really enjoy staying at Miraval Resorts.

Unfortunately, you don't get these until 100 nights. So you need a lot of nights. You need a lot of nights to get one of these puppies. Then speaking of needing a lot of nights, we have the brand new Ultimate Free Night Award, which can be used almost any Hyatt anywhere up to two person occupancy. And I'm saying that because like Hyatt has their all inclusive resorts that charge more if you have more than two people. This is only good for the two people part of the word chart. But still, I mean, it means all the way up to the top category hotel all the way up to

top category all-inclusive um even includes a miraval as well so theoretically you could if you got one of these and you want to stay a miraval you could use this for one night and use your miraval extra night for a second night oh that's awesome that would be a great way to use these awards you know what you know what makes me the most excited I'm sorry I didn't mean to cut you off go ahead any guesses as to how many nights you need to get the ultimate free night award now well since the rewards go up to 150 nights I'm gonna guess that that's the 150 Niter it is it is that that to me was that to me was so disappointing because I just can't see ever getting to 150 nights.

But for those who do, it's a nice award. But the reason that I'm excited about this is because if they have such a thing as an Ultimate Free Night Award, then that's something they could offer as part of a welcome bonus, isn't it? To give you two Ultimate Free Night Awards when you sign up kind of a thing. Wouldn't that be great? I think that would be great. I think you're dreaming though i mean hyatt is not hyatt has not been known to offer like especially good welcome bonuses on their on their cards not for years but but years ago they used to offer two free nights

anywhere right so maybe that was so long ago yeah i hope you're right i hope you're right. All right. Now, the biggest change to milestone rewards is guest of honor awards. This did not exist before as a milestone reward. Guest of honor is today in 2023, just a perk of having globalist status, which is top tier Hyatt status. Today, you can use your points to book anyone else a stay as a guest of honor. And during that stay, they're treated like a globalist. That means they get free breakfast, they get 4 p.m. late checkout, they get room upgrade up to a suite and things like that. So that's been great. And it's been unlimited. But in 2024, starting in January, it's no longer going to be a perk of global status at all. What it'll be is something you earn. It'll be these rewards that you earn along the way. So the good news is it starts at 40 nights. So Globalist is 60 nights. So you didn't

have any way to do Guest of Honor before 60 nights. But now at 40 nights, you'll get one of these. And here's why that's pretty darn cool. When you apply one of these and you can apply them to yourself to your own stays uh you get treated like a globalist so at 40 nights um you know you're far from having globalist status but you can have a stay of up to seven nights where you're treated like a globalist so that's um i think that's pretty nice another nice nice enhancement is that it'll work with paid stays. Previously only worked with points stays. And another enhancement is when you apply one of these awards to someone else for someone else's stay, you earn an elite knight for their stay. So let's say I give one of these

to Steven Pepper and he has a seven night stay. I earn one elite night, not seven, but one. That's nice. But still, that's something. All right. Let's talk about the key takeaways of all these changes to milestone rewards. Suddenly 40 elite nights becomes a very desirable level to get to. At 40 nights, you not only get guest of honor award, as I talked about before, but you get your choice of some other things, including a sweet upgrade award. So that's new. Previously, you didn't get that until 50 knights, where still at 50 knights, you'll still get two. But at 40 knights, you'll get one. And so that means after achieving 40 nights,

imagine you wanted two special stays to use your perks at. You could do one stay of up to seven nights where you spend it all in a suite because you use your suite upgrade. Another where you apply the globalist upgrade, I mean, the guest of honor so that you're treated like a globalist now i i purposely said two different stays because one of the bad things is that that they haven't fixed is that you can't combine these two you can't have a guest of honor stay and apply a suite upgrade award so that's But still, that could be two really special stays after achieving only 40 nights. So I think that's great. They've moved down from 50 nights, how many nights you need to get to to have meaningful benefits. Yeah. Actually, I think for a lot of people that are, I mean, I think it's probably

fairly common that people go on one large vacation a year, right? So if that's you, then if you do 40 nights a year at Hyatt, you're going to get that globalist recognition on that one big important stay, right? So you'll get the globalist benefits. And so I feel like that actually is an enhancement for a lot of people, the ability to get that at 40 nights and apply it to their own stay. I mean, it is disappointing that you can't do both and get the suite upgrade and the guest of honor at the same time. Obviously, you could still get upgraded to a suite, but I think that that's going to be a solution that I think that makes Hyatt an interesting program for someone who stays fewer nights than before, because now it's somewhat competitive with Marriott.

Obviously, if you do 50 nights with Marriott, you'll get platinum status and get breakfast at a lot of places or lounge access at a lot of places. But if you're not going to need it at a lot of is where you want to be able to have free breakfast and free parking on the awards day and those types of things and the late checkout, then you could do that with just 40 nights with Hyatt. So I think that's a net positive. I'm disappointed about not having the ability to guest of honor to an unlimited capacity. But at the same time, I think it's not unreasonable. And, you know, and this, this is probably a positive thing for a lot of folks. Yeah, exactly. There's, there's a little bit of negative for, for certain people around the, the guest of honor thing. Uh, I think the

biggest losers with guest of honor is those who match to globalists through some kind of promotion, um, because you won't have any guest of honor ability at that point because it's no longer going to be a fixed benefit of globalist status. I will say I'm disappointed that Hyatt is not giving more lead time on this, that they've announced this after many people have completed 60 Nights, presumably expecting a benefit, unlimited globalist upgrades, or completed a fast track, like you said, and expected to have the benefit of guest monitor because it's long been a program feature.

To nix that with a month left in the year, at the end of the year, starting January 1st, I'm a little disappointed that Hyatt didn't give more notice on that. Well, it turns out that if you read the terms and conditions, they've got you covered. So here's how it's going to work. If you have earned globalist status for 2024, so that means this year you've earned it for next year, you're going to start in January with five Guest of Honor awards. So that's probably enough for you, but here's where it gets better. If you use those up, uh, you can still call Hyatt and apply them the old fashioned way

up to, uh, the end of your elite period, which is end of February, 2025. So they they've got you covered. Uh, now if you do it that old fashioned way, you're not going to earn elite night for each of your, the stays that you guess, but that's fashioned way, you're not going to earn elite night for each of your the stays that you guess. But that's fair because you weren't expecting to get that when you earned global status this year. So, yeah. So so so they've got you covered there. Very good. OK. Some other takeaways at 100 or more nights. That's where the most valuable new stuff is found. That's where the Miraval extra night thing and the ultimate night are found at 100 plus.

All right. So that's all milestone rewards changing. There's more news though. That's not it. That's not all. That's not it. No, there's so much. Nick picked a great week to be on vacation because it was all me writing all this stuff up.

Right. There are new ways to earn elite nights for meeting and event planners, for travel advisors, including like Hyatt Privé agents, and for Hyatt leverage administrators. Now, Hyatt leverage is something that like any small business can sign up for. And what it does is it gives you a code that you and your employees can use to get like 15% off of Hyatt stays. And when your employees, not you, but when your employees use that code, the spend that will accrue through that is going to be important starting in 2024. Because all of these people I just mentioned will earn two elite nights for every $10,000 on meeting and event stuff at Hyatt, you'll earn two times two, you'll earn four elite nights from that. If you're a travel advisor, Hyatt Privé, for example, and you book for someone a great Hyatt Privé stay, same thing. You'll earn two elite nights per 5K spend. And for small business

owners who are Hyatt leverage people and your employees, spend $5,000 on Hyatt hotels using your code, another two elite nights for you. So that's pretty cool. That's all brand new. Previously, they did have stuff for meeting and event planners, but it was all based on earning elite tiers, not milestone, not nights. So you couldn't earn milestones along the way. Now they'll just be nights just like everything else. You'll earn milestones along the way. So that's really great. That's great.

And so as a high-prevasion, for instance, you could then theoretically earn nights, like really an unlimited number of nights, depending on how much people book through you, right? I mean, that's, you know, yeah. Yeah, I think an active Hyatt Prevay agent will, you know, be, well, it's not unlimited. All of these are limited to earning 60 nights through these things, but that's enough to get globalists. So Hyatt Prevay agents will easily get globalist status and all the milestone perks along the way.

That's fantastic. And I think they could even give some of these awards because they're all giftable. They could give their best customers some of these awards as a perk for booking through them. So a lot of good stuff there. Yeah. Interesting. All right. But that's not it.

We're not done. We're not done yet. We're not done. There's more to go. All right. You remember how not it. We're not done. We're not done yet. There's more to go. All right. You remember how Hyatt bought Mr. and Mrs. Smith? I do remember that. I remember not being very excited about that. I was very excited. You were.

So Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a very large collection of independent hotels that basically they sign up for Mr. and Mrs. Smith. We were told by Hyatt that 80% of those who apply to be Mr. and Mrs. Smith hotels get turned away. So it's highly curated. They only want the best properties. And so IHG used to have a loose partnership with Mr. and Mrs. Smith. That's gone. Now Hyatt owns Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And so they have the ability to go a lot further than a light partnership. And we are now told finally that Hyatt expects to integrate hundreds of Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties by early 2024. We haven't been told what early 2024 means, but we do know that there's a gift card promotion going on that ends end of March 2024. So I think I would bet on an April 1st integration, but we haven't been told that. Seems likely. We were also told that integration will be much tighter than with their SLH partnership.

So small luxury hotels, they have a nice partnership with SLH where when you book SLH properties through Hyatt with points or with cash, you get things like free breakfast and some other perks. This partnership is going to be tighter. And so it's going to be more like booking one of Hyatt's brands. It's going to end less like booking some other thing. And that includes some level of elite recognition on property. We haven't been told what it is. I did ask, ooh, are we going to be able to apply our suite upgrade awards to these properties? And I was told point blank,

do not expect that. So a little hint there, we probably won't get that, but there may be other good stuff. We'll see. We don't know. That's a bummer to me, not only because you can't use them, but because I don't like seeing exceptions carved out because then it makes room for more exceptions to get carved out. So, yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah, that's true. Um, but Mr. Mrs. Smith has some amazing, amazing hotels on their, on their ledger.

And if those come to Hyatt where we can book them with points, and if they jam all these things into the current award charts, it's going to be seriously exciting stuff. Um, so yeah, I am, I am, uh, I am excited about that. I, I think there's good stuff coming. One concern I have is that Hyatt talks so much about why this partnership or this, why owning Mr. and Mrs. Smith is better than like having a partnership like they do with SLH that it made me concerned about their partnership with SLH. Yeah. Nick, you've got a favorite hotel in Lake Como. I looked it up.

It's not part of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Oh, yeah. Bummer. But there is overlap. There are SLH properties that are part of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. So if, and this is just a big if, this is just speculation, if SLH partnership goes away, there'll be some of those hotels that will probably stay because they're part

of Mr. And Mrs. Smith, but yeah, next hotel. Well, I'm just, yeah,

the grand hotel, Victoria. I'm bummed in general because each of the SLH places I've stayed so far. And really each place that I've heard about from anybody who's stayed at one, they've all been like rave reviews. Basically. I like, I don't feel like I've heard people talk in a disappointed

way about an SLH stay yet. So it'd be disappointing if we do lose those. I posted about a disappointing SLH stay a while ago. Why would I read about a disappointing stay? That's right. No, that was a while back. It's no longer part of

SLH, though. So I don't have to worry about that. There are some exceptions, but usually they're good. I expect Mr. and Mrs. Smith to be next level from that. I think it's more highly curated than SLH towards the high end. We'll see. We'll get to learn a lot about it. Okay. Lastly, I just want to remind, we've talked before about how Hyatt has this temporary gift card integration with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, where until end of March of 2024, you can buy these Mr. and Mrs. Smith gift cards, earn five base Hyatt points per dollar when you do that, plus earn one Elite Night credit for every $300 of gift card

purchases. There's some new stuff that I didn't really realize before. if you use your world of hyatt card you'll earn four points per dollar with your uh card because it's counted as hyatt spend so you know that's like nine points per dollar you also do earn elite bonuses on those base points so that's even more not a lot more but right but some more and um also if if you have uh elite status with americans to where you've connected your hyatt and american account and you're earning american airlines miles with each hyatt stay this counts so so you should for each 300 get 300 american airlines miles and 300 loyalty points. So it's actually looking a lot better than when I first looked at it. And yeah, so that's something worth considering.

It's a way to, you know, if you wait till January to start buying these, it's a way to start earning towards those new milestone rewards. Yeah, that's interesting. So you'll have some opportunity to pick up some additional late nights. Now, what about so the promotion on these gift cards runs to the end of March, right? So what about when we had previously said when you use these, you have to use them through some special website or something? Do we have any idea what's going to happen after March 31st when they integrate more tightly? No, we don't. Yeah. So currently, you have to book a prepaid stay through Mr. and Mrs. Smith, or we've been told by readers and listeners that it is possible to book a refundable stay and call

Mr. and Mrs. Smith and apply these gift cards. So it's not as bad as we thought from that point of view. But what happens after end of March? I did ask a Hyatt rep about this. And while she didn't know, I think exactly what happens. What she did say is there's no expiration date on these gift cards so uh whatever happens with the integration and everything there will be some way to use them for these days um so i think that's intriguing because we previously said oh i think the chance of sort of double dipping is is gone but I think this kind of leaves open that possibility that, and please don't take me as like this is certain, I don't know this at all, but I do think there's a chance that after, that once the integration really happens, that there'll be some way to use these Mrs. Smith gift cards for stays booked through Hyatt. And if that's true, then you should both earn late nights for the stay and when you bought these gift cards. So if that

double dip happens, that would be a terrific, terrific opportunity. Yeah, that'll be fantastic. So hopefully we'll keep our fingers crossed for that and hope that that comes comes to comes to pass. All right. So I mean I mean, that's pretty awesome overall. I think that there's a lot of positive to be had there. Is there anything really negative that stands out to you about any of this news? Is there anything that you're like, apart from the guest of honor being limited, is there anything where you're like, oh, that's really a bummer? Yeah.

Yeah, there is. First, let me say the biggest positive is probably that they made all these changes but didn't change their award charts. So we're excited that they have award charts, unlike most other hotel programs. They didn't change them. They seem to be happy with what they have. So that didn't happen. I was expecting the Category 1 through 7 awards to become like Category 1 through 8. And yeah, they did introduce this ultimate free night award in addition to Category 1 through 7 awards. But you have to get 150 nights to get there. That's almost six months, right? Yeah. So they did not enhance the category one through seven awards. They also didn't.

They probably should have moved their category one to four awards to category one to five, you know, because they're just not as valuable as they used to be. So those are a couple of disappointments. One other one, they still, on free night awards, they still have 180 day time period to use them. What's with that? You know, I mean, even Marriott gives you a full year, but Hyatt's only giving you half a year.

Yeah, well, if you want to use it for a specific stay, like holidays, for instance, then it encourages you to not stay at Hyatt. Right. So you don't earn the free certificate too early or whatever. It's ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So. So, yeah. So. But those are minor quibbles that we already had, basically. Right. Right. Exactly.

The negatives are mostly around what didn't happen that we wished had. Right. Right. All right. Well, overall, we wished had. Right, right. All right. Well, overall, pretty good news there. All right. Well, that wraps that up. Now we return you to your regularly recorded Frequent Mile Around the Air episode.

Another piece for this week's award talk is I wanted to quickly talk about the Park Hyatt Vienna because I've been here at the Park Hyatt Vienna for the last couple of days. It's been a great stay. I've been in a Diplomat suite, which is one of their premium suites, which I booked as a premium suite award. And I wanted to talk about this because in Europe, you often run into the situation where hotel rooms only accommodate two or three people. And so if you're a family of four or more than that, it can be very difficult to find a single room that will accommodate everybody. And that was certainly the case here. The only room type that would accommodate five people was a two-bedroom suite. And that was not something you could book with points, at least not on the

website. So anyway, what I did was instead of booking a regular room, I did see a premium suite award available and I wanted that. So I booked this premium suite, the diplomat suite, which again, still only accommodates three people like a standard room. But when I looked at the room rates, I noticed that the diplomat suite was significantly more expensive than a two bedroom suite at a cash rate. So I looked up the name of the general manager and I sent an email and I just nicely said, listen, I saw that this diplomat suite was available so i booked it we actually have five people because on this particular trip it's my wife and i and her sister and our kids so there's five of us three adults and two kids and i explained that we have three adults and two kids and so i booked the diplomat suite because it looks plenty big enough for all

of us and we'd be happy with a roll away and blah blah blah or if that's not possible i noticed that the two-bedroom suite actually has a lower cash rate. I wondered if maybe we could be blocked into that instead. And I just asked nicely, and I knew that I may very well be told no. And if not, I had a reservation at the Andaz instead, which would have been fine. It would have been an okay place to stay. It would have been a lot fewer points, many fewer points. If it was just my wife and I, we probably would have stayed at the Andes for the difference in points. However, with the kids, we thought it'd

be easier to be closer to the Christmas markets if we could. And the Park Eye at Vienna has a very good location in the middle of Vienna. So anyway, I emailed and much to my surprise, they wrote back and not only said, yes, if you'd like to put a roll away in the diplomat suite, that's fine. And we could have three adults and two kids. And they said there would be plenty of space. I was right. Or if not, the other option was that I could book a standard suite, a park suite, plus a standard room, and they can connect those. That's how they make their two-bedroom suite is a connecting room with the standard park suite. So that would have meant paying more points because a standard suite would have been 48,000 points per night. The standard room is 30,000. So it would have cost me

78,000 points per night altogether. Whereas the diplomat suite during my dates was 60,000 points per night for a couple of nights and 70,000 for another. So I would have had to pay a few more points if I wanted to book the two separate rooms. But what made that interesting was that those two rooms were not available to book on points at the time that I emailed, but they wrote back and said that I could do that alternatively. They would let me do that instead. So even though those rooms didn't show up as available on the website at all to book with points or with cash at the time, that was an option. That's a great tip. Just in general,

like not necessarily with that particular hotel, but just sort of in general that it could be worth booking something, knowing it's cancelable, and then contact the hotel and see if they can accommodate you in what you really want. That's really cool. Was your diplomat suite, how many bathrooms was in that? So two, I mean, one, one half bath and then, yeah. And then a full bathroom. Yeah. So that, that worked out well and, uh, and it's spacious, has a large living room, dining table, a desk, et cetera. So it's, it's quite large, quite nice. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Yep. So very convenient. And again, like you said, I think the takeaway for me, the biggest surprise for me was when

they offered something that I couldn't get otherwise. And that only happens when you ask, I guess. So it's always worth asking. And of course, now that I've said that, I'm sure that that'll never happen for anybody else at this hotel now. But at least you'll know that that's something that could happen if you ask for it. Right. So good luck.

All right. That, my friends, brings us to this week's main event. This week's main event, the art of extreme stackery. I love that word, stackery. Extreme stacking for extreme rewards. Well, this is all Nick, right? I mean, so we took... Well, I do engage in some stackery now and then, Craig. Nick is a master of stackery. And so we took an outline of a recent post he did to outline today's topic and I'll chime in whenever relevant, but take it away, Nick. Well, so when we talk about extreme stackery, what we're talking about here, just briefly,

for anybody who's not familiar with a made up word that you've probably haven't ever heard before today, pretty understandable. So what we mean when we talk about stackery is stacking multiple levels of discounts, deals, etc, rewards, in order to earn as much back as you possibly can when you're spending money on just about anything. So there are oftentimes ways to stack multiple ways to save or to earn more for whatever you're spending. So when we talk about doing that online, and when you're shopping online, and I know many people out there probably are at this time of year, you always want to start out with a shopping portal. And so shopping portals, very briefly for someone who doesn't know, are websites you might have seen on TV like Rakuten or Top Cashback. I've seen those

advertised on TV plenty of times. And so you go to one of those websites and you click through their link to go to Macy's.com or BestBuy.com or wherever it is that you want to spend your money and you buy whatever it is you're going to buy from Macy's, let's say, but you start out by clicking through a link at Rakuten.com and go to Macy's. You check out, you buy whatever it is you're buying at Macy's, and then you earn points or cash back from Rakuten. They give you rewards for having clicked through their link because of course they earn some commission based on whatever you buy from Macy's. And so basically they're sharing some of that commission with you. So that's the general concept of a shopping portal. Now, I mentioned two of them, but there are tons of

them out there. So there's lots of different cash back portals. Every major airline in the US has a shopping portal and quite a few foreign airlines have them now. And then you have a bunch of different credit card programs that have portals also. And then that one that I mentioned already, Rakuten, actually gives you the option of earning cash back or earning Amex membership rewards points. So there are a lot of different shopping portals out there. So you want to compare the portal rates. And in order to do that, we very frequently recommend a website called cashbackmonitor.com. Cashback Monitor is a portal comparison site. They list tons of different shopping portals, many that I haven't even used because there's just so many on there that I haven't even used all of them.

And they're not all cashback. That's true. Yes. Yes. Yes. Like I said, you can earn airline miles, hotel points. Many of the hotel programs have shopping portals also and credit card points. So you've got lots of them. Yeah. And Cashback Monitor, despite its name, lists all of those as well as the cashback sites as well. So yeah, yeah. I love that you used Macy's as an example when you're discussing how to click through a portal because that's always my example for some reason. And it's weird because I don't even remember the last time I shopped at Macy's. I don't know if I've ever bought anything online from Macy's, but yeah, for some reason, it's the example that always comes to mind. Because it just seems like such a general, like everybody can imagine shopping,

even if you don't, right? I don't, but I can imagine shopping at Macy's. That's what it must be. Yeah. I guess that's what it's funny you mentioned that because you're right. I never buy anything from Macy's generally either. But the next tip when we're talking about shopping portals is don't ignore Capital One shopping. And so one of the reasons we say don't ignore Capital One shopping, let me stop. Capital One shopping is another shopping portal. And it has nothing to do with Capital One except for the fact that they own it and branded it with their name. But you don't need to have a Capital One credit card. You don't need a Capital One account of any type. It's just a shopping portal like Rakuten or TopCashback or American Airlines

Advantage eShopping or all of the other portals out there. It's just another portal. And they advertise cashback rates. And actually, those rewards that you earn, you can redeem for gift cards. That's the way that works. You don't actually get cash. You get rewards that you can redeem for gift cards. But Capital One Shopping often has really good targeted offers. And in fact, we just mentioned Macy's a second ago. And the other day, I got a targeted offer for 24% cash back at Macy's. Now, I don't shop often at Macy's, but at 24% cash back, it did make me wonder, what do they sell that I might want? Because that's quite a return on shopping. And there's been tons of great Capital One Shopping Awards. I just saw that

my wife got an email 16.5% back at IHG Hotels. I have 25% back at Allbirds the other day. There's just so many of these coming all the time. And oftentimes, many of them are good for travel-related things, Viator, TripAdvisor. I've seen north of 20%, almost 30% at times. Giftcards.com, we've seen offers in the 12, 15, 18, 20, 27% back or something. I think somebody got one day. I got an 80 back on 450 the other day for giftcards.com. So just great targeted offers. You've gotten a bunch of these too, right?

Yes. Same kind of things as you. And it's amazing. And when you see these like 30% back type of offers coming through, it's just like, you know, it's doing what it's intending, which is making you think, I should be shopping at this vendor or whatever it is, because those rewards are huge. And they're often big known vendors that... It's one thing to do one that you've never heard of that might be jacking up prices 300%, but when they're national chains that almost certainly have at least some things that are reasonably priced, that's an amazing deal.

Preston Pyshko, Yeah, it really can be. And I've talked before about their targeted offers. I just mentioned a lot of the best offers are targeted offers. And so how do you figure out what your targeted offers are? Well, on the Capital One Shopping website, if you go to the website, don't bother with the search feature up at the top. So there's like a little search box where you can search for the name of a store. Don't even use that. Instead, if you start to scroll down, you'll see different stores listed and there's a filter off to the top right corner. If you hit the filter, then you can pick the

stores that you're interested in seeing. And sometimes you'll see multiple rates listed for the same store. Just click through the button that has the highest rate and that's what you're going to get. So it doesn't really make sense. Sometimes there'll be, again, like three different rates for the same store, but you just want to click through the highest one, whatever that is. And also they have an extension, a Chrome extension and an app. And sometimes the rates in those things all differ a little bit. So you got to look for which one has the best rates, but that's one area to find targeted offers. And the other is- Let me just add in there that when the Capital One Shopping says something like 17% back for the Fitbit watch or something, and you're like, I don't want that. It doesn't that one product they're showing. And that's just an example.

That rate will apply, like you said, to anything they sell with very limited exceptions. Like sometimes I've seen for Office Depot or Office Max, it shows a Visa gift card or something like a Visa gift card in the example product. But anybody who shops or plays this manufactured spending game enough knows that OfficeMax and Office Depot don't actually process the charges for gift cards. When you buy through their site, it actually goes, I think, through like gift card mall or something. And so those purchases aren't actually processed by Office Depot and OfficeMax. So you won't earn the cash back for that. But that's a pretty rare example where something like that comes into play.

Like if it shows the Fitbit at Macy's, well, you don't need to buy the Fitbit. You can buy whatever you want at Macy's. And the same is true for lots of other stores. Walmart is on there, tons of different department stores. And yeah, that can be misleading. So great point. And I was starting to say, just before you jumped in with that, that they send emails all the time too. And it's worth clicking and opening those emails because sometimes you'll see really incredible rates at stores that you might want to shop at in the emails. So don't ignore them. They have some of the best rates and we wouldn't be talking about this if it weren't for the fact that they're so far beyond what everybody else is offering. Some of these 20, 25, 30% back type rates are just

leaps and bounds beyond what you're going to find elsewhere. Yeah, that's true. Although Rakuten occasionally has these deals where they go as high as like 15 or 20%. And that's true cash back or even better membership rewards points at 20X. And I would take Rakuten 20X over Capital One Shopping 25% or even 30%, maybe. I think I would. True. Yeah, good point. In most cases, I would too, because I'm taking my Rakuten as membership rewards points. And membership rewards points are more valuable to me than cash back that can only be redeemed for gift cards. So yeah, that's a great point. Speaking of portals,

all right, and we've talked quite a bit about Capital One Shopping there, you want to sign up for new portal offers, because oftentimes they'll give you a bonus for signing up for a new portal offer. And the reason I said, we just talked about Capital One Shopping is because we've seen them offering lately, a referral bonus for some people where both sides learn $75 back after somebody signs up through your link, installs the browser extension and spends just $10. So for instance, I referred my wife and she bought a $10, made a $10 order on walmart.com, earned 15% cash back on that $10 offer. And both she and I will get $75 in rewards from Capital One because she signed up through my referral link. So it'll be $150 altogether in rewards on that $110 purchase.

You can do that same kind of thing with lots of other portals. Capital One Shopping, that $75 offer has been targeted. Not everybody has the ability to refer to that. And that's the highest I think I've ever seen from a shopping portal. More commonly, we'll see Rakuten now and then offer $40 for both sides, or you can take that as 4,000 membership rewards points. On TopCashBack, sometimes offers like $30. Beef Ruggles had a $30 offer, I think, recently for Freakamiler readers anyway. So you could stack some of those on top of your shopping in order to just earn additional rewards. So that can be a great way to stack up a little bit more. Absolutely. And don't forget to do it in multiplayer mode. So if you have a spouse, a significant other of some sort that plays the game with you, well, sign them up too. Like I said, I referred my wife because I figured, well, I've had Capital

One shopping for a long time and I've been meaning to get her onto it, but I just hadn't gotten around to it. And 75 bucks for each of us was enough motivation for me to do that. And in fact, also to recommend it to several other family and friends and say, hey, you should check out this shopping portal because it's going to be pretty rewarding just to check it out. So don't forget to do that. Encourage other folks to get into it. Yeah, absolutely. That reminds me, I need to get my wife and son on there. Yeah, yeah, exactly. For sure. It's a great offer. And we don't know how long, I don't think that one's going to last. I don't think it said what the expiration was on that particular offer. So check those out. So compare your portal rates, don't ignore Capital One

Shopping, sign up for new portal offers. So shopping portals, you're always going to start with a shopping portal. But before you click through that shopping portal, you got to know the best shopping practices. How do you handle this, Greg? What do you do in order to make sure that you're going to earn the cash back? Because, you know, haven't you ever been skeptical? You click through a portal that maybe you're not going to get the advertised rate. Have you had problems with that? How can you avoid that type of problem? that is going to basically try to earn the commission for the sale for the store you're going to. And the way to avoid that happening is, oh, and I should say, if that happens, if some other site earns the commission, not the portal that you intended, then you're not going to get paid from the portal. The portal won't even know about the purchase probably.

So the way to avoid that is to do your comparison shopping on one browser and do your actual purchasing on another. Just have a clean browser instance set up just for shopping. And that's where you start clean at the portal. Once you know what you're going to buy, click through, buy the thing, and you should be good to go. So now what does that mean, a clean browser instance? Can you maybe shed some light on how you would do that? Yeah, I mean, there's multiple ways. In Chrome, Chrome lets you set up multiple sort of personas

where you can click near the top of the screen. There's a little circle that has maybe a picture of you or a picture of something that represents you. And if you click there, there's an option to choose other profiles if you've created them. And if you haven't, what you could do is click add. And so you can add a profile and call it shopping, something like that, or portal shopping. And then whenever, and then the cookies and everything will be completely separate on that profile than on any other profile you work with. And so that's one way, for example, to keep a clean browser for portal shopping. There you go. So you can keep one that's just totally clean just for that. And in fact, I do that for Capital One Shopping. I have a Capital One Shopping

browser instance set up like a guest profile set up for just that. So that way, when I'm clicking around in that browser, hopefully the only entity collecting information about me is Capital One Shopping. And I want them to be collecting some info and trying to figure out what they should target me with. And so I don't know whether that's even working anymore, but it certainly did seem for a while anyway, in the beginning that the more you clicked around in websites, in whichever browser where you had their extension installed, more likely you would be to get offers for those particular websites that you're visiting if you weren't purchasing anyway, to encourage you to go back and purchase. So yeah, so you want to keep something clean. So that way you just click through the portal and check out and buy.

You want to do your shopping around like checking coupon codes and looking at comparison sites and Google Shopping and whatever else that needs to be in a different browser than the one where you buy, or at least the best practice is to do it that way, because that way you can avoid any chance that some other site steals the click. Right, right. The one exception for me is I do all my comparison shopping on the browser that has the Capital One Shopping Portal, and I will buy through that one as well. I could set up two instances, one for comparison shopping, one for browsing. But as Nick mentioned, by having the browser extension set up on the browser instance where you do all your comparison shopping, it's watching. It's watching everything you're looking at. And it will often email you a deal on the product or the store that you are shopping at. And sometimes those deals are fantastic. It actually also has some built-in

really useful features. For example, when looking at products in Amazon, it'll tell you whether the price you're looking at, if it can find a better price somewhere else, or if there's a coupon that can be applied to make it cheaper, it can automatically apply coupon codes. I know there are other extensions that do this too, but it can do that for you. And I've actually had it happen a time or two where I didn't even think to look for coupon codes and it automatically found some for me. So that's some nice features there too. That's awesome. Very good. Very good. All right. So there's your shopping portal best practices to be careful and make sure that the clicks don't

get stolen, so to speak. And what's your, I mean, I know you probably don't have this drilled down, but in general, like, what do you feel like your success rate is when clicking through a portal? I mean, do you have a lot of problems clicking through portals and not getting paid? Do you find any rhyme or reason to that? How do you avoid that problem? Apart from anything else you said there, is there anything else you do or any other advice you have or tips you have or thoughts you have on that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so some people complain about having a lot of trouble with that where whenever they buy stuff, it doesn't get tracked and they blame this or that portal. In my experience, I've had great luck. And I think it has to do with doing safe portal

practices that in general, all of my purchases get tracked. There are some exceptions like where, I don't know, I remember like the Wyndham shopping portal, it may be a track, but it never paid. I had some weird stuff happening with that, but Wyndham is just weird in so many ways. So that's not a surprise. But my general approach is to practice safe portal practices. I don't sweat the small stuff. So I don't obsessively watch to see,

did this or that pay out? But if I'm going to do something really big where I'm expecting a big payout, then I'll set myself a reminder to check that the portal tracked it and check that I got paid from the portal. And I can't think of a single time where I haven't gotten paid either. I think one of the very few times it didn't happen, I sent an email to support or whatever and they paid me. So very high percentage. Yeah, same, same. yeah, very high percentage. Yeah. Same, same,

very, very high percentage. I don't track the, like, if I'm going to earn 68 miles from a portal, I don't sweat that at all. I don't, I don't even bother to follow up and make sure that those 68 miles posted, I figured they probably did. And if they didn't, it's probably not worth the time to follow up for them anyway. So, and I hopefully didn't make the purchase for those 68 miles. So I don't worry about those tiny little ones like that, but I've had plenty of big orders where I've earned hundreds of dollars in cash back on a single order. And almost every single time it's automatically posted one time I can think of when it didn't on a large order.

And like you said, an email to support, got it fixed. So yeah, very good, very good success with portals. But we do hear reports, like you said, all the time from people who say that this one doesn't work or that one doesn't work. And I just, I don't know, I've had very good success by following the safe portal practices for years. And it's not because I'm a blogger and they know I'm a blogger. I mean, I was doing much more portal shopping long before I was a blogger. I was just buying and reselling stuff. And shopping portals were the main way I was earning points at that point, not even credit cards. It was just shopping portals. And

I earned tons of rewards through shopping portals without a problem. So there's a lot to be said there. Okay. So we got that. Before you click through the shopping portal at all though, so now you're prepared by having your best practices. You know, you're going to go through a portal, but before you get there, you want to check for card linked offers because there are lots and lots of different card linked offers out there that can help you save more or get more back anyway for whatever it is that you're spending. So there's lots of them out there. Of course, Amex offers we talk about quite often, and we keep a database of current Amex offers.

So if you go to frequentmiler.com slash current dash Amex dash offers or see the link in the show notes, that's going to be the offers that we've seen on our cards. We update that pretty regularly. So you can check and see what offers are new or what we've found or search for a particular store in the search box to see if there's a current offer around that might be on one of your cards. If you've got a whole bunch of Amex cards and you're like, oh, I don't want to spend forever searching through, you can search our database. Although now also Amex has made it much easier to search your own Amex offers by just typing in a search box there too. You still have to switch card to card though. So that can be a little tedious if you have a lot of Amex cards, but that's only one and not the only one.

So you've got Amex offers, Chase offers, City Merchant offers, US Bank cards have those offers now, Bank of America cards have offers, Wells Fargo cards have offers. So there's tons of different card linked offers. And so you link one of those to your card and then click through the shopping portal, you can earn both the card linked offer and the shopping portal rewards. Yeah, yeah. And there are ones, there are plenty also that are not affiliated with a bank. So Rakuten, for example, they have not just the shopping portal, but also card-linked offers. And then there's all kinds of apps and things that do it as well. Steven wrote a nice post listing all of those kind of card link offers. So you can check

that out as well. And, and you know, what's cool about these is they're great also for when you're doing in-person shopping, not just for online shopping. Yeah, absolutely. They're good for in-person shopping, not just online shopping. And also sometimes the in-store offers will work even when you're shopping online. So that varies. It depends from store to store, but there are times when that works. So it can be worth syncing up an in-store offer, even if you're buying from the website, just to see if it does track, because sometimes those will. If the website codes essentially the same as a physical store would, then you may well

earn that and your portal rewards and whatever else. So it's worth checking for those. And Stephen's post talks about which ones stack, because sometimes you can stack more than one of these card linked offers. And I'm not just talking about, obviously, if you have an Amex card, you can't get a chase offer on that purchase because you're using an Amex card. But there are all of these other apps and some of those apps will stack. You might be able to link the same card to two different apps and earn rewards through

two different apps at once. So that's great. It's good to check for those opportunities anyway. So those are definitely a bunch of ways to stack. Now, all of those out of the way, don't forget, it's not too late to open a new credit card because if you're going to make a large purchase, you may be able to open a new credit card, either A, if you're planning far enough in in advance a few days in advance of your purchase, very easy then to open a card and most issuers not all but most issuers will overnight a card

to you upon request. If you call and say I just got approved and I'd really like to get the card because I have a big purchase coming up. Again, not all issuers, but most of them will send you a card in an expedited way. But that aside, you can also get an instant card number. So even if you're not planning days in advance, some issuers will issue an instant number. Amex is well known to do this. Most of the time when you get approved for a new Amex, you'll get the option to generate an instant number and you'll get an instant number that you can then use. You may not get access to your full credit line right away, but enough usually to make a purchase or two. So that can be a way if I know I'm going to make a relatively large purchase, I might say, oh, well, I could get myself halfway to a signup

bonus. If I open a new Amex card, get myself halfway to an intro bonus or something. So that can be one of the ways to do this. They're not the only show in town that gives an instant number though. No, um, built is another one. They give a, they give a number right away that you can start using your, your built card, uh, right when you get it. Um, one little warning though, if you're hoping to take advantage of built rent day, and it's, uh, just a few days before rent day, which is the first of each month. Built has a clause on the rent day terms that says that you have to have had the card for at least five days or something like that for you to participate in rent day promotions. So don't do it

for that reason, at least not if it's that close before the first of the month. But yeah, but in general, you need a card right away. Built is another good option. Yeah, there you go. So you might consider those things if you need a new card right away. And that, again, can be something you can stack because your spending can go towards a new welcome bonus. And you can also, of course, see if there are any card linked offers or go through a shopping portal. All the other things that we've talked about also apply. But earning a welcome bonus, obviously, is one of the quickest, fastest ways to jumpstart your points to get more points. So that can be a good deal. All right. So those are a bunch of different ways to stack and probably not the only ways,

but a bunch of the ways that we frequently stack anyway. We didn't really talk about finding coupons, but there are coupon codes out there. And of course, I always love to see a good coupon code that stacks. If you're going through a shopping portal, be aware that portal terms will usually say that if you use a coupon code that's not found on the portal website, that it may invalidate your cash back. And whether or not that's enforced really varies a lot. But generally speaking, if it's a unique coupon code, one that's tailored just to you, you're almost guaranteed it's not going to work with a shopping portal. You're probably going to lose your shopping portal rewards when you enter that unique coupon code. In most cases, if it's a more general one that's open to everyone, there's a chance. But again,

if it's not shown in the shopping portal, then you don't really have anything to follow up with if you don't get the rewards. So just be aware of that. But oftentimes, the most popular codes are going to be found on those shopping portal sites. So that won't often be a problem. Yeah. And this is going to sound weird, but if you see the coupon code on one portal, but not on another one, and you'd rather use the other one, the other one probably will work. The only problem is, as Nick said, if things don't work out, contact us to support. You could have some trouble there because of using a coupon code. But even then, I really doubt it would come up, but it's possible. Yeah, that's a good point because generally those coupon codes, if they're available to one affiliate, they're going to be available to all of the affiliates

probably. So yeah, good point there. All right. And one more word about shopping portals is that if you've only clicked through them to sites like Omaha Steaks or 1-800-Flowers, then you may have realized that prices can be different depending on where you click through. That's not common. Like that's not going to happen with Macy's or Walmart or something like that. It's basically just going to be those sites more like the Omaha Steaksy type sites, where they, you know, they have a million different links for different prices for the same stuff. So, so that's not the general experience you're going to get. It's going to be a pretty slim list of stores where you're going to run into that problem.

Yeah. That's a great point because there are those few sites that are really weird that way. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what about finding deals? So you got a bunch of different skills for stacking them. How do you go about finding the deals in the first place? One of the sites that I use most frequently is slickdeals.com or slickdeals.net, I think is what it is, but I'm sure you could use either one of your browser. So Slick Deals is one I've been using for a long time, and this is just, I'm a creature of habit. So it's the habit that I've built to use that site. But one of the things I like about it, especially at the time of year, when we see a lot of sales, is its live view. Because there's this live.slickdeals.net or.com, whichever one it is. You'll have to check the show notes for

the link. If you go there, you'll see things immediately as they're posted. And so it gives you three different columns. One column will show you the most recent comments on everything across the site and the various forums. One column will show you the most recently posted deals, period. And then one column will show you the most recent ratings. I don't really pay attention to the ratings very much at all because, well, I shouldn't say that. I don't pay attention to the most recent ratings. Those don't necessarily matter very much to me. But overall, the deal ratings can be helpful sometimes since they're generally user-generated, I think. But I find the comment section to be really useful to me because sometimes I'll see that a deal got posted and I think,

oh, well, that's not applicable to me. I don't shop at Macy's. And then somebody in the comment says, oh, wow, Macy's is selling an iPad and this coupon code applies to the iPad. And I'm like, oh, I want an iPad. No, that's just a made up example because I don't want an iPad and Macy's doesn't sell them, I don't think. But there have been plenty of times where I've discovered a deal like that, that I wouldn't have even thought about that website for that particular deal, if not for the fact that I saw it fly by in a comment on the live view. So that I think can be useful if you don't want to have to click through each one and read through a million pages dialogue. You'll sometimes just catch chatter that will maybe pique your interest. So I like the live view for that. And I use the app because I just find it easy to use on the phone. through that and see what's getting posted, what's getting likes and what people are talking about,

because oftentimes you can find decent deals. And it's not the only deal site. There's lots of other ones out there. Dan's Deals also has their own forums, plenty of deals there, lots of travel related ones make it to the sort of front page of their website. So that can be a good one for folks in our hobby. They have plenty of that type of content, but then also lots of good stuff in their forums and plenty of other deal websites out there. That's just one of the ones that I happen to use quite a bit. Twitter or X or whatever they want to call it these days. That's another site that I still use for alerts. I don't use it like day to day.

I just, I never really was much of a Twitter or, tweeter, whatever you would say, Twitter user. But I follow Dan Steele's and Doctor of Credit and a few other sites like that on Twitter. And I find that useful for the notifications because I'll get those notifications on my phone and they pop up. And so it kind of draws my attention because it's a different place where I don't really do anything else. So I'm not getting notifications about other unrelated things. So I don't ignore it. I'll actually look at it from time to time. So I find that to be useful for those deal sites. It could also be useful for FrequentMiler, just FYI. If you want to add that to your list of those things to get notifications from, you can certainly get notifications of what we post there

also. So those are a couple checking discounted, rarely discounted stores and brands. If you're a Black Friday, Cyber Monday type of a shopper or those types of sale days, then I find often the best stuff, maybe not the best stuff. The stuff that interests me more tends to be things that I can't get a discount on during the rest of the year because I find a lot of things you can get a discount on just about any time of year. But there are some stores that will only discount their stuff at that time of year. So that can be a good time to shop for those types of things and whatever you can stack because shopping portals will often have increased rates at that time of year also. So that can be useful to look at.

Yeah. So one other tool that I just stumbled upon on the morning that we're recording this is that Chrome seems to have slipped in a shopping helper into their browser. So I was on like amazon.com looking at a particular product and I saw a little bubble appear in the URL bar that said low price. And after a little while, it changed from words into a little tiny shopping bag. And if I click on the little shopping bag or the low price words, it popped up a side panel that showed the history of the price across websites for the history of the low price for this particular product. And then there's a link to click to see other places you could buy this thing. But also, you can click to be alerted if the price goes down from what

you're currently looking at. So again, it's not really for finding deals in the first place, but for finding out if what you're looking at is a good deal. I know you like to use Camel, Camel, Camel, Nick, but this seems to me so much easier because it shows up right in the process of browsing, you know, so you don't have to go to another site and try to find the same product there. Yeah. Yeah. No, I thought, and in fact, when I saw it, when you shared that with us, Camel, Camel, Camel is something I thought of right away, but I agree. This seems much easier. The Camel, Camel, Camel website for reference for folks who aren't familiar, it just tracks Amazon. And so you can put in a link to any Amazon product and it'll show you the price history for both Amazon and third-party sellers, new and I think used also. So you can

get a sense of what the price has been over the last long time. I don't even know how far back the price history goes, but it's quite long. So you can see what the highest prices have been, lowest prices, the average prices. And so now you've got that Chrome shopping helper that can give you a similar experience, but probably with more stores than just Amazon. Yeah. It's not just limited to Amazon. I checked it out with Dell and a couple other places where it works as well. So that's really cool. It is because this, I'm glad that you added this because that's important because one of the things I mentioned, really the whole impetus behind me writing a post about this

was that somebody in Frequent Mer insiders had posted saying that they heard that the tuesday after cyber monday is a great day to get travel deals and they wanted to know if that's true and what kind of travel deals to look out for and i think that's being marketed now as travel tuesday i think giving tuesday i know was originally a thing but i think i've heard it referenced as travel tuesday now the day after cyber monday and and to me that seems like such just a marketing gimmick. There's travel deals all year long. Anybody who plays in our pool knows that any given Tuesday, you could potentially score a slamming deal depending

on how the stars align and what the algorithm- Maybe even a Wednesday if you're lucky. Right. Right. Exactly. Or Thursday or Friday or any other day of the week. There's no one specific day when you're going to get a great travel deal necessarily. So that was kind of the whole impetus behind writing the post initially. And one of the things that somebody mentioned in the comments that I absolutely, you know, 100% resonated with me, it was the best way to get a great deal is to search all the time so that you recognize a great deal when you see one, because that I think is probably the most important thing, knowing that you're getting a good deal. It's hard to know these days, is this a good price? Is it not a good price? And that's where something like that Chrome Shopping Helper, I think becomes such a valuable tool because that click can show you, it can do the work for you, right? You don't have to search all the time. If you can see the history of it, see what the price has been, then you'll know, okay, is

this a good price or is this just somebody trying to separate me from my money? So I say that I'm getting a great deal. And my assumption is it's only going to pop off if it knows it has data about that thing that you're looking at, but still, it's great, great, great new thing. All right. I'm going to add something here, Nick. I'm going to ask you to tell us about your best stacking deal ever that you personally did. But while you're thinking of it, I'm going to give you time to think about it because

I'm going to tell my story, my best stack ever. I've had some really good stacks over time, but this one I got 100% off. Here's how it worked. 100%. You didn't buy anything. Well, here's how it worked. My wife went to, she had picked out some things that she wanted to buy on a particular store. And she was like, oh, which credit card should I use?

I said, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. Make sure to log into my account on that store because I have a rewards account on that store. You'll get store rewards from there. So she logs in and then she had to find the product again because it wasn't in her card anymore once she logged in as me. And so she found it and then she's asking again, what credit card should I use? And so I was like, oh, wait, wait, wait, you've got to start at a portal. You've got to click through a portal to get to this store. So she backs out, goes to a portal, clicks through. And then I tell her which credit card to use and she's starting to put that in. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, we can buy a gift card and earn points buying the gift card before you buy that. So stop what you're doing. Let's go through another portal to buy a gift card. And she got so frustrated and so upset. She never bought whatever the heck that was. Great tip. 100% off. 100% off. Great tip. No, that's a good point because you spend too much time doing this and you might drive yourself a little bit crazy. Or you're off. Yeah, right. Right. That's why I was loosely using yourself.

Yes, absolutely. Or significant other. And not only that, there's been plenty of times where I've wasted so much time trying to figure out how to stack it that the deal has died before I've gotten a chance to actually buy it because I wasted too much time thinking, oh, can I stack this? Can I stack that? And blah, blah, blah. So yeah, that's a good point. Don't get too lost in the weeds. I don't know what my best stack was, but I know that there were plenty of times I missed out on something because I got too lost in the weeds of trying to figure out the best way to do it. So don't forget that the rewards are not necessarily the most important thing, especially if you're getting an amazing, amazing deal. There have been times where I've seen that amazing, incredible deal and wasted so much time. And then I think about it often with business

class and first class mistake fairs, trying to figure out the perfect dates for the trip or whatever. And I almost always regret that I didn't just go ahead and book something right away because I'm not going to get that price again. And so I should have just made a trip work kind of a thing. So same thing goes if you find a fantastic deal, probably just get the deal. That's probably more important. All right. All right. I think that wraps that up for the most part. And I think that will bring us then to this week's question of the week. And think that wraps that up for the most part. And I think that will bring us then to this week's question of the week. And so this week's question of the week is one that came in our frequent miler insiders, Facebook group from Kyle. Last week, we talked about Southwest

companion pass and how the timing is right to get bonuses and earn the Southwest companion pass as early as possible in the year. So you can have it for two years. And Kyle asked our Frequent Miler insiders recently, actually, I think even before we recorded the show, though, and said, I'm going to apply for both the Southwest business and personal cards. Now, of course, remember, if you listen to last week's show, you know, there's five different cards, two business and three personal. He meant he's going to apply for a business and a personal card, consumer card for the companion pass. Kyle asks, should I apply for the personal or the business one first, or does it matter? How much of a gap in time should I leave between applications?

I'm well below 524, so no issue there. Thanks in advance. So if you're going to go after the companion pass with two welcome bonuses, I don't think we talked about which one you should open first if you're going to open a business and a consumer card. Does it matter? Is there any strategy there, Greg? Should you do them both on the same day, in the same week, in the same month? What do people have to consider? Well, so if you're close to going over 524, I could see an argument for going for the business card first because that one is not going to add to your 524 count.

That means that when Chase goes to look at how many cards you've signed up card in the past 24 months, it won't matter that you did that one. And so if you do that, and let's say you're denied initially for the consumer card, but you got approved for the business card and you applied for that first, then the good news about doing it that way is then you could try again and wait a month and you applied for that first, then the good news about doing it that way is then you could try again in, you know, wait a month and try again for the personal card and you'll still, you know, have a chance and you'll still be under 524. So that's one argument for doing the business card first.

I could see an argument for doing the personal card first, though. Yeah. So what's that? Tell me. Well, which is, and this is all based on the idea that maybe you're more likely to get applied, get approved for the first card you apply for. And I don't even know if that's true, but let's say it's true. Then you might want to apply for the card that has the temporary bigger welcome bonus, which is the personal card right now as we're recording this, as opposed to the business card offer, which is the standard offer. And so that way you're securing that one for sure.

And then you can wait and keep trying to get approved for the other one as time goes by. So I could see arguments either way. What about you? Did I miss any? Obviously. No, no. I think those are both good arguments. Do you need to wait? And how long would you wait in between applications? No, if you haven't signed up for any other chase cards in the last 30 days, you can sign up for both of them. You can apply for both of them same day. And that should work. I mean, I don't know that you're approved, but it's a valid way of doing it. Yeah. When my wife opened these cards years ago, she did both of them on the same day.

Started with the business card and then the consumer card both on the same day. So I don't think you really need to wait in between. You could, but you don't need to. There's no specific amount of time that you'll need to wait, especially true if you're way under 524, like you said. So there aren't a ton of other card applications anyway, then I think you'll most likely be fine with both of them in the same day or within close proximity, a few days, a week, whatever the case may be. The only consideration then is can you meet the welcome bonus within the same timeframe? Or do you need to space them by a few weeks to give yourself a little bit of extra time for the second bonus to meet the spend? That just depends on your ability to generate the spend in order to earn the welcome bonus points. Yeah, that's a good point. And

you know what I should say? All those things I said about why you might want to do this one or that one, those are such edge cases. I'd say the answer for 99.9% of people is it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Do whichever one that comes across your screen first and then do the other one and you're fine. Yep. Yep. Agreed. All right, my friends, that brings us to the end of this week's episode.

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