Frequent Miler on the Air - The dream trip that got away | Ep160 | 7-23-22

Episode Date: July 23, 2022

As we plan for our 3 Cards, 3 Continents dream trips, we can't quite have it all. There have been dreams we've had to put on hold for future trips and this week Greg and Nick discuss a couple of those fantastic trips they hope to take one day but couldn't fit into this challenge. 00:45 Giant Mailbag: Chase reconsideration success 4:00 3 Cards, 3 Continents, 3 Updates https://frequentmiler.com/tag/3cards3continents/ 16:45 What crazy thing.....did IHG and Chase do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/ihg-premier-140k-welcome-offer-free-night-certificate-cant-be-topped-off/ 21:08 Awards we booked this week 25:03 Main Event: The dream trip that got away 27:30 Greg's free night certificate wish list https://frequentmiler.com/best-uses-for-marriott-free-night-certificates/ 33:24 Nick's tropical paradises lost https://frequentmiler.com/aeroplan-plans-for-future-dream-trips/ 56:52 Question of the Week: What's the strategy for a person with high business spend?

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, the dream trip that got away. The one that got away, oh.

As Nick and I have been planning our Three Cards, Three Continents challenge, we both have trips that we really, really wish we could have done. It's just not going to work out for this particular trip that we're planning for September, but we thought it would be worth sharing with our listeners because they're still great ideas and they're definitely worth doing. So we will get into that. First, of course, we have the giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Jennifer and she emailed about Chase's 524 rule. So Chase, of course, will not approve you for a new credit card if they see on your credit report that you have opened five or more credit cards in the past 24 months. That's the 524 rule.

And she applied for a new World of Hyatt card and was denied despite knowing that she was just under 524. So she called and I'll let her words do the rest of the talking. Jumping to the middle of her email, I called the reconsideration line obtained from Frequent Miler and explained the above to the representative. He asked about responsibility for cards for which I am an authorized user. My application went back through reconsideration and was approved in about four business days or six calendar days. I wanted to share the success story

and thank you. So there you go. Good job, Jennifer. You know, what she's talking about is when you have authorized users, when you have an authorized user card for someone else's account. When someone else makes you an authorized user. Yeah, exactly. Someone else has added you as an authorized user. Chase will see that on your credit report. And if it if the card, you know, account was only open within the last 24 months, it'll look like you're it added to your 524 account and you may get denied for that reason. The solution to that is to call Chase's reconsideration line, which you'll find on our best offers page and tell them you're not responsible for the payments to that card. Great job, Jennifer. That's exactly what you should be doing. Glad that you found that information on our page where it is. You know, we keep that stuff there so that people can have easy access to it. So that's great.

And it just goes to show that that can be done. And sometimes it's not to say that you may not still get a no, because there's a lot of variables in terms of card approvals that we can't predict. But we know from data points like that, that it's possible to have a reconsideration rep, eliminate those authorized user cards from consideration. So you just have to give them a call and do that. And we always say, or at least I always say, I always just wait at first. So if you apply and you get a pending message, you may call the reconsideration line right away and talk to a representative and see if you can get it worked out. I usually prefer to just wait and see what happens because if you get denied, then you can call the reconsideration line. Sometimes automatic

approvals take a few days. Like in this case, even after calling the reconsideration line, Jennifer said it still took about a week. And that's not really uncommon with Chase. They do tend to be slower on their approvals than a lot of other issuers. Right, right. So the best practice advice is to wait until you get denied before calling, but I don't really think it makes a big difference if you try calling ahead of time, if you're kind of anxious to get past that stage. But yeah, if you're not in a hurry,

just wait and then call one if you get the denial letter. All right. So that brings us, I think, to three cards, three continents, three updates. Yeah. So first of all, what is three cards, three continents? It's our big annual challenge this year. Each of us, me, Nick and Steven are using the welcome bonuses from three cards we picked in a draft. And that's our budget. We each have a different budget because we picked different cards. And we have to build the biggest three continent trip we can.

And ultimately, readers will vote on who has the best trip overall. We've all been crazily working towards building the best possible trip and trying to beat the other guys. So I know that's been on our minds. And as a regular update until then, we're doing this three cards, three continents, three updates. First update is from Steven, who says he had planned to buy 15,000 IHG points from the daily getaways. So last week's show, we debated what did we think he was actually thinking of buying through the daily getaways. We kind of landed on choice points as the most likely, but no, he was thinking IHG.

Surprising. Very surprising. Yeah. I don't know why he had to wait for daily getaways to do that as opposed to buying during one of the sales. But anyway, maybe buying an exact amount like 15K was better through that than through the sales that sometimes have a minimum before you get the 100% bonus. Anyway, it turned out that the hotel that he thought was 15,000 points was actually 21,000 points for the day he needed to be there. And if he bought that many points, that would have been $112 in points. Meanwhile, he says he remembered that there's a bit of mystery here. He said he remembered that there's a hotel chain that doesn't show up on OTAs, that's online travel agencies, for the country he's visiting. So he checked their site there, meaning whatever this hotel chain is, and found a good option for $69 and 20 cents. So that was

almost half off the price it would have cost him in IHG points to get the hotel he was originally planning. So that's his update. I'm so intrigued. I like a hotel chain in a specific country that he knows doesn't show up on online travel agencies. That just seems like such a weird assortment of tidbits there. There's definitely some mystery. I'm really curious. I can't wait to find out what this is all about. And the way he said that, like, and I remembered that this is the case. So he's encountered this before.

And at least that's the impression I get. Right. And so he was able to dig up that that memory and find find a gem. So maybe it's a place he's been to before. I don't know. Maybe something that someone else has written about. I can't wait to find out what's happening there. But, you know, I think the the other piece of this that's interesting for me is like, I have along with Steven been looking at ways to chop the price of a hotel as

much as we possibly can, because the budget gets a little tight between the annual fees and, you know, of course, award taxes and things, all the various stuff in the budget. I have also been looking at, okay, how can I slice and dice and get a hotel for as little as possible? But Greg's in probably a totally different boat because he's got that Marriott offer with the five 50,000 point certificates. So you're just looking for hotels that fall under 50,000 points, whereas Steven and I are looking for, okay, can I buy points? Should I use some sort of a discount? Is there a coupon code I can find? Is there a portal I can go through to try to slice and dice as much as possible? It's a very different outlook, I think.

Oh, it's totally different. And I'm trying to find hotels that would cost over $400 a night. Right, right. You're on the totally opposite end of that spectrum. I want it to be at least this because I got to get good value from these certificates. Right. And yeah, you're at the opposite end. So it should be really fun to see how that goes. Right, where I'm like, okay, can I find a holiday inn that is nice enough and costs few enough points? You know what I'm saying? So yeah, I mean, I'm there with you, Stephen. I understand what you're going through there. I feel your struggle. So in terms

of my update next then, I had talked about how I needed to get on the phone with Aeroplan to change an award ticket that I had booked because award tickets booked before July 5th got one free change. And so my update, I actually could probably have a couple updates here. But my big update is after numerous calls and hours upon hours of trying to price stuff out online or piece together, figure out which flights will match, and then more hours on hold with Aeroplan. I finally did get my award changed, and I'm happy to report that there certainly was not a change fee. In fact, I ended up getting a bunch back because the taxes on my new award were much less than the taxes on my original award. What I didn't anticipate, I didn't realize as I pieced this together was that, um, originally I had a stopover.

So I had transferred 110,000 points to Aeroplan, um, because I had a stopover on my intended journey, but the way I pieced together the flights on the new journey, I didn't end up with a layover of more than 24 hours. Close, but not quite. So I actually got 5,000 miles back also, which is exciting in the one sense, because it means I have some extra Aeroplan miles that I can do something with. In the other sense, it means I need to transfer more to Aeroplan in order to use them, or I'm going to end up with some orphaned points that would have been much more useful

in a different way. So does Aeroplan,eroPlan, you know, some programs will let you book hotels for at a poor rate, but maybe you could get a $30 hotel with 5,000 points. Yeah. I mean, I have not checked yet with AeroPlan. I have checked with American Airlines and I have looked at a number of the options through there. It's like, I think it's hotels.useaamiles.com. Don't quote me on that. You'll just want to Google use AA miles for a hotel. And again, like you said, it's poor value, but there are options anyway. So I had already looked into that. And so that was my next thought that maybe I can use those towards a hotel. I am slicing and dicing quite a bit on my hotels already, but we'll see. So I haven't yet found my use for those extra

miles, but I did get my award change. So that was exciting. So my trip has taken shape here in terms of what I'm going to do. So I'm pretty excited about that. I had to rebook my fine hotels and resorts booking. So it's not the same that it was before, but I'm still going to earn some points and we'll talk more about that as we get closer. So I'm getting pretty excited though. And my wife is getting pretty excited, even though she can't come on the trip, the more she hears about all this stuff, she's like, oh my goodness, I want to do this. And she is not the type of person who wants to fly around a bunch. So that's kind of surprising. So I'm excited for what I think is going to be a fun trip. And it's definitely,

like I said, taking shape. I booked actually the majority of the flights, although some of the non-aero plan options are going to need to be rebooked again. So I have some more work yet to do, but my update is that I did get that changed after more than two and a half hours on the phone with AeroPlan for the final phone call. So that was a fun time. All right. Well, good, good, good. I guess my update is similar to last week's. Last week, I said there's, even though I'd booked my Round the World Award, I'm still thinking of changing it. And my thinking has sort of accelerated along those lines, I guess, is my update.

Because the main reason I was thinking of changing it already was that I was extremely low on cash after paying all the award fees for the round the world ticket, as well as some filler awards that I had booked. And by that, I mean, you know, awards to connect the dots because my round the world award doesn't literally get me all the flights around the world. There are some places where I'm using other miles to get pieces of it. And to be clear, you can get all the way around the world. It's just that Greg is working on a budget here. So he's got a, he can't fill in all those gaps because he doesn't have enough miles in his budget from the cards that he chose. Right. Right. So, so anyway, you know, in working out my budget for all the little things like

hotel transfers from the airport to hotels and visa fees and things like that, you know, it just, it was looking so, so tight. And I didn't realize until yesterday that Turkey, which is one of the places I was planning on transitioning through, I'm not saying I'm not going to, but I didn't realize that they had a $50 visa fee for Americans. And that doesn't sound like that much, but when you're already really hurting for those dollars to, oh, I could get there, but I can't pay for a taxi to get to the hotel. You know, it could be a problem. So, um, no, that's, I think that's part of the interesting dynamic here because we're making decisions that are not realistic in the sense that, you know, in a real situation, Greg would pay the $50 and if it put him, you know,

$25 over budget, whatever he would pay it. Right. So, but this is forcing us to try to be creative and work within the constraints because I've certainly, there've been a number of trips that I worked out where I was like, oh man, that would put me like a hundred dollars over budget. It'd be an awesome trip, but it'd be just a little bit too much. So I need to, you know, tone that back or change this or that. And that's part of the reason why I didn't end up with a stopover because I, there's enough expense already that the budget is thin. And so if I added any more, and when I say I didn't end up with a stopover on my award, that's not to say I'm not going to have a couple of hotel nights along the way. But I couldn't extend more, A, because of budget and B, because

of time. The trip, obviously, I can't travel forever. So I needed to keep things within a reasonable amount of time. So, so those are, you know, constraints that we're working within, but I think that leads to more creativity. So that, yeah, I do too. And I find it a lot of fun. It's, it's like solving a puzzle that, that has all these different constraints, you know? And, and so and, and when I, when I solve one, like, or even two, so I solve like, you know, okay, I could do this in few enough miles and I can, and I would have enough cash left over. Then I realized, well, wait a minute, at these locations, there's no good use for my hotel certificate. So I've got to change that up and go to places where I could actually get good value

out of them. So that's the type of thing, all these things playing together. But I love it. It's a great challenge. So one of the things we're doing, it should be obvious to the listener is we're not going to be revealing our trips to each other or to the world until we're actually taking them. And that is intentional. I mean, and I think that's going to make it a lot more fun when we're actually taking them. And, um, that, that is intentional. I mean, and I think that's going to make it a lot more fun when we're taking the trips, but there is part of me that's like, it would be fun to be publicly talking about these challenges as, as they come. And, and, uh, we, you know, we haven't been to the, to the type of detail we, you know, we would love to, because it would reveal too many things.

Right, right, right. But it is a lot of fun and the challenge is good. And I think this is one of the things that differentiates us a little bit in the sense that we have these challenges that do force us to think outside the box a little bit. And I think that they lead to a number of interesting finds, even though some of those things like, is it realistic that Greg wouldn't, you know, would worry at all about the $50 Turkish visa? No. But if it leads him to discover something else that he can save on somewhere else, because he needs to, in order to free up that $50, then whatever that other discovery is, will be worth it. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll give you, I'll give you a real example. I wrote last week, I think it was, that how United has fuel surcharges on flights to Japan. And what I discovered since writing that, I need to update it, is that as long as you book a onward flight, so you're not stopping in Japan, but it's just a layover at the airport, those surcharges are not imposed.

So, or at least not as heavily. It's hard to tell if they're not at all. But so that's, you know, that's real concrete information that can be used in the future. You know, in general, it's not just for this trip. Right, right. All right. So that's our three cards, three continents, three updates. So then we need to talk about what crazy thing did Chase and IHG do this week? I don't know who it is. Who did it? Did Chase do it? Did IHG do it? I guess IHG did it. What crazy thing did IHG do?

That's a great question as to who actually did it. But the thing is, I emailed, based on a reader question, I emailed our IHG contact about the new IHG Premier welcome bonus, which is 140,000 points plus a free night certificate. And a reader had asked, is that free night top off a bowl with points? Meaning, can you add points? Let's say the free night is for up to 40,000 points. And so let's say a hotel charges 50,000 points for the night. Can you use the certificate plus 10,000 points to book your room? And I came very close to replying to that reader immediately saying, yes, you can do that with the free night from the welcome bonus because it's the same as the free night that comes with annually upon renewal of the card. And those free nights that

come after a year and every other year after that, when you renew the card, those are top offable with points. But I stopped myself and thought I better email our contact first and find out. So I did. So what do you think she said? I mean, it can't be, it can't possibly be that IHG has two totally different 40K free night certificates associated with the same credit card, the one you get for the welcome bonus and the one you get every year at anniversary. They can't be different, right? You know, part of me is still even a little skeptical that we got the right answer. But the answer we got from her was it is not like the certificates of old or the ones you get on the old IHG card, the no

longer available new IHG card that comes with a 40K certificate each year. Those are not top offable. This one, according to our contact, is not either. That's insane. I can understand the old $49 IHG card that's not available anymore. I mean, for 49 bucks, be happy with the 40,000 point certificate. I mean, I'd love to be able to top it off, but I get it that it's not top offable. But this, this doesn't make any sense at all. The card comes with a certificate that you can top off every year. People who had existing certificates when they made that change have been able to top

off those old certificates, right? I think so. So now you're going to tell me the one that comes for a new card holder with the bonus doesn't work that way. That's just confusing and odd and strange. So it really is. That's why, you know, part of me still thinks maybe she gave us the wrong information. I'd love to hear from a reader who actually got one of these. If you signed up recently and got one of these free nights immediately upon, I think it's after you meet the minimum spend probably. But let us know if it's top-offable or not so that we can know whether we got good information. But assuming the information's good, it's just insane, I think. I mean, presumably it costs IHG more to give out top-offable certificates because they're less likely to be used for full value and better chance of them not being used at all. But the amount of ill will they'll generate from this from people who thought, I mean, just assumed it'd be top-offable, it can't possibly be worth it to IHG to do that.

I can't imagine that either. And you know, it's interesting because like you said, I wonder which side this was like, was this IHG didn't want to offer that? Or was it the chase didn't want to pay enough for IHG to give them that type of top offable certificate? Was this like a compromise in the negotiations about how this was going to work? Okay. We give them a free night certificate, but don't let them top it off with points because we don't want everybody to use it. How cheap does that seem? I don't know. Who knows? But I don't know which side it was. Either side, it was crazy. So you're all crazy. Chase, you're crazy for not making sure that I HTML it the same as the other ones too. I'm not going to let you off the hook, Chase. All right. So that's crazy McCrazyness. Let's see. Then let's talk about awards we've booked

this week. Yeah, let's do it. I think you've booked an award, right? Yes, I have. So this week, by the time this publishes, I will have stayed at the Thompson Central Park in New York City, which is a category six. I don't know my category numbers. Hyatt property. It's 25,000 points per night standard. And that's what the price point was. Pretty good value because at 25,000 points, well, a standard room was over $500 per night before taxes. So already looking at about two cents a point or better. Now, it's a little murky when you evaluate it that way because I wouldn't have really spent $500 a night. I just would have stayed somewhere outside the city if I had to. But as it turns out, I need to attend something

that's close by this hotel. So it was a good opportunity to try out Thompson. I have not yet stayed at Thompson. It's one of the many Hyatt brands. And so the nice thing there is I haven't yet stayed at Thompson and Hyatt has their brand explorer awards where after you stay at five different brands, you get a free category one to four or category one to four free night certificate. That'll be good for a property that charges up to 15,000 points per night standard. And so I'm at nine different brands, or at least I was before this day. And so booking the Thompson was kind of something I accidentally did. I booked it and then I thought, I wonder how close I am to the next brand Explorer Award. And sure enough, that'll be number 10. So I should get a free category one to four certificate.

Plus of course, since I'm a globalist, I get free parking. Now I had discovered on a recent stay in New York city that the Andaz on wall street doesn't have its own parking garage. So I had to call the Thompson to make sure, but sure enough, they do have valet parking and they quoted me prices starting at like 65 for small cars and 75 or 85 or something plus tax for oversize. So we're going to drive our minivan down and park it for free since I'm a globalist and get a good value on that. So, and then I saw on the website that breakfast is either a room service or restaurant. So we'll see what works out best or I'll know by the time this publishes, I guess. And hopefully I'll have a little

quick bottom line review coming out to see how it is, because I'm curious to see how the Thompson brand stacks up. So that was something I booked on relatively short notice, and I'm excited to try it out. I thought about the Park Hyatt, which is nearby and would have been 15,000 points per night more, but I figured let's try something new. Yeah, that sounds great. And I can't wait to hear from you about how good that place is or not. Hopefully it is. And I meant to mention also, I was surprised. So the day before check-in, I looked in the Hyatt app and I saw that my room type was upgraded. It wasn't the standard room. It was the studio suite. And I thought that was interesting because I've

seen that happen a lot with Marriott. I've seen it happen with Hilton. I feel like I have not noticed my room type change within the Hyatt app before check-in day before. Even if you use a Suite Night Award certificate or a Suite Upgrade certificate with Hyatt, it doesn't reflect that Suite within the app. So I was surprised to see that because of course I hadn't applied an upgrade. And then this morning, the day of check-in,

as we record this, it's the day of check-in for me, I got a notification in the app that my room had been upgraded. And sure enough, it was just that studio suite that I saw yesterday. But again, that was nice to see proactively before I even got there. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I haven't stayed in a Thompson yet either. I've heard really good things for the most part, although there have been some negative Thompson experiences here and there that we've heard about. I'm excited too. There's a new Thompson opening in, I think it's Madrid, Spain. And I bet that would be a fabulous place. So, you know, I had a great almost 24 hours in Madrid during the 40K to far away competition. And I loved it. I loved my time

in Madrid. And so I'd love to go back. And so if there's a Thompson there that I could stay at, that would be, I'm sure a very nice way to do it. Very good. All right. What's up next? It's time, I think, for the main event. Main event. Today's main event, the dream trip that got away. All right. So as we've been working and working and working to try to figure out our ideal three-card, three-continent challenge trip, each of us have had ideas for travel that didn't pan out for one reason or another. And so, you know, I'm not going to put words into Nick's mouth, but I'm going to say for

in my case, there's a particular sort of, I won't even call it mini trip, but there's sort of a cluster of things that I wanted to do. And that whole set of things just weren't practical to slip into the bigger trip. And it's something that I still want to do someday very much. And so I'm going to talk about that. What's your two sentences about what you're going to talk about, Nick? Yeah. So I wrote a post this week about several different things that popped into my mind. But what I really want to talk about in terms of the trip that got away is the way that Aeroplan's award chart and partners has helped me discover some new destinations. And when I say that, I mean, not only the destinations that their partners fly to, but the thing that I've become intrigued with

is all of the places sort of around them, even places that aren't necessarily served by their partners, but are close enough and cheap enough flights that I've discovered several new tropical looking places that I'm really curious to learn more about and check out. So I'll do a quick little tour of the tropical places that I wanted to get to, but I'm not going to get to during today's thing. And there's been plenty of other stuff too that I wanted to do, but couldn't. And so even when you were talking about the IHG certificates a few minutes ago, I was thinking, man, there's a nice looking intercontinental somewhere I'm going where I would use one of my 40K certificates if I could use it. But of course, I didn't draft an IHG card, so I can't. And so maybe I'll swing by and take a look at what the place looked like.

And then there's a fine hotels and resorts property that, oh man, I regret going to the place I'm going to go to and not staying at this fine hotels and resorts place. It's just not within the budget. So there's a lot of those little things too, but I'll discuss some of the tropical places I think would be my focus today. That sounds great. All right. Should I go first, I guess? Yeah, go ahead. All right. So as you know, one of the cards I picked in the draft for this competition is the Marriott Bonvoy card that at the time, the welcome bonus was five 50K free nights. And so I've been basically scouring the planet for where are there Marriott hotels that are priced around 50,000 points and have the best reviews and would offer some sort of

experience. Like, it's not just good value, but it's a place I really want to go because it would be really interesting. And one cluster of hotels is found in Peru, where I've never been to Peru. I've wanted to go for years. And what they have is a number of luxury collection hotels. So you have one that's pretty well known in the points and mile space called Tambo del Inca, which is a luxury collection hotel, which has a, it has a train station, like its own private train station, not a private train, but a station for taking the train to Machu Picchu. And so that alone, I mean, that's like a fantasy trip right there. Just go there, you know, spend all five. I could have spent all five of my certificates right there, done the train to Machu Picchu and been a happy guy, you know?

For sure. For sure. I don't think I could have won the competition with just that, but I would have been a happy guy. Right. But there's so much more because there is also a luxury collection hotel in Cusco. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but that's fairly recently opened, is my understanding. It seems to also get great reviews and just looks beautiful. So you could definitely see tying together, staying at those two. Absolutely. And probably be fantastic because Peru is generally an inexpensive destination once you get there. So these luxury properties, I'm sure, are very highly rated and is probably very nice as well.

So you could move over there. We're not done. There is also a luxury collection resort called Hotel Paracas, which is in Paracas, Peru. brew. And this was on the list of the best hotels in the world that I think it was a year and a half ago or so that I went through a travel and leisures, you know, top hundred hotels in the world. This was on there. It looks fabulous, gets incredible reviews and it's actually available. So these others I talked about, you are close to 50,000 points a night. They have her between, you know, about 45,000 to 50,000. This one at a particular night, I looked at 31,000. So you could easily use one of those 35 K free nights for this, for this place.

But you see what I mean? I could have easily just flown to Peru and lived it up at these different Marriott properties. And I think I would have had a terrific trip. I would have actually been disappointed I didn't have more than five nights if I tried to do all three of those. Right, right. Well, you know, and this is an interesting dynamic of the trip because there was part of me looking at it when I mentioned that Intercontinental a few minutes ago, I was thinking to myself and thought to myself the same type of thing a few times. So my 40K certificate comes from, or I have a couple of them now from my $49 a year IHG card.

So there was a big part of me that's like, I mean, basically it would cost me $49 for a night there, right? The cost of the annual fee of the card. And I'm going to end up paying more to stay at like a Hilton garden in or something, you know? And, and, and so there's the part of me that's like, oh man, I wish I could just pay the annual fee and count that. But of course that would go outside of the constraints of the competition. But when you look at places like that, that you mentioned, one of the best hotels in the world, that you could probably use those 35K certificates that come with cards that cost $95 a year. So you're essentially paying $95 a night for a place that is probably quite luxurious. I mean, certainly it was named one of the best in the world. That's a pretty incredible deal. I could imagine us doing a future mid-tier certificate competition to see who can stay

in the best hotels that are bookable at that mid-tier. Which that Thompson in Madrid, by the way, I meant to mention as a category four. So it would be bookable with a category four Hyatt certificate. There you go. Yeah. Well, very good. I'm about to have one of those. So I guess I'll have to plan a trip. That's right. So, all right. So that's, I think, a good collection. And I like the fact that it's Peru. It was a place that was probably not in what the group of places people might have expected you to be considering for the trip.

I feel like South America doesn't get enough attention in the points and miles world. There are a lot of great deals to be had there. I don't give it enough attention either. So, uh, so that, that I think was, uh, uh, intriguing. What we'll see, of course, you said that wouldn't fit into the overall trip you were doing. So that won't be it. We'll see what you come up with instead. That's even better than if you had gone to Peru. Yeah. So speaking of good places to go, I have taken a look at lots of different places. And like I said, one of the things I've really enjoyed is that this has led me to seek out places that I was less familiar with because I obviously wanted to fly on nice airlines and visit a number of places. But I was also pretty interested in getting to a few places I haven't been before. I didn't want to just go to places I've been before. And that was a little bit of a struggle initially because I have traveled a lot on Star Alliance carriers.

I've done a lot of Star Alliance awards. So a lot of the major Star Alliance hubs I've been to before. And so I had to kind of look outside the box a little bit to find, okay, well, where can I get to that I haven't been? And so of course, I'm a palm trees and sunshine kind of guy. And so one of my main focuses is what tropical islands can I get to that I haven't been to before? And so there were several that stood out at me and were interesting because of the ability to get there or get close by using Aeroplan. And so one of them that I wrote about this week was Mauritius, which is an island country off sort of between, it's east of Africa and it's part of Africa, but it's kind of out there in the middle of nowhere in the ocean and looks gorgeous. And of course, Air Canada partners with Air Mauritius. Air Mauritius flies there from

Paris and London and Johannesburg and the fly from Cape town during part of the year and from Mumbai. So we've got a number of different options to get there and they have daily flights to most of those places. So very easy to get there in terms of finding a flight off the beaten path. Pictures look amazing, but unfortunately for some reason, I just couldn't seem to get any awards to price that connected there and continued onward. So I seemed to break it. Nobody seemed to know why. So I'm not sure. Yeah. And I couldn't figure it out. We tested a lot of stuff. I couldn't figure out why they were breaking there, but because I was only a few segments in by the time I got there and just

wanted to be able to continue on to Asia. But for some reason, it just wasn't working. So, and that's something to know about Aeroplan that there appear to be some unwritten rules that won't let you do certain things. And it's just up to the computer. It's not something that the agent can manually change. Although I say that, and you do sometimes need to coach them a bit on how to search for awards. Like for instance, on the itinerary I finally booked, there was a connection I wanted. And when you searched the two legs of the connection separately, they didn't show up available. But when you searched from point A to point C, it showed the connection in point B. And so I explained that to the rep. I said,

if you look these up separately, you're not going to see them. You just have to look it up from the origin to the destination. And then you'll see the connecting itinerary. And sure enough, she tried at first to search it individually. I heard her doing it and she's like, okay, no, I don't see that. All right, let me try. And she tried exactly what I said. And she's like, oh, there it is.

And there she saw it. So there's some element also of like how they search for stuff. So that's something to keep in mind too. When you're. So for listeners who aren't familiar with this, that's referred to as married segment logic where whether or not awards are available depends on multiple segments.

So those segments are sort of married together in the award availability. So yeah, that does make it harder when that's involved. It does. And that probably contributed somewhere to some of the other things that I was trying to do. I ran into some fair unavailable type situations, but anyway, okay. So Mauritius is one of them.

The next place actually, probably before Mauritius that I had in mind is a place called Kota Kinabalu, I believe. If I mispronounce it, hopefully somebody will correct me on that. Yeah, I'm not going to be the one correcting you. I've never heard of it. Yeah, I had not either. And so this is an island. Well, actually, it's not an island. It's a city on Borneo, which is an island. Of course, it's part of Malaysia. Kota Kinabalu is part of Malaysia. And so Borneo is shared by three different countries, I think, the space on Borneo. But Kota Kinabalu looks gorgeous and off the beaten path. Someplace I had never heard of before. I just stumbled on it. And I only stumbled on it because I was about one of his favorite tools is flight connections. And I said, I've been using that a lot because I've been looking at places like, okay, if I get to Bangkok or I get to Singapore, I get here or there, where can I go from those

places to see something else? Because I've been to Singapore before and I've been to Bangkok before. And that's not to say I may not visit one or both of those places again, but I wanted to see where else I could get. And so this Kota Kinabalu came up and I hadn't heard of it. So I started looking into it and it's a gorgeous destination and it has a Shangri-La that looks amazing. That's on a 400 acre reserve. And so it got terrific hikes. It looks like gorgeous views. It's on the ocean and it's a fine hotels and resorts property that cost about 150 bucks a night during the dates that we're looking at. So, wow. Yeah.

So that, that looked really nice and was pretty exciting. And actually I say 150 bucks a night that was for a base room and you could get an ocean view nicer, like junior suite sort of a thing for what came out to be $208 after tax. And so that's what I had booked. Yeah. So I was looking forward to that and the sunrise hike that they do there, which is, it sounds interesting. There's some like poisonous snakes and tarantulas and stuff like that, but you know, all part of the fun. So I would have enjoyed that very much, but I couldn't do that because it wouldn't fit in

with some of the other stuff I wanted to do. Now, the reason I was kind of looking at that in part was obviously because I hadn't been there before and I was unfamiliar with it. And I found some really cool information about stuff to do, but also because flights within Asia are so darn cheap that award tickets often don't make sense. Now, when I say so darn cheap, I mean, I'm looking at flights within Asia that are $25, $35, $55 each way to various places. It's really easy to bounce around Asia on the cheap. And a post I've been meaning to write this week, and hopefully it'll be published before this comes out, but I'm not sure, is that Malaysia Airlines is doing a deal where you can pay, I want to say it's about $300 for six segments. And you're basically prepaying for a flight pass that you can then fly around to various destinations that they serve. Cote de Quinebalo is one of them. And so that would

be something that would be interesting in order to bounce around a number of places in Asia. So Cote de Quinebalo was on my list next. And then when I realized that just wasn't going to work out because of the other stuff I wanted to do and places I needed to get, I found the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. And so I had not, I thought I had not heard of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands before, although I eventually learned that I had and just didn't realize it. So this is a small archipelago that's off the coast of sort of, I'd say off the coast of Thailand more than India. It's part of India. It's in the Bay of Bengal. Again, looks gorgeous. A bunch of small islands. You can travel back and forth between the islands and ferries that cost just a couple of dollars each way. Very, very inexpensive destination to visit, it seems. Looks gorgeous.

And some of those islands are very small, like we're talking 10 or 12 square miles maybe, and sparsely populated. So in fact, one of them that looks gorgeous with beautiful, pristine beaches, doesn't have internet from what I hear and just kind of an off the beaten path type of a place that seemed pretty intriguing to me. So I was excited about that. Now, like I said, I thought I hadn't heard of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands before. And then I got looking into it and I saw from the tourism page that there was one of these islands that was forbidden for visitors. And I didn't think too hard about it until eventually I started doing more and more research. And I found that it's North Sentinel Island, which I realized I had heard of because at some point a few years ago, there was an American

missionary that tried to go to this island that is inhabited by a tribe of people that don't have any contact with the outside world. And they had killed him. It was 2018. And I remember reading that story because he had gotten there illegally. People cannot visit this island. It's one of those places that's just cut off and they allow the people that are there to live the way they want to live without contact with the outside world. And so I remember that story and I was like, oh, that's where this is. So it's way out there in the ocean, kind of in the middle of nowhere, pretty isolated. But there are a bunch of islands you can visit. You can't visit that particular one, of course, but there are a number of other islands in

that chain that you can visit. And the key airport there, Port Blair, is served by both Air India and Vistara, which are both Air Canada partners. Air India, of course, is Star Alliance Airlines. So they partner with all the Star Alliance Airlines. Vistara partners with United also and a number of other airlines, but they're not part of the Star Alliance. So it would have worked out for this trip because, of course, I was using Aeroplan miles. So that seemed like a really intriguing destination, very inexpensive,

would have probably gotten some fantastic pictures if there was the beautiful sunshine that you'll see when you Google pictures of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. And I was really set to call and book this before I was finally like, you know, I should check what the weather is like when we're going to be there. Let me just take a quick look at that. Good safety tip. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, that's something my wife always thinks to do. And I almost never think to do. I'm like, what? It's an island. It's always sunny, right? It's always sunny and gorgeous. They got palm trees, right? But of course, no, they get monsoons at the time of year when we're looking to visit. So apparently, monsoon season is quite wet there and ferries often get canceled or disrupted. And so if you're not on the island with the airport, your ferry gets canceled because there's the cyclone or monsoon or something.

I imagine that's inconvenient. So I figured that's probably not going to work out, especially with the rest of my trip being tight with flights in terms of I don't have a lot of time to play with in order to be able to connect all the dots and make everything play together. So I wasn't able to do that either. But those were Cote Canabalo, Mauritius and, uh, and the Andaman and Nicobar islands were all places on my radar, a place I just discovered this week, uh, but decided not to go with was the Comoros islands. You can look up Comoros also

that's off the coast of Africa also looks gorgeous. I found all these islands that I'm like, I didn't know about Comoros. I didn't know about the Andaman and Nicobar islands. I didn't know about Camaros. I didn't know about the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. I didn't know about Cote de Calvado. Now I do. Thank you. Three cards, three continents. Yeah, seriously, seriously. So those all sound amazing. A little trivia about Mauritius is that, you know, in the 40K to far away adventure, I ended up flying from Cape Town to the Seychelles.

Yes. But Mauritius was my other likely end point. Um, I picked the Seychelles for one reason, one reason only, which was it was slightly further away. So when, when adding up all the distances of all the flights we flew going in Seychelles made it look a little bit more impressive. Um, but they both looked like amazing destinations and Seychelles made it look a little bit more impressive, but they both looked like amazing destinations and Seychelles was an amazing also you can fly from Mauritius to Madagascar. So there's a number of different options in there if you want to get into that region. And of course, if you take advantage of the right partnerships with stop often are not very cheap in part because they connect pretty far distances in a lot of cases. So, and just less, less inexpensive. It's not like flying around Europe or flying around Asia, which tend to be really inexpensive. And I think one of the takeaways for me really is that if you're looking to bounce around a few places within Asia or potentially within Europe, I say potentially because it varies somewhat, but certainly within

Asia, then award tickets will get you there and get you back. But if you want to get around, you probably just want money, right? I mean, I feel like the flights are so cheap that unless it's really important to you to fly business class for an hour and a half or two and a half hours or whatever, you're better off flying some of the discount carriers probably. Now I say that, I mean, maybe I'm sure my wife would question the safety record of this one or that one, but I'm less skeptical, I suppose. So I would be happy to fly around in some of those more inexpensive airlines. You could build a pretty interesting trip that way also. But of course, I wanted to mix in some good

award knowledge. So we'll see what comes out of all of this when we get to the end. So yeah, for sure. Well, my boy, it sounds like a lot of amazing opportunities that you're not going to be doing this trip. So I want to time spent looking at what you are going to be doing. Well, we'll see. We'll see. I mean, I did have to kind of change things some just to, in order to keep within the budget. So, you know, and I, my very first trip that I had worked out and I wrote about in the, in the post that I mentioned, Victoria Falls being something that I had looked at and my very first trip, the one I had actually booked, I had booked planning on getting to Victoria Falls. But then as I ran all of the numbers, I realized I was just

not going to get within the budget. It was going to take me a little bit too far. And so that's why I had to redo everything because I knew I like I thought I was okay. I had done kind of the quick math. I was like, No, I think everything's fine. And then when I actually sat down and like took out the pencil and started to add things up, I was like, No, I'm not okay, where can I slice and dice and there's just nothing more I I slice and dice? And there's just nothing more I can slice and dice. It's just not going to work. So, uh, so a lot of hours doing that stuff, but like Greg said, that's been a lot of fun. And I feel like I could see myself doing another trip like this, you know, maybe not quite as strict on, on the, uh, the parameters,

but I feel like it, like you said, it's a fun puzzle to put together. So, you know, to try to stick within those parameters anyway, because on normal trips, I'm not usually trying to stick to parameters like that exactly. So, so this is kind of fun. During normal trips, we have, we have other parameters, which is what are things that our family would be okay with doing. This is the one opportunity for us to travel the way we want to without that particular constraint. So it has its ups and downsides. Yep. Yep. So, all right. That's going to be fun. So I think that brings us next to, unless you had another one there, the question of the week. No, but I have a question for you before we get into the question of the week, which is, have you encountered any surprises? I know Air Canada does not charge, does not pass along fuel surcharges, but they do pass along like airport tax fees and things like that.

That's true, yeah. So were there any like negative surprises along those lines where, you know, oh boy, by flying through this airport, you know, it's way more expensive than I would have guessed? You know, quite the opposite. I've been surprised at how inexpensive it is in terms of the taxes, because I really didn't know what to expect. First, I figured, well, let me look up the different segments individually and just look up what the taxes would be on those and add that up. But that's not it. That's not what it comes out to be. And I'm not surprised that it doesn't come out to be that, because I'm sure that some taxes are affected by being a transit passenger or that sort of thing. So I don't understand the complexity that goes into that. And I looked

through the receipt to see the different fees that I was charged. And no, I have not encountered anything that surprised me in a negative way. I've been quite the contrary, positively surprised. I saw actually your mileage may vary posted a post this week about booking an airplane award and mentioned within the post that Air Canada has a 30 Canadian dollar fee for phone bookings. Now they also, I shouldn't say they also, they definitely have a $39 Canadian fee for partner awards. So if you book an award on any partner, you're going to pay the $39 Canadian for a partner award, which I talked about last week or the week before being such an inconsequential amount to me

in the overall scheme of booking a large partner award anyway, that I don't find that to be a particularly big obstacle. But your mileage may very mention that you would also pay a 30 Canadian dollar fee for a phone booking. And then they said they were surprised that they didn't end up having to pay that. Now, I hadn't seen that fee in the fee schedule and I hadn't noticed it. Maybe it is in there and I just didn't notice it. But I definitely now I booked one and I changed one to something else. And there definitely has been no fee for phone booking. So it's just been the $39 Canadian dollar partner fee. Yeah. No, it is. It is great. And there are probably some places I would have run into nastier surprises in that regard. There have been in terms of visas. I have

been surprised in a few different places at what the cost of a visa will be to visit or the places where I need a visa, where I didn't expect that I would need a visa. You know, you mentioned Turkey, and that's a great example of a place where I just wouldn't have even thought that Americans need a visa for Turkey, right? We don't need a visa for, is there any place else in Europe that we need a visa to visit? Not that I'm aware of, but I can't think of one. I don't think of one. And, and, you know, and even I know Turkey's like sort of in between Europe and Asia there, but you know, when I think about the places, the few places I've been in the middle East, I haven't needed one yet either. So, so I, I, I definitely would find that type of thing kind of surprising, but but you know,

that's just part of the way the cookie crumbles, I guess. So the other thing I think that's interesting that I found interesting, and this was not with Aeroplan, this is actually using the American Airlines miles, was the variance in taxes there, depending on where you connect. Because it's not necessarily significant amounts of money, but the itineraries that I've been looking to book with my American Airlines miles to have the same start and end point taxes have varied by like a factor of double. So, you know, the more expensive connection points have doubled the time. I'm not talking about London. I'm talking about, you know, just other airports, regular normal airports that some of them do have higher taxes. Like for instance, I looked at something that connected through Frankfurt. Odd, I know. But Frankfurt had much higher taxes than any other airport in Europe

that I saw. So that's been a surprise a bit to me in that I would have expected more consistency there, but there is quite a bit of variance in the taxes on American Airlines awards, depending on which connection points. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So you see that on American Airlines, but not Air Canada. I mean, I haven't noticed it, but yeah, I mean, it's to be the places you've booked. Exactly. It could just be the number of the places that I've booked through and, or just well, yeah, I guess the places that I booked through and who knows, because it, I feel like there's so much variance there in terms of what gets charged and what doesn't, depending on the rest of the itinerary. I don't think anybody at Air Canada

could tell me why the taxes are what they are. In fact, when I changed my award, I got X amount back. Well, actually, I had to pay like $8 Canadian dollars, and then I got like 60 Canadian dollars back or something like that. So weird. I don't know why I had to pay more to get 60 back or whatever it was, something like that. So I have the details written down somewhere. So I started to ask for an explanation and I was like, oh, who cares? I'm going to get 60 back. I'll pay the eight. Not question this. but you might be getting back, you know, 60 aeroplane bucks or something. I guess we'll see. I mean, do you have anything to share there that you wanted to share in terms of? No, I mean, I already mentioned the fuel surcharges on United. That was a big surprise in itself. Just, you know, I mean, I knew somewhere in the back of my head that such a thing existed,

but I had forgotten going into this. So I had assumed that booking United would be fuel surcharge free when booking with ANA miles. And I think it's not clear once you book what you just get a number of fees. there are like these individual numbers as well, but they're not tied to concretely to segments in your trip. So you have to kind of just guess which each thing went to. And so I don't think it turned out that I had, I had been charged any fuel surcharges in my trip after all, but it's something that might've happened.

It was just not clear. So something that is, I think, worth a quick mention anyway, when you're talking about the United thing and Japan and the fuel surcharges is something that I ran into that surprised me somewhat is that, well, you need to look at the rules for where it is you're going in terms of obviously the destination requirements, but not just that, the requirements for connection points, because Greg mentioned United and their fuel surcharges to Japan or lack thereof, if you're a connecting passenger. But here's the thing.

I looked at some itineraries. Air Canada showed me some itineraries that had overnight layovers or layovers in Japan connecting from flying into, let's say, Narita, which is one of the Tokyo airports and flying out of Haneda, which is a different airport. And we mentioned, I think, last week, maybe that you can't do that right now because only people on a package tour can get a visa, at least at the time we're recording this, to visit Japan. So you can't enter Japan. You can transit, but you can't enter. And so you can't change airports. But not only that, Air Canada showed me plenty of itineraries that had an overnight layover, which I would have assumed is no problem. I was very surprised when I learned that Narita airport is not open 24 hours a day. They close at midnight. And so you can't do that.

And what I read was that you would be denied boarding, uh, getting on the initial flight. If you didn't have a visa to enter Japan because the airport is not open all night long. So, uh, so you've got to look at that kind of stuff because air Canada would have let me book that. Apparently it's certainly seen. And they're not the only, I say air Canada and I don't mean to single them out. They're not the only star line. I'm sure. I'm saying all the way to Fletcher. Yeah.

Right. So you got to look at some of those things and figure out, okay, well, can I actually do this? Don't necessarily in this current day and age still until we get out of this phase of the pandemic, I guess, don't necessarily assume that just because they show you an award that's bookable that you can actually fly that. Make sure you read the requirements. So this website, people wrote in after last week's episode with a number of suggestions. And one of the best, in my opinion, is a site called Join Sherpa. Or if you just Google for Sherpa map or something like that, you'll find it. And it does. One of the things I liked about is the other ones were specifically

just about COVID requirements. This one is more general about like, can you get in? So there's information about COVID requirements, but there's also information about our visas required and things like that. So a really handy tool. There you go. Oh, good, good tip there. Excellent. Well, so that brings us, I think, to the question of the week. I almost forgot about it there because we got talking about that. So question of the week came in via email from Brian, and I've seen a similar question recently, I think in our Frequent Miler Insiders group. So this is a question about business spend. Brian says he's a frequent reader and listener and has a question about business spending.

He says he currently owns a business that does about $15,000 to $20,000 per month spend on credit cards. And he's in the process of buying a business that will do upwards of $75,000 to $100,000 per month spend on credit cards. I know this wouldn't apply to most people, but I'd be curious to hear a breakdown on business spend in the 25K, 50K, 75 to 100K per month range. Do you just open a new card every month and capitalize on new signup bonuses or just spend the majority on a major transferable point? What would you do if you had a business where you were spending that much regularly? Somebody else asked this question recently to, and our frequent miler insiders essentially where they had a business again with high monthly spend. So what do you do? Yeah. You know, um, so, so the, you know, the way to earn the most possible rewards would be to keep signing up for new cards. But

if this was my situation, like I wouldn't want to be juggling which credit cards I'm using for my business spend. Probably, you know, you probably want to keep things more simple. And I think, you know, one just really solid strategy is to find a uncapped two points everywhere card. So that'd be like the Capital One Spark Miles or their new one. I'm forgetting what it's called right now, but Spark Elite, Spark Travel Elite. Okay, good. So that way you'll learn two transferable points per dollar for all the spend and you'll have an enormous amount of rewards for whatever you want to do and transfer them to airlines or some hotel programs or just use them to reimburse all your travel.

So that's a great option. The other thing that you might want to consider is throwing in, if you're interested in hotel elite status or airline elite status is throwing in, if you're interested in hotel elite status or airline elite status, is throwing in spend, for example, on the World of Hyatt business card. You could pretty easily get to top tier Hyatt status by spending a lot on that World of Hyatt card. I don't think the points earned would be quite as rewarding, but the rest of the rewards from getting that top tier elite status could very well make it worth that trade-off. You could do similar things with some airline cards. for elite status, I would switch then to the 2X Everywhere card once you've spent enough for the elite status because you're just not going to be getting as good of rewards otherwise. Yeah, I agree with Greg's strategy there in general. I totally agree that if you're spending

that much, yes, obviously the way to maximize rewards would be to open four or six or 10 new cards every month, but that's not a sustainable practice over the long haul. And realistically, if you're spending 25 or 75 or $100,000 a month, you're going to be earning enough rewards to take care of whatever your rewards needs are for a very long time, where those signup bonuses are not going to matter too much because you're earning that much every month, even if you're only earning one X. So I wouldn't focus too much of my energy on that. I would be happy to go after one here or there if it matters for a specific use for you. But otherwise, I think I would probably worry less about it with that quantity of spend. The other thing that came to my mind was the business platinum card because

purchases over $5,000 earn one and a half points per dollar, which isn't great. But they also, because it's a pay over time card, they call it what they used to call a charge card. And the capacity to spend on that is a lot higher than on other cards. I definitely know people who have charged more in the six figures per month on business platinum cards before for legitimate businesses. So that's a card that you could easily put all of that spend on. Whereas I don't know if you'll be able to on your Capital One Spark card or not, if you'd be able to cycle your limit repeatedly, because whatever limit you get is probably

not going to be enough if you're doing 75 or 100,000 a month. So the business platinum would simplify things, assuming that your purchases are over $5,000 each. If it was a bunch of small purchases, I probably wouldn't want to be earning one point per dollar, but that's an option anyway. So your options in terms of individual cards that'll allow you to put a lot of spend on the card each month would be the business platinum card. What's the chase one? The ink business premier, I think. Premier. There you go. I couldn't remember which P that one was. Yeah. I think you're right. That's the one that looks like the other ink cards, but its points are not able to be transferred in any way. You can't even move them to another chase card in order to transfer them. So it's kind of tricky, but it does have the ability to earn, I think it's two and a half

percent on spend over 5K, on purchases over 5K. So that would be very compelling from a cashback point of view. Yeah, yeah. And with those levels of spend, cashback may be the option I would go for because the return you'll earn, I mean, if you spend $100,000 a month, right, $1.2 million a year, and you can earn 2% back on that, I don't know, was that $2,000 a month on $100,000, right? So 2% back, be $24,000 a year. That will probably cover most of your travel for the average person for a vacation.

So, or may very easily cover it depending on the type of travel that you do and give you some money you can invest in and use differently. So even at 2%, I think I'd be pretty happy with that return. So, all right, there's a few thoughts anyway, if you've got really big spend. Like I said, personally, I'd be less concerned with maximizing signup bonuses or even, you know, like you're in the two points per dollar on the spark card, but if you can only put, like, if you're going to give me a $20,000 limit and won't let you cycle it, if you can only put 20,000 on that card each month, I don't know if it's worth the hassle. When I look at the fact that you're earning a profit on whatever it is you're buying anyway. So if you earn a little

bit less return, but it simplifies things because you use one card, then I might go for the simple route on that personally, but sacrifice little rewards. But maybe you'll get a very big lament and then that one. Yeah, maybe. But yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. Well, my friends, that brings us to the end of today's episode.

If you've enjoyed today's episode, and you'd like to hear more about what we've been talking about, you want to get on our email list, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. You can join daily or weekly. You can follow us on all the various social media platforms. We're on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. And join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where you can discuss this kind of stuff and ask questions and have other people who are super interested in all of this award booking stuff help you figure out how to earn the best return

and use your rewards to good value. Thank you very much for being out there with us today. And we will be here with you again next week. Bye, everybody.