Frequent Miler on the Air - The best transferable points program is... | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep243 | 2-23-24

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

On episode 243 of Frequent Miler on the Air, Greg and Nick dissect the different factors that make a transferable program "the best". Use the timestamps below to navigate to each individual topic within the episode.  (Our apologies for the continued audio issues with Nick's mic.) (01:38) Uni Portable Toll Transponder (Mail Bag) - Find the Uni transponder here. (07:22) Capital One to acquire Discover (Card Talk) (12:12) New Amex refer-a-friend bonuses through May 22 (+10x restaurants worldwide, up to $25K spend for 3 months) - Learn more about the  Amex refer-a-friend bonus here. - Learn about the Amex Consumer Gold Card here. - Learn about the Amex Blue Business Plus Card here. - Learn about the Amex Business Gold Card here. (19:22) AA charges more per person for 1 person to fly Madison to Phoenix than for 2 (Crazy Thing) (22:52) Hyatt Bonus Journeys through 4/30/24 (Mattress Running the Numbers) - Learn more about the  Hyatt Bonus Journeys here. (29:29) Citi 30% transfer bonus to Virgin through March 16th (Award Talk) - Learn more about Virgin Sweet Spots here. (31:50) AwardTool (one-ups PointsYeah, but with controversy...) -  Learn more about AwardTool here. (37:13) PointsYeah adds child award search - Learn more about PointsYeah updates here. (39:40) American Airlines news - Read more about  transferring American Airlines points at half cent here. - Read more about  American Airlines no longer offering points for flights booked through OTAs and raised checked bag prices here. (46:05) Contenders for best transferable points program: Chase Ultimate Rewards, Amex Membership Rewards, Capital One Miles, Citi ThankYou Rewards and Bilt Rewards (Main Event) (48:01) Best transferable points program for: point earning opportunities (56:00) Best transferable points for: transfer partners (1:03:19) Best transferable points for: pay with points awards (1:09:04) Best transferable points for: points management (like moving from one person to another) (1:19:49) Nick’s pick for overall best transferable points program (1:21:26) Greg’s pick for best transferable points program (1:23:27) Nick's runner-up pick for overall best transferable points program (1:25:42) Greg's runner-up for overall best transferable points program (1:31:04) Would you feel comfortable booking a Small Luxury Hotel of the World property knowing that the relationship with Hyatt will be ending soon and would you wait for the hopeful integration of Mr. and Mrsh. Smith properties... (Questions of the Week) Visit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don't forget to like and follow us on social media. Music Credit: "Ocean Deep" by Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, the best transferable points program is dot dot dot. We're going to get into that in the main event. We're going to discuss the different transferable points programs which we're doing because we love transferable points when when there are great award flights uh or award nights out there to be had the power of

transferable points is that you're not stuck in one particular airline or hotel program you can move your points to the right program that you need to book that amazing award. And so they're fantastic, but there's a bunch of them. So we're going to discuss which is best. They're not all created equally because the value you can get from some certainly eclipses the value you can get from others. And we'll talk all about that stuff today. But before we do, let me remind you that you will always find the timestamps in the show notes. So if you just scroll down to where the show notes are, you take a look at that, expand that. You can jump around to different segments if you want to skip ahead to a segment or you want to come back and listen to a segment again. Also remember wherever you're listening to this or watching this, don't forget to subscribe,

like the episode, enable notifications for future episodes because we are dropping some new episodes now. You may have noticed that we've been dropping one on Tuesdays now, a coffee break episode. So that's a little something new. We've put Ask Us Anything into the feed. So you'll want to make sure you're subscribed and you have your notifications enabled so that you find out whenever something new like that comes out. But now let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. Yep.

Today's giant mail comes from Frank, Indiana. They heard us talking about rental cars and tolls and how the rental car companies charge a lot for when you go through a toll. And they replied with something very similar. A number of people mentioned this to us, but I wanted to read their particular mailbag entry because it's kind of fun. Listening to the two February 16th podcasts, we noted an amount of consternation on Greg's part. That was my attempt to say it in a consternated way. On Nick's part, it was more befuddlement. That, and it's a really fun word to say. Befuddlement. That is fun. It's more fun than befuddled, too, right. Befuddlement, that is fun.

It's more fun than befuddled, too, right? Befuddlement. That's more fun than befuddled. Okay, I'm sorry. So anyway, Greg was concerned, and Nick was befuddled when discussing inflated rental car toll charges. I can't even say it.

A $2 Florida toll charge. Now they're talking about themselves now. A $2 Florida toll charge. Now they're talking about themselves now. A $2 Florida toll bridge charge passed along to us as $14. After all the nonsense fees, that was the last straw that broke the camel's back. Searching the internet,

we came across the Uni Portable Toll Transponder. It's an easy pass portable transponder that works in rental cars at toll gates in 19 states. The upfront cost is $15 for the unit. It's available at Amazon, and you must keep $10 minimum in your account. Accounts can be managed via a smartphone app or the website and refilled by credit card, and you must enter the license plate of the vehicle it's currently being used in. We recommend deactivating in between rentals. No nonsense, convenience, or administrative fees, just the actual tolls on a nice monthly statement. So to sum up, they're

saying, when you go rent a car, bring one of these toll pass, easy pass things along with you. And that way the toll booth will charge that instead of reading the license plate of your rental car and charging you the toll plus the rental car charging you those nonsense fees. So that's it in a nutshell. And then they go on to say, Nick, it can also be used to pay for parking at Orlando International Airport and Port Canaveral Cruise Terminal. I wonder why they're calling that out for you, Nick. They seem to think that I might be the type to head to those types of places, and they're not wrong. So what do you think of this? I mean, is this something you would carry with you? Would you

toss it in the travel backpack and bring it with you or what? Yeah, it's hard to say because I don't know. We do tend to have like maybe one or two trips a year where we do rent cars and might go through tolls. But we often go to places where we we do rent cars and, and might go through tolls, but, um, but we often go to places where we don't rent cars and just use local transportation. And, um, and then when we're doing driving trips, my car actually has one of these built in, so I don't have to worry. So, so there's no advantage to me getting it for my own use, you know? Uh, and so, so I don't know if I would remember to bring it as, as my point, I guess, because I don't want it kept in my to-go backpack all the time.

And so would I remember, I don't know, but it's a great idea for those who rent cars a lot for sure. See, my problem is not what I remember to bring it. It's that we came to Hawaii. I'm in Hawaii right now recording this episode and I'm, I'm in Kauai and we came to who i'm in hawaii right now recording this episode and i'm i'm in kauai and we came to hawaii with two amazon fire kids tablets and my wife just went to set up the kids with their tablets while i record this show and we have one amazon file kids tablet and so a type of thing happens from time to time and so my fear is not will i remember to bring it it's will i remember to take it out of the rental car will i remember remember not to leave it wherever it is that that fire tablet got left the other day? So yeah, I feel like I would just lose this. And that's the problem for me. I hate'll be even more annoyed when i lose my little easy pass and you know of course if i remember that deactivated i guess soapy it probably just cost another 15 bucks to get another one of them but if i lose one of those

every time it'll add up so i do have an easy pass at home but even that i'm actually not sure where it is at the moment because i think at least i'm pretty sure it's on your car well it was for a long time but i didn't have the little velcro thing to put it up in the windshield and the new york car we got and i think they just go by license plate and so it gets charged anyway to my account with the license plate so i don't actually think there's a need to have these and maybe i'm wrong about that somebody's going to tell me i'm wrong i'm going to get it i think it depends on the state and the tolls and stuff yeah i don't end up incurring a lot of tolls at home anyway so uh so anyway that's uh i think it's a good idea and i think if i were more organized or

for my more organized friends that would absolutely be a good idea to bring along with you so i don't mean to to talk down on the idea at all i think the idea is a great one just i know i won't execute it well so right right well you know if you do get one i'd recommend you don't let your kids be the ones who carry it around like the fire tablet you know that might help with keeping it from getting lost but um but yeah i mean next time next time i'm traveling and know that i'll be renting a car and and we'll be likely to go through tolls maybe i will order this i mean there's no reason to get it now if I don't have an immediate need, but when it comes up, yeah. I think that seems like a really good idea.

Because you can get this on like Amazon. So it's not something that's hard to get. Yeah, so this couple mentioned one particular one, but I think there's a lot of brands of this, yeah. This type of thing. Okay, very good. All right, let's talk about card talk. This week's card talk,

we got a couple of big things going on on so first piece of big news this week is capital one wants to acquire discover they've come to a deal to buy discover what do you think i mean have they discovered was this the thing all along that uh you know the piece of the puzzle that capital one was missing what's up with this what are your thoughts is this good news bad news what's going on i mean i i at this point i think we could at best say it's interesting news. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know if the deal will fully go through and what Capital One will do with it once they get Discover. So anyway, but what I find fascinating is the possibility that we'll have another card issuer like Amex that also controls the credit card transaction process. So there's the Discover payment network. they'll control that and presumably they'll change over their current cards to work on that network

or maybe have some way that they could work on both networks. You know, I don't know, but, um, but, but that's very interesting because, you know, Amex has been in a unique position. I mean, discover has been the other one, but they've been such a minor player in the credit card space. Now, I mean, in the credit card reward space, I should say, that we haven't talked a lot about them. But with Capital One, they're a much bigger player. So that combination could lead to who knows what. There's all kinds of possibilities, both good and bad for the consumer yeah yeah i mean i think the the potential for capital one processing their own transactions uh it does create a an opportunity and if they're able to scale it at capital one scale you know i mean discover's not small either but uh even though

there's something like you said that we don't talk about much it's not that they don't have a lot of credit cards or a lot of credit card customers it's just they don't have a lot of cards that excite us uh but but you know they've got And of course, I also had read that their deposit business was something of interest to Capital One also because they've got their savings accounts and so on and so forth. But I think with Capital One having the ability to process their own transactions, obviously, they're going to collect a lot more data that way. And, uh, and also they're going to be able to collect more of the money from the swipe fee and, you know, the, uh, not have to pay essentially the swipe fee, I guess. Right.

Which leaves open the possibility of bigger rewards for the end user, you know, doesn't mean they will do that, but you know, that's something we see at least historically i've seen bigger uh like category bonuses from amex than most other issuers lately they the others have been catching up but um but yeah so to see more of that that would be that would be potentially very exciting but we can hope we can hope we'll see long way down long way down the line yeah but last question about this so is this is you take it back in with capital one girl i mean anybody who's been listening for a long time knows that greg did open a venture card at some point ventrax card and they can and they shut them down like they just

they gave it to him a venture okay gave it to him gave him the welcome bonus let him have it for a little while and then all of a sudden they were like i don't know you know what we don't want you greg the frequent miler and took away all your points it was ridiculous it was crazy it was totally crazy i didn't do any kind of weird spending with it or anything um and there's nothing nothing unusual i did with the with the account um they closed me down without explanation um and the worst part is they took the points and gave me half a cent per point which is just criminal it is that's that was the part that frustrated me the most it's like half a cent are you kidding me you know but uh yeah so is this your ticket back in though is that because you guys is this your ticket back

in um yeah i mean because i have i have the discover it card and the Discover It Miles card. So yeah, if the purchase goes through, then there will be at least a period of time where I'll have credit cards that are technically owned by Capital One. But more likely, yeah, because I think more likely it's Capital One's opportunity to shut down more of my credit cards. Somebody over there is like, we need to get this covered. When they were running the pros and cons of making the deal and how much they would offer, the accountants were there with a spreadsheet. It was like, how many points does Greg have in Discover?

Yeah, it had the shutdown Greg factor. It was like a big plus. So they did that. Oh, man. All right. So that's the only piece of crime talk this week, though. Beyond that, we also have new Amex refer a friend bonuses out. What's going on with the new refer a friend bonus?

Wow. So the Amex points parade is marching on big time. Yeah, Amex is back. So they always have, and we've talked about many times how Amex has let you refer friends. And usually when you successfully refer a friend to another credit card, you earn some chunk of points, like 15,000 points, 20,000, whatever the offer is. Everyone gets a different offer usually. And that's it. But now they're offering that plus 10 points per dollar. You, the person who refers someone else, will earn 10 points per dollar at restaurants worldwide for up to $25,000 spend for three months after the referral goes through. And so this deal is going to be available through May 22nd.

And so, yeah, if you refer one person from a card that earns 1x, that means earning 11 points per dollar for restaurants for the next 25,000 spend for three months. But if you refer from a card like the gold card that earns 4x at restaurants, then you're talking about 14 points per dollar at restaurants. 14! That is a nice return for a few months. 14x. I mean, that's something I can sink my teeth into, right? I see the pun there. I probably didn't deserve a laugh on that one. But somebody got the dad joke there.

Yeah. So, I mean, I'm excited about this. I think that's pretty cool. I think this could be potentially really valuable for some people. Like, for instance, when i got married i made sure that the caterer was going to code as a restaurant and then i took advantage of a restaurant bonus so if you're planning a wedding and you're able to pay for your catering and it does code as a restaurant which is definitely an if you may need to to test that with a smaller test purchase to

begin with but but if they did and you were spending the 25 000 here you're talking about 250 000 points i mean a quarter of a million points would be yeah a nice little haul for referring a friend yeah it really would be i mean so imagine this if you've got a little time to plan uh you could you could apply for the gold card now assuming you don't already have it uh get earn it the,000 point welcome bonus that's currently advertised on our site. And then refer maybe your fiance to... And the nice thing is, it doesn't have to be to another gold card. You can refer them to any Amex card. But because the referral's coming from your gold card, that's the card that's going to earn

an extra 10 points per dollar for the next three months. And so then you use that card to pay for the catering for the wedding in that example. And boom, you've got your point, not a millionaire, but 100,000 air in no time. Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. And that's a great point that you brought up there. We've done that in my household in the past where my wife referred me to a card with no annual fee, and I did the same to her. I referred her to a card with no annual fee just to get one of these referral bonus type offers. And so if you were in that position that position now i mean if you're just going to be dining out once a week and you're not going to spend anywhere near the 25 000 it may not be worth the hassle to do that you'll have to decide you know how much you're you're going to spend but

if you had something like that where you would have certainly large restaurant spend coming up then i think it could be totally worth a strategy there. But this isn't available on every single card, is it? No, it is not. So of membership rewards cards, it's available on the gold and platinum version of both the consumer and business versions of the gold and platinum cards and available on the Blue Business Plus. So if you have a Blue Business Plus, which earns 2x everywhere on the first 50k of spend, then that's not as good as the gold card. But still, you're going to be getting 12x at dining, which is still, I mean, incredible. Then it's available for a few cashback cards,

Blue Cash Every Day, Blue Cash Preferred, and the Blue Business Cash. And then, oddly, it's also available on a few Delta cards. The Delta Gold, Platinum, and Reserve. Only the consumer cards, though. As things stand right now, ever since Delta overhauled their credit cards, the business Delta cards haven't had the power to refer friends and that seems to be true even now and and with this deal so so you have to have a consumer card um problem is there you'd be earning an extra 10x delta miles which i wouldn't value nearly as highly personally as 10x membership rewards points on the other hand you know if it's if you don't have, if you're, I would still take that over, uh, you know,

I don't know, five X of transferable points. Cause it's still a very valuable, um, thing. If you go to fly Delta enough to be able to use them. Sure. And if you're doing spend on a Delta reserve card to, to, you know, earn status. So if you're going to spend on it anyway for that, then yeah. I mean, now all of a sudden you're talking about a great return on your dining. So then it would it would certainly make some sense, I think, in that case. So I think lots of good opportunities here. We mentioned the consumer gold card.

We mentioned the business blue business plus card being potentially good options. Another good option for this would be the business gold card, because that card also can earn 4X. It earns 4X in your top two categories each month. And of those can be restaurants u.s restaurants so within the united states you could still be earning 14x on that card also if it's right in your top two categories for the billing cycle so lots of lots of good options to march your point parade on so points parade definitely does march on that is fantastic to see it's exciting exciting. It's cool. I mean, especially as we reach the time of year you're here now or the next couple of months, weather will be warming up in a lot of the country. And so it'll be nice to get out and go out to dinner and that sort of

thing. So enjoy, enjoy some extra points. So I might actually, so it's been more than seven years since I've had a gold card. And, and personally my wife has one, but so I think I'm going to throw my head and try to apply, see if I can get the bonus, you know, the welcome bonus, and then see if I have the referability. Um, I, I need this, I need this restaurant bonus because we just heard that this incredible chef from Detroit is moving to a restaurant in Ann Arbor where I live. And so we're going to be plunking down some serious change at restaurants coming up soon. 14X would be nice to earn on that. Exactly.

Nice little rebate on that spend. All right. Well, excellent. Good stuff there for Card Talk. Let's talk about Crazy Thing because this week's Crazy Thing is a doozy. What crazy thing did or is American Airlines doing? I guess we should say. What crazy thing is American Airlines doing, Greg? flight that charges more per person for one person to fly than for two people. And it's not just a little bit, it's like significantly more. So one person would be $309 for this flight. Now, in his case, it was a flight from Madison to Phoenix. But if you add another person, you keep all the other search parameters the same, you add another person, it drops down from $309 per person to $185 per person. So it drops like

not quite in half, but sort of in that range. Yeah. That's great. And it's not like going from economy to basic economy, right? No. Where there's an apples to apples comparison. It is. It is. So those numbers were basic economy. And I saw the same pattern with the other classes of service. I replicated this. You know, I got on American Airlines dot com and replicated what he found. I didn't it. It's not happening like in every city pair. And it also doesn't seem to happen, at least with his city pair. It doesn't seem to happen for round trip.

So it seems to be only one-way travel. And it was interesting. He hypothesized, and I think there could be something to this, that maybe American Airlines is assuming that people booking for one person one way are most likely business travelers that are going to be less uh you know concerned about price and and so they are gouging the business that way that could be i i don't know but it's weird because all the other airlines look so cheap when you're looking for just one person you look on like google flights you know you wouldn't even look at that american airlines flight because you'd see the others that are that are half the price of this one and you'd go with Delta or one of the others. And so. I wonder how many times this has happened to me because I only search for one person most of the

time, uh, you know, until I picked something that I want to take, I've only, I usually only search for one person. I don't put in multiple passengers. And I know that, you know, some people are going to say, Oh, but we need to put in the multiple passengers because the price can change. It could go up. Sometimes it'll go into a higher fare bucket and price everybody at that higher fare bucket. And I know that, but just to get a comparison shopping, you know, a piece down, I usually just search for the one passenger because that's what the search engine defaults to. And I wonder if this has happened to me before because I could. I wonder too. And, you know, I specifically do that on Google flights because the one person thing, because sometimes I get confused. Like I forget that I put in two people and it shows all the prices.

It doesn't show per person pricing. It shows total pricing. And then you get confused thinking, oh, that's really expensive because you forgot that you set it to two. Um, and that's why I always default to one as well, but now they got to be more careful, at least with American Airlines. Weird stuff. Yeah. I'm glad that Andrew wrote in with that because that's a good tip that'll change my search habits. I'll have to see. Now I'll have to compare and see if that's happening at all in my searches too. But it certainly is a good reminder that when you search for things in general, you do have to sometimes try different things that you wouldn't expect would make a difference, but maybe they will. So good tip there, Andrew.

Thank you. And that is crazy. All right. But now we got this week's mattress running the numbers. So what do we have up for this week's mattress running the numbers? We have Hyatt bonus journeys, new promotion out, right? Yeah. They love to call their seasonal uh their seasonal their bonus uh

they call they always call it bonus journeys which is really inconvenient for us um to keep track of what's going on but they don't need to pay that marketing team any more money for a new idea right i mean hey you know what if they if they saved all that marketing money and and used it to give us bigger bonuses during these bonus journeys, that would be great. But that does not seem to be what's happening here. No, unfortunately not. So this one's what, 3,000 points for every three nights? Yeah.

So through April 30th of 2024, you must register first for this, but you'll earn 3,000 bonus points for every three nights. They don't have to be cont three nights. They don't have to be contiguous nights. They don't have to be nights in the same hotel. But for every three nights, you credit to Hyatt. So that's whether you're booking with points or cash, as long as it's not going through an online travel agency where you might not be getting night credit at all, it should work for you. Now, there's also this extra for Hyatt cardholders where you get an extra thousand points per three nights. So that sounds kind of nice, like a nice little sweetener until you read the fine print, which says,

only select properties in, are you ready? Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, mainland China, Macau, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, India, Indonesia, Japan, mainland China, Macau, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and Vietnam. Did you notice anything missing from that list? You know, there's there's a country I tend to visit now and then called the United States. I think that's not included there. That's not there. No, it's not there.

Yeah. And Canada is not there either it's not there though yeah and canada's not there either so um yeah i mean they i i understand well i don't understand how much could this cost them to just make it available to every every property it's it's only a thousand points per three nights three nights yeah yeah a thousand points per three nights no kidding i mean it's like, so even if you bought those directly from Hyatt, they charge, I don't know, two and a half cents or something like that per point. So you're talking what they sell for $25 to members. So, you know, surely the cost to them is much less, right? But so, but let's, let's call it $25.

So $8 and eight extra $8 per stay. They couldn't have just financed that and made that $8 everywhere. I mean, come on. And $8 is a generous value. And the funny thing it's, it's not even all properties in those countries. It's properties in those countries. So yeah, thanks Hyatt. But, um, all right. So still, still, if you look at just the 3K points for three nights part of it, that basically means if you stay in a multiple of three nights over the period of the promotion, then you're averaging a 1,000 points per night rebate. So here's the question. That means if you can find Category 1 properties that are off-peak, which are bookable for 3,500 points per night, that means you'll end up paying a net 2,500 points per night for these nights. Is that mattress run worthy, Nick? What do you think?

You know what? It depends on where you are or where you anticipate being. Mattress running in early in the year, bonus like this is questionable because you don't know what your stays are going to look like later in the year. But I think that if you anticipate being just a little bit short of a key milestone, the 40 nights really is the one that I think you got to consider. If you're going to be close to 40 nights with Hyatt over the course of the year, then yeah, it might be worth mattress running a couple of nights like that. Because once you reach 40 nights stayed with Hyatt over the course of the year, you get the 40 night milestone benefits, which are two guest of honor awards and Suite Upgrade Awards, if I remember correctly, right? So those are pretty valuable if you're able to put those to use. The two Guest of Honor Awards you could use to give yourself globalist benefits on two stays

or give them to somebody else. And then the two Suite Upgrades could be used each to confirm a suite for up to seven nights if you have standard suite availability where you're staying. So yeah, for me, it would be worth mattress running a couple of nights for that i mean maybe even four or five nights depending on what your use case is going to be for the guest of honor awards and the suite upgrades but if you're not going to be like really close to 40 and if there's a chance that this mattress run is going to put you well over 40, but not to 50, then it starts to get kind of murky. Yeah. Not worth it probably. Right. Right. So yeah. So I just wanted to say at 40 nights, what you get is you get one guest of honor award. So you could have a stay that is

where you become a globalist basically, or you could give a so you could have a stay that is um where you become a globalist basically or or you could give it to someone else to become a globalist for that whole stay that means free breakfast and all those great things free parking um and you get a choice of uh well 5 000 bonus points or a sweet upgrade award that's that's one sweet upgrade award um or 150 dollar find experience so i think most people will get the guest of honor award and the sweet upgrade award. And basically at 40 nights, that means you could have two really, really nice stays out of that. And you'll have to do the math and figure out, you know, how much you're gonna get out of those perks, depending on what kind of stays you're gonna be using them on and how confident you are that you'll be able to use them.

But, you know, for instance, right now I'm at the Grand Hyatt Kauai and we were talking just yesterday about the club lounge and how much that saves us traveling with kids because in the middle of the afternoon, we could pop into the club lounge, they could grab a cookie each and a juice or something that they would ask us for anyway and we would pay for it at the pool probably. And when I added up the

prices of things, because they had some very similar things at the pool, I said, you know, that little pop into the club saved us at least 20 bucks. You know, so day after day, that could add up if you're making a long stay at a place like that. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It can be huge. Yeah. All right. All right. So that's, I think that's it for match throwing the numbers, right? It's like, maybe it's award talk. So for award talk, we have several different things up today too. First up, City has a 30% transfer bonus going to Virgin Red through, or Virgin Atlantic,

I guess, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club from City through March 16th. So you can get a 30% bonus. So you transfer 100,000 points. You end up with 130,000 Virgin Atlantic points. What do you think? Is that exciting news? Is that lukewarm news? What's your opinion?

I mean, it's nice. You know, if you have a good award that you can book through, Virgin obviously saving a bunch of City points for the transfer is great. And it can make the difference of whether you have enough points or not for a given award. So Virgin has some really great sweet spots, but the best ones like flying ANA business or first class or flying Delta One between North America and Europe. So that one is 50,000 points one way. Those two are incredible sweet spots, but those two are also incredibly hard

to find award availability. So my point is like, you have to know that you have a good use where you can actually find that good use in the wild before you'd take advantage of this 30% transfer bonus, in my opinion. I agree. I agree. The one other situation where I may personally consider it is for short flights within Europe, because they can be a good value sometimes for flying Air France and KLM within Europe. Greg's written about that before. We'll include a link in the show notes. And so there's a specific itinerary i'm looking at where that might be

the best deal and so 30 off of that it's not going to be a huge savings because it's a relatively cheap award to begin with but i'll take the 30 or it's not exactly 30 off when it's a 30 bonus math nerds save your pitchforks i understand that but it's like discount anyway let's uh let's let's let's put it that way also keep your eye out because sometimes virgin red will offer virgin voyages uh cruises for 80 000 or 100 000 points and then if one of those comes up that could be a fantastic use of the 30 transfer bonus so yeah seriously and i've read great reviews about those too so um you know that that could be really nice. All right. What do we have next on Award Talk?

Well, Greg stirred the pot this week and wrote about a new tool called Award Tool that looks pretty awesome. I played around with it a little bit and I was pretty excited because it's another award search tool, but one that allows you to search multiple airports in and out so you could put i think up to four airports for departure points and and of course also arrival points and so that enables you to search quite a few different things all at the same time which i love because living in the northeast it's about the same for me to drive to new york or boston or philadelphia and so I'll look at multiple

airports or Washington DC is an hour flight away from me. So I love to be able to look at multiple airports and be able to do that with one search is super useful to me. And I also on the other end, if I'm going to Europe, I don't care a lot about which airport I fly into because I know I can get around Europe relatively cheaply, usually. So I'll search to multiple points in Europe also. So that sounds pretty awesome. But that wasn't without any controversy, right? It wasn't. But let me give a little more background here.

So a word tool is so similar to a tool we've talked about before called Points. Yeah, we love Points. Yeah, because it has a free version that's actually very capable it allows like date ranges in the searches it allows free um alerts which is something that uh before uh before points you came out getting free alerts was not something i don't think any tool did did. And it was fast. And so those three things combined to make it a really amazing tool. If you do the paid version of Points Yeah, you do have the ability to do two from airports and two destination airports and a longer date range. So then along comes Award Tool,

which is identical in so many ways. It also has the ability... All the things I said about points, yeah, Award Tool can do too. The biggest difference is that Award Tool allows more flexibility in how you use the multiple searches at once. So if you think about a date range, like let's say you have a four day date range

and just a single from and to airport, that's like four separate searches they have to do. So when you buy up to the paid version of AwardTool, I think you get something like 16 simultaneous searches you're allowed to do. And what's neat about AwardTool is you can arrange that in any way you want. You could do one from and one destination airport and 16 day date range, or you could do a single day date, date range, um, and, uh, maybe 16 different destination airports or, or, and you could do any combination, uh, thereof. And that already I found really helpful because I was, I was looking at flights to Europe where coming back, I guess it was, we wanted to leave on a specific day.

But we were open to leaving from a few different airports and we're open to arriving at quite a handful of airports in the States. And I was able to do all that in one search, which is not something other tools allow. So all that, that's really great. The downside, or I guess I should say a potential downside here is that there are accusations flying that,

that point that award tool has been stealing code from points. Yeah. And it, there are certain things about it where it does look very suspicious. I've been in contact with both of the tool vendors where WordTool says no, they're making it up. And Points, yeah, says yeah. And look at how this is and that is similar to this and that other thing. And yeah, they both are somewhat convincing. So I can't step in and say who's right, but there is that controversy. And so personally right now, because of this controversy, I'm not sure i would pay the annual fee for the pro version of award tool

just in case in case the accusation is true well for one you wouldn't want to be supporting them but two who knows if they'll get shut down early if if there's some kind of lawsuit or something but yeah that's a shame because i i think it's really cool what award tool does yeah yeah it is a shame it's a shame that it got tainted with that so and and like I said it's hard to know what's going on there I I certainly don't have the technical uh background to really be able to even understand all of the the ins and outs and what have you is there so um the tool looked really cool to me I was very excited when I first started using it but yeah I'm not sure what to think about it beyond that right now. We'll find out, but in the long run, I guess we'll find out one way or another. But anyway,

that's all we have for award tool today. In fact, we've got another piece of Poitier news. So Poitier added the ability to search for child awards. Yeah. So now when you're searching and when you say number of passengers, it lets you pick how many are children and how many are adults. And apparently it will adjust the word prices and things that it finds based on based on what you put in. And so that's something new. I mean, I don't think we've seen that in an award search tool ever. I don't think so. Not that I recall anyway. I guess I haven't looked for it specifically, but because in general, with most award programs,

it doesn't matter whether, well, the age doesn't matter in terms of the price, usually. Sometimes you still have to put it in as a child. Like I've run into issues where I just put in four adults because I knew that the price was going to be the same, whether they were adults or kids. But then when I went to enter birthdates to make the booking, it would tell me, no, I couldn't put in that birthdate because it wasn't an adult. And so that was a little weird. But there are a couple of programs anyway that do it for discounts for kids. In France, KLM Flying Blue is a really notable one because their long haul awards are 25% off for kids between ages two and 11, which makes a big difference if you're looking at a 50,000 000 point award from the united states to europe in business class then the kids are paying you know 25 percent less that's over 37 500 points

apiece so it's a pretty significant discount and even if it's a more expensive air france award it helps balance things out uh pretty nicely because again everybody pays a little bit less so so that's nice to be able to have that factored into the search. I usually just mentally figure that on my own and like, oh, well, I know it's going to be a little bit less because kids are going to pay less. So nice to have that though, because there might be other programs that offer it and I don't even know. That's what I was going to say. You might stumble upon others and be like, wow, I didn't know, you know, why is this so cheap? Oh, it's because I put in kids. Yeah, that could happen for sure. that's neat that's neat same thing on cash tickets i've discovered that sometimes uh you

know when you're looking at i will every now and then at paid business class flights between europe and the united states because sometimes they're cheap enough that using points especially if you're using the right kind of points which we'll talk about later on today then you know if you're getting one and a half cents per point in value or so out of your points, sometimes it's worth booking a paid business class ticket. And in many cases, I do find that there is a discount for paid tickets for minors. So also useful tip to know. But that's not all that we have this week, right? Yeah. Lots of news from American Airlines. So American Airlines did one nice thing and a few not so nice things. So the nice thing, they were both naughty and nice this week.

They lowered the cost to transfer points. So it used to be that it was so expensive to transfer points, it just didn't make sense. So meaning moving points from one person to another. But they lowered it. It's only half a cent per point now. And so now there's, I could definitely see cases where, you know, let's say maybe, maybe you've been flying with your family and your kids have each, you know, accumulated small buckets of points and, and you, you need more for an award and, you know, it could definitely be worth paying the half cent each

to move them to your account so that you can book it all. Yeah, I think that's good. I mean, I may do that with my kids' points just because they do have some from paid flights, just the way I explained a moment ago, and just not having to worry about them expiring or keeping the points active or whatever, it might just be worth the half a cent each to me

to move those into my account just to not have to worry about them. Right. So it's not as great as point pooling, but it's a nice feature. It is limited to something like $200,000 per year. I'm a little concerned that it's going to make life easier for mileage brokers who basically will buy miles cheaply from people and then sell cheap flights by booking awards. And the reason I say it in that way is that I'm concerned about it is I feel like that business overall, because that business exists, there's

many fewer award flights available for people who are just trying to find flights for themselves and their own family. And so I don't like that. But yeah, it'll be a new source of selling miles, I think, for them because they could pay the half cent plus a little bit more and get American Airlines miles. Yeah, yeah. Cool, cool. And they could pay the half cent plus a little bit more and get American Airlines miles. Yeah, yeah. Cool, cool. And a couple of not so nice things are now you'll have to pay more for checked bags. And if you've booked your flight through an online travel agency, they're not going to offer you American Airlines miles, right? You're not going to get loyalty points or redeemable miles if you book through a third party.

Right, right. So they're the first major airline that I'm aware of to do this, to go all hotel chain on us. This is something hotel chains have done forever or for a long time now, which is not awarding points when you book through Expedia or whatever. But now American is saying, we're going to do the same thing, I think starting in May, something or other. And interestingly, they left a bit of a loophole, which is that if you're a Advantage business member, you'll still earn points and loyalty points unless you book basic economy. So they still will give you nothing. So anyway, yeah, so they're doing that. So, you know, I think in a way this is interesting because it,

you know, we used to say if you book with your chase points, for example, a book, a flight, at least you're earning the rewards from the airline, but not with American unless you're a business advantage business member. Yeah, you know, that's a I think that's the whole thing is really weird, to be honest, because my understanding has always been that there's like almost no commission at all on flights for online travel agencies and really that they make their their bread and butter money on on selling hotels and packages. Now, I don't know.

I don't know that business. So maybe I'm wrong, but I've always understood it to be that there wasn't much commission to be earned, and that's why the price is the same, whether you book through Expedia or Priceline or whatever else, because there's not really any room for play for them.

Again, that's always been my understanding, so it would seem kind of like just a greedy play here to try to get people used to booking direct, which seems like a gamble to me. I can't imagine it's worth the customer service hours they're going to have to put into explaining to people that they're not going to earn miles or why they didn't earn miles when they call and complain and say, hey, I've always earned miles. Why don't I have any miles for this?

I can't imagine the hours that they're going to spend in customer service are worth it, at least it doesn't seem like it would be. But I guess they've run the numbers on that and decided that it is yeah uh you know what do you think do you think do you think delta and united are gonna copy this and do the same so if i'm right that there isn't very much commission paid to the uh the online travel agencies anyway i feel like that seems so cheap and and again like it seems short-sighted to me. It doesn't seem like a cheap solution in the long run when you factor in the hassle. So I would say no, but then I mean, I guess everybody would like Book Direct. So I guess if they see American being successful with

this, then they may be tempted, but it doesn't seem like there's enough money to be made there in terms of uh keeping those bookings direct that it really would make enough of a difference to spend the time and effort to do it i wouldn't think so obviously american thinks so so maybe i'm wrong about that but i'm going to say no i don't think that we'll see that all right how about the ability to transfer points for half a cent each i don't know that came out of nowhere i didn't didn't see that coming didn't expect it i i mean i'm glad to see it cheaper i'd like to see it free but we probably won't because of the mileage broker situation so uh do i think anybody else is going to do it

probably not because it probably is just going to increase mileage broker activity unfortunately so no i don't think anything else is going to do that either I don't think Americans a leader in these I think that they're just weird yeah I agree I would love to see Delta and United do do this the half cent thing or even better to do household pooling which gets around the whole brokerage thing and costs nothing which is probably why they won't do it because There we go. Right. All right. That's where we're going. So let's talk about this week's main event. Main event time.

The best transferable points program is drum roll, please. I don't hear a drum roll. Oh, well. Carrie, insert drum roll. So, by the way, our creative director, Carrie, has been editing our podcasts and videos lately. And so if Nick's sound is a little off, you can blame her. No, not really. He's been having some mic trouble and he's in Hawaii and hasn't been able to find a good replacement mic. So sorry about that. Hopefully

he'll get a new one soon. Anyway, back to the show. The contenders for the Best Transferable Points Program are Chase Ultimate Rewards, Amex Membership Rewards, Capital One Miles, City Thank You Rewards, and finally, Built Rewards. Okay. All right. So we made some crowd noises there. So those are our contenders, right? But we need to talk about this because it's not just a simple answer, right? It's not just like, oh, this one's the best and that's it. There's a lot of complexity here. There really is. There really is. So we're going to look at this in a set of categories. So we're going to look at which in, in a set of categories. So we're going to look at which one is bad, has the best point earning opportunities, which one has the best transfer partners, which one has the best pay with points awards, because sometimes you can't find award flights or, you know, hotel awards that are any good.

And sometimes you just want to pay with points and get good value. Uh, And finally, I think this is a really important category that's often probably overlooked. Best point management, for lack of a better term. So that's like the ability to share points with others, the ability to keep points alive if you're canceling your main credit card, things like that. All right. So best point earning opportunities. So when we talk about point earning opportunities with these different programs, we're talking about things like having lots of opportunities for big welcome bonuses, ability to earn a lot for everyday spend, ability to earn a lot through creative spend. So by that, I mean, you know, maybe you go into an office supply store and you buy something that's a gift card where you can, you know, use that spend elsewhere, but you've earned 5x because you pre-bought it, where you can earn a lot of points through refer a friend offers the retention bonuses portals that sort of thing

there are a lot of things to consider there so yeah i mean there are a lot of different ways to earn points and i think it's important to mention that we really need to look at this holistically because it's not just one thing you know if we were just talking about welcome bonuses it might be one answer if we were just talking about welcome bonuses it might be one answer if we were just talking about everyday spend it might be another but when you take it all together and i think you have to i don't know i think in my opinion there's there can only be one choice here it's going to be amex the amex points parade has just been out of control over the past few years number one they've got the most uh transferable points welcome bonuses that you

could possibly earn so they've got tons of transferable points welcome bonuses that you could possibly earn. So they've got tons of different cards that earn Amex membership rewards points. And when we talk about transferable points, we probably should have clarified at the beginning to make this super obvious for somebody who's not really familiar with that. But each of the major credit card programs that Greg mentioned offer their own points that you can then transfer to various airline frequent flyer programs and hotel programs. And so anyway, when we talk about Amex membership rewards points, which is the Amex point system, you've got so many problems you can earn multiple bonuses on. You've got so many good category bonuses. I mean, you could be earning 4X at US grocery stores or US supermarkets, I guess it is,

and 4X at restaurants worldwide. You could be earning 2X as a base level everywhere. There's lots of different 3X categories, travel and things like that on different comments. And so when you look at all of that, and then you consider things like, oh, well, the referral friend bonuses, you can often earn 15 or 20 or sometimes even 30,000 points per referral. You could refer your spouse or a friend or family member and earn that additional bonus. And then you get these crazy bonuses like the one we talked about today, like the 10x at restaurants.

And then on top of that, the retention bonuses, they're known for giving a retention bonus at least every other year. If you say you want to cancel your card, then it's pretty likely that you'll be offered some sort of a retention bonus. And that's Rakuten. You can make that points through rakuten rakuten.com is a cash back shopping portal but you have the opportunity to earn membership rewards points instead of cash back and so when you see 10 cash back that could instead be 10 membership rewards points per dollar when you add all of those things up and especially because rakuten tends to offer some of the best portal rewards uh amounts the best portal rewards amounts, the best portal

payouts on the market, and the most consistent in tracking and things like that. When you can see all of that together, like Amex is just head and shoulders far above and away from everybody else. All right. Before we close the story though, consider Chase for a little bit. I'll consider it. Go ahead. Consider that they they've

consistently had huge bonuses for their ink cards and that uh that any given person uh with with a business um or you know it's something that that that they may not have known as a business but can be considered a business for applying for cards, that they can earn the welcome bonuses on all three cards, and that Chase doesn't stop you from applying for the same card again and getting the bonus again, unlike Amex, who has that lifetime rule for most other cards. All right, so that's welcome bonuses. They have a 524 rule, Greg, and isn't there a restriction on not getting the bonus again for another couple of years? If you exceed five consumer cards in the past 24 months, then yeah, you might not get approved for another Chase card for a while, but the ink cards won't add to your 524 count. So, you know, theoretically,

as long as you can keep getting approved, you can keep signing up for ink cards and getting those big welcome bonuses. So I'll fill in the other piece of that then is that there also is not the once every 24 months limit on the ink cards that there are on other cards. That was the other piece that I sort of slid in there and didn't make it very clear.

But yeah, because most of their consumer cards, you're only eligible for the welcome bonus once every 24 or 48 months, but the ink cards don't have that restriction. Yeah, yeah. Even other business cards on Chase have that restriction, but not the ink cards for some reason. And then consider also with Chase,

they've got to be the best for creative spend with offering 5X at office supply stores for Chase Ultimate Rewards points with the Ink Cash card. Refer a friend. Again, the Ink cards have been offering 40,000 points lately for referring a friend, which is fantastic. So, you know, when you take all that together chase is looking pretty strong right i mean i think that you could make a case for it you could certainly make a case for it pretty strong is a pretty strong term uh maybe strong age i mean the ink bonuses certainly when they were increased recently uh for a long time they looked really good and and you know as we're saying it was possible my wife opened a couple ink two or

three in cash cards last year i think so uh you know it is possible to get more than one and so that certainly could be very very rewarding and the the refer friend bonuses are good uh but i think i still would have to give the nod to Amex Amex has got their lifetime language but they until recently anyway were pretty frequently offering people the chance to get another of the same card even if they've had it or currently still have it and so there were plenty of opportunities at least until recently maybe for some people still where they can get an offer that doesn't have lifetime language and get the same card bonus again and because big bonuses are often

as high as 150 170 sometimes 200 000 points if you can get two or three of those that pretty quickly starts to eclipse the potential earnings on your ink cash card so um so you know i think it depends it depends on how much creative spend you want to do if you're going to do a bunch of creative spend then you know i could see the argument for chase but i'd still give the the nod to amex here especially when you consider also the portal uh giving you know good rewards much better rewards than the chase amex amex is my pick too i was doing doing – Chase is a bit of a devil's advocate there. It is, and you made a good argument. Yeah, all the things Nick said are true.

The Rakuten portal is especially big for anyone who shops online a lot. When Chase first started their Ultimate Rewards Shopping portal, they used to frequently have like 10x deals, but we haven't seen much of that in years. Whereas Rakuten regularly has 10x and 15x deals at popular merchants. And so it's often very easy to rack up a lot of points shopping through Rakuten. And because you can choose with Rakuten to get cashback or membership rewards, it's a great, great, great addition to the membership rewards program. Makes earning membership rewards points easy. All right. So that is earning. Amex wins both of our nods there.

All right. Let's talk about best transfer partners. Which program has the best transfer partners? And I made some notes beforehand about, like, what are the key differences between each of these? Because they all share some transfer partners in common. Like, so they all can transfer to Flying Blue, Air France, KLM, Flying Blue, for example. So we're not going to talk about which ones they have in common but rather where where are they really differentiated so and nick feel free if if i miss any like that you know of in this list um and also i'm only pointing out the important ones i'm not going to point out that you know amex has some airline you've never heard of who cares um so so amex has ana which as we know has incredible award pricing

especially for business class flights uh and for star alliance and for themselves for flying on ana itself uh and they also have delta which uh is not like necessarily like a huge win in terms of uh award value but um they're the only program that transfers to Delta, although they do charge a small excise tax when you do that. Chase. So one of the things that's somewhat unique on Chase's part are some bad things. They don't have LifeMiles, They don't have Cathay Pacific. They don't have Qantas. And they don't have Etihad as transfer partners. But they do have Hyatt and United. Now, Bilt also has those two, but it's still a differentiator, especially we love our Hyatt.

You can get great value from transferring your points to Hyatt. They also have JetBlue as a one-to-one transfer partner, and Citi is the only other one in this roundup that have JetBlue as a one-to-one. So those are some good things with Chase. Capital One. I wasn't seeing a lot of exciting, unique things there. I noticed that they're unique in having Tap Air Portugal, but are you aware, Nick, of anything that really stands out that's unique there?

I mean, Citi has Wyndham also. Oh, Citi has Wyndham. That's right. That's right. Yeah. No, they share a couple in common with Citi, actually, that they're good transfer partners, but it eliminates them from being unique transfer partners because of that. Right, right. Yeah.

And then City. City, actually, like Chase, doesn't have Aeroplan. So that's a big downside. Am I wrong about that? Chase does have Aeroplan. They issue the Aeroplan. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Yeah. Yes. I was thinking LifeMiles. You're right. City is unique. City is unique in not having Aeroplan. JetBlue, so one-to-one like Chase. They have EVA.

Is that how you say it? Or EVA? One or the other. I think it's EVA or maybe. Which they have one-to-one. Now, Capital One also has them, but not one-to-one. It's worse than one-to-one. It's worse than one-to-one. So that's a big secret weapon for Citi because EVA Air has great award availability on their own flights. And so

for flying to Asia, if you want to fly in business class, that could be a secret weapon for you. Citi also has transfers to choice, one to two. If you have the premier or prestige card one to two transfers, that's amazing. Um, they are also the only program that transfers to leading hotels of the world. Uh, so that's, uh, you know, they, they have two unique, uh, transfer options that, uh, get, can get you into some, uh, great hotels. Um, all right. So that's Citi. Now Bilt.

Bilt has American Airlines. They're the only one. And, you know, these days, until American Airlines devalues their partner award chart anyway, we've been loving our American Airlines miles. They can be so, so valuable. So that's great. Bilt also has both Hyatt and United,

which is also something Chase has, but outside of Chase and Built, they're the only ones that have those two. Now Built is missing some like Qantas and Etihad, but those aren't necessarily big players in my mind. So Built doesn't have a lot that's super unique, but they have some of the best partners right there. All right. So let's move on. Nick, what is your pick? Which of these programs has the best transfer partners?

It's tough for me, actually. I have a hard time here because I think that for best overall transfer partners the race for me is between amex capital one and built uh and and i i like amex's strengths a bit more than capital ones it's tough because capital one has turkish which even though they've obliterated their partner award chart for the most part the uh the flights within the united states are still a deal with Turkish. So Capital One has that on Amex. But otherwise, yeah, I guess I would have to, between the two of them, give it to Amex. Between Amex and Bilt, for best transfer partners, it's legitimately tough because Bilt does have Turkish, like I just mentioned, and they have many of the other Amex strengths,

programs like LifeMiles, for instance, that I like a lot, Air Canada Aeroplan, I think Bilt has also. So yeah, I think they do. Of course they do. They just have the big transfer bonus. So I think having also Hyatt and American and United, I'd have to give the nod to Bilt for the best set of transfer bonuses. I think, not transfer bonuses, transfer partners, rather, is what I meant to say. Bilt has the best set of transfer bonuses. I think, not transfer bonuses, transfer partners rather is what I meant to say. Built has the best transfer partners, I would say. I think if they had more opportunities for earning points, I'd be even more excited. But yeah, I think out of those options,

all of the various transferable currencies, built is my pick for the best transfer partners. Yeah, yeah, same here. And it's tough, like if the question was, you can only have one of these, that wasn't how I laid out the question. But if the question was, you can only have one, it would be really tough to give up some of the options that other programs have that Bilt doesn't, like some of the city options we talked about, for example. But, yeah, Bilt, you know, I love that they go to American Airlines and Hyatt and United. That's a really amazing combination, plus all the others that the other programs have as well, like Aeroplan and LifeMiles and Air France, all those things. So they have all the key ones that are common and some really great rare ones ones I guess we should say yeah yeah it's not that I'm most

excited about transferring to the U.S based programs it's that having those and the common ones is the differentiator here because I more commonly transfer my points personally to foreign programs for the most part apart from Hyatt anyway I mostly transfer my transferable points to foreign airline programs that most of these transferable currencies have. So to me, this is the differentiator that these are the pieces that, like Greg said, are more unique to the program. So that's why I think Build wins this one. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Next category, best pay with points awards. So with Chase, you've got the Sapphire Reserve where you could pay with points for travel, anything in the travel portal and get 1.5 cents per point. Business Platinum.

So Amex doesn't have a lot going on there unless you have the Business Platinum card. Then you can pay with points for airfare. And if the airfare is the airline that you picked as your preferred airline, or if you're booking business or first class, then you get a rebate and then your points are essentially after the rebate worth 1.54 cents each. So tiny bit more than the value of the Chase points for purchasing flights in that situation. Built gives you 1.25 cents value when booking travel through their portal. Chase also does that, by the way,

if you have the Sapphire Preferred instead of the Sapphire Reserve. In a few cases, there is the opportunity to pay with points to pay your annual fee or whatever. I didn't do a assessment of what's out there along those lines. But, you know, for travel,

it really seems like we're down to those three. I'm probably missing something important, but I can't think of anything like really useful in the other programs along those lines. No, there isn't really. I programs along the no no there isn't really I mean you know there isn't so I think that's it and I think that the pick here has to be Chase because I think the ability to get one and a half cents per point towards basically all sorts of travel with the Sapphire Reserve clearly eclipses only being able to get that value towards flights

if you use Amex points towards anything other than flights, and then there's all the qualifiers that Greg mentioned, it has to be either your chosen airline or business or first class, uh, it's just so much more limiting. So even though you get a tiny bit more value per point in those limited circumstances, I gotta give it to chase for the range of things you can use it. Like one and a half cents. Totally agree. We're, we're not disagreeing much, uh, neck.

I think the, uh, the point that some readers might argue is that of course, in order to get one and a half cents per point, you have to be willing to pony up the $550 annual fee for the Sapphire reserve. And so that's the one part where I hesitate a little bit, because if that card doesn't make sense for you then you're talking about having the Sapphire preferred and only 1.25 cents per point and now I don't really know that I have a I don't know I don't know whether I take that or a built or Business Platinum I mean well business Platinum is no longer in the mix if you're not willing to spend 550. that's true that's true

spend 695 on the business Platinum so probably not i mean unless you buy a lot from dell every year you know maybe that card works out better for you than a sapphire reserved i mean i feel like sapphire reserve has to make sense more sense than the business platinum you're probably right so yeah all right so if you're not willing to pay for the sapphire reserve then what's your pick here is it all the same well then you know chase and and and belts are pretty pretty equivalent i think i mean i guess Built has a fee-free card that offers you the 1.25, so maybe Built would get a slight edge because otherwise with Chase, you need a $95 card to get the 1.25 point value. say, well, what about capital one, which gives you two cents per dollar or whatever, two points everywhere. It makes it sound like you're getting two cents per point, but you're not. You're earning two points for every dollar you spend with capital one. But when you redeem those points,

you're only getting one cent per point value. And we weren't looking at any opportunities that are better than one cent, that than, better than one cent, that are not better than one cent per point. One cent per point, yeah. Yeah, you'll get one cent per point when you're redeemed towards travel. Of course, you can do better with their transfer partners. But yeah, I'm not particularly excited. Not that I won't ever do it, but I'm not particularly excited about redeeming Capital One points at one cent per point. That's just not compelling enough compared to the other options that we presented in that segment.

I guess I should be a little more. at one cent per point. That's just not compelling enough compared to the other options that we presented in that segment. I guess I should be a little more. So with Citi, if you have the Rewards Plus card, then you get a 10% rebate on all points that are redeemed any given year. So you can kind of think of it like if you use your points for anything, even cash back, you're getting like 1.1 or 1.11 or something like that once you consider the 10% back. All right, I'm going to throw a different argument back at

you now. I'm going to tell you that you're wrong, that if you're not willing to pay for the Sapphire Reserve, the answer should in fact be maybe, maybe Capital One over a Sapphire Preferred. Here's my argument why, Greg, and you can tell me I'm wrong. With Capital One, you can book your travel any way you want and then redeem your points at one cent per point. So you could book directly with American Airlines to make sure you earn your American Airlines miles. You can book directly with Hyatt, make sure you earn your elite credit and get your bonuses. Whereas if you use your Chase points, you may not earn American Airlines miles in the future, and you probably won't earn Hotel Elite credit or hotel points when you're using your points through the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal. So Capital One has an advantage. Well, except you're wrong there because if you book outside of the Chase portal and you still want to use your Chase points, you can exchange your Chase points for one cent per point against your statement charges and do the exact same thing.

And it doesn't even have to be for travel with Chase. That's true. That's true. He's right. He's right. Okay. All right. So Chase, so what's our next category?

Best point management. Okay. All right. So Chase, so what's our next category? Best point management. Yes. So ability to move points to others, to transfer points to other person's loyalty program and so on. Let's quickly run down, I guess, with each of these programs. So Chase Ultimate Rewards, you can move your points to another household member's card. So if someone else in your household has a Chase Ultimate Rewards card, you can move your points freely to them. You can also, if an authorized user of your, let's say your Sapphire Reserve card, wants points transferred into their loyalty account, let's say their Hyatt account, you should be able to do that. Now, people have recently written in saying they've had trouble doing that, that it hasn't been working, but that's supposed to be allowed as well. So that's what Chase has. Now, Amex, you can't move points from one person to another at all unless you die.

If you die, then you can move your points to someone else, but you've got to fill out forms and everything. Which is hard after you're gone. Which is hard when you're gone which is hard when you're dead right but Amex will let you transfer points to an authorized user's loyalty program so let's say I want to transfer my membership rewards to Nick's

Aeroplan account I could do that if Nick has been an authorized user for at least 90 days on my Amex account so that's what Amex account. So that's what Amex allows there. Capital One. You can just move points to anyone, right?

Yeah. You just have to call the number on the back of the card. You can move them to anybody else that's got a Capital One card that earns miles. No consequences, consequences, anything. So that's great. And built? You can't, oh, we missed city. So let's do city first. So city, you can move to anyone, but then there's a clock that starts.

And after, I forget, 60 days, 90 days, those points expire if they're not used. So don't move them to someone else unless they're going to use them right away. But that's nice that you can move them to anyone else. You can't, I don't think you can transfer to another person's loyalty program, though, despite authorized users or anything like that. Built doesn't let you do any of this kind of stuff.

I mean, built, it's your own points and that's it. Right, right. There's no way to move into another family member. There's no way to transfer them to a family member's loyalty account. You're just like, they're your points and that's all there is to it. So I think it's very clear that built comes in last in terms of sharing. They do not understand that sharing is caring. And so, so built is definitely last place in this category. Yeah. So before we pick a winner, let's talk about what happens when you cancel cards and how to keep your points alive. If you cancel, um, chase, uh, if you're about to cancel your Sapphire reserve card, you've got to, you better move your points to another chase ultimate rewards card either your own or you know a household members account uh to keep them alive otherwise they're gone um amex they're they're pretty good

because uh as long as you have any any card that earns membership rewards points they stay alive that's right that's right themex just pulls them all together automatically into one, into account like tied to you, not tied to the card. So it doesn't matter if you cancel an individual card unless you have no more accounts that are in membership rewards. Capital One, what happens there? Well, with Capital One, to be honest with you, I don't know. I assume that you probably ought to move your rewards before you cancel the card. They're not automatically pulled. So I assume that it's the same as Chase. And we should mention also that nowadays, I think in at least New York State,

you do get 90 days even after you close the card to use the rewards. So what we said about Chase points, I think if you live in New York, you'd still get the 90 days. I mean, I know only some readers are going to live in New York, but it's worth mentioning in case you ever make that mistake that you'll know that there is potentially a way to use them. But with Capital One, I assume it's the same as Chase. You've got to move them to somebody else before you close the card. Right. So if you're about to close a Chase card, you don't have any other Chase cards, you don't want to get any more, you don't have a family member who has any, move to New York before you close your

account so that you have 90 days to use your points. There you go. There you go. Change your mailing address. All right. Citi is where things get really murky here. With Citi, you can pull your points. You can choose to pull your points, but that doesn't help. In fact, it makes things murkier. Because if your points are pulled and you cancel the card that the points were earned on, those points still go away. But it's hard to tell that once you've pulled the points, how many points are going to go away. So my general advice with Citi is don't ever, ever cancel a thank you rewards card and just convert it to a fee-free. There's a whole bunch of fee-free Citi bank cards.

Just convert it to a fee-free if you don't want to pay the annual fee and keep it around forever. Some of their fee-free cards actually have really nice perks. So there's no reason not to do that. And potentially good retention offers. We didn't really mention that when we mentioned points earning opportunities, free cards actually have really nice perks so um there's no reason not to do that and potentially good retention offers we didn't really mention that when we mentioned points earning opportunities

but city has long had some of the best retention offers and they'll offer retention offers even on cards that have no annual fee sometimes so so keep that in mind too yeah uh all right and then uh built i i don't know for sure, but since they have a rewards program that's independent of the card, I think you would just keep your points if you cancel the card and it should be fine. I would assume so. Yeah, I would assume the same.

You should still be able to transfer them to their partners and things because you don't need to have the card in order to be able to transfer points to partners. So yeah, I guess with Built, there's no consequence at all if you were to cancel the card. So, right, I mean, that gives us a decent rundown of the points management. It does vary a lot. And I think that's a potentially confusing point

for people, especially if someone who has always had one type and then expands into a second type of transferable points and probably logically assumes that it's all the same and it's very different from one program to the next. So I think that's a good summary to keep in mind. And thankfully, we have the timestamps so you can always come back to this when you can't remember in the future how it works with which program. So which one do you think has the best point management? Combination of transferability and cancellation features? You know, I really want to say Amex, and I think you'll argue something different. So I'll stick with Amex and let you argue something different. Amex because, okay, so you can't transfer points to another person, and that's kind of a pain. You can't pool them within your family, and that's

kind of a pain. However, I like that they pull the points from all your cards so there's one pile you don't have to do any manual moving around with your points in order to put them together and redeem them they're all in one pile it doesn't matter what membership rewards or any card you have they all transfer to partners the ones that are available these days anyway all transfer to partners the same ratio you don't have to worry about if you close one or which part are you closing etc because cetera, because you'll keep that one-to-one transfer ratio with all their various cards. And you can add whoever you want as an authorized user. And you do need to wait 90 days before you can transfer points to them. But for most people in most use cases, I think that's probably not going to be a big restriction.

You just add whatever family member you play the game with as an authorized user. And then you have the ability to transfer to their loyalty programs. So even though you can't transfer the membership rewards points to the person, you can still get them to their loyalty program. So I think I'm going to give this to Amex here. I think there's an argument to be made for Chase and for Capital One for that matter, but I think I give the overall nod to Amex. All right. Yeah. So those are all good points. I can't though, forgive that you can't move points from one person to MX. All right. Yeah. So those are all good points. I can't though, forgive that you can't move points from one person to another. So things like, what if, and this happens in real life, like what if my wife has a lot of membership rewards points? I want to pay with points, but I'm

the one with the business platinum card that gets that rebate. I can't do that. I have to use my own points or not at all. And so I'm going to give the nod to Capital One. I think it's great that they let you move points to anyone. It just makes it so simple. And I think you should be able to do things like, if I hadn't had my account shut down and you needed some of my, you needed some Hyatt points from me and I could, then I could give you some Capital One points and, I mean, you could give me Capital One points and I could give you Hyatt

points or whatever. You know, those kinds of things become possible when they don't have any restrictions. And that's really nice, I think. Yeah, it is so the downside with capital one is not being able to transfer to unauthorized users loyalty programs because if the person that you want to be able to give points to doesn't have a capital one miles earning card then the ability to transfer to another person doesn't help you and and people for people who play this game pretty hard, if, you know, your player two already has a ton of credit cards and they don't have a Capital One card, there's at least a non-zero chance that they'll have a hard time getting approved for a Capital One card. And so you may not have the ability, like that might not be an option for you because they might not have

a Capital One Miles Earning card and you just want to be able to top off their loyalty account with some extra points. So that was my main hesitation with not picking Capital One. But you're right, the ability to move points. My wife and I use it all the time, the ability to move points, because there's no limit as to how many points you can move. You can move cash back to cards that are in Miles. And so my wife's Spark Cash card, for instance, she'll use that instead of the Venture X, because then we have the option to just easy redeem it for cash if we want to. Otherwise, she can call and transfer her cash back on that card to one of my cards that are in miles of my venture cards. So yeah, I capital one. It's not that I don't. That's the one piece that could

be difficult for some people. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's wrap it all up now and come up with who has the best combination of best point earning opportunities, best transfer partners, best pay with points awards, and best point management. What's your pick? My pick's got to be Amex because there's so many ways to earn the points. And I can concede that I don't love the fact that you can't share the points to another person directly. You can't transfer membership rewards points to another person. That's the biggest drawback for me and the only hesitation I have. But that's overcome, I think, with the ease of keeping the points alive, because you can get a card that has no annual fee and keep your points alive and transferable.

You could have the Amex Everyday card or the Amex Blue Business Plus, and then you can cancel all your other Amex cards if you want and still be able to use your Amex points. And because there are so many opportunities to earn Amex points, and they have a great set of transfer partners, it may not be the best. It doesn't beat built in my mind, but it's very good. And the points are easy to earn. Partners are very good. Points are easy to keep alive and transferable. I have to give the best overall to Amex. I think that's long been my favorite program out of the bunch. And I'm glad I don't have to pick only one because I wouldn't only want Amex because I would be losing some things, namely a good way to book

hotels with points because Amex's hotel partners just aren't very good. I don't get particularly excited about using Amex points for hotel bookings. So that's the biggest drawback for me. But for me, I could live with, if I had to only pick one program, I could live with just booking cash bookings for hotels and just find the ones that are within my price range and save the money on flights that I would save with Amex points. So yeah, Amex is my pick. Yeah. For me, so not having Hyatt really comes down to it. I can't pick Amex. That's like too important to me. You know what?

So even though Chase was not like number one in any of these categories, they were pretty much like number two in almost all of them and at least in my mind and so i'm gonna give my nod to chase as the best overall um it's really close though it's really close so please i mean they've improved some with uh some of their transfer partner additions over the last couple of years but they're still missing life miles uh so that's a problem for me and uh and they don't have been with turkish which isn't they don't have an issue these days but but uh but that's certainly somewhat of a drawback for me still but they did add aeroplan and so that's one that i really like for a foreign partner program they do have some other good foreign partner programs one thing we didn't mention and this is an oversight

on my part i think is that we didn't mention transfer bonuses because amex frequently offers transfer bonuses chase has started to dip their toes into that pool so they've started to offer some but not nearly as many as amex has offered over time in the last couple of septembers i think amex did like 12 different programs at a time for uh for transfer bonuses so uh so when you also consider that i feel like that just makes it even a stronger argument for mx in my opinion but um as much as anybody i'm recording this from the balcony and i buy it that i love the grand night kawaii so it's not that i don't love it it's that i uh i just don't love enough of the rest of chase's program to yeah to pick it yeah no that's don't love it. It's that I just don't love enough of the rest of Chase's program to pick it.

Yeah, no, that's understandable. You make a really strong case for MX. I'm going to stick with my Chase pick. It's like the best because it comes in second everywhere. Yeah. It's almost everything. Second hand. I don't know.

Okay. All right. So now, last question on this topic um if you could only have two transferable points programs so you can have your amex or i could have my chase what would be you could only have one more what would be the other one. Boy, this is tough. For me, and this is going to sound a little crazy, but for me, I think I would be stuck between Capital One and Built. And I'm sure that there are people saying, what, Chase? You know, I love Chase for Hyatt. I don't love them for much else other than Hyatt. And so I would have a hard time giving up Hyatt if I had to. If I had built points, I wouldn't have to though necessarily. Now, can I earn enough bill points to uh fully satisfy my hyatt habit uh but i i think i would probably go with capital one as uh uh i thought you were going with bill no yeah capital one um yeah i think i think i would have to go with capital one because

there's more ways to earn the points we can transfer them easily from person to person i could deal with uh windham for some the class of vacation rentals and and hopefully cottages.com rental i'm hoping to put together here so uh yeah well you know what i'm going to go with capital for those listening next next face is like scrunching in pain. He's struggling as he's trying to. There's just not enough ways to earn built points. If built had a good way to earn more built points, then I think it would be easy for me to pick built as number two.

And that's really my biggest struggle. I do have some other ways to earn Capital One points, but I probably can't get a lot more new Capital One cards. So it comes down to 2X Everywhere spending, mostly with Capital One. I could get a Saver One for 3X Grocery and 3X Dining. So there's some potential there. All right, Capital One.

Capital One. I'll pay for my Hyatts with Capital One points and reimburse myself at one cent per point. Capital One. All right, all right. For me, it's pretty easy. I would pick Citibank. So Citi would fill in the holes as far as airline transfer partners with Chase.

And, of course, they add some really interesting hotel options that Chase doesn't have. And like Wyndham, like the one to two choice, and, of course, leading hotels of the world. And I love that I love exploring new luxury hotel properties and and having points to be able to book them at great rates is is really terrific so even though Citi doesn't have as many point earning opportunities so it sort of has that same built problem in a way I would I'd still I think I'd go with Citi. I find that interesting because Citi would not even really be on my radar, to be honest. It's the choice partnership is potentially interesting. I've been potentially interested in using those for preferred rewards hotel ever since

they announced that. And I haven't yet done it. I haven't yet run into the situation where it seemed like that would be the right redemption for my needs so uh so choice is like i mean i like choice well enough but i'm not using them often enough to care about city points at this point sure so that's not a big draw for me wyndham certainly could be just like it could be with capital one you know of course as long as i have the windermere business card it's not drawing me in but if we're only picking two transferable points and that's going to be it then the ability to transfer to windham

is kind of nice but i could get that with capital one leading hotels in the world there's an interesting one that i think you know time will tell whether or not i find good opportunities to actually put that to use because i like a nice luxury hotel as much as anybody i guess we'll see it also depends on what happens with hi mr and mrs smith i think and how exciting that ends up being uh as to whether or not i really care enough about uh you know about leading hotels of the world but it's probably interesting because i never would have said for you that it would have been chase and city i don't think that would have been my favorite what do you think what would you have guessed well i mean i like amex because the points just roll in so yeah so well i mean like the amount of effort you're gonna have to put in to earn i would have

definitely thought you would add amex as one of the two packs because the rate at which you would have to earn points with anybody else to come close to what you could earn in a year uh with amex without a lot of effort is just like that there's a pretty big gap there i think yeah so yeah yeah even if you use your amex points to not amazing value there's so many ways to earn them in an accelerated clip that it makes it hard for right right and i have to admit you know i'm looking at this from the point of view of someone who has across my household millions of membership rewards points so it's not like on my mind like how do i get more and um that makes sense so but yeah so so

that is definitely biasing i think you made a good argument for that i probably should have had amex because of how important that one category is of of the ease of earning points um that really is extremely important um so yeah i mean i i could imagine i guess uh an amex plus chase or an amex plus uh built combo um that way i preserve my hyatt at least and uh with either one of those but uh still, I'll stick with, we might as well have different picks. I'll stick with my Chase and City. All right. And I'm Amex and Capital One. You already have me somewhat regretting the fact that I didn't say Amex and Built because I probably don't need any more like flight awards if I've got Amex.

So I guess the only thing I really need is hotels. And so maybe Built would have been the better pick. I picked Capital One. So now I got to, I made my bed. Now I got to sleep in it. So there we have it. All right. Well, what are your views? If you're listening to the show, let us know in the comments. Let us know, you know, the comments on our site or on YouTube or on your favorite podcast platform, what your picks would be. If you could only pick one or you could pick two transferable points programs, what they would be. And we should also probably have clarified at the

beginning that neither of us will go with one or two. This is an extremely academic exercise that's fun because you have to think about it a little bit, but neither one of us would do that. We're always going to diversify our point collection so that we have the ability to do all of the things that we're talking about. That's a lot more fun. It sure is. I would be so sad to have to give up any of those great opportunities that we're aware of. Right, right. Except for Capital One. You wouldn't be sad about that because they...

Yeah, well, you know what? My wife has a Capital One card, so I keep just enough points on hand in case we do one of those baseball games that every now and then Capital One makes these great seats available for, what is it? 5,000 points per seat, I think. 5,000 points per seat. Yeah. So yeah, I'm actually hoping to do that at a Tigers game this summer if we can.

Yeah. Hopefully that will be on the docket. I would like to get to another baseball game too, because at 5,000 points a seat, it's a great deal deal and i'm not a huge baseball fan but a day at the baseball stadium is just kind of fun no matter what i think you know a live game is live sports are fun to watch and so uh 5 000 points a piece to have really good seats where like you're you know standing not that far away from the players and get to see the game up close i i don't know i look forward to being able to do that again myself so hopefully that works out all right i think though that brings us to this week's question of the week and this week's question of the week is about the mr and mrs smith i had integration so sam writes in and says he has a question he's getting married november planning

to take the honeymoon shortly thereafter has a decent slash ultimate rewards points about a half a million points he's been building up hoping to get outsized value transferring to hyatt for the honeymoon questions one would you feel comfortable booking a small luxury hotel of the world property knowing that their relationship with hyatt will be ending soon and two would you wait for the hopeful integration of mr and mrs smith properties before booking assuming that those will be bookable with hyatt points what What do you think? Yeah, I thought this was a great question. You know, for a regular vacation or something, I'd be fine with booking an SLH property through Hyatt with Hyatt points and enjoying it that way and, you know, and hoping for the best.

I mean, it should work, but you just never know since, uh, Hyatt is, uh, giving up their SLH partnership altogether. Um, you don't know what'll happen. I don't think I'd risk it on a wedding situation personally. Wow. Wow. That's interesting. So would you, would you wait and hope that a Mr. And Mrs. Smith integration is done by then? I mean, same one I'm going to ask and say, thought he picked up in a press release that maybe the Mr. and Mrs. Smith integration will happen sometime around April 1st. Do you know anything about that? Do you think that that's going to happen? Would you be confident that we're going to be able to book those with Hyatt points? Or would you say, okay,

well, you know, what would you do instead then with the half a million ultimate rewards points? Would you look for a regular Hyatt then instead of an slh but what would your strategy be half a million membership rewards points sorry ultimate rewards ultimate rewards better have a million ultimate rewards points would you book something else and totally well what would you do so if you were in that situation where it's like i mean gosh it depends it depends how much uh how urgent it feels to get something secured. But I wouldn't... So with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I mean, the problem is, am I confident that you'll be able to book Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties with Hyatt points? Yes. Am I confident that the particular Mr. and Mrs. Smith property you're looking at will be bookable with Hyatt points?

No. It won't be all Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties. I would guess that, that in the starting gate, it'll be, it won't even be half would be my guess. But I mean, we'll see. But, um, so I would only wait if, if you don't feel like it's urgent enough that you have to get something locked in now. And the alternative would be to, you know, find some other way to lock in a hotel, but that's fully refundable. And then see what happens with Mr. And Mrs. Smith later. But yeah, personally, for something, for an event that's that important is that I wouldn't risk it. Would you, Nick?

I would. Yeah. Yeah. I was surprised to hear you say that. I think, I mean, I would with a couple of qualifications, but I would because so far my experiences with SLH properties have been really good and they have been really high end. So the places that I've stayed or that I've booked, I have a couple of bookings coming up later this year, just seems sufficiently high-end enough and when i look at the reviews seem so high on customer service that i would still expect to have a really good experience even after that partnership ends so and a lot of them i at least a lot of the ones i've looked at include free breakfast for everybody booking so that free breakfast when you book through Hyatt is not always something that you wouldn't get anyway when you booked through the hotel. So and I've been treated well after having booked through Hyatt. I think you'll still be

treated as though you're booking through S.L.H. in those cases, which sure what stands out to me is one time when I checked into one and they brought me to a room and then the guy ran back from the front desk to say, wait, this isn't room i i he he said i thought it was strange because we don't usually put members in that room and that word to me had as okay so my booking came through as though i was a member of the slh program and that is what made the difference rather than hyatt he doesn't know that i'm a member of the Hyatt probably. So anyway, I think that probably you're still going to be taken care of as an SLH member at most of those places. Now, I would look at the reviews of the particular property you're looking at to get an idea of

how accurate that is likely to be. The other thing is that probably you have to look at the cancellation policy, but I assume that your reservation will still be cancelable. So if the integration with Mr. mrs smith happens and it looks amazing and you're like oh wow i have a great opportunity then as long as you're within the cancellation policy soon they'll be able to cancel and get your hyatt points back actually that's a great point yeah yeah you know and in most places don't have a an insane you know cancellation policy there or something so it depends on where you're looking to go but but as long as it's something that's relatively close to when you would check in in november then

i probably book that now and when the integration happens then you'll know okay i'd rather do us or mr mrs smith or you'll hear from people horror stories saying that their slh experience was awful after booking through hyatt and the partnership ended i doubt that's going to happen but but you'll know one way or another before november i would think yeah that's going to happen, but, but you'll know one way or another before November, I would think. Yeah. That's great advice that there's no harm in booking the SLH now, if it's a fully cancelable, usually there'll be some rules like, you know, uh, a week before a month before, whatever it is, make sure you, you note that, make sure you, uh, I do things like I use a Gmail to send myself a, a, uh, reminder in the future, email myself like, you know, 10 days before it would become non-cancellable. Like, remember, this becomes non-cancellable on whatever this

date is. And so, you know, decide whether or not to cancel it. And that way I don't have, you know, risk forgetting. And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I have three SLH bookings already right now, and I'm probably going to make a fourth before that ends in part because I want to get those in while I can because some of those properties look really appealing to me. And so I have some booked and I don't know if it turns out that people are saying, oh, I booked through Hyatt and they put me in the broom closet and refused to give me breakfast. Well, then I'll cancel those and I'll get my points back. Yeah. No, I'd be more worried about things where a hotel walks you because they decide to sell out for another event. That's fair.

And they're like, well, we don't even know where this reservation came from. There'd be nobody advocating on your behalf. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. And if you want the Hyatt Elite Nights, obviously, that's something. And you can count on a certain level of customer service with Hyatt. So maybe I would be looking at, well, what Hyatt properties might fit for my honeymoon then if I were nervous about that. That's a good point. Great. as to whether you should do it or not. Sam would, I mean, Greg would not risk it, Sam,

and I would. So there you have our indisputable answer to that question. That brings us to the end of this week's episode. If you've enjoyed this episode, you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe.

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