Frequent Miler on the Air - The Hotel Loyalty Rollercoaster | Ep 135 | 1-29-22

Episode Date: January 29, 2022

1:06 Giant Mailbag 9:37 What crazy thing did . . . Aeromexico do this week? https://frequentmiler.com/expanded-delta-award-availability-via-aeromexico/ 15:50 Mattress Running the Numbers Triple Header https://frequentmiler.com/ihg-offering-up-to-35000-point-bonus-with-intercontinental-ambassador-renewal-or-enrollment/ https://frequentmiler.com/marriott-promotion-earn-1000-bonus-points-per-night-doubled-elite-nights/ https://frequentmiler.com/radisson-rewards-americas-stay-3-nights-earn-30000-points/ 29:35 The Hotel Loyalty Rollercoaster https://frequentmiler.com/excited-about-ihg/ https://frequentmiler.com/ihg-card-changes-new-biz-card-higher-earning-top-up-certs-with-points-more/ 1:02:31 Post Roast 1:04:41 Question of the Week: What counts as American Airlines Loyalty Points? Subscribe to our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, the Hotel Loyalty Roller Coaster. We are in for a lot of fun, especially as Nick, for those listening to the podcast, aren't going to see this, that he was, he was doing his hand in a rollercoaster motion. So that, that was a lot of fun, but it doesn't really help the podcast listeners. Does it? I mean, you heard, you heard the sound effect that went with it. So you probably imagined it. I think. Oh, there you go. I only heard a little bit of it for some reason. So,

I don't know. Anyway, hotel loyalty, it's being rocked this way and that way. So, we are going to be talking about the ups and downs of it. I mean, there's some both exciting and depressing stuff going on. Preston Pyshko, MD, PhD Try to keep the mood light though. Preston Pyshko, MD, PhD Right, right, right. There's some good stuff. Don't worry. Don't worry. But first we have the giant mailbag. Today's giant mailbag segment. We have two pieces of giant mail in the giant mailbag. Two. And yes. And I just, before I forget, want to remind everybody that we are now accepting giant mail via email at mailbag at frequentmiler.com.

And for that one person who requested it, you can also email giantmailbag at frequentmiler.com. Stop it. Don't confuse them. Don't confuse them. Stop it. I have to always confuse people when I bring up the email address because it's so hard to remember mailbag at frequent miler.com. Right. Okay. First piece of mail comes from Beth. So we, in a recent episode talked about Hilton free night shirts, and I guess we were discussing

a promo. I don't even know how recent this was, but a promo that some people got offered where they could spend, I think it was like $8,000 on their Hilton card and get a free night. And we, I think we were unsure. We either said that the free nights now would not be good for any day of the week that they now were like weekend only as they used to be, or maybe we said we weren't sure. I don't't know but anyway beth comes to the rescue and says they actually will be good for any night of the week because she points out that hilton has uh actually terms that that say through any certs issued in through the end of 2022 oh Oh, good. Any day of the week. So that's pretty exciting. Nice. You know, that's right. Seems like it must. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong,

but I thought that that had said through the end of 2021. So I wonder if they updated that or we just I don't know either way, one way or another. They either updated it or I have to admit, I did not fact check Beth. She pasted some terms in the message. It seemed official. It seemed real official. I assumed we're correct. So hopefully she's right. And I think she probably is.

So that's great news. It really does make me more interested in earning a Hilton free night this year. There you go. Next piece of giant mail comes from Robert. He is talking about the Hilton breakfast credit. So we all learned recently that Hilton gold or diamond status no longer means free breakfast at any Hilton hotel worldwide. So now it means, at least in the Americas, I think, I can't remember what the restriction is. I think it's just the US. Yeah. Just the US. In the US, it means you get a dining food and beverage credit, and it varies what the credit is based on the type of hotel you're at, and in some cases, the market you're in.

And he says, I would recommend that anyone booking a Hilton stay indicate that they have two in their party for every reservation. This would allow them to get the maximum credit for each day because the credit is per person up to two people, giving them more of an opportunity to actually pay for breakfast with the credit. So I thought that was a good point. And I wanted to bring it up not just because of Hilton, but also there are other things like Marriott. If you have platinum status, normally you get free breakfast for two, but there are all kinds of exceptions. And which one is it? The brand that gives you like $10 per day. Yeah, Courtyard.

$10 per day per person, up to two people. And so if you check in with just one person, you're not going to be getting your $20 a day credit. So just make sure that two people are listed, whether or not you're, well, you know, you say that, but the last time I stayed at a courtyard, I had moved me and my wife and my son at the time it was very young. And, and I went down to breakfast in the morning and they refused to give me two $10 credits without my wife standing there. Yeah. Well, that's just inexcusable. I mean, that's... I agree. I agree. But it may not work 100% of the time or you may have to push back. Usually,

probably you'll get it for two people no matter what, but... Yeah. Well, I mean, you could have just gotten one $10 thing and then come back a few minutes later as your twin. As my twin. Just that guy's twin. His hair was messier than mine, right? You'd be like, oh, you mean Nick? No, that wasn't me. I'm Rick.

I'm Rick. That's right. That's right. Maybe change your shirt in between. Good hack, though. Good hack. Well, before we move on from the mailbag, I have an extra piece of giant mail today because this is confession time. Oh, confession time. We all love confession time, especially when it's not my confession. So yeah, this is usually exciting. What's happening in the last time?

Less happy with myself on confessionession Time in this one. So I recently bought a car and used a credit card, earned lots of points. We talked about that last weekend, right? Oh, yeah. That was awesome. I bought a car and earned over 500,000 membership rewards points. Insane. In a single purchase, right?

One little swipe. And that seemed really exciting. Now, people who read the post and kind of got the details probably realized that I had put, and I said this, I had put $24,000 worth of the car on a credit card and paid the balance in a check. Now, I didn't push hard to do more than the $24,000 because as I noted in the post, I was paying a 2% fee, which was totally worth it for the amount of points I was earning on the purchase, but it wasn't worth spending beyond my capacity for the small business bonus at just the, or rather at a 2% fee. I wouldn't have wanted to earn one point per dollar

at a 2% fee. Now, I didn't push to see if they would let me split payment on a second card, which I don't know whether they would ever, they wouldn't have. But at the same time, I thought, eh, it's not as much of a win on the second card. So it's okay.

I'll just pay by check. And I didn't think too much about it until I was going back through records over the weekend, this past weekend. And I realized that MX ran two different referral promotions last year where they added extra points. One of them was in like, I don't know, August E. And that promotion was when you referred someone, you got plus four points per dollar at shop

small businesses and restaurants. That's right. Then they ran a second promotion later that was plus four everywhere. Now, the second promotion that ended December 1st was good for plus four everywhere and up to 25,000 spend for three months. So I made the assumption that the first promotion must have also been for three months. Right. So it must have been like I lost my capacity on that a long time ago. Right. Until I realized this weekend that the first promotion was good for six months. Six months it was. Yeah. And then you were still within that six month window.

Sure am still within that six month window as we speak right now and had not spent much at all of the capacity on that. Not realizing I triggered both referral bonuses on the same card. So that would have been an extra eight points per dollar within nine points per dollar on the balance of the car. Plus, not even done. I wrote a post not that long ago about how my wife had gotten a retention offer on her platinum card.

And that's the card that has this offer. And I'm an authorized user on it. So I have one in my name on that card. There was also a retention bonus of 55,000 points after four of that. So I gave up a ridiculous number of additional points. Yeah. You know, a lot of people are very, very sorry for you because you're only sitting on 600,000 Amex points recently acquired and you could have earned so much more.

So yeah, I mean, that's a very, very sad story. Oh man. How did I mess that one up? That was like, right. Another six figures. Yeah. Well, it just goes to show we all, we all, we all mess things up and it reminds me of a confession I need to make, but I'm going to make that next time because we can't pile on too much so we do do things wrong even even if we know we kind of know what we're doing kind of but it's still even knowing what you're doing it's easy to make mistakes in this game burns me on that one all right so that my friends brings us to what crazy thing did arrow mexico love it what did arrow mexico do well you know i don't know if they did it this week. Actually, I know they didn't do it this week, but I discovered it this week that Aeromexico is doing something kind of crazy.

They're offering dynamically priced awards on partner airlines. have for their SkyTeam awards, you can also book Delta flights at dynamic prices, which means that Aeromexico has access to all sorts of Delta space with award tickets, which wouldn't ordinarily necessarily excite you, except that with the current transfer bonus, it's basically almost two to one, right? So you divide their prices in half. And when I went looking through and I wrote a post about this, I found that in many cases, the Aeromexico price was fewer miles than the Delta price and had access to a wide range of award seats that other partners didn't have access to. And then when you chop those prices in half on top of that, it just turned out that Aeromexico is the best option for booking Delta flights in some specific scenarios. Yeah. Yeah. I love this find. So just to make things a little clearer, because not everybody probably understands this. A number of point programs allow transfers to Aeromexico, but

most of them are one-to-one. You get one Aeromexico kilometer or whatever it is per point that you transfer. But Amex standardly does, what is it, 1.6? I think so, yeah. You get 1.6 because they're – anyway, you get 1.6 Aeromexico thingies in exchange for each Amex point that you transfer normally. But right now, through mid-February-ish, there's a transfer bonus from Amex. So that transfer bonus on top of their normal 1 to 1.6 thing makes it close to 1.2. Yeah, it's close to 1 to 2.

It's 1 to 1.92, but let's just call it 1 to 2. But for doing the math, it's easier to say you're basically doubling your points in a way, but getting them stuck in Aeromexico world, which up until now never interested me at all. Because when I've looked at award prices through Aeromexico before, even with knowing that I could get a lot more of them from Amex, the prices were so bad that I wasn't interested. But you found actually, not only were the prices when you consider the doubling good, but they were often, I don't know if often, but they were sometimes better than Delta's own award pricing, like from the get-go, like just comparing Delta Miles to Aeromexico

Miles. Right, right. Which really surprised me because I had the same impression as you that Aeromexico Miles were basically worthless. And let's be clear, they are worthless in a lot of scenarios. There are a lot of situations where awards are way overpriced and it wouldn't matter if Amex gave you three Aeromexico thingies per point. They still would have been out of range. But specifically, the routes that I found where they were potentially a great deal were routes to Alaska and Canada, even some domestic U.S. routes. And then Outlier there from Honolulu to Sydney

was much better through Aeromexico. Still bad, but much better through Aeromexico. So it's something I never would have checked. I never would have gone to Mexico to check their award prices. And now I'll at least give it a look, especially while the transfer bonus is on. If I happen to want to book a Delta flight, then I'll give it a look and see. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to log into search. It's really easy. That's great. That's nice. Cause some programs do make you log in and that's kind of a nuisance.

One thing I do want to mention, some people have asked about Aeromexico's round the world chart. So in the past, some blogs have published like how it's a pretty good deal, especially considering the transfer from Amex to book around the world award with Aeromexico. But all the feedback I've ever heard or read about that is that it's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to actually book the thing. So they have an award chart showing a good deal, but it's not necessarily a good deal if you can't actually do it. So, you know, just something to keep in mind if you're thinking of going down that route. Right, right. I mean, buyer beware. If you're going to transfer to Aeromexico buyer beware. Yeah. Yeah. I still, I would not transfer speculatively to Aeromexico under any circumstance. I would be like, you know, if I found that situation that you described in your post

that there's a, there's a flight I want to take it's, it's on this particular, you know, daytime, whatever Aeromexico has a better price or a good price after considering the transfer bonus, then, yeah, I'll transfer that amount needed for that. But no way am I going to get my points stuck in Aeromexico. Tied up in Aeromexico, yeah, right. No, that's fair. That's fair. I want to also mention, though, that Grant from Travel with Grant made a point. I showed in the post that Aeromexico, in addition

to the fact that they had access to tons of Delta award inventory, was also showing a lot of itineraries that Delta wasn't serving up when you did the searches at Delta.com. And Grant noticed, and I think he's probably right, that it seems what Aeromexico is doing is putting together any two flights with whatever Delta defines as saver space to its partners that have a connection of less than 24 hours. So in some cases, you could get a connection of 20 or 22 hours on a domestic itinerary, which is not particularly common with most carriers, hard to find something like that. So even though a lot of carriers will allow up to a 24-hour connection on their national itineraries, domestically, it's often not something that's simple to book online, at least if it's even possible. So that may also be of interest. Again, very niche kind of

situations, but you never know. Maybe it'll work out. It is. I love it though. I mean, it gives me another opportunity, you know, if I'm looking at a particular Delta flight that I want to take and there's no good way to book it through the normal channels. Yeah. One more spot. I'm going to give our Mexico a look. Why not? Why not? All right. All right.

So then what crazy thing? Mattress running the numbers. About where we are. Mattress run. Are we going to talk about crazy mattress running? Are we talking about we make right. We I'll tell you how crazy we are. We have three mattress run, three run, three mattress runs to discuss.

Before you even start running, you stretch for a second and I'll just quickly update on a mattress run, uh, segment from, I don't know, a week or two ago, we talked about the whole Marriott thing and cashing in the points or the seven, there you go. The seven night certificate and how people were being told different things. And I did follow up with the Marriott representative. And I was told for anybody who's sitting on one of those travel packages, if you haven't yet attached it to a hotel stay, we talked about how you're going to be able to get seven nights of, you know, like basically the equivalent of a seven night peak price stay for that certificate. And that's going to work out to be a pretty good deal. You can't get these news.

So if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, if you don't already have one, you don't know what I'm talking about. Ignore me for two seconds here. What I was told from the Marriott reps is that you will have to wait for the packages to get canceled out at the end of February in order to get the seven nights of peak points. So they're not going to, if you call now and try to cancel it and get points, they're going to give you whatever the old points value was, which is not called now. So don't call now, Which is sort of usually a good advice with Marriott. But you confirm that it's not just one night of points. Correct. You get the equivalent of seven nights. That's amazing. I really wish I had some travel packages left over. And as I mentioned last time, Marriott seems to think I do.

So maybe. Maybe. Good luck. They did email me saying I did. All right. So back to mattress running the triple the triple hatter. What's going on right now that now that Nick is done with that public service announcement for the three people who have travel packages. All three of you. You're welcome, guys. OK, so Marriott.

We mentioned Marriott. So why don't we start with Marriott? Marriott's out with a new promo, which I think is pretty good, especially for anyone who's interested in earning Marriott elite status. You get double elite nights on paid stays during the qualifying period, as long as you register. And you get a thousand bonus points per night. So to give you an idea, last year, they had a double elite night and points promo, which required two night stays or more. This doesn't have that requirement. So this is a little more flexible. Last time you were able to mix award nights with paid nights. It seems like you can't do that this time, although haven't tested that theory. And the 1K points per night bonus is in some cases better than double points. So if you're booking a hotel that costs less than a hundred dollars a night at most Marriott properties, then getting a thousand bonus points is better than double

points. Where it's a lot better is if you're booking one of their extended stay properties that normally gets five points per dollar, getting a thousand point bonus is better even if you're booking a stay of less than $50. It's better. I'm sorry, I went the other way. Less than $200, it's better. So pretty good. I'm not going to call it... I don't think we need to discuss, is it mattress run worthy or not? If you're, if you are serious about earning Marriott elite status, then it's, you should look into this, I think, unless you have anything else to say. No. Yeah. I mean, it reduces the path for people that have a business and a personal card. You started the year with 30 elite nights. And so, I mean, this what, seven or eight nights of this and you're at, at, uh, you know, you would need 10, 10 nights, 10 nights, 10 paid nights.

We get you the 20 needed to get to platinum status. So that's pretty good. Right. All right. Next up, IHG has an interesting combination of things going on. So IHG has their ambassador elite-ish program. It's not like a normal elite membership program because

you can't earn it through stays. Instead, you buy it each year. You can pay $400, no, $200 or 40,000 points to buy ambassador status for a year. And that's the normal pricing. And you get a bunch of things, like you get a free weekend night certificate. So that can be used at- You gotta buy one, get one coupon, Greg. Buy one, get one coupon. Yeah, that's a good way to describe it.

And it works at Intercontinental Hotels, Kempton's and a few other of their higher end brands. And you also get various other things. One is if you, um, stay, if you, if you book two nights, two paid nights, I think it is, uh, during the promotion period, you get 20,000 points. So, you know, if you that's, I mean, that's pretty good. If you already had plans to stay two paid nights at an IHD or an intercontinental, I think it has to be, then, you know, this is like a heck of a rebate on top of pay for the ambassador status, then you get that free night coupon or buy one, get a bunch of other benefits because of having the ambassador status, and you get the 20,000 points. On top of that, a number of people have been targeted for like Tim who wrote about, who wrote this post was targeted for to get 15,000 points for renewing. So just for renewing his ambassador status. That's great. And that stacks, huh? Yes. Those two will stack. So total 35,000 points for like, if he paid the 40,000 points to renew, he can get

up to, he could get 35,000 back. It does require that, that two paid nights though. And I got a, I got a 10,000 point offer because it's not about renewal because it's been so long since I had it. It's about signing up again, I guess. So, you know, look in your emails and also when you get the email, look very closely at the bottom of the email where it lists the terms, because when you click through, this is the weirdest thing about IHG. When you click through to the promo, it says, click here to sign up. It says nothing about what it promised you in the email. Of course not. So it's really scary. It's like, well, will I get this or not? I mean, you got to just have faith that you'll get it, but

that's bold. That's bold. You can. Yeah. But anyway, the point is you, if you have, if you have a stay where you want it to be a little better because ambassador status stuff, which includes things like a guaranteed category upgrade in your room, you can do things like, like I talked about this a while ago in a post where I stayed a weekend in an intercontinental and I use this coupon for the second night free. And, and if I had played it right, you know, I could have, you know, booked the paid, like the top category before the room that I really room type I really wanted and been, you know, I could have, you know, booked the paid, like the top category before the room that I really room type I really wanted and been, you know, basically guaranteed as long as it was available to be bumped up to the room category I really wanted. And so you can do really cool

things like that. So I really liked this promo and, you know, I have a, I still don't know if I'm going to go, but I do have a Six Senses booking for the Maldives. That's a really luxe property. And I've been thinking I need ambassador status before I go. And the reason is that at Six Senses properties, ambassadors get free breakfast for two every day, something they call a signature amenity, which is like a spa massage. You get a one category room upgrade, you get late checkout, early check-in, just those things alone. For such an expensive stay, it'd be kind of crazy not to buy into Ambassador before the stay, I think.

Right. Totally. Absolutely. I mean, a free breakfast at a place like that is going to save you a whole ton of money. So totally worth the $200, even if you weren't getting anything back. And with the various rebates, then, yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely interesting. And depending on how much it costs you to book those two intercontinental nights you need and how much you need those two nights. Yeah. I think this is definitely intriguing and that's a stretch for me because I'm not usually particularly intrigued by IHG or the ambassador program. I don't know. There's just something about it. It doesn't excite me usually, but this promo is good enough that even if you're not really an IHG person in general, you may find

this one to be worthwhile. So I agree. Yep. Cool. And then finally, Radisson Americas. Yes. I've been waiting for this one. We're not big fans of the Radisson Awards program, I'd say, but they're out with a good promo, which is for every three nights, 30,000 bonus points during the promo period and up to 90,000 bonus points total. I mean, just that alone, that sounds great, right? Compared to just about any other chain's bonus. Sure. Well, I mean, the thing is Radisson points aren't super valuable. So, you know, 30,000 points doesn't necessarily inspire a lot of excitement in me. And perhaps I'm right. I'm a little jilted by the fact that the Radisson expired their free night certificates without extending them at the end of 2021. So I got stuck with a couple that expired on me that I never got to use. So now I'm a little bitter Radisson. But that said, I mean, 30,000 points, what do we have for our reasonable redemption value for Radisson points? Like four tenths of a cent or something? I think it's like 0.3 or something like that. I can't remember.

0.3. I mean, that's still not bad because 30,000 points would be what, like 90 bucks. And I think if I did the math right on that. So I mean, 90 back on three nights, that's probably not terrible because Radisson nights in the US generally aren't going to be that expensive. The majority of the properties in the US anyway are country and in Swedes. There's just a few higher end Radissons out there. So that's probably a reasonably sized rebate. But you pointed out when we were talking about this before that there is a potentially interesting angle what is that there there is there is so their award chart starts at 10 000 points a night so if you look at their category one hotels they have sort of the equivalent of off peak and

standard peak and the off peak rate is 10,000 points a night if you can find that then oh and this promo does work for awards days according to the term so if you can find that 10,000 points a night you should be able to stay nine nights with a hundred percent rebate on the points you spent so you need to have you would need to have those 90,000 points to begin with but you spend the 90 000 you should get back 90 000 now great that's pretty amazing i know two guys who've got 90 000 radisson points so are you are you mattress running this one greg or what you know if i for some reason wanted to stay at category one off peak uh radisson. You would, right. But that doesn't seem like it's

not on the cards for you. It's not at the top of my plans. All right. Well, I will say that I have searched because I wanted to try to use my certificates before the end of last year and just didn't find an opportunity. So I did do more Radisson award searches than I care to admit at the end of the year. And I did find a lot of properties that were off-peak priced. I feel like we were told a while back that the Radisson off-peak pricing was decent and to keep an eye out for that. And I was kind of like, eh. But then I got looking at it and I was like, the properties were all cheap. So the off-peak pricing was still not great value for points,

but it was at least good to see that they weren't full priced in points anyway. So I think there's at least a reasonable chance if you can find whatever category ones there are that maybe you will find it off peak price. You know what? Maybe I could find a friend or relative that wants to stay at one of these properties and just put them up. Right. Put them up for nine nights. 18 between the two of us. We can put them up for 18 nights. 18 nights. That would be great. That'd be a good story. It would be. Right?

We should find somebody willing to stay 18 nights of country and in suites. And then we're good. Yeah. All right. Okay. You know what? I think it's time for the main event. All right.

The main events. Welcome to the main events. The hotel loyalty roller coaster. Things are going up, down, sideways, loop to loop. What's the corkscrew thingy? Oh, the corkscrew. I guess that's what you call it, right? It is. It is. Yes. You know your roller coaster terminology. All right. All right. Let's start with Hilton.

Okay. That's a good place to start because we can hate on Hilton for a few minutes. So yeah, we've been publishing a few hate on Hilton things recently because they seem to be eager to drop to the bottom of our hearts and minds. Don't you think? They really do. And I mean, I've long felt like I was the closest thing to a Hilton fan boy that existed in the blogosphere. And they are really just trying to get rid of me. They clearly don't want me staying at their properties for one reason or another. So there were so many times, I think on our show, where you made fun of me when I was talking about Marriott, like free breakfast and all the rules about it. And you'd be like, just go with Hilton because you know, you're just going to get free breakfast

no matter where you stay. Right, right, right. And now you know, you're not going to get free breakfast and they're going to make sure that credit isn't going to cover it either. So yeah, yeah. So of course, Hilton, first of all, has decided to make that permanent where rather than getting free breakfast. Now you can't, you can count on instead a food and beverage credit, which varies depending on the brand you're staying at and the market that you're staying in. So there's very little consistency in figuring out what you're going to get. You're just kind of at the mercy of whatever somebody tells you when you check in, unless you really study this stuff. And, you know, some people are going to prefer that because maybe you already have breakfast covered, or maybe you prefer to, you know, get something off the extra value meal at McDonald's or go to a local place and get a really good, you know, healthy breakfast or brunch or

whatever it might be. So there's some people, or maybe you're not a morning person. And so you'd rather get a drink at the bar. So there's some people for whom that'll be better. Yes. I'm not one of those. And there's some people and there's some situations there have definitely been situations where for whatever reason, I couldn't take advantage of the breakfast benefit, but I could have taken advantage of food and beverage credit. So in those situations, fantastic. Right. And one of those situations would be if you're trying to use a fine hotels and resorts credit or make a Hilton impresario booking because those bookings come with free breakfast anyway. So now you got yourself an additional credit you can use towards dinner along with whatever property credit

you're getting through those programs. So, I mean, there are definitely some situations where that is good, but unfortunately for me, I think that's a bad, a very negative change. Although when I wrote about it, I said, maybe it's good because it'll force me to stop booking hotel stays based on the free breakfast. Like now I can measure, like there was this subjective value of free breakfast,

the convenience of it and everything else. Now that whole subjective aspect of the loyalty is gone. Like this, this hotel stay is worth 20 bucks off of breakfast. So is that, is that going to do it for me or not? And so it's easier to compare apples to apples. Right. Right. Which. Which brings up a non-chain roller coaster, which is the non-chains and well, and let me put it a different way. Being your own elite, meaning not worrying about elite status and all that stuff,

I'd say is on the upswing. It's going up. And it's not just because of these kind of reductions in benefits from some chains, but also because of things like the Amex Platinum card, giving everyone a $200 credit towards fine hotels and resorts. Now you can book anywhere that they offer their hotels and get $200 back or the hotel collection is another one. And those kind of things make booking wherever a good idea. And so I think a lot more people are doing that. Or 10X, Miles, if you have a Capital One Venture, VentureX. Or Sapphire Reserve. Sapphire Reserve, there you go. Yeah, booking through their portals. I mean,

10 transferable points per dollar becomes more appealing to me when all I'm giving up is a credit that's not going to cover breakfast anyway. So I'm probably not going to eat breakfast at the hotel or, you know, so, or maybe I just value, I mean, if it's like a $200 stay, you're talking about 2000 transferable points. I mean, they're chase points, then pretty easy to value those at one and a half cents each as 30 bucks. It's probably more than you're going to get from the breakfast credit, you know? Right. Right. Right. Unfortunately. So I recently had to book a independent hotel and that's not the important, that's, that's not the unfortunate part. The unfortunate part was even though I could find it on like orbits and, and, um, hotels.com and booking.com,

all those kinds of things, it was not on the Chase portal. Or actually, I should put it a different way. Chase portal claimed there were no rooms available. Oh, yeah, that's annoying. They seem to have different access to inventory. I've noticed that before once or twice too. Odd. All right, so Hilton did that.

That was bad enough. And then Hilton decided, you know what? While we're on the bad news train, let's just chug it ahead full steam. And and they made some change that Steven Pepper picked up on in terms of not or no longer allowing or offering suite upgrades to elite members at like the vast majority of their portfolio at any of their lower limited service brands. Hampton Inn, Hilton Garden Inn, Embassy Suites, no suite upgrade for you if you're a Hilton Diamond member. You know what?

It's just room upgrades, not suite upgrades. Right. Even so, yeah, right. Yeah. So it's unclear when they actually made this change, but Stephen learned about it and wrote about it. And wow. I mean, he identified it's over 75% of their properties that do not promise a room upgrade. Now an individual property may in fact give you an upgrade anyway, but it's the program. It's a

Hilton honors that, that says, you know, you can get a room upgrade if you have, you know, elite status, except for these properties. And it really ought to go the other way and say at these few properties, you might get a room upgrade if you're lucky. If you're lucky, which is still an if you're lucky situation. Let's be clear. It's not a guarantee. It's still like an if you're lucky, but they're saying, yeah, we're not even going to bother these 75% of properties, push them to give you a room upgrade. I mean, not so Hilton honorable. That's not nice at all. So Hilton elite status is down, down, down. For sure. For sure. I mean, what value is there? All right. All right. So Hilton Kicking you to the curve. All right. Let's talk about Marriott now. So Marriott up, up, up, right? Because they announced that they are going to early this year, but who knows when they're going to allow

us to add up to 15,000 points to our free night certificates so that we can book the hotels we actually want. And that's a huge deal because as you know, they, they price a lot of hotels just out of reach of the free night certificates, like, like the 35 K certificates that most of us have from a lot of credit cards and from various Marriott promotions. You know, when you go to book a hotel, it's often 40 K instead of 35 K. And so now we'll be able to add 5 000 points fantastic feature so is marriott like way way up in our in our estimate sense slow down a little bit i mean that's that's nice but the fact that they're no longer going to have an

award chart makes me wonder if they're not going to price that just a little bit too high to add the points to it or price it at a point where now your free night certificate basically always needs points. So it's not really valuable on its own. It's only valuable when combined with other points. Maybe I will see. So we don't know. We don't know. This upcoming abolition of the award chart is a problem. That part, getting rid of the word charts means that we no longer can rely on the hotels

when the paid price is way overpriced. We can no longer rely on getting a good deal from our points. And that's a shame that Marriott is following Hilton, IHG, and some others down that path. To me, I mean, we'll see how this plays out, but to me, this means Marriott is more on the downswing than the upswing. The combination of the two, I think the elimination of award charts is more of a negative than the ability to add on to your certs is a positive. So, yeah, I mean, it all depends, I guess it'll all depend on how much the points are worth, which we imagine will probably be relatively consistent and probably not great. I think

actually the free night certificates will hopefully still be a decent deal because even if Marriott values the points pretty low, those points, the certificates will be worth enough to easily mitigate the annual fee, I think. So I think probably- I think that's true. I think that's true. I would like them to go further and make it so that like fifth night free benefit would work when you use certificates and that you can, when a hotel is, when no standard rooms are available, but there are like upgrade rooms that you could somehow use your cert for those, but they don't, they don't allow that. So there's a number of limitations now, but I agree. I actually am hopeful that the certs are going to become more valuable than they

were before. Or at least more predictably valuable, right? Like you'll know you can probably count on that much. Yeah. But I'm not, I'm not at the moment high on the program overall. No, no. And. Agreed. Yeah.

Agreed. And they still haven't made any effort to simplify the breakfast situation. So that's not much better than Hilton's situation going on there. So for those who are new to this, Marriott has different rules for, so when you have platinum status or higher, you're supposed to get free breakfast, but they have different rules by brand as to what you get. And they have 27 brands. And they have 27 brands. And even within brands, there are hotels that have their own individual exceptions in some cases, and it's just ridiculous.

Right. So you need to consult our chart. We actually have a searchable chart so you can try to figure out whether or not you'll get breakfast. But the fact that you need to consult that to figure out whether or not, the fact that I need to consult that to figure out whether or not I'm getting breakfast on my stays

that I write about this stuff for a living and I need to go to the chart to see, wait, am I going to get breakfast there? That's a mark of how ridiculous it is. It's bad. All right. So they're up and down, probably more down than up. So what else is out there? So what do you think about Hyatt? You know, so far so good. I mean, knock on wood here. This whole peak off peak thing is kind of

a bummer. A lot of properties that are highly desirable are peak a lot of the time and rarely if ever off peak. So, I mean, that's kind of a bummer, but in the overall scheme of things compared to their competitors, it's, it's been pretty good there, right? I mean, you gotta, yes, gotta agree with that. There's, they've done a great job in terms of the fact that they gave everybody, I say everybody, they gave everybody that had the club's upgrade certificates that were expiring points for those upon request. Now, it was terrible that they gave varying amounts of points and that got really confusing. But at the end of the year, people were able to get points for those and for some of their free night certificates that they earned as milestone rewards.

So that was nice. And they have continued to offer great elite benefits, still offer probably the not even probably even probably, clearly, I think objectively, the best top-tier hotel elite status out there. They haven't taken anything away from globalist status, right? I mean, you still get everything. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, so I totally agree. I think there was a slight downward bump with the introduction of peak pricing, but overall, you know, in my mind, Hyatt is still at the top of the loyalty world with, with hotels. And so I love what they're doing. I love that they're

rapidly expanding with new properties because that was, you know, one of their biggest downsides is that they don't have properties everywhere you want to go the way Marriott and IHG do. But they're trying to improve that. And they're doing a great job in improving that on the higher end of the chain, on the luxury properties, which is obviously what we get most excited about because that's where you're going to get the most outsized value. The problem I still have with Hyatt, though, is that they haven't made any effort really to build out that like mid-tier limited service footprint, at least not enough of an effort. Because if you're someone who's traveling for work now and then, it's hard to find enough Hyatts. Unless you travel to the

major cities in the U.S., then it's hard to find enough Hyatts to be able to meet the nights that you need to. So I feel like Hyatt really, as much as I enjoy the high-end stuff, they need to do a better job of building out the Hyatt place, as much as I enjoy the high end stuff, they need to do a better job of building out the Hyatt place, Hyatt house type of a footprint. Is that right? So in my, like, just my own, like looking around at stuff, it seems like there are Hyatt places like, and Hyatt houses, like pretty much everywhere in the US that I've looked at. Now, this is obviously an example near me, but you look at Albany, New York, capital of New York state, plenty of people coming to New York, you know, to Albany from the city, you know, for, for political stuff and whatnot. There's not a Hyatt place in,

in, in Albany, the closest one is 30 miles away up near Saratoga. So there's, there's not one there, which blows my mind. Anytime I need a night near the airport, I'm like, I just want a Hyatt place by the airport. I mean, that's all I really need. Right. And I can't get one nearby. Now, I think they were building one at some point because I saw a sign, but never heard anything more about that. And I often find that when I need to stop on road trips within the U.S., I mean, unless you're in the D.C. or Dallas area, I don't know. I feel like there's not enough of those, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just biased. That's where I'm going. I don't know. Who knows? So it sounds to me like frequent miler. We need to open a Hyatt place in Albany.

We do. In Albany. There should be one in a capital in New York state. There's no Hyatt. Come on. Come on, Hyatt. Help me out here. All right.

So Hyatt overall, though. Good. Hyatt, two thumbs up for the most part. Right. And there's not much more to say. Right, right, right, right. So I'm going to talk now about choice privileges. Why?

Why? Why are we talking about choice privileges? So choice from a loyalty point of view has been and continues to be pretty much at the bottom. Like if you imagine a chart like with lines showing like the level of how good or bad like each program is and what direction they're going. Choice only really has one direction that it can go because it's been like bottom feeding all along, in my opinion. Now, it has made positive improvements like a few years ago. So they used to, for example, points were only, I can't remember the details, but I think points would expire after like a hundred days or some crazy stuff. I don't know. They, they, they, they fix some of those problems. Um, but they still have like really weird stuff. Like you can't book an award stay more than like a hundred days,

a hundred days in advance and they don't give any meaningful benefits for elite status, you know? So, so they definitely are not a loyalty powerhouse, but I wanted to mention them because I talked about this many times on the show. I see them on an upward swing solely because of Citibank. you transfer, suddenly it's possible to get really great value by using your city points transfer to choice to book choice properties or even preferred hotels and resorts, which are bookable through choice. So a bit of an upswing there. Yeah. I mean, yeah, a bit of an upswing. I feel like choice, yes, it's kind of been a bottom feeder program in the sense that there's not a lot of benefits. There's, a bit of an upswing. I feel like choice, yes, it's kind of been a bottom feeder program in the sense that there's not a lot of benefits. There's not a lot of points to be had.

They didn't transfer from enough places or at a good rate. So, I mean, yeah, that is getting fixed a little bit. However, choice has always had some particularly good values in the sense that, A, Nordic choice has always been really good. We've talked about that before. In a lot of places, you could book any room type that's available. You can book a suite for the same price as the standard room. Certainly not, but in a number of places. Yeah. So, so it's got like some benefits. There are some decent options and award stays are usually relatively cheap compared to other programs. So there's some pluses, but they're limited. So I

feel like Greg was right. There's really only one direction for Choice to go. It's not really going to get any worse. So their promotions, you know, they really are usually the same promotion over and over again. And not that exciting. Not exciting. I can't remember an exciting Choice promo. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. So Choice, I mean, you got nowhere to go but up. Keep up the good work, I guess. Keep it upper. Right, right. Do more good work. Come on, choice.

Yeah. Okay. So speaking of bottom feeders. Well, you know, when you said that, I was like, I don't know, is choice at the bottom because i i stick ihg at the bottom i let's talk about ihg i i think ihg is a little bit higher than choice but it's another bottom feeder the way it is today but but i mean ihg doesn't have these like crazy restrictions like 100 days before you can book and it does give some elite benefits on stays. I mean, not necessarily guaranteed, but you do get some things.

It's a little bit more, it's, it's a little bit more of like a real rewards program. A little bit choices. Yeah, it's true, but it's nowhere near, at least with respect to the elite program,

it's nowhere near what, I mean, not, not even close to high, but it's not even near what, what Marriott and Hilton offer. I don't think near what, I mean, not, not even close to high, but it's not even near what, what Marriott and Hilton offer. I don't think. No, I mean, because there are no, for the, I say, no, there are very few, if any on property benefits, you know, basically the elite benefit of IHG is you can earn more points. And so if somebody else is paying for your stays,

you're traveling a bunch for work and you're just looking to earn as many points as you can to be able to take vacation. The night, she probably makes a lot of stays, you're traveling a bunch for work and you're just looking to earn as many points as you can to be able to take vacation the night. She probably makes a lot of sense because you can earn a lot of points on paid stays, especially with elite status. But that's like where the program begins and ends, you know, opportunities. I mean, you get some things that some properties like if you have elite status, like you get a free drink when you check in or or or some properties recognize like at a Kempton status, like I got upgraded to a suite, you know? So there are some things that, that, that happen, but not, not a consistent, not a consistent guarantee. I mean, it's like, you know, if you get lucky,

yes. I mean, I've gotten great service and gotten nice upgrades. It's some IHG properties overseas. So that's, that's a good point. I mean, I feel like platinum status with IHG isn't worth anything really in the United States, but abroad, certainly I've run into cases where I've been treated very well as an IHG platinum member. So yeah, I mean, but there's no consistency there in terms of what you can expect. There's not a lot of consistency in the properties either within the United States. You know, you get a Crown Plaza anywhere on the spectrum, could be pretty nice or it could be not nice at all. So very hard to know what to expect from

property to property, which I don't like. If I'm going to stay in a chain hotel, I want to know what to expect. And I don't feel like I have that with IHG. So those are some issues with it. On the flip side, though, now they've made some potentially positive changes. I coming. And the more interesting of the credit cards that are available new is the Premier card, the iQiYi Premier card. And the one downside is it will go up in price from 89 to 99, I think it is, annually. So $10 more.

And you're still only going to get a certificate good each anniversary, each card anniversary, good for a hotel up to 40,000 points. But they are taking a page from Marriott's book and expanding the page, or at least erasing the restrictions from the page. And they're going to let us apply any number of points we want to book a night, a free night with that certificate. So, for example, one IHG property I really enjoy is the Kempton Seafire in Grand Cayman. And that one, even though most IHG properties are dynamically award priced, there are some that are still fixed price for some unknown reason. Maybe they forgot about them and I shouldn't be mentioning it. I don't know.

But anyway, that one is 70,000 points per night. And of course, I wasn't able to use these 40K free night certificates, but now I could. I could apply 40K and 30K points to stay at a place like that. And that's fantastic. A fantastic enhancement. You know, that place is going to become 110,000 points a night now. That's the next step. I'm sorry, but there are others that you just have to hunt for them. So, I mean, yeah, it's potentially very good. I saw the changes to the credit card and I said, wow, this looks really interesting. I may actually consider upgrading from my old $49 a year IHG Select card to get some of these benefits, particularly that one, the ability to add points to the

free night certificates, because that potentially makes your free night certificate much more valuable. Now, of course, I made a joke there about the Kempton Seafire, but we don't know what's going to happen with point prices of hotels. They've certainly been dynamic and gotten more dynamic over time. And we saw like a flashed evaluation all of a sudden at some point, and then they kind of walked it back after they got a bunch of backlash. So forgive me for not having lots of faith in IHG. This is going to work out as well as I'd like it to be. No, no, that's totally understandable. But let's talk about, that's not all with the credit cards. And I do want to clarify something you said. So the old IHG select card, which is no longer available, it's $49 a year. A lot of us have

it because it was a great deal back in the time. We are told that the free night from that will not be point upgradable. I don't know if that's really true. I mean, I feel like they'd have to go to a lot of work to put in that restriction. And so my guess is that it will work, but we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. The other thing to, so what other brand?

It gives you like $50 United credit. Yeah. Every year. Every year. On a card that costs $99. So, I mean, if you book a United flight every year, I mean, 50 bucks, that's not bad. So just off the bat, you're getting a 40K free night.

And because of the ability to add points, it should be really easy to get sort of the full 40K value, which even if IHG devalues their points a little bit to be worth half a cent each, that's still like a 200 value right towards a free night and then you're getting 50 of united credit um just that alone makes this card like a fantastic one to get and keep um and they're adding a new business card a business premiere card so with the same very perks. And so you could then get just one person could have those two free nights. So free weekend every year, plus I guess, a hundred dollars of United credit to spend to try to get to where you're going. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, the points. All right. So this is a big thing too. Up until now, the IHG credit cards only offered one point per dollar for most types of purchases. They had a few things where you're in a little bit more. And one point per dollar, if you're getting points that are worth less than a penny each, earning one point per dollar is a tragedy. Right. Right. Right. You've been earning one point per dollar. Listen up, guys, because we can help you a little bit there. Because yeah, I mean, that's a horrible, horrible return. And that's why the IHG card mostly just stays in a wallet somewhere in a drawer and rarely ever makes an appearance for me because one point per dollar, you got to be crazy

IHG. You got to get smoking there. It's nuts. But with the Premier cards dollar, you got to be crazy, IHG. What are you guys smoking there? It's nuts. But with the premier cards, it's going to be three points per dollar is the base rate. And five points for some categories. So that's more reasonable. It doesn't feel anymore like you are losing out a lot compared to other alternatives. And at $20,000 spend, you get some bonuses. So that helps make up for any difference with if you had spent on a more rewarding card. At, I think it's 40,000 spend, you can get their top tier elite status, which currently is called Spire, but it's going to be called Diamond status.

And so the credit cards alone, the announced changes, vast majority of it is positive. So just that alone, IHG is on the upswing. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree, especially for anybody who already was an IHG fan. Like if you were already staying at IHGs, this is amazing. I mean, you're in all of a sudden earn a lot more points. You're going to have a credit card certificate that's more valuable.

I mean, the whole nine yards. This is a great, great positive change for you if you're already an IHG person. If you weren't already an IHG person, it's still pretty good. I mean, it's I'm not really I don't wouldn't classify myself as an IHG person. If you weren't already an IHG person, it's still pretty good. I mean, it's, I'm not really, I don't, I wouldn't classify myself as an IHG person. I don't stay at IHGs very often, but I still look at it and say, oh, wow. Like I said, it's enough to make me consider upgrading if indeed I'll need that, that premier card to get the, the, the ability to add points to my free night certificate each year. So, yeah, I mean, overall, I think that's, that's nice in your posts though. You talked about all these things that you hope for wish IHG would do that were

like off the wall. Okay. You got a little, so, so here's the thing in March, I can't remember the date in March, but they're going to be revealing a brand new rewards program basically. And I think they're taking like club out of it like it currently maybe it's called rewards club and it's just been called rewards something like that i don't know anyway uh that that's not really important though the important thing is that they are alluding to the fact that there's going to be new benefits that basically the you know we discussed probably way more than anyone listening wanted to hear about the lack of benefits with the current program. They're promising benefits.

They haven't told us anything about guaranteed benefits today, chances are good. The new program will be better than today. Would we say chances are good? Chances are possible, but it will be better. Yes. I mean, I guess that you're right. Better, better. Okay, better. I'll give you better. All right. So, so yeah. So my first reaction before hearing about the credit card changes, my first reaction was, was, well, it has to be better, but it's probably not going to be much better because IHE has never shown any inclination to have a true loyalty program around their elite program. were so positive and interesting. You know, I feel like especially the Billy-Eyed Points certificate means somebody in charge is listening to what customers want and is making it happen.

And I find that exciting. And I find it promising that that same person may have something to do with the new loyalty program. And if that's true, then I have high hopes for what we might see. You know, I think that's a really interesting point and a good point. And it does kind of start to make me excited. But then I remember the footprint that IHG has. And I mean, they've got so many hotels. And so like for something like, for example, free breakfast, let's say that, you know, that's what everybody kind of wants, right? We all want free breakfast. I just can't imagine IHG getting every owner of their thousands of properties to get on board with giving away

free breakfast that they haven't had to ever and stay affiliated with IHG. I feel like that is a colossal undertaking that is just probably a bridge too far. I totally agree with that assessment. So I had, as you mentioned, I had a post with a wishlist of things that I would love to see their elite program do. I'm not saying I expect any of them or certainly not most of them. The number one thing that I put on the list is also the number one thing I think is most unlikely to happen.

And that is that whatever benefits they provide, they provide consistently across their brands. I think that has like close to 0% chance of happening. For the same reason Marriott can't do it. These different brands, these different hotel owners have their different priorities and they're just not going to go along with what the corporate says. And if they want to keep those hotels as part of IHG, they're going to have a hard time convincing them to go along. So, yeah, I just can't imagine somebody who owns like a $50 a night Holiday Inn Express or Candlewood Suites or whatever. Like you said, they just don't have the same priorities in terms of what they need to offer guests as an Intercontinental or a Kempton or whatever else. So yeah, getting them all on board to offer something consistent is probably unrealistic.

And that's too bad because what do we really want? We want consistency. I'd love to be able to have consistent benefits. So yeah, I think it's probably going to be fragmented. My other problem with IHG is just brand identity because like Regent, for instance, I don't know anything about Regent Hotels. All I know is that the logo looks really outdated to me and don't tell me anything about the hotel.

And I'm just like, I couldn't be less interested in Regent. Every time I see it, I'm like, that looks like something from like 1985. It looks like it was a fancy hotel when I was a kid and hasn't been updated since. And maybe they're great. It could be fantastic. I don't know.

But the branding just doesn't speak to me. And Mr. and Mrs. Smith is the same thing to me. It's like, what is it, Mr. and Mrs. Smith? That doesn't sound like extra classy. I know they are, but I wouldn't know that from the name. So it doesn't get me excited. I can't wait to stay at a Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I just like I've never felt that way. That is such a funny and irrelevant way of looking at things. It is. It's totally irrelevant. I'm like, there's no consistency. I would much rather stay in a really nice hotel that has awful branding than one that has fantastic branding and is a shitty hotel. I guess that's true. But what can I say? What can I say? You're not getting me excited about any of this stuff yet.

So you got work to do. You got work to do. I got work to do. Don't get me excited. All right. So we'll see. I'm hopeful. Like you said, I think it's unfortunately a stretch.

I don't think we're going to see. But if we see good benefits just at Intercontinental and Kempton and Regent and Mr. I guess that'll be nice for the people who are drawn to Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I guess that'll be nice for the people who are drawn to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Well, yeah. I mean, I was looking at some properties last night and it looks like there's some really outstanding properties. I'm unclear though. I think that Mr. and Mrs. Smith is more of a partnership like Hyatt has with small luxury hotels of the world. And so I don't expect benefits to necessarily translate in any meaningful way to them.

Anyway. Anyway. All right. So to summarize, Hilton down, Marriott all over the place, mostly sort of trending down. Hyatt staying up above the fray. Choice coming up a tiny bit from the bottom. Slowly ascending.

IHG dragging its tiny bit from the bottom slowly ascend ihg ihg uh dragging its way up from the bottom but with a big thing to come in march and we don't know will it go way up will it it can't really go down right right right now let's swim around in circles right we will see we'll see we can be hopeful we can be hopeful i hope hope I'm hopeful. I hope you can. I'm on the record hopeful. OK. All right. So that brings us, I think, to the post roast. Post roast. Post roast time. All right. So my post roast was going to be that you had these unrealistic expectations in your IHG post, even though I knew you didn't actually expect them to come true. But we just talked about that.

So I don't need to belabor that point. So I'm going to leave it up to you. All right. All right. So I was going to post-roast Steven Pepper this time. I like that. But it wouldn't really be fair for me to roast someone who's not here to defend themselves. Plus, he wrote that great Hilton, Hilton dishonors post. And I can't roast that because that was fantastic post. And so,

so I'm not going to pick on Steven for those reasons. Instead, I'm going to pick on the new guy, Tim. There you go. I like it. I like it. Let's pick on Tim. What did Tim do this week? Tim, Tim, Tim's been, Tim's been doing a great job. I mean, he has sprinted out of the gate, writing lots of great posts. But he wrote a post about the transfer bonus not at the time update the hidden table that we have on the back end for transfer bonuses so that our page that shows current transfer bonuses was not updated when he first published that post. What was Tim thinking? What could he have been thinking? Tim, Tim, come on. I mean, come on, Tim.

You're supposed to know these things. Next time you do something you need to, you know, and we didn't tell you in advance about the hidden behind the scenes tables, you need to dig around for yourself and find them. I blame that on the head of the HR department. So we're not offering that training. Our onboarding training is subpar. Is that the issue?

Well, I don't know. You'd have to ask Tim. I don't know. No, all right. Tim's been doing a great job. So welcome aboard, Tim. Absolutely. It's been a lot of fun having him around.

So that's good. That's the post roast. That brings us, I think, to the question of the week. And this week's question of the week came in via email. And it was a great question that I think we're going to get again and again and again. And on March 1st, I imagine we're going to get lots of panicked, similar questions when this doesn't happen right away.

So I want Greg to try to put this one to bed, but I'm sure it's going to keep coming up anyway. Here we go, Greg. It will. Christopher says, Hi, I'm enjoying playing the American Airlines status chase game and appreciate your hard work and the research you've done. I happen to read an article on TPG today that suggested that some of the big stashes of

miles collected on Simply Miles and the AA portal may not count as loyalty points. In fact, I went back and read the rules and they only referenced base miles and gave an example of one mile per dollar at acts on FTD on Valentine's flowers. He thought that was an easy way to pick up a few thousand miles. But now after reading the rules, he says, I don't think those are going to count as loyalty points either. We're all earning renewable miles and that's a good thing. But I'm wondering about the validity of the strategy you guys are proposing here. What do you think? Yeah, it's a great question. And let me tell you why you are going to be earning loyalty points for those purchases, I believe. So first, let me agree with the wider premise, which is that American Airlines has not done

a good job of officially declaring what counts and what doesn't. It's very murky right now, With the exception of their credit cards, they're very clear about what counts, which is for most credit cards, just one point per dollar is a loyalty point. Even if you're earning two points per dollar, like at grocery stores, for example, you're still only getting one loyalty point per dollar with those. But for portals and all that other stuff, it's kind of murky, but let me explain how it actually is expected to work with, uh, portals. You will get, or you should get all of the, uh, miles. So you'd be getting 30 points per dollar. All of those points should count as both redeemable miles and loyalty points. The thing that won't count with portals is when the portal itself has a bonus,

like portals frequently have these like seasonal bonuses that say things like spend $500, you know, through any merchants in the portal, and you'll get this number of bonus points. Those bonus points will not be loyalty points, but your 30 points per dollar will be. And I know it's really confusing. So how do we know this? Well, let me give a couple of reasons we know this to be true. One is you can look at your activity in your American Airlines account and for portal purchases, you will see that they're listed, the miles you got are listed under base miles, not under bonus miles, except for those kind of portal promos will be listed under bonus miles. And that's how you'll know the distinction there.

We also have a lot of past experience with similar things. So to go way back with Southwest has had the ability to earn companion pass earnable points through portals and other things. And it worked and still works the exact same way, which is whatever the portal rate is, the 30 points per dollar through the portal, those count towards the companion pass. The bonus points that the portals are offering for spending $500 do not count. And so we have that experience. We have experience from Simply Miles. So Simply Miles is similar to a charitable organization.

But on top of all the deals, they were offering an additional five times as many points as you earned. And so what we saw in our American Airlines accounts after these posted was that the 40 points per dollar or whatever the original deal was that showed up on Simply Miles, those show up as base points. So those are expected to be loyalty points if they post this year. Those posted last year, but I'm just giving an example. But the five points, the five times as many that was the portal promotion, the Simply Miles promotion, that posts as bonus points. And so that will only be, those will not be loyalty points when that kind of promo happens again. So we have a lot of evidence, even if it's not coming all directly from AA to really explain the nuts and bolts, a lot of evidence that that's how it's going to work directly from AA to really explain the nuts and

bolts, a lot of evidence that that's how it's going to work. Yeah. And I mean, to, to piggyback on that, to make that, hopefully maybe a little clearer to anybody who hasn't caught what Greg is saying, portal wide promotions are bonus points. Those are not going to be your base now. So if it's something that like spend at any merchant in the portal, it's been at least this much and get this many bonus points. If it's portal wide like that, those are not going to be loyalty points. But any offer for a specific merchant, like open a new line of Verizon and get 6200 miles, that 6200 miles is posting to American Airlines accounts right now. It says base miles. So, you know, I think that it would be hard to imagine a situation where Americans like, yeah, those base miles aren't really base miles, though. And we've

already been seeing that. So you probably, Chris, when you look at your American Airlines account, can already see that the 30 points per dollar you got at FTD are, in fact, base miles. And any of those offers that you're doing through the portal where it's like, you know, go to wink wines and sign up for wine and get a thousand miles. That thousand counts as base miles. It's just anything that's like spend at any merchant in the portal and get this many extra points. Those are the extra bonuses. Same thing with simply miles. So that's, that's what we're saying. We expect all of that stuff to be base miles because it all says base miles now and base miles are said to be, you know, loyalty points or count as loyalty points. So, I mean, I'm as confident as I possibly could be without actually being the person that created the program that I'm going to. I'm confident too, but let me just clarify one point. Not everything you see as base miles are going to be loyalty points

because credit cards bonuses show up as base miles. Credit card spend, even when you're getting 2X, shows up as base miles. So there's not a one-to-one with everything, but most things will be one-to-one. and yeah, it's confusing. Yeah, it is. It is. So we're going to keep getting this question again and again and again, but we are, we'll try to refer people back to this, uh, this segment hopefully. And, and like I said, this is supposed to debut on March 1st and I'm, I'm going to go right out here and bet five bucks that on March 1st, this is not going to post automatically right away at the beginning of the day. And people are going to be flipping out crazy, like, oh my goodness, I didn't get my loyalty points.

Where are they? And you just give it a day or two. I mean, it's probably going to be fine. Or even a week or two. Take a couple of deep breaths. It's probably all going to shake out okay in the end. So that's my advice. All right. So that brings us, my friends, to the end for this week. We want to thank you very much for being out there with us. If you enjoyed today's episode and you would like to get our posts in your inbox each day, go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequent miler.com slash subscribe. You can join for instant emails, daily emails, weekly emails,

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