Frequent Miler on the Air - The new American Airlines Executive card. Is it worth the new fee? | Ep212 | 7-22-23

Episode Date: July 22, 2023

If you're a loyal American Airlines AAdvantage customer, does this card make sense with the new structure?  00:00 Intro 00:42 Giant Mailbag #1 01:45 Giant Mailbag #2 03:41 What crazy thing . . .did Delta Airlines do this week? 06:13 Award Talk 06:15 MGM and Marriott to partner from October 2023 https://frequentmiler.com/mgm-to-partner-with-marriott-bonvoy-from-october-2023-onward/ 10:40 Air Canada has access to more Singapore Airlines space https://frequentmiler.com/an-air-canada-advantage-far-more-award-space-with-some-partners/ 13:49 AAdvantage Hotels 21:00 Main Event: The new AA Executive Card: Is it worth the fee? https://frequentmiler.com/aa-enhances-the-citi-executive-card-and-encourages-spend-elsewhere/ 50:03 Question of the Week 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 Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, the new American Airlines executive card. Is it worth the new fee?

Cost of business has gone up. Is it worth it? It has indeed. We will see. We'll discuss. We'll go into all the new features of the card. It's going to be interesting because it's exciting in some ways and quite a bummer in other ways. And of course, we'll get into that when we get to our main event. First, we have Giant Mailbag. Today's Giant Mail, we've got two. Double header today. So first, in response

to last week's show where I talked about how you can see the transcript from our YouTube video. Uh-oh. Htown Harry says, an hour after this podcast was posted, neither option you gave to see your words and texts was available through the

menu option. However, when I checked last week's episode, it was there. It must take YouTube a while to generate the supplemental information. And then another commenter replied a bit later saying, yes, it's,

it's up now. So, yeah. So last week I talked about how you could in YouTube click to show transcript in case you prefer to read the words rather than listen. And it turns out that those words aren't available instantly when we publish, but they'll be available soon enough. Okay. That was giant mail number one. Giant mail number two was a comment in response to my post about the JW Marriott Massey Mara Lodge, which is that luxury safari camp lodge in Africa, in Kenya. Steve says, it looks like there's nothing available at all, at least for three days plus. Do you expect them to add availability for July through December?

So specifically, he's talking about the ability to book this lodge with Marriott points. We had posted that it was actually available for a reasonable number of points. And the time I first posted, it was available for you could pretty easily get like up to five days in a row. And so get a fifth night free type of thing. And so he's asking about how do you find that? He's saying that all of that space is gone. I can verify that you can still find one day or even two days in a row, but three days is hard to find. So really my answer, and I just wanted to say this on the show as well. My answer is this is why I've talked about that tool, stay with points and how valuable it can be for the alerts. So stay with points has a premium alerts feature, which lets you set flexible alerts and the flexible alerts. you could set up things to say, alert me anytime there's three or more days available and it will send you an email when there is.

And so I told them, you know what, do I think they're going to open up awards? Yes, I do. And the reason I think they'll open up awards is because I think people will cancel bookings they've already made. And when they cancel those bookings, those awards will automatically or should automatically go back into inventory. And so they should be available at that time. But unless you're watching all the time or using a tool to watch all the time, someone else is going to snap up that award space. And so it's sort of a game there to snap up that award space when it becomes available. So there you go.

Great tip there. Fantastic. Very good. All right. Well, that brings us to what crazy thing did Delta do this week? What did they do? I had an interesting story. I wasn't sure whether it was Delta or WestJet.

Yeah, I was helping family members book a trip to Vancouver. And so they booked a couple of seats through Delta using Delta SkyMiles, which, by the way, turned out to be a great value for booking a combination. It was a Delta flight and then a WestJet flight would have been 400 bucks to buy the flight. And instead it was 15,000 SkyMiles and six dollars. So every now and then you do get a good deal out of SkyMiles. But the problem was that there was no way to select seats on the WestJet leg. It showed up in the seat selection, but it said that in order to select seats, you'd have to go to WestJet.com.

And so I went to WestJet.com and I tried the Delta confirmation number and that didn't do me any good. So it said it had to be all letters and Delta had numbers in there. So I couldn't select seats that way. What I ended up having to do, and this was lucky because Steven Pepper had seen something on Flyer Talk and I never in a million years would have thought this, but there's a little error, sort of a, it looks like an error message at the top that tells you we can't select seats here at Delta. You need to go to westjet.com and the westjet.com is a to go to WestJet.com. And the WestJet.com is a hyperlink to WestJet,

but it looks like it would just go to the homepage. It doesn't. It actually goes to the confirmation for your booking. So you can select seats on WestJet.com. It's like, who would ever think that that link goes directly to your booking to manage it at WestJet? I mean, it doesn't say that. It definitely doesn't say that. Nick shared a screenshot of this with the team. And yeah, it looks like a little footnote with

a little link to WestJet in it. Like no one would ever click that on purpose. No, no, it's not like, and how easy would it be to put in a button that says, click here to go to WestJet and pick your seats, you know, but no, it's this tiny little hyperlink that you would never, you might not even notice is there if you if it wasn't for the fact that somebody told you that there's a link to WestJet to select your seats like, you know, never would notice this. And you do have to pay, by the way, it wasn't free to select seats at WestJet. I didn't expect it to be free. I just wanted to be able to pick them. So anyway, so there you go. There's your tip. If you book a

Delta SkyMiles award that includes travel on West west jet in the seat selector tool that tiny little link to west jet is actually going to your booking all right that brings us speaking of an award like that brings us to award talk so what's up with award talk this week greg yeah so we've got a whole bunch of things to talk about uh first mgm so they they ditched hyatt we've talked about that before i think and now they're partnering up with Marriott Bonvoy. What's the deal? You went to a virtual press conference about this. Did you learn basically the response to all of the questions about, well, how is this going to work and how is that going to work? You're like, yeah, we'll let you know down the road. But that actually seemed fair because they they don't want people to cancel bookings or, you know, hold off on booking things based on how things are now or are going to be later. So I'm not surprised that they aren't releasing all the details yet. They did say that they will release all the details. So, OK, let me back up. So, of course, as we said,

MGM and Hyatt have had a tie up at that end, September 30th, starting in October. MGM and Marriott will be partners. So 17 of the MGM resorts in Las Vegas and then a bunch of them around the country also will partner with Marriott Bonvoy. Several of the properties in Las Vegas, and then a bunch of them around the country also will partner with Marriott Bonvoy. Several of the properties in Las Vegas are joining like autograph collection, luxury collection, et cetera. I think there's four or five joining those specific collections. And then they're going to create a separate MGM collection, I assume, so that they don't have to honor as many elite benefits at those. They'll carve out whatever exceptions they want for those is my guess there. Speaking of elite benefits, we don't know what elite benefits will be yet.

In the press conference, there were two things that I thought were somewhat interesting. One of them was that in making the comment about how they weren't going to talk about how elite benefits and elite credit and all that stuff would work yet. He listed off the things that, you know, later on we'll be communicating details about A and B and lounge access and C and D. And I thought, oh, lounge access. Well, I wonder if there's any chance that Marriott Elite members will get lounge access at at least those properties that are joining existing collections. I don't know. I mean, it might be wishful thinking, but at least he did mention that. So I was kind of curious. The other thing that was interesting was someone asked how long the partnership will be for. And 20 years was the answer. The agreement is for 20 years. And they

both sides sounded hopeful that they would extend that, which doesn't surprise me. You know, in comments, a few readers talked about Hyatt getting burned by this partnership, by cheap elite nights and whatnot. And I don't really think that that's why the partnership ended. I think that Marriott is such a bigger fish. It's such a bigger marketing tool. Of course, that had to be attractive to MGM if you can get that. Absolutely. Of course. So if you can lock that in for 20 years, why wouldn't you? And I think the Hyatt partnership was just scheduled to end. It was like a 10 year agreement. So it was just time for them to negotiate something new. And Marriott was possible. So of course they took it. So anyway, so we don't know much more.

By the end of this year, we know that everything should be integrated. So you should be able to earn points, whether or not you'll earn elite night credit, and it'll be full elite night credits or partial elite night credits for Lux or Excalibur or whatever. We don't know those details yet. But by the end of this year, we should be earning whatever it is we're going to be earning. And we should hear about what it's going to be before October is what they told us. Yeah, hopefully it'll be good news. Hopefully we'll get good elite benefits. Chances are good, like many Marriott things, they'll promise good things and the individual hotels will fail to deliver on some of those.

But we can help. We can help. You know, one of the other interesting things in the press release is that they said that points you earn from the BetMGM app would be transferable somehow to Marriott. I don't know if it's going to be a one to one or what, but that's interesting if you're into sportsbook stuff at all, because, you know, you do generate some points that way. So we'll see how those transfer over. It might not be a bad thing. I'm sure it won't be super exciting, but, you know, it'll be something perhaps. So so anyway, keep your eye out for more details about that. I'm I'm hopeful that this will be not terrible at the very least. Marriott's such a big program that, you know, it'll be useful to be able to earn Marriott points still not as nice as Hyatt, but hey, you know, not awful.

And also the other MGM properties around the U.S. are participating, whereas they weren't with Hyatt. So that's also good news. OK. Yeah, for sure. That's a word talk. All right. So that's not all. Next up.

Well, we have more award talk. We've got three award talk topics today. Next up is Air Canada. You found that they have significantly more award space available for booking, I believe, Singapore Airlines than other Singapore partners. They do. Yeah, far more. I was really surprised when I was looking at a date this summer and it had six seats available on a Singapore Airlines flight. And then I later found that there were a bunch of dates in August of 2020. So we're talking summer 2023 still. And there were nine seats in either

direction on a number of days, which I mean, nine seats, that's when do you see nine business class seats on a flight, it's just not a very common site to begin with. And to find it on one of the top premium carriers in the world on a very desirable route, the JFK to Frankfurt route, I thought that was pretty notable. So I wanted to share that, though I should mention that a few readers pointed out that there have been problems in the other direction where apparently Air Canada has not been seeing Etihad award space that's available to American Airlines. And something that I had noticed but hadn't registered was the lack of Oman Air award space. Somebody mentioned that there hasn't been any since February. I don't know if that's totally

true, but I know I've searched some routes where I would have expected to see some Oman Air space and I didn't. I just assumed it wasn't available. But if that's true, then we'll have to see if we can find out about what's going on with that. Yeah. You know what? I've been seeing strange things in Star Alliance world all around. So I've been seeing flights that should have been bookable with Air Canada United and Avianca Life Miles, and they've often been bookable or at least findable online with one or two of them, but not all three. And I can't figure out what's going on.

So it does seem to be, I mean, I'm kind of maybe overreacting here, but splintering to where you have to check every program now. And that's really unfortunate. It is. I mean, it will increase the utility of tools like Point.me and AwardLogic and Points. Because they do search multiple programs because otherwise it just takes a long time to have to go and search each individual program. So and I was also pleasantly surprised if you really are traveling with a large group

to see that you could book more seats through Air Canada than you could through Singapore. So even if you wanted to book through Singapore Airlines, they just don't let you book more than six at a time. So that was the maximum for a search, whereas Air Canada, you could search up to nine. So right. So the funny thing is, I had found a similar thing like that with Alaska Airlines being able to book more Singapore space like several years ago. But now it seems like they moved over their preference to Air Canada for some reason.

I mean, who knows what's going on? Air Canada seems pretty cunning. I feel like they would be smart enough to negotiate those types of capabilities for their members. So they know that people like us want that. And I have to imagine that Air Canada stands to gain a lot by being a popular program in the U.S. and getting a lot of transferred points in from credit card programs. So hopefully we'll continue to see them expand on that.

And hopefully whatever's going on with Etihad and Oman Air gets resolved because those are good partnerships also. All right. So that's Air Canada, more Singapore space. Let's talk about Advantage Hotels. So what's up with Advantage Hotels? I saw this news and I actually didn't read it. So I don't know what's up with this, Greg. Tell me about it. Yeah. Okay. So I actually wrote a post, I don't know, six months ago or so. I read that one. Comparing earning. Yeah. At the time, it was possible to earn American Airlines miles and loyalty points from two different hotel booking platforms.

One was AA Hotels. The other was Rocket Miles. And at the time, I said, well, in all my searches, Rocket Miles was better. It was just clearly the better platform to use. Things have changed a lot. So first of all, Rocket Miles, if you go directly to them, the earning rates for AA have tanked. So if you want to earn AA miles from booking hotels, don't go through rocket miles. AA hotels is now called advantage hotels. And that has also completely changed. It's now powered by rocket miles. So under the covers,

it's rocket miles, but with the potential for good American Airlines miles earnings. And when I say potential, what I mean is this. If you search for hotels without logging in, the earning rates are awful. So you'll get the same bad cash rates for the hotels and maybe a couple hundred a miles. If you check in, I mean, if you log in, um, you will get better rates and those rates that you see apparently vary based on your elite status, credit card ownership and things like that. I don't know. I'm not sure if anyone publicly knows what the rules are about how many points you might get or who would get more points. But just to give you an example, like I did a, I did a search without logging in and I was seeing like 200 points or 400 points for various hotels. And then I logged in and I was seeing like more like 2000, 4000,

7,000, that kind of range for the same dates and hotels. So yeah. And the other thing, people have complained about that the new rates aren't as good as what Rocket Miles used to offer. But I think that varies a lot based on things like, well, again, your elite status and so on, but also length of stay and other factors. I think you have to play around with it. Sometimes you might find that you'll get more miles by booking multiple one-night stays, for example, instead of one longer stay. But I don't know what the rules are, what's going on,

but I do know if you want to get the better rates, don't go to Rocket Miles, go to Advantage Hotels, which, yeah, you can still get to by aa.com forward slash hotels, I believe. Okay, so question. If you are logged in, and so you're seeing a higher payout, will those count? Will all of those count as loyalty points? Yes, yes. I mean, unless, you know, unless they're running some kind of promotion where they say, you get this plus 5,000 bonus miles. If they say something like that, those bonus miles won't be loyalty points. But absolutely, if it says you'll get 6,000 miles for this day, those will be miles and loyalty points. So that's that's good. I'm glad this was on this week's award talk because I'm about to make today as we record this a booking at an independent hotel that's not in a chain that's expensive, actually. And I hadn't even thought about trying to book through that. I thought about some other techniques, some other things, but I hadn't even thought about

advantage hotels. Now I need to look at that because and I wouldn't have necessarily thought about the two separate one night stays which is the type of thing i would normally think about i think but not here because it was uh just independent so great tips great tips is my point uh always good to keep that stuff in mind all right one more yeah and always oh let me just say always compared to cash rates though i i did some some uh you know searches and sometimes it matched the best I could find in other, you know, hotels.com and whatnot. But other times it didn't. And so just and it could still be worth it.

You might be getting so many miles that it's worth paying more, but you should really do the math and figure that out. For sure. Okay. quick award talk, and that is that I ran into a situation last night where I was booking a bunch of Hyatt hotels, and I made several transfers from Chase Ultimate Rewards because I kept finding something else. Oh, I want to book that too. And unfortunately, the third time I went to transfer from Ultimate Rewards, the points did not instantly transfer to my Hyatt account, which is something we've heard from readers plenty of times before. Don't do multiple transfers. We've said it before. Don't do multiple transfers. Do one big transfer for the number of points you need. Don't do this 1,000-point test transfer and then 100,000 points

and then 37,000 points. Ask me how I know about those numbers. Does Chase just get tired? It's like asking for a sip of water one, one at a time. And the waiter has to run over with your little sip and then goes back to the kitchen. Then you ask for another one and you know, you should just ask for the pitcher all at once at the table. But I don't get it.

Why, why does Chase get tired delivering your, I would assume that it's a fraud prevention type of a thing that they're, they don't want somebody else to have stolen your login information and transfer out all your points. And so I guess the people who are into fraud more frequently do a bunch of small transfers rather than transferring all the points out at once. I don't know why you would do that. So that's a lesson to all you fraudsters. I don't know.

Fraudsters do it all at once, not little bits. Transfer it all out. Come on. What fraudster is going to transfer a thousand and then a hundred thousand and they're going to be like, you know what, let me only take 37 more. So anyway, so needless to say, I didn't get the points into my Hyatt account for the reservation that I needed to make and it was high demand. So I called up the Hyatt Globalist line to ask if I could make a points advance booking, which is a feature that I knew was something that Hyatt has had before. I wasn't positive whether you could do it if you

didn't have a my Hyatt concierge, which is a benefit at 60 elite nights. My, of course, globalist status came from the built challenge. So so anyway, yes, short story. I was able to make a points advance reservation. So even though the points have still have not as we record this the next day, I have not made it into my Hyatt account. I was able to make the reservation. I just need to have the points at least eight days in advance of this day, which should be no problem at all. So that was great. In the meantime, I also had to make another transfer. I needed a few more points and I had some in my built account. So I transferred over points from built and those did move over so just seems that the chase

thing must have been fraud prevention they just slowed down that last transfer to make sure i don't call in and say whoa whoa it wasn't me so yeah yeah that makes sense that makes sense all right so i think i think it's time for the main event. Yeah. Today we are combining card talk with main event because the main event's about a credit card. The new American Airlines executive card. Is it worth the new fee? So let's get into the details. The beloved card was $450 a year and offered up to 10 free authorized users, each of which everyone. So the primary card holder and all 10 authorized users would get free access to Advantage

Admirals Clubs. So that was a great deal for people who valued Admirals Club access. And now it's changed. So that whole thing has gone away. So let's talk about the new structure. $595 annual fee. So the price has gone up by $145. But where I think it really hurts to people who are taking advantage of the old structure is that now you are uh paying for your your uh

authorized users so 175 for up to three authorized users and then every one after you have three will be 175 each so yeah so i mean i I guess that's still cheaper than everyone buying their own Admirals Club membership for sure. But, you know, it just changes the equation quite extraordinarily for those who are getting the card just for that feature. Yeah. I mean, if you had 10 authorized users before, what does that even come out to be now that it would cost you if everybody wanted to keep it? That's what, $1,400. To carry the two, it comes to a lot. $1,400 just in the authorized user fees. I'm not even including that. So plus the annual,

so about $2,000 versus what used to be $450. Ouchouch that hurts yeah yeah um i mean luckily if you're traveling with other with your friends you can still i believe guess them in um so you know it's not it's not like uh it's not terrible but anyway um so that's a big change it's a big change anyway right but that's not the only thing that's changed right there's some no no no but before we talk about what's changed let's talk about the the things that stay the same you still get admirals club membership with the card you still get a hundred dollar uh global entry fee rebate or pre-check rebate um you still get your first check bag free plus up to eight companions on the same ticket you still get priority boarding, priority check-in,

priority this and that at the airport. So all those things don't change, but there's lots of new stuff. Let's talk about the coupon book first. They've joined the Amex world of coupon book rebates. And so here you go. You get up to $120 back on Avis or budget car rentals. And I have to say, as we're recording this, there's not much information out there about

these coupon book features. So I can't tell you. Boy, that seems to me. Well, no, we know it's not a $10 a month thing in this case. But yeah, we don't know what you have to do to qualify for that rebate. If it's truly just book an Avis or budget rental car and you get $120 back, if it's that simple, then I like that particular coupon. I mean, that's pretty good, but if it's more complicated, it might not be good. Now we get to the ones that are more annoyingly coupony. Up to $120 back on Grubhub.

And this one is up to $10 a month. So you have to use Grubhub regularly, charge it to your Advantage executive card in order to get that feature. Did you hear that eye roll? Was that an audible eye roll from me? I heard it. Totally.

So, you know, this one seems very familiar. I mean, talk about borrowing from the Amex coupon book world. This is exactly out of the Amex gold card coupon book, isn't it? And then this one gets particularly nasty. Up to $100 in Lyft credits. The headline sounds good to me. Up to $120 in Lyft credits. Sounds great.

Yeah. Awesome. But then it says up to $10 credit each month after taking three eligible rides. What? What? Does that mean you have to take three eligible rides each month before you get the ten dollars the fourth ride will get a ten dollar credit that's ridiculous i think that might be what it means and if that's what it means that's that's insane i mean lyft

should just give you that for free you're taking that many rides it's like give us some kind of rewards you have to not have a car in order to say. So forget about the Avis or budget rental because you're not renting cars. You need to be taking lifts in order to be able to use this benefit. I mean, like how ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, OK. All right. They're aiming this at people to travel a lot.

I understand. And so, you know, people are going to need a lift from the airport to the hotel or hotel to office or whatever it might be. But come on now. That just seems like not a benefit. Is that even worth advertising? I mean. Well, they want they want that big $120 part, you know, in the headline, because look, you've

got $320 credits. That's way more than making up for the the uh new annual fee right i mean that's that's you know there should be a point though where it's like gonna get all that back and probably not it shouldn't be right to advertise credits that require too many hoops right because i mean like at what point do you say okay they really shouldn't advertise it that way like if they say after you take 10 eligible lift rides a month like i mean how many can oh you get a thousand dollars in lift credits if you just take a Lyft rides a month, like, I mean, how many? Oh, you get a thousand dollars in Lyft credits if you just take 100 Lyft rides a month. That's all. I mean, come on.

There has to be a point where you say that's just not genuine advertising. I mean, I guess three is not a huge hurdle for people who are traveling very frequently, but it just seems like. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I did say at the beginning, we don't know the details. We don't have the terms and conditions conditions for this as we're recording the show and um so it's possible that they mean after taking three eligible rides a year a year okay i mean i or yeah once in a lifetime i don't

know but it sounds like they mean monthly and that's that's what we're reacting to so boo if that's if that's the uh and what the other thing i want to see in the terms is do you have to have paid for those first three lift rides with this i mean is that another you know contingency that you have to have paid for the other rides with your city executive card like you did what if you take three cards and you charge them your built card or whatever like then you still don't get the 10 to i yeah yeah i mean people who have the sapphire reserve card which is currently earning 10x on lyft rides um would really hate

giving up that 10x in order to earn 1x on the executive card in the hopes that they'll take take enough rides with lyft for this 10 credit to be worthwhile, which is just hard to imagine. All right. So bad news out of the way. I mean, it's not all bad news. If you use Grubhub a lot, you rent from Avis a lot. I mean, those certainly could be nice. Yep, yep. They make up or can make up for some of the new annual fee.

Absolutely. All right. Let's talk about the earn rate from spend. So like every American Airlines credit card out there, most spend, you get one American Airlines mile per dollar and you also get one loyalty point per dollar spent. When you spend in bonus categories, like every other American Airlines card, you still only earn one loyalty point, even if you're earning two or more American Airlines miles. So where do you earn more than one American Airlines card, you still only earn one loyalty point, even if you're earning two or more American Airlines miles. So where do you earn more than one American Airlines mile?

Forex, if you actually spend on American Airlines itself, so you pay for flights or check bags or whatever it is, which actually you won't have to pay for check bags because you have this card, but you get the idea. You'll get 4x american airlines miles if you've spent 150 000 on the card in a calendar year and we'll pay for a a an intervention for you because that was no i'm sorry we won't we don't don't it's not a good idea um but uh then But then they'll suddenly award you with 5X for AA purchases. Yeah, that's weird. So I applaud them for giving 4X for American Airlines itself because most cards, most branded cards are giving you like two or three. And so it's hard to justify using those cards instead of a card like the Sapphire Reserve that gives you three points per dollar for travel.

This at least gives you a reason to use it. So that's nice. The 5X thing just seems like dumb. I really wish they didn't even have that so we didn't have to talk about it. I mean, it'll be nice for the person that just opened one card and puts everything on the AA card.

I guess at least they'll get something extra. But but but it's not something to get something extra but it's only their spend on a after hitting the 150 000 within the calendar year uh anyway yeah all right okay next up you get uh 10 points per dollar for car rentals booked through AA.com slash cars. And I say meh because we've talked about before, we don't like booking car rentals through these kind of portals. And you don't earn a lot of AA miles to begin with going through their portal. I don't see any reason for doing that. Anyway, but 10x for hotels booked through Advantage Hotels. So now that's getting interesting. We talked earlier about how Advantage Hotels, it's a new platform based on Rocket Miles.

And if you're logged in and you have elite status and you have certain credit cards, you'll get better offers for how many points you earn for your hotels. And then earning 10X with a credit card is on top of whatever points you get from AA hotels. Now, these 10X are not loyalty points. It's still just one loyalty point per dollar, but the points you get as advertised through the Advantage Hotels site, those are loyalty points. So this is a good way of making those hotel reservations even more rewarding, I think. So I like that. I like that. No, yeah, I think that is that's a great feature. So if you're booking a place that costs $500 a night, you're looking at 5000 points from this. Plus, if it's that expensive, you're probably earning another five or seven or 10,000 through the

portal. So yeah, I mean, that can certainly make a nice dent in the cost or a nice rebate. So I think that one's potentially interesting. Of course, we don't usually book most hotels through portals like this, because when you're booking through Advantage Hotels or any other kind of third party online travel agency, you're probably not going to get elite credit if you're staying in a chain property or hotel points, and you may not even get your elite benefits. So I don't want to book like a Marriott or a Hyatt through this usually. But if you're booking independent hotels, it certainly can make for a nice return. And if you're booking even one of those Marriott or

Hyatt's where you don't care about the elite benefits, then obviously it could make a difference there too. So, all right, so the earning rate, the 4X on AA, nice if you're buying some AA tickets, I guess, you know, a little bit extra there. And the 10X to Advantage Hotels certainly has some uses. And again, like Greg said, we're not really big on the rental car thing because usually you can do much better

booking rental cars in other ways. So the price difference is usually not worth paying more for in order to get the 10X. So that's why we're not excited about that. And I did a quick search before the show of a rental that I actually have planned where I'm paying around $40 something a day. And through aa.com slash cars, it would have been about $100 a day. So definitely not worth it if I had the card yet. day. But you'd get 10X, Greg. Definitely not worth it. If I had the card, yeah. Yeah, 10X would not make up for that. No, it doesn't.

It definitely not. Okay, so that's earn rate. How about loyalty points? Can I earn some loyalty points? I want to get American Airlines elite status so that I'll be really happy about my credit card that gives me the free checked bags and the priority boarding that I get my elite status. Anyway, I don't know. It seems kind of redundant, doesn't it? To me,

it seems like the card gives you the benefits of elite status without having to earn the loyalty points. But I guess it appeals to people who are loyal to American Airlines. So what can you get? What are the loyalty points? Yeah. Yeah. And first, I mean, it doesn't give you like free upgrades that elite status could give you. So there are definitely advantage to elite status that you wouldn't get just by holding the card. Yes. So what it does for loyalty points is once you've earned 50,000 loyalty points through whatever means within a elite program year. So American Airlines does things weird their their elite year is i think march 1st to end of february um but if you weren't once you weren't 50 000

loyalty points within that period of time uh just having the executive card will mean you'll get a 10 000 loyalty point bump that's nice and once nice. And once you get to 90,000 loyalty points, you get another 10,000 point bump. So for those chasing loyalty status, nice thing here, there's no need to put any spend on the card to get these bonuses. You just have to earn loyalty points however you do it. And so, for know, for example, if you're earning from actually flying, or if you're earning from shopping through the advantage shopping portal, or if you're earning through the hotels thing we talked about, however you're doing it, earning those loyalty points, once you get to, you know, as we said,

once you get to 50,000, and then again, at 90,000, you get that 10,000 loyalty point bump, which I think is a really cool feature for those chasing elite status with American Airlines. While we're on that topic, I think it's very interesting to me that this card they did away with they used to offer a 10 000 loyalty point bump if you spent 40 000 within a year they did away with that and so they've done away with virtually all incentive to spend on this spend big on this card no greg that's not true you get you get five x today i count if you spend 150 grand, Greg. Come on. Isn't that enough of a carrot for you? If you're a travel agent spending millions of dollars at AA.com, it could be worth it. But yeah, no, they really did.

They took away all the incentive for spending big on the card, but are giving you real incentive just to have the card, which is a really kind of weird, unique way to go about things. But an interesting sort of side effect of that, and View from the Wing was where I first read about this idea, but it totally makes sense, is Barclays also has American Airlines cards. And their best card, in my opinion, is the silver card, which you have to get the red card and then get offered an upgrade to the silver card to get the silver card. The silver card gives you the ability to earn loyalty points with big spend. So just like any American airlines card, you get one loyalty point per dollar spent, but when you hit certain dollar thresholds you get a 5 000 loyalty point bump

um so if you do a total of 50 000 spend on the silver card um you get a total of 15 000 loyalty point bonuses because you'd have gotten three 5k bonuses up to then so with that card alone the silver card and fifty thousand dollar spend you've got 65,000 loyalty points. If you also have the executive card, you've got the 10,000 point bonus when you hit 50,000. So now you're at 75,000. That gives you platinum status with American Airlines. And then it also gives you at, I think it's 60,000, you start earning a 20% bonus on loyalty points earned through the advanced shopping portal, Simply Miles, the hotel, Advantage Hotels, and a couple other places. And so you're earning your loyalty points quicker at that point. Get to 90,000, you get the 10,000

loyalty point bump from this card. At 100,000 now, the bump in loyalty point earnings goes to 30%, from 20% to 30%. So you have this sort of accelerator effect of getting higher and higher elite status more quickly, partially thanks to this card, but no spend is required on the card at all to do that. Yeah, that's interesting. It definitely is an interesting feature. And, you know, backing up to the no incentive to spend, I think they're changing the incentive. And so instead of incentivizing you to spend big, they're incentivizing you to spend in ways that benefit American Airlines. Right. So they're encouraging you to spend on a dot com on a dot com slash cars and on Advantage Hotels, which really is an interesting, I think, different way of looking at things. And we've said since American launched the new program

that they're looking at loyalty in a very different way these days. They're looking at loyalty as being people that are in the American Airlines ecosystem, spending money in all of the ways that benefit American Airlines, which is typically by giving them the ability to sell miles to somebody, whether that's to the credit card company or to the advantage shopping portal or, you know, advantage hotels, et cetera. So it's, I think it's interesting that they're, that's what they're incentivizing. They're not incentivizing general spend. It's spending ways that's going to earn you more American Airlines miles, which presumably is going to keep you more loyal. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you're spot on about that, Nick. And we didn't get to one

significant new feature of the card, which is travel protections. So this card is going to introduce trip cancellation and interruption coverage, trip delay protection, lost baggage protection, car rental insurance. These are all things that Citi dropped from, I think, all of their cards. And now they're reintroducing, this is a Citi Bank card, and they're reintroducing these features just for this one card. I think it's because of what you just said. I think American Airlines wants to incentivize people to use the card on American Airlines and they don't want to hear the excuse. No, we don't want to use this card because it doesn't offer travel protection. I could use my

Sapphire card instead and get all these travel protections. Well, no, now you will not only get 4X American Airlines miles from that spend, you'll also be protected to some degree. I don't know the details of these travel protections, whether they come close to matching what Chase offers. But the point is, at least they've got some coverage for these things. And I applaud that. I think that means that someone's really thought through what they want of their customers from this card and what kind of spend they want to encourage and how they want to reward you and everything. Yeah, it makes so much sense to me. I don't understand why some airline credit cards don't have trip protection features because, you know, I just I think that there are probably a lot of people that don't think about it at all.

But I think the people who travel very frequently and get into this game for sure do think about, OK, what happens when my flight gets canceled? And do I have some sort of protection? And, oh, I can get that easily with this credit card. Then it makes sense to use that. And so I think that that to me, it should be a no brainer. Every airline credit card should have trip interruption, cancellation, blah, blah, blah type of insurance.

That should be one of the selling features. So I'm glad to see Citi put that on here because I think it belongs. And it's on some airline cards, but not all of them. So I think that's a good feature to have on there. So good job with that, Citi. And I'm glad you brought that up. I kept meaning to bring it up because I thought to myself, I'm sure there are some people that hear us talking about Forex on AA.com and they're like, why haven't they talked about the fact that there's no travel protection? Well, because there is finally. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. So, so that's really great. So, so that's, that's what we know about the new card as we're recording this. So what do you think, Greg? Are you excited about it? Is this a card that you would want?

Is this a card I'd want? Well, so I'm conflicted. Let me first say a couple things that we haven't said yet. was also about American Airlines lounges themselves, the Admirals Clubs themselves, that they have basically promised to make them less sucky. So I think that was the official announcement. Good. At least they recognize they're self-aware. I appreciate that level of self-awareness. And in fact, we've had a reader to write to us about like, hey, have you seen the lounge in this airport or that airport? It's actually really nice. So they have been making strides to make some lounges better. They've promised to include like real food instead of just snacks. These are things that they're just playing catch up.

Like Delta especially, but also United Airlines are just way ahead of American on improving their lounges. And American's just playing catch up. But why did I bring that up is because I think that has always been access to the Admirals Club lounge has always been the number one selling feature of the card. And for the most part, that's still true. And to that extent, when I'm asked, do I want the card? You're not sold. Well, I'm not sold because not even because even if I totally believe that the lounges are going to be less sucky, every airport I tend to go to that has an Admirals Club lounge, I also have access to like the Centurion lounge or a priority pass lounge

or something else and so it just hasn't been a thing for me to even care at all about whether i get into admiral's club lounges now i i might find you know after saying this i'll end up you know i don't know somewhere that uh where that's the only option and I wish I had it. But at SingStand right now, that's not a selling feature for me. What is a selling feature is the elite status, it would give me up to 20,000 bonus points just for having the card, depending on how far I get on my hunt. That's intriguing to me. 10X rewards for the hotels is kind of intriguing because especially with hotels.com no longer being a rewarding platform. Now it's like to the extent that I'm booking independent hotels, that combination seems like a winning combination to me.

Like if I already have this card to book through Advantage Hotels, get a whole bunch of loyalty points, plus earn a lot of miles thanks to both the Advantage Hotel platform and this card. That's pretty sweet. So those things are attractive, but are they $595 attractive? That's the problem. So I could see myself signing up for a year to get the announced 100,000-point welcome bonus offer. That requires, I think, $8,000 spend. But I don't... It'd be hard to imagine me keeping the card past the first year, but we'll see. What about you? Is it a card you would consider? I'm not even moderately tempted by this, to be honest.

Not even a little bit. All your points are good points. But well, for me, first of all, like you said, Admirals Club access just doesn't matter much to me. So you got to take that for what it's worth there. The times I'm flying through an airport with an Admirals Club are so few and far between to begin with. And when I am, like you said, there's almost always access to numerous, very good lounges. So I'm not particularly concerned with access to what might be a moderately good lounge. So that doesn't sell

me on it. And the elite status benefits, ironically enough, don't sell me on it either, because I could get the free checked, or I say the elite status benefits. Let's start with the benefits of elite status if you're not going to get to executive platinum, and or you're not going to fly 30 times a year, so you're not going to get the system-wide upgrades. That's not required anymore. Oh, right, right, right. I totally forget that every time. The system-wide upgrades are- They're at 100-

You get them with enough loyalty points, but you have to earn a lot of loyalty points. So if you're not going to earn the loyalty points for the system-wide upgrades are... They're at 100... You get them with enough loyalty points, but you have to earn a lot of loyalty points. So if you're not going to earn the loyalty points for the system-wide upgrades, then the benefits of elite status are free checked bags, better seat, right? Some extra legroom seating, access to business class lounges or first class lounges,

depending on how high you get when you're at an airport with a partner's lounge, right? Not an American Airlines lounge, but a lounge from some partner and maybe an upgrade. And maybe an upgrade, there's a lot of different factors that play into that. I mean, everybody knows sometimes you might get one and a lot of times you probably won't. So when I look at that, I say, okay, well, I can get the free check bags from like a $95 American Airlines card and the priority boarding and those things. Like those are all things that to me, I don't think it's worth $595 to get like a little bit closer. I could just buy a few more things to

the shopping portal and get that 10,000 extra points. So I just don't find it worth enough. Either I'm going to go after elite status or i want the shortcut but this is kind of an expensive shortcut to me i think there are cheaper shortcuts so so i'm not particularly interested but you know if i lived in dallas and didn't have a capital one card to you know access the capital one lounge there then you know maybe i would want this card so that I could use the the Admiral's Club lounge frequently because I'd probably be flying a lot if I lived there. So I can certainly see the situation where it would be appealing. The other thing, the hundred thousand point bonus is

not like wildly exciting to me either, because the Aviator Red card frequently has a bonus of 60 or 70 thousand miles after first purchase. So $8,000 worth of spend to earn 20 or 30,000 more miles. I'm like, I'm not like, oh, I got to get it now. So I'm not super hot on that. That's right. So it's not bad, but it's not super exciting. I think those are all great points. And so I think what it comes down to again is, is just like the old card, you know, as I said, its main value is if you want access to the Admirals Clubs, Nick and I don't. But if you do, it's a great way to, it's better than buying the club membership because it's cheaper to have the card and you get all these benefits with the card.

And if you're serious about chasing American Airlines elite status and don't mind paying a bit to get further along in it, this can help with that as well. But I think the number one selling feature has to be the lounge. And it's a bummer if you are using it for yourself and lots of family members and or friends as AUs, then it's a huge bummer how much more it costs. If you were using it just for yourself, going up $145 in price, I don't think that's a bad trade-off for the new perks you get, especially if some of these coupon book features actually pay out. And, you know, the 10X at hotels and so on is good. So I think you're probably coming out about even, if not better, with the new features. But yeah, if you have authorized users, that's a bummer.

It's going to cost you a lot more. Sure is. All right. Well, I guess that wraps us up for the main event and brings us to this week's question of the week. So this week's question of the week came into the giant mailbag address. So I'll remind you now, since it's top of mind, that if you have a question you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback, you can send that to mailbag at frequent miler dot com. And that's what John did. So John writes in and says, I've

only been following you guys for about six months, but I've derived significant value from the advice. And I really enjoy your style. You know, all these ridiculous offers. Well, I've earned lots and lots of points. So he says just this evening, I took advantage of your advice and got one of these offers that I read about and I saved a lot of money. But he says now with the ability to get my wife to refer me on some of the cards, I see no opportunity yet to repay you by using your links. I imagine this sounds ridiculous, but if I don't have an opportunity to use one of your links soon, could I just send you a check? Regards, John. So my question, John, is how big is the check? I'm just kidding, John. I love it. Thank you, John. No, you cannot send

us a check. You rewarded us with your email. We love it. I love that you want to reward us, but no, just keep visiting our site. Keep telling your friends about Frequent Miler and what you get out of reading and listening and whatnot. And that's all the thanks we want from you. Yeah, you know, and when it makes sense to use one of our links, you know, that's great. We appreciate when people do that in a situation where there's not a referral offer, where you can earn some extra points within your household or that sort of thing. You know, then great. And I think I hope anyway, I think our hope is that by being trustworthy, by telling you, hey, listen, you can earn more points by referring your, you know, your player to whether that John mentions his wife. So, you know, your wife can earn some points by referring you for this

card that you know that, you know, we're in it for you to get the maximum return. And hopefully that keeps you coming back and reading and then using our links on the occasion where it makes sense to do that and telling your friends and family about the site. Like Greg said, I think that to me is much more valuable. So please do spread the word that this is a good place to learn about miles and points.

We appreciate that. And we're thankful for all the readers we have out there. So thank you, John. It was a generous offer, but please just keep reading. Okay, that brings us to the end of today's episode. Unfortunately, we're out of time. If you've enjoyed this though,

and you'd like to get more in your email inbox each day or each week, you can go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. You can follow us on all the various social media out there and join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group so you can ask and answer questions like these all the time. All right. I think that brings us to the end for this week. Thank you guys. And we'll see you again

next week. Bye everybody.