Frequent Miler on the Air - The Rental Car Game | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep318 | 8-8-25

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

In today's podcast episode, we'll talk about Bonvoying Barclays, we'll discuss which Premium cards are keepers, then share everything we know about car rentals. Giant Mailbag(01:08) - One listener tells us how he Bonvoyed BarclaysMain Event: The Rental Car Game(04:09) - Why don't we talk much about car rentals?(06:23) - Always join the car rental program and attach your number(11:37) - Car rental status via credit card(14:20) - Which rental car elite statuses matter?(22:06) - Status matching(26:50) - Earning free rental days(40:27) - Rental Car Savings(48:57) - Avis First(51:54) - Do you need anything special to rent cars internationally?(57:02) - Any favorite programs or programs you avoid?Question of the Week(1:04:47) - What should you do if you're an intermediate player, trying to go from one or two credit cards to five or six, or seven to ten?(1:10:58) - Read more about which premium cards are keepers here.Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's episode, we'll talk about bonvoying Barclays. We'll discuss which premium cards are keepers, and we'll tell you everything we know about car rentals. Frequent Miller on the air starts now. Today's main event, the rental car game. We talk often about using points and miles to book flights and hotels and how to get elite status and hotel and airline programs, but we don't talk a lot on our show about rental cars. Today's show is going to correct that.

That's right. That's right. And, you know, truth be told, there are fewer ways to get great value out of your points for rental cars, but it's worth understanding how the various rental car programs work, which ones might be worth it, which ones have benefits that you should know about. We'll discuss some of that today. But before we do, don't forget that you can always jump ahead to something or come back to something later on by just expanding the show description. That's going to have all of the timestamps so you can jump wherever it is you'd like to jump and you'll find links to more information. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this a thumbs up. Give us a like.

Leave us a comment. We appreciate all those things. Now let's drag out this week's giant mail bag. Today's giant mail comes from Bobby. Bobby wrote, How I Bonvoy, Barclays. Bobby says, player two, that's presumably Bobby's spouse, opened a Barclays American Airlines Aviator Red Master Card for the elevated 70K offer in early 2025. Well, Barclays accidentally sent him two cards on two accounts. We activated both cards, met the single purchase minimum spend, and paid the annual fees.

After the statements processed, each card earned 70,000 American Airlines miles, both attached to one American Airlines account. approximately 30 days later, I noticed one of the accounts was closed, even though we did not close it. We also received a letter explaining the double card mistake, plus a refund check for the second card's $99 annual fee. So, 140k points later, we booked two business class roundtrip international tickets for a $99 annual fee and two small purchases. Well done. Congratulations. That's awesome. So, you know, oddly I've heard about this kind of thing happening with Barclays before. And in fact, I had it happen to me once where they sent me two cards. And I think in that case, I might have just let them close one without even

considering, this is years ago now, without even considering the chance to earn both welcome bonuses. But I've heard about that every now and then with Barclays. And obviously the key point here is in some cases, you can do that. You can open two of the same card with some banks. So Barclays typically won't let you open two of them at the same time like that unless they accidentally do it, though, I think. Yeah, I think the lesson is, like, if they do accidentally send you to, make sure you meet whatever the minimum spend requirement is on both cards before they cancel one of them. So you get the welcome bonus. You know, in this case, the minimum spend was just first purchase, so it was really easy to do. But I would think,

even if it's like $1,000 or $2,000, if it happens to me, now that I know this, I would go out of my way to try to do it quickly on both cards so that I could potentially get both bonuses. I think that's really cool. Yeah, it is. It is funny enough, I was having a conversation with somebody very well known in the game recently who their introduction to this whole world of ours was essentially something like this where they didn't expect to be able to get the bonus on that second card. And then they did.

And they were like, oh, wait a second. Hold on. What's going on here? I didn't know I could do that again. And so, of course, one thing leads to another. And eventually you start looking for more and more of those opportunities. fees. That's a great deal. And of course, keep in mind if Bobby had also opened at least one, that would have been 210,000 miles between, you know, those three cards, I suppose, for $299 annual

fees. So it's a great deal when the, especially when the Aviator Red card offers that after first purchase bonus, which it pretty frequently does. That's a very good deal for people who can qualify for it. It sure is. All right. Well, let's dive right into this week's main event. main event time the rental car game so just as a little background i'm personally on vacation this week as you're listening to this and so we don't have any kind of topical this is what's happening now types of discussions on today's show which is why we skip the other segments um but i i'm coming to you from wherever i am now to deliver the rental car game main event um lucky for luckily for me since some relaxing on vacation.

Nick is the one who's going to take the lead on most of this topic. We'll see. We'll see. Greg will have plenty to add, I imagine. But let's first touch on what Greg kind of mentioned at the beginning, and that's that we don't talk much about car rental programs, and why not? Well, I mean, the first reason is that the programs really generally don't offer very much value at all. I mean, as compared to hotel and airline programs, there's just not nearly the opportunities to get good value, certainly not many opportunities to get far outsized value. And a number of major rental car chains don't offer any program at all, really. So it's kind of

a situation where there just isn't as much to talk about as there is typically with airlines and hotels. And there's not much variance from one program to another. The few programs that do have something, have something kind of similar in some ways. So we don't talk much for those reasons. And then, of course, also, there's the fact that your experience with rental car companies is going to vary so much from one location to another, that when it comes to things like customer service and whether or not there's even a vehicle available, you know, that's going to vary so much from place to place. And price varies a lot from place to place. And honestly, price drives a lot of my decisions when it comes to car rental decisions. So that tends to matter more to me than the programs do because the programs offer such little value that it's often not a decision. deciding factor in terms of which company I rent from. That said, there are certainly reasons to be

involved in the rental car programs and to understand them. And I do have some preferences. I'm sure Greg has preferences here too. And so we'll discuss a little bit of that. First piece of advice, though, is always join the rental car program and attach your rental car program number to your rental. So whoever you're renting from, whether it's Avis or Hertz or budget or thrifty or whatever, join the rental car program and make sure you get your number attached because even programs that don't offer any sort of, or even rental car companies, I should say, don't offer any sort of loyalty program, often offer the chance to skip the counter and that can save you a ton of time. So for instance, budget. Budget doesn't offer any elite status. There's no points. There's no way to earn free rentals, but they have the fast break program. And so all it is is signing up for a free loyalty account with budget. And then you can attach your fast break number and you don't have to stand in line at the counter to wait for your keys. And to me, that's huge. I don't want to stand in a rental car line. I want to go straight to the lot. Yeah. Before we get a lot of calls about that, though, I do want to mention that a lot of

small locations across the chains don't have skip the line necessarily. But if you're on a major airport location, it should have the skip the line capability. That's a great point. When you're at a small airport that that piece of advice won't always apply. Small airport or regional rental car location that's not attached to an airport. Oh, correct. Yes. Yep. And so on that along those lines of attaching your number, keep in mind that you can attach your numbers sometimes even when you book through a third party. Price line, for instance, is a site that I rent from sometimes. And they do offer the chance to add your loyalty program numbers. So if you're renting from Hertz, you can add your Hertz number or your Avis preferred number or whatever it might be. There's a little

little box, though, that you have to expand to do that. It's not really intuitively obvious. You've got to expand the little box for rewards, and then you can enter the rental car number. And that's helpful for those situations where you are renting from a major airport, because then you should be able to skip the line and go to your vehicle. So you want to make sure that you do that. Speaking of renting through price line, the reason that I rent through price line, a fair amount anyway, is that you can double dip rewards. So you could potentially go through a shopping portal and earn shopping portal rewards for, say, price line, and then also potentially earn rewards in the rental car program. I just did this recently. I rented from Hertz. I clicked through Capital One shopping to go to price line and

book my Hertz car and I put my Hertz number in there. And I earned shopping rewards from Capital One shopping. I earned Hertz points from Hertz and got to pick a car from the president's selection because of my status with Hertz. And we earned credit towards Priceline's loyalty program. Priceline has a loyalty program where you make a certain number of bookings and you get elevated status that gives you access to advantageous pricing. And sure enough, actually, I've seen better rental car pricing numerous times already because we have made several bookings lately through Priceline. And so we've hit whatever the next tier of status is and probably we'll hit whatever the top tier is by the end of the year. So that gives you a potential opportunity to

to double-depth. Nice. So when you did that recent Hertz rental, did you do a pay now or pay later rate through price line? Great question. That was a pay later rate. And I actually don't even know that price line had a pay now rate for that. At least I didn't see an option to pay now when I was booking that. So I don't know if that's something they always offer or sometimes or what. Yeah, I don't know either. But the best I can gather is that in general, when you're booking not directly through a car rental company, if there's a pay later option, you should be able to either earn rewards for the rental and or get elite benefits of your elite status with a car rental company, probably both, as long as you pay later and then figure out a way to attach your loyalty number, your car rental loyalty number to that reservation. Often they'll have an option right there, but sometimes if you book it, you might be able to call the car company and say, hey, here's my booking confirmation. Can you attach my number to it? But when you pay now, my impression is usually you won't get any, you won't earn rental car points or get any of the benefits of elite status. But that's just on a very small sample of my own and sometime Googling around about this topic. So I'm not 100% confident. about that, but that seems to be the trend. Yeah, that may very well be. I don't do very many pay now car rental situations. The situations where I have used pay now have mostly been either

booking through auto slash, which we'll talk about in a little bit here, or sometimes through rentalcars.com when Capital One shopping offers a really good portal return on it. But I don't do that very often. I usually choose the pay later. I want the flexibility of being able to cancel because plans change or prices change and a different company becomes more advantageous. So I rarely do the pay in advance rates, but that's a good point that you may not apparently earn your rental car rewards if you pay in advance. All right. Now tell me, how can I shortcut the line to elite status?

I want to sit up front in these rental cars in first class. So how do I get those free upgrades? Well, you can sit in for you. You will be sitting in front if you rent the car. You should be sitting in front if it's rented in your name. Anyway, there are several credit cards that you probably have in your wallet that offer some form of elite status with one or more rental car companies. For instance, the Amix Platinum card offers some level of status with Avis, Hertz, and National. So you can get elite status with all of those that'll give you some ability to select a car that you want, depending on various from one program to the next a little bit.

They also offer a code with Hertz specifically that gives you a four-hour grace period on rental car returns. That can come in handy sometimes when you need to keep a car just a little bit more than 24 hours because you can keep it up to 28 hours and pay the one-day rate. Of course, depending on the discount codes you have access to, you may have access to better discounts that make that not as good of a deal. It just depends. It varies. But I've run into numerous situations over the years. where that extra four-hour grace period saved me over the cost of having to pay for an additional rental day. And even if the MX Platinum code was a little bit more expensive than my next best

daily rate code or whatever, because I was paying for only one day instead of two, it often has worked out to be a better deal. So that's something to keep an eye out for the Venture X card. If you're a Capital One Venture X card holder, that gives you Hertz president circle status, top tier status with Hertz, which just gives you the opportunity to choose from the president's selection when you book a midsize or larger. We'll talk more about the benefits of status in a second, but VentureX card gives you Hertz President's Circle, and the Sapphire Reserve card gives you National Executive Status, which again, we'll talk about what you have to rent in order to pick from a certain selection there. So those are three cards you may have, the MX Platinum, Capital One Venture X,

Sapphire Reserve that offer automatic car rental status. You just have to link up your account. counts and activate that benefit. Yeah. And, of course, that's not a full list. There's plenty of cards that offer some level of status. Also, if you have airline elite status of any kind, it's worth checking whether that gives you car rental elite status as well. There's a number of partnerships between different airlines and car rental companies.

Yep, that's a great point. In fact, because as we record this, JetBlue Mosaic 1, I recently got an email reminding me that I could match to some level with Avis and I'm sure plenty of other. companies offer something like that. So speaking of your elite status, we talked about how to get it through a credit card, which ones actually matter and why? So Hertz has two levels of status that matter. Hertz 5 star and Hertz President Circle credit cards that we just mentioned offer one or the other of those two statuses. And the benefit of having either Hertz 5 star or President Circle status is booking a mid-size car or larger. That's letter C,

you're looking at the cars, they all have different, you know, mid-size, standard, large, et cetera, et cetera. They all have letter codes next to them. So you need to book the C class or higher, which is going to be mid-size or higher with Hertz. And then you can choose from a selection of vehicles. So if you've got five-star status, you can go to the five-star section and pick from whatever's there. If you have president circle, rather, yes, president-circle status, you can go to the president-circle section and pick from the vehicles there. And I, I, Ideally, they should be slightly better vehicles. Probably they're going to be mid-sized or larger vehicles.

Sometimes you'll be able to get a small SUV or a nicer car. You should, anyway, be able to get that in those sections. And I say you should because it's going to vary from one place to another. Not all airports have a president's circle selection. And, of course, if you're booking off airport, then this isn't a benefit that exists there. There you're looking at potentially a free upgrade. but I always find the free upgrade to not be all that valuable. It's usually going to get what they've got if you're renting off airport for the most part,

whether your status really matters much is very questionable. But on airport, you at least should have a few options to choose from. I did recently get to an airport, though, where there were literally like three cars in the president's circle selection. So it really varies from one place to another and one day of the week to another, depending on when you get there. But that's why I like having status with. hurts because I do just pay for the mid-sized car and count on being able to pick something

that's going to fit my needs. What about national? You have national status, and I know you like national. Yeah, so it's very similar. If you have national executive status or executive elite status, same idea. If you book a mid-sized car, you get free access to the executive aisle. So everybody who's a national member gets access to the emerald dialing and pick any car they want from whatever is sitting in the Emerald Dial. The executive aisle, you know, is supposed to have nicer cars available in it. Often does. Not always.

And just like with Hertz, like there's going to be some locations, small airports, and off airport locations that don't have a, you know, any kind of aisle at all. Or you just get whatever cars available. But when those, you know, executive vials are available, that's, that's, that's, a really nice perk. I've used that in the past, for example, I was with another family. We were traveling with another family, and we had two rental cars reserved, but we were able to get such a big, like SUV or minivan or something from the executive aisle that we were able to cancel one of the car reservations, and so that saved a bunch of money. So, yeah, so I've been really

happy with national executive status. Yeah, you also earn free days with one fewer rental credit when you have executive status so executive elite status so it gets you to a free rental a little bit faster um you know that minivan trick i used for years i would book from national because there were almost always minivans on the executive aisle unfortunately the last couple of years yeah it's not that way anymore so i agree i've noticed the same thing um and it's even fairly rare to get like a big enough SUV to have like that third row kind of thing um yeah they will often have often have like medium SUVs, but it seems to be like they're airing more towards like nice cars. So you'll have like all the latest, you know, bells and whistles in them and everything,

but not necessarily bigger. And I think they're probably trying to prevent people from doing what I just described. Doing what we were doing for years and years. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. All right. So that's Hertz and National.

Avis. Avis has their quick pass where you can select a car in the app and show a QR code at checkout. I think you've done this before. before, right? I have. I think I have Ava status from maybe my Delta Elite status. I can't remember where I got my Ava status from, but yeah, this is kind of cool. When you, or at least this is what's happened to me for a couple times, I fly to an airport and like when I land, I look and I see that I have an email from Avis or maybe there's a pop-up from the app saying you're,

you can now select your rental car. And so it's kind of like the executive aisle with National, but it's virtual. So you actually, in the Avis app, you see the different cars that are available, and you can pick whichever one you want. And then that's your car. It tells you what spot number to go get it. And then that's all there is to it. So I like that.

I like that better than walking down the executive aisle. and noticing, like, another couple is checking out the car that I'm interested in, and then you have that whole standoff situation. So this happens virtually, and there's none of that. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. By the way, we mentioned when we talked about Hertz and National that, you know, in some cases you'll get to an airport, a smaller regional airport maybe that doesn't have an executive aisle or doesn't have a president's selection, and then you just kind of get what you get.

or sometimes you show up to one that's empty or maybe one that's very full. It all kind of varies some. What I do in advance is that I Google flyer talk, which car to expect, and I put in the airport code and the rental car company, because there is a flyer talk thread for just about all of these airports where people will report what they saw at a certain day and time. And so I just go to the most recent reports and see what do they say, A, is there a selection to choose from at all? and then B, what kind of cars are people reporting relatively recently being able to get?

It doesn't guarantee you're going to have the same experience, but at least it helps me avoid. Like, for instance, I almost chose to pay more for National recently from an airport where I later Googled and looked at the flyer talk throughout and realized, oh, that airport doesn't even have an executive selection. So there was no sense in me paying more for National in that case because I was going to have to stand in line anyway. So I might as well just pay less for Hertz and stand in line there instead or whatever it was. I don't know in the exact situation. But that always helps me. So I do that usually before I end up somewhere to get an idea what to expect. All right.

Then sixth is the last one to mention here in terms of an elite status that kind of matters. So with sixth, you can match. And we'll talk about status matching in a bit here and get their platinum status pretty easily. And I frequently hear from readers who say that they get nicer cars with good elite status with 6th. So I know it must happen to somebody, but I have never gotten a nicer car from my 6th platinum status. I always get exactly the car that I've reserved with 6th. So I don't know if it's just me. They don't like me or it's not as widespread as it sounds when everybody says they get nicer cars. I've not gotten upgraded to anything meaningful with 6th, but I do hear it

often enough that it's probably worth a mention. No, I think you should just move on to 7th. something like i've moved on from sext that's for sure because i've not seen any of those uh those upgrades speaking of matching though there are several different rental car programs that offer status matching national offers perhaps the best one because it's an easy match either to other car rental programs or to any airline or hotel lease status you can submit a status match with national they have a dedicated page for this where you just submit proof of your airline or hotel or rental car status and then they'll typically match you to their executive status and you'll be able to pick from that executive selection that Greg was mentioning. So that's worth it. If you don't have any

status with National now and you do have status with something, maybe you have Hilton Gold status thanks to the surpass card or you have something of that sort, then you might as well, go ahead and try to get a match to National if you're going to rent with them. Sixth very easily matches other companies. Again, this is rental car companies though. They have a four online for this, where you just submit proof of your status with another rental car company, and the match is very quick with sixth in my experience in the past anyway. And then Hertz offers a match to National Enterprise, Avis, or Europe car is what they specifically list. And they list on their website, which status matches to what with Hertz from each of those programs. Again,

it's just an online form you fill out. And Avis is the sort of oddball here in the sense that there isn't an official landing page for a public status match. There's a couple of landing pages you may find for specific companies out there, for employees of specific companies. But otherwise, you just email profile.update atavisbudget.com. There's plenty of reports at status matcher.com of people getting their rental car status matched from other programs. If you have Hertz president's circle, then my understanding is that it'll match to the equivalent president's circle or whatever it is that Avis calls their president sort of status. I don't remember all the time I had.

Exactly what it is, but plenty of reports of that successfully matching over. So yeah, yeah. So this is pretty cool. So if you're starting with like almost nothing, but you have like an IHG card that gives you platinum status with IHG or a Hilton card, as Nick mentioned, that starts you with gold status with Hilton, then it sounds like you could match from that to national and then from national to all the other guys. Yeah, exactly. And you'll end up with at least a mid-tier status on all the different rental car programs. So pretty easy to match to that mid-tier level and then get at least a slightly better car or selection from a slightly better area when you're renting. So I think both of us probably value that ability to select what it is we want. Obviously, Greg seems to like the Avis version where you can select it in the app. I haven't used that. So I've been happy with picking from the lot.

But still, either way, I do like to pick the car that I want. So having some level of status is nice. Yeah. Yeah. I do have to say, like, no matter what level status you have, you're not going to be treated like a, you know, prince as you walk onto the, to the rental car lot. You know, you're just another, another Joe Schmo. And, but you have some of these minor perks that we talked about. I mean, it's, it's, don't, don't think like, ultra luxury.

That's a great point. That's a great point. perks and also the elite perks in my experience don't typically mean anything overseas i haven't had any meaningful upgrades and they don't have typically that choose your car type of a thing even in places internationally where these companies exist it's it's just a get to go to the counter and get what you get and don't get upset kind of a situation with most of these so don't expect much is probably the the right the right play now i will say though that that said i've had a really good luck with national status at places where I do have to go to a counter and get my

car at the counter. I've had notably good service multiple times from national counter employees in terms of maybe they've assigned a vehicle to me and I want something a little bit different and they've been flexible and able to change it. I've had notably good experiences with national. I can't really say that about anybody else. Yeah. Yeah. And one thing I did have happen internationally. I can't remember if it was national or hurts. But what I remember is at the Frankfurt Airport, there was no skip the line option to go get your car. But there was a separate line for those with elite status. And that was significant because there was a long line waiting for regular, long regular line. Yes, I've seen that long regular line at Frankfurt Airport before. So

I know what you're talking about. All right, let's talk about earning free days because free days, obviously what you're kind of aiming for if you're looking to collect points or you're looking to stay loyal with a particular company. You probably hope that you'll eventually be able to rent a car for free. So let's talk about how that works with each of them. The best of the best is national. So national gives you one, and now I say the best of the best.

Let me take that back. I like national free days. And we'll talk about why I like national free days in terms of whether the program is most rewarding is going to really vary on your rental habits. So with National, you earn one rental credit for every rental of one to seven days. So that means whether you rent a car for one day or you rent a car for six days or seven days, you're getting one rental credit. So this is not necessarily as good for people who have a lot of long rentals that are five or six days and perhaps kind of pricey because you're only getting you at one rental credit. But if you've got a lot of one day rentals, this could be a

pretty good program for you. If you have no status with National, then after seven rental credits, you get a free day. If you have executive status, it's six rental credits for a free day. And if you have their top tier executive elite status, then it's five rental credits for a free day. So that's how you earn a free day. So you could earn a free day with as few as five or six or seven days of rentals. If they were all one day rentals, then you can get yourself a free day in a relatively short number of rental days, if they're short rentals. So why do I say at the beginning, why did I say that I love national free, free days? Oh, you're asking me? I'm asking you, because I know you know. Yes, I know you know. I know that I know. So, yeah, National's free days work on one-way rentals.

And so, you know, how often booking a one-way rental can be extremely expensive. The chance to get a free one way is can be huge and especially in situations like what nick has where he lives pretty far from most airports and uh what so what he can do instead of um driving all the way to an airport and paying for his uh car you know paying for parking for for all the time he's away he can book a one-way rental um to get to the airport and just drop it off when he gets there or a one-way rental coming back or both and by using these national free days. I mean, that's saving a ton of money. It is. And of course, because these free days work on mid-sized cars, you can book a mid-sized car for free and then potentially pick from the executive

aisle when you get there. And so I've used these in the past back when we said years ago, they used to frequently have minivans on the lot. I'd use them for one-ways and a minivan that would have cost a lot of money, particularly over these longer distances that I've had to sometimes bridge the gap. And so it's been really, really good at times in the past. Now, the minivans typically, like we said, aren't on the lot anymore, but even still, getting a, even a midsize SUV for free for a one-way rental can be huge sometimes. So that's nice. It's also particularly nice that National sometimes offers accelerated promotions to be able to earn those free days faster. We haven't seen that the last couple of years as often as we used to.

We used to frequently see a one-two free promotion where they would offer a free day after two rentals. But we've seen other promotions now and then. It's worth keeping your eye out because sometimes it might be worth paying for an extra rental with National now in order to earn that free day that you can use for a valuable one-way rental later on. All right, Hertz is up next. With Hertz, you earn points based on your spend. One point per dollar spent is the base. Five star gets you 1.25 points. President Circle gets you 1.5 points per dollar spent. So you're not going to earn a ton of points even if you have top

tier status. But the points then add up to earn you free days. A single free day with Hertz costs 950 points at what they call the standard rate and then 1,900 points at the any day rate. So essentially, think of this like a saver award and an anytime award. If rental cars are really cheap, you might find one for 950 points a day. Personally, I've never seen a car for 950 points at a time when I needed it. They've always been 1,900 points. So I would not hold your breath on the 950 points a day. 1,900 points a day is usually it for me.

So you look at it and you say even with President's Circle status, that means essentially you need to spend $1,200 to get one free day with Hertz. So it's not easy to earn those free days. One of the things that many people enjoy about the Hertz program, though, is that you can book all of the different rental car types. They have different prices. So the price I just quoted was for like a standard mid-sized car. But you can book their specialty cars and their adrenaline.

in series cars. You might be able to get like a, you know, cobra Mustang or something for, I think the adrenaline series is like a little less than 2,800 points at the saver level or a little less than 5,400 points at the any day level. And so, you know, if you want a day with a really cool car of some sort, you can do that. So that's one potential benefit of the Hertz program that you could reserve one of those specific kind of, you know, souped up cars if that's what you're after. They also offer free weekly rentals at a slightly better price. It comes out to, to a few less points if you're booking a free week and it's 4,750 at the saver level or 9,500 at the any day level. And they offer one ways. The one ways are 1,900 saver or 3,800 non-saver. So again,

now at 3,800 for the any day price for a one-way rental, you're talking what, like $2,500-ish in spend in order to earn a free one-way rental with Hertz. It could be a lot cheaper with National. Yeah. It could be. And, you know, it seems to me that, like, it just depends on your rental car habits. I think, as you said at the outset, if you tend to rent for multiple days at a time, you're probably averaging hundreds of dollars per rental. And it could very well turn out that the Hertz program is more rewarding than national in that case. So, yeah. Okay, what about Avis? So Avis looks like, It's a pretty similar situation to Hertz as far as you earn points per dollar based on status. And it starts at one point per dollar and moves its way up to 1.5. So it's the same deal, right? Sort of. One thing that's kind of nice, I guess, is that they offer a minimum of 100 points per rental.

So if you're booking cheap one day rentals most of the time, then you come out a little bit further ahead. even if you're booking $50 rentals, essentially, you're earning a minimum of two points per dollar spent, I guess, for the small win that that is. So, yes, sort of similar. Then you use your points for free days. Free days have a big range. They range from $700 to $3,500 points per day.

It's based on the cash rate. So the $700 points per day is when the cost of the rental is less than $50 a day. And it goes up to the $3,500, which I think was $125 to $225,000. a day. So it just depends on the cash cost of the rental in terms of how many points you're going to need. So that could work out to be pretty decent if you're earning those points. Like I said, if you're earning 100 points per rental and your rentals are relatively cheap, then you know, you may come out similar to national here in terms of the cost of the free days. The difference, of course, is that your free days here, the cost of your free day is just going to

be entirely tied to the cash cost of the rental. And it's all ranges. So if you're at the sort of bottom end of a range, then you're not getting quite as good of a deal as someone at the top end of the range. Right, right. You know, the math gets a little odd there. Yeah. And at the end of the day,

none of these programs are offering massively outsized return on your expense. No, right, right, right. So, okay, so tell us about taxes. Let's say you're redeeming with any of these cars for a free day or free week, whatever. Um, does that cover the taxes on the, on the car? No.

So yes and no. Uh, you don't pay, there are some taxes. You're still going to have to pay with all of them. It varies from one program to the next as to how much I think you're going to have to pay. With National, I usually find that it, it's minimal. And whatever the airport concession fee is, five, six, seven dollars, something like that. When I'm booking with National, with Hertz, it seems to vary. I've seen anywhere from a few dollars.

to the $20 or $30 in taxes and fees on the free days. I've just been looking at several Hertz options recently because I have some Hertz points. And so I've seen quite a bit of variance there. Avis, I don't know. I've never reserved a free day with Avis. So I can't speak to that. Yeah.

Good question, though. Yeah, I had some. We're not really equipped to talk about enterprise right now, but I had some enterprise points about to expire and I used them on a rental recently. And, you know, I think that, it was a cheap rental to begin with. It was like going to make up numbers.

Let's say an $80 rental. And I think that using the points saved me like $55 of the $80. Something like that. That's a pretty big percentage was the taxes that I still had to pay. But I figured that was still better than letting the points expire. Yeah. You know, speaking of letting the points expire, that's something that I didn't even think to collect when we were talking about this.

But it's worth a mention. And with Hertz specifically, I know that the points expire, I think, is five years after they were earned, use them or lose them. There's no extension on that. They expire after five years. And then if you have no rental activity for 12 months, they expire. So if you don't earn or redeem for 12 months, they expire. So that's kind of annoying. And that's another piece of these rental car company rewards, the way that they expire.

So the rewards programs from rental car companies don't really much. motivate my decisions very much. I like those national free days. So if the price is about the same, I'll book from national oftentimes because I find good value out of their one-way rentals because most of my rentals are short. They're usually just for a day or two or three. So sometimes that'll tip the balance a little bit. But for the most part, the rental car program doesn't tip the balance for me. And I do look for opportunities to use the points sooner rather than later because I know that eventually they may expire. Who knows whether I'm going to rent again from Enterprise anytime soon. It's a great example. I've rented from Enterprise before. I don't know how frequently I'll rent from

them. So I tend to look to use these as soon as I can. Yeah. All right, let's talk the top of your head how quickly the national free days expire. And maybe that varies based on whether you got it from a one to free promotion or from a normal earnings spend. I believe, I'm going to double check. I believe it's the calendar, the end of the calendar year after in which the year that you earn them. Yeah, that's what the internet tells me. So December 31st of the year following the year in which they're earned.

So if you earn one this year, 2025, then it would expire December 31st to 2026. So usually get a fair amount of time out of that, at least a year and potentially. But that's still way quicker than like the hurt. Hurts, a five-year thing. Yeah, that's a great point. Unless you're not renting enough from Hertz to keep it. Yeah. Keep the activity going.

Activity, yeah. It's complicated. But I totally agree with Nick about, I find these programs so underwhelming that they don't move the needle for me at all in deciding which to rent from. I base which to rent from based on price and how. how much I like, you know, good or bad experiences with the rental car company basically and or expectations for what it'll be like picking out the car. For example, if one is in airport and the other I have to take a shuttle to get to,

all else being equal, I'd rather be in airport to pick up my car. And other folks will look at that and say, I would rather get off site because then I wouldn't have to pay the airport taxes. Well, we'll talk about that one, saving money on rentals. Yeah. There you go. there you go. Though I agree with Greg, typically my preference would be for something available right on the airport also. I'll also mention I do have a preference of renting from major rental car companies. I typically avoid the smaller, more local type companies or the, I don't know, the Fox and Advantage renter cars of the world advantage. I think just went out of business. And I typically avoid those because I don't know what to expect as well as I do with the major national names. And I tend to prefer an experience where at least I know what to expect, even if that's not great service, at least I know

what it is that's going to be there. And I'm reasonably confident that there'll be a vehicle to rent. So I typically stick with the major names, but that's just my personal preference. So that's me. But let's talk about saving money because obviously cost is a huge factor here. So how do you save money on your car rentals? Yeah. So we just mentioned booking off airport. So I think there's kind of two categories of this. There's a lot of airports where all rentals, all car rentals, you have to take a shuttle to get to them, but they're still considered airport location. And as long as a car rental is considered airport location, it's probably going to cost you more. There's often specific fees involved because it's an airport location. And there's also just more demand for

those cars, so they can afford to charge more and still get all the rentals. But if you look for a completely off-airport location, but that's not far from the airport, which there's usually plenty of those options. You can often save a ton. And I've had luck in the past. It's been a while since I've done this, but I don't know if it's national or enterprise where I booked at a, you know, a regional location that was maybe four miles, five miles away from the airport, took an Uber there, but had the reservation set up to drop off back at the airport. So the price was the same, whether it dropped off back at the original location or at the airport, so might as well save you a Uber trip back and all the time involved in that for the return. So that's one good

way to do that. I'll also talk about the next thing. Company codes. If you work for a large organization, there may be discount codes available to employees. And sometimes these are not really codes as much as links, like special links that you log into your works portal and click through to rent a car and you might get really good savings that way. I've had great luck with this through the company that my wife works for in saving a lot of money. money with those kind of codes. Yeah, there you go. Absolutely. And so it's worth looking for those or looking for any codes you may qualify because of affiliations with various organizations. So worth checking those out and seeing what works. And in some cases,

you may have access to a code through work that you might think needs to be used on business rentals, but sometimes they provide a similar discount for leisure rentals as well. So it's worth taking a look and seeing because that you may still be able to qualify to your use it. Costco is another way that lots of people love to book through Costco to save money. You can go to Costco Travel.com and compare prices there. And sometimes the pricing can be quite good. I don't always find that it beats what I find elsewhere. But I'll take a look because sometimes it does. And we have some readers and listeners that swear by Costco rentals for saving money. So it's certainly worth taking a look if you're a member.

And you can still like your, and you could link your car, you know, in both of these that we've talked about, you can still link your loyalty club number to the reservation and get your elite benefits and points that way. Yep, very good. Sites like Priceline, and sometimes you can get access to discounts that you have that you should have access to through sites like Priceline. So, and I say sites like Priceline, and that covers like Expedia and Travelocity and all the various major travel sites. I use those sometimes, like I said earlier, because I can, click through from a shopping portal. And so when shopping portal rates are good for a site like price line or Expedia, I will sometimes click through from a shopping portal and make my booking

through that major search engine in order to earn a good portal reward, a good return on my rental that way. I've done the same thing with Rentalcars.com because Capital One shopping had great rates for that for a while. I haven't seen good rates now for a while on that site, but they did have great once for a while. So those are some of those types of sites that we use. Bank portals. So bank portals, you know, offer rewards for booking through the bank portal, anywhere from 8 to 12 points per dollar. Yeah. So, you know, you'll see it advertised to you that you could use your Venture X card and get 10 points per dollar or your Sapphire Reserve to get 8 points per dollar or whatever. You know, that's a good amount of rewards for your spend with the car rental

company, but, you know, check the prices because in my experience, when I've looked at these bank portals, which admittedly is not often because, you know, the prices seem to be so much worse than what I found elsewhere that I've given up on looking through those bank portals. So could it be a mistake that I've given up on that? Maybe, you know, maybe that's changed. But I also think usually with these things, if not always, you have to pay in advance, certainly, well, if you're going to spend your points to book the thing through the portal, then you definitely have pay in advance. I don't know whether they always require you to pay in advance to use your credit card to reserve it, but assuming they do,

you're probably not going to get rewards from the car rental company or potentially not any elite benefits either. Yep, absolutely. We mentioned other portals like Capital One shopping, and that's one that I mentioned a few times today. It's not the only one. Look at Rackettin. Look at Cashbackmonitor.com to compare your options through lots of different sites because you never know what you may find. I mentioned Capital One Shopping because the targeted offers there have been really strong for me.

Over the last couple of years, I've done tons of rentals through that portal specifically because of their targeted offers that have exceeded other portals. But every now and then we see really good rates from Rackettin also. So it's worth checking out and seeing what you got there. there. Auto slash, I almost always start my search at auto slash. So auto slash.com is a kind of comparison site where you can enter your parameters and they will email you with a link to see prices for your particular rental needs. So A, it's good for finding good prices because you can check a bunch of boxes during the process of requesting a quote and mention, you know,

you have Sam's Club and you have Costco and you have, you know, BJ's wholesale. and you belong to these different airline loyalty programs, and you've got a MasterCard, World Elite, and a Platinum card, check off whatever boxes. You don't have to apply to you. Yes, right. You can check whichever one's applied to you. And so that's nice because you can find which discounts you might have available.

In fact, I mean, the whole reason I'm aware of, you know, Costco often having really good pricing is because auto slash points me there every now and then is what they found is the best pricing. Yep. And you can also track your existing rentals through auto slash. So once you've booked a rental, then you can enter the information in terms of your dates and car size and the cost that you're paying. And they will track to find a better price. And so that can be useful because oftentimes they'll find better prices and then you can cancel your existing rental and rebook. So that's an awesome feature that I think is terrific from auto slash. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And then they also have a blog that's all about renting cars and and I find that really useful has all kinds of different topics from you know very specific about maybe renting from a particular location to more general like what do you do if you how do you make a claim if you get in an accident while while you have a rental those kind of things you'll find on their blog so I like that about them as well um finally for rental car savings I mean actually there's plenty of other things we could talk about but but

We don't want to dominate the whole time with us, but one thing I do want to mention, if you have the American Airlines executive card, one of its perks is getting up to $120 back on Avis and or budget rental cars every calendar year. They changed the original benefit to where now it has to be prepaid, but it can still be cancelable. It just has to be a prepaid rental. And that's obviously a good way to save if you have that card anyway. Great. Now, finally, we've got Avis First, which is a new program from Avis. And you know more about this new program, I think, than I do.

So how does Avis First work? Yeah, it's a pretty low bar. We both know very close to nothing about this. It's brand new. I know a tiny bit more. I haven't used this service yet. It literally just came out recently. If you book a premium SUV, a premium large SUV, a luxury sedan, or a luxury SUV from Avis at certain locations, then what happens is instead of having to go to the rental car counter and get your car, like if you're in airport, let's say, they will supposedly just come and bring your car to you right at the

you know, departures or rivals, I guess, probably, level of the airport. So you just get in and go. And in certain locations, they will, when you're not, certain non-airport locations, they'll bring the car to you wherever you are. So currently those locations are Manhattan, Hoboken, Jersey City, Washington, D.C., Miami, Orlando, Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco. So pretty good list of very highly populated cities. So probably a lot of listeners are qualified to at least get this service.

That seems pretty cool to me. I mean, obviously you're going to have to pay quite a bit for one of these higher-end cars in order to qualify for this. But according to View from the Wing, you can use discount codes when you're booking. I think you have to book directly through Avis, but, you know, if you have a, if there's a portal that's directly rewarding you for booking through Avis, you should be able to click through the portal. So that way you get a rebate that way. You should be able to apply discount codes, if you have any, and then, you know, and then you're good to go. As far as airport locations, this is pretty small, what they have available so far.

They have Palm Beach, Florida, Honolulu, and Denver are the only thing. that are live so far but still that sounds like fun i'd be very interested in trying this out if the pricing isn't like so obscene that that it would turn me off but we'll see yeah yeah yeah i have an upcoming rental car needed palm beach airport where i'm currently reserved through a different company but i'm going to have to take a look and see because if the price is anywhere close to similar then it might be worth it just to try it out we'll we'll see we'll see what the difference is yeah all right the last kind of topic that i'd like to cover here is what about internationally people who haven't rented internationally

before often ask do you need anything special to rent internationally what do you do do have you in your experience have you needed something special to rent internationally i'm sure you've rented cars overseas before yes i've rented overseas i've never so i know uh you're going to talk about international driver's permit. I don't have one, and I haven't had any trouble getting a rental car. I've only rented in a small handful of, I was going to say European-only countries, but that's not true. I've rented in South Africa, England, and Germany off the top of my head is what I can remember. So not a ton of places, but just my driver's license was fine. Yeah, yeah. So I've rented in dozens of countries before, and we've rented all over the world. And generally speaking,

we have not needed anything special. The only place in my recollection that has required us to have international driver's permit was when we tried to rent in Taiwan, they would not give us a car without an international driver's permit. And I tried multiple rental companies, and nobody would without an international driver's permit. And you can't get an international driver's permit online or something when you're out of the United States. So we weren't able to rent a car when we intended to rent a car on that trip that was, gosh, more than a decade ago now. But in general, my experience has been, no, you don't need something beyond your U.S. driver's license, especially if you're renting from a major international company, then I have not had a problem renting with just my

U.S. driver's license. And also, I've rented from smaller outfits just recently in Europe. I rented from local companies and a couple of different Greek islands. Only needed my U.S. driver's license. That was it. So rented a new way, very small Pacific Island nation a few years back. There you need to get a local license. You go to the police station and pay, I don't know, $20 or something like that to get a local license, but you don't need it when you pick up the car.

You just need to do it at some point while you're there. So kind of an odd requirement there. But generally speaking, the thing that you need or would be helpful is a knowledge of how to drive a standard manual transmission car because a it's going to save you money oftentimes most of the rest of the world it's significantly cheaper to book a standard transmission and b sometimes you're just going to need it because they won't have an automatic available in all cases so if you don't know how to drive a manual transmission maybe try and learn how if you can if not i mean it's not that there aren't automatic cars most countries have automatic cars but i would tell you it'd be helpful

because you have more options if you can book a standard transmission or you could if you can drive a standard transmission vehicles also that international driver's permit that i mentioned is easy enough to get that it's probably worth the peace of mind for anybody who's nervous about renting internationally because all you have to do is go to triple a and it's like 20 bucks and i don't even think you need to be a member to get an international driver's permit at triple a i think you just show up get your pictures taken and at 20 bucks 25 something like that it's very easy takes like 10 minutes or less, they take your license and take a picture of you and fill out something and sign it and stamp it. It's really pretty quick. So unless there's a long line, you'll be in and out of

there in less than 10 minutes probably. It's only valid for a year, though. So every year you'd have to do it again if you wanted to keep renewing it. And that's why I don't always have one sometimes if I'm going somewhere, particularly somewhere where I'm thinking, well, if I get pulled over, it might be difficult to communicate. And so having a license, the international license might be helpful because it's translated into all the different languages. That's really what it's all about, the international driver's permit. It's a little booklet, and it just says in a whole lot of different languages that you have a driver's license. So I have occasionally done it when I've thought that there might be some concern over getting pulled over and being

in a situation where maybe a police officer wants some money or something in a foreign country. So maybe looking for a reason. So I've paid for it when I've been nervous that there may be some of that. But generally speaking, I have not always gotten this. Like I said, only ever one place have I been asked for it. But it's worth Googling before you take a trip, because if you're going somewhere that maybe there's another country that requires it on all rentals, and I just haven't been there and rented a car there yet. So I always Google and say, can I rent with my U.S. driver's license in and, you know, enter the country name wherever you're going and try to do a little bit of research ahead of time to know whether you're going to need an international

driver's permit or not. But know that if you need it, you'll need to have gotten it before you left home. I have looked multiple times and not been able to find a way to get it online without going in person. And I think AAA is the only place you can get one in the U.S. So I think that's it. All right. I think that brings us close to the end. What's your favorite rental car program? Do you have a favorite? Do you have ones that you avoid like the plague? I mean, my favorite for a long time has been national. Not so much. The free days are nice, but it's not really what motivates me. It's more, you know, they've had the emerald aisle thing for the longest of all the rental car companies. And then I've had the executive aisle thing for a long, long time. And, um, I've just had really good positive experiences with them, which, meaning mainly, like, I haven't had any issues with them. And that's been really nice.

Of course, they're affiliated now with enterprise, is that right? Enterprise as well. I had some really good experiences with Enterprise as well. So between the two, you know, it's been my favorite more because just, like I said, just I haven't had anything bad happen. Meanwhile, like I've had bad experiences with Hertz. I haven't been thrown in jail unlike some other Hertz customers. I haven't been charged for, you know, tiny AI found discovered Nix, as some customers have. but when I've had issues, their customer service has just been horrendous, like really, like, criminally bad.

So I will rent from Hertz. So 99% of the time, nothing bad happens, and it's fine. And so if the price is better and everything, I will rent from Hertz, but all else being equal, I'll avoid them. Another one, it's been a long time, but I had really bad experience, one rental, just one, with Alamo. And so that's another one, like, unless the price is way better, I'm going to avoid running from them. How about you next? You know, I love the national free days. So that would motivate me if prices, similar, like I said.

And like Greg, I have always had positive experiences with national. Now, that doesn't mean you're always going to have positive experiences with national. You might have a terrible experience. Obviously, there's going to be different employees in every location and different situations. So there's probably positive and negative stories about. every single rental car company out there. But my experiences with National have largely been really positive, employees that have been happy to help and helpful and polite and nice.

So I've enjoyed that part of it, and I tend to find the vehicles nicer renting through National. However, I haven't rented from National very much in years now because the prices have gotten so high. They're usually significantly higher than everybody else. So I haven't been renting from them as much as I'd like to because of the price difference. I have rented from Avis a few times recently, and I don't love the Avis experience because I did not have that app, like the email experience where I had the opportunity to pick from the app. That would have been kind of nice.

Then I might have liked it a little bit more. So I'm going to have to check that out for the next time that I use Avis. So that it hasn't appealed to me because they didn't have the selection, the area to select from that Hertz has and National has. So that's why I mostly haven't rented much from Avis, but now I'm going to have to check it out because if I can pick my car in the app, that'll make a difference for me for Avis. And so I have been renting a lot from Hertz because they've been cheap because they have terrible customer service and everybody knows it. So they've been cheap enough. And so that's that has been a motivating factor for me. And luckily I haven't had any negative things happen. But like Greg said, I mean, they've been in the news because there were lots of customers that got wrongfully arrested and that's absolutely horrible. And now with the AI scanners charging people exorbitant amounts for repairs and then negotiating it down to some other price if you pay right away today. It's just terrible. They don't seem to care that customers don't enjoy renting with Hertz. And so that stinks. But most of the time when I'm renting a car, I just need to pick it up, drive it and drop it back off. And so I don't have very many

needs for more customer service than that. So I've risked it and continue to rent through them and been okay with it. So that's just been my experience with it. If prices were equal, though I would, like Greg said, I would pick national most of the time. I don't often end up picking thrifty budget, Alamo, but that's just because, A, I don't get to pick my car, and I don't like that. And B, I oftentimes find that with various rental car codes, the prices aren't necessarily better than they are with the major national companies. So, yeah. Let me ask you a question about Hertz. The platinum code, the platinum card code that gives you an extra four hours, would you ever use that even if you didn't think

you needed it just in case you get thrown in jail? And as long as you get out on bail in less than four hours, they won't charge you extra. Maybe. I mean, I haven't yet, but maybe I will. You know, though, I know you're joking about that. But one thing that I want to mention that I should have before is with National, I have some sort of, I think I have their executive status from having a platinum card. And so my platinum card is in my profile or the fact that, that I'm a platinum card holders in my profile. And super annoying because it sticks that discount code in by default on National. If I search in the national app,

and it is higher than searching with no code at all most of the time with National for me. So I have to remember to delete that each time, which is kind of annoying. Yeah. Yeah. On my Hertz profile, I have a code from like a company I worked for like a billion years ago that just won't go away. And, you know,

sometimes it's better, but sometimes it's worth, but it's very hard to get it to try different things. Yeah, actually, and that's why I'm glad that came up too, because I mentioned several times Capital One shopping. And Capital One shopping has had really good rates for me lately for Avis. None of them have tracked properly. And what I've tracked it down to in terms of the reason I think is because I can't seem to figure out how to have no code attached to an Avis rental. It's got like a couple of codes saved in my profile. No matter what I do, I can't get to the checkout page without one of those codes populating if I put my Avis wizard number in.

So I guess what I need to try to do is book as a guest totally and see if. But even then, they automatically enter the Avis worldwide discount and that makes it ineligible for Capital One shopping cashback. So that's one that's been a frustration point for me that Avis, I haven't been able to earn my portal rewards as expected. Yeah. Okay. Okay. One last thing I want to mention. I can't remember what the current status of this is, but there's some kind of tie up or was between Amazon Prime and Avis. So if you have Amazon Prime, you might be eligible for status and or a discount.

It's 10% back. It's 10% back in the form of Amazon gift card credit. That's one of the ones that's automatically in my profile. There you go. That's how I know that. And it's the kind of nice thing there is, It's automatic and the gift card just gets added to your Amazon balance, which on the one hand isn't nice in the sense that you may not even realize you got it if you're not paying attention. It's not, they don't do a good job of making it clear that, hey, you got your Amazon gift card back from your Avis thing. But I've been surprised once in a while to end up at Amazon and see, oh, I have some gift card balance.

Where did that come from? Oh, from an Avis rental. Totally forgot about that. So, yeah, that is a good point. Glad you brought that one up because that does exist. Yeah. All right. I think that brings us to the end of today's episode just about. But we got our question of the week first. So this week's question of the week comes in from Marco. So Marco was

particularly curious about intermediate players and what to do with intermediate, if you're in an intermediate sort of a situation. So I'm going to jump to sort of the middle of his question as I know you'll have a good answer for this. Marco says, I feel like an issue I have personally experienced is a difficulty going from being a beginner to an intermediate player in the game. Everyone knows to start with the Sapphire preferred maybe or a venture card, but the progression from one or two credit cards to five or six or seven to ten can be difficult. At least it was for me, what cards should be the next move? Which cards should be closed a year after earning the bonus? How do you pay for all these cards and does the value of them decrease with each card that

shares the same benefit? What logic do you use? use personally to figure out how much value to put on a specific perk. There always seems to be a lot of writers and travel influencers who focus on beginner content, but intermediate strategies seem to be less common. So it goes on to say he's curious to hear about your thoughts here. Is intermediate content missing, number one? And number two, how do you determine what he's saying? How do you determine a, which cards to go for next? And B, how do you value the perks? And how do you figure that out to decide what to cancel? Yeah. For the most part, when I'm looking at what cards, to get next, it's more about the welcome offers than about the cards, perks, or annual fees

or any of that stuff, because usually a first-year welcome offer is worth way more than the first-year annual fee of a card. So, you know, I'm looking at earning a big bunch of points or free night certificates, whatever the offer is. And with the plan of probably product-changing at the end of the year to a fee-free card if that's an option or canceling altogether if that's not an option, things like that, that you wait till the next year's annual fee comes due and then that's when you make the switch. But that said, lots of cards are worth keeping long-term with their annual fees and everything and figuring out which ones to keep or to get for that purpose is really tough. There's no question about that.

And that's why, like, one of the things we've done is create a spreadsheet. It's primarily aimed at, like, the more expensive cards, the premium card worksheet where you can, you can put in your own values for how much you value, like, different things like priority pass or the free night certificate that comes with your card or, you know, elite status, the car rental elite status that comes with the card, things like that. And that way, what you can do is, you know, look at how much you value those things compared to the annual fee. You can say, like, you can figure out from that which cards are kind of no-brainers for you to keep because the value, how much you value them is way, way above the annual fee. And then when you're looking at the next set of cards, you could say, well, I know I'm keeping, I'll just throw out one, like, Ritz-Carlton card for sure. So I'm not going to add any more value to this other card that has an overlapping benefit with the Ritz card because I already have that Ritz card. So I don't care that this other card has priority pass because, you know, I already have priority pass as an example.

So you would value priority pass as a benefit at zero in that case because you already have a good card for that that you plan on keeping. Anyway, that was a long way of describing how to use the spreadsheet, but the most important point about it is when you're talking about how much you value each perk of a credit card is it's not how much you hope to save by using that perk. What you want to do is value each perk based on if it was available for a subscription, how much would you pay in advance for that? So like a card comes with national executive status, you know, maybe it would save you a bunch because you're able to pick up bigger cars and, you know, rent a medium card, pick up bigger ones.

It would save you a bunch if you would have rented the bigger cars from the get-go. But in reality, it's probably not saving you anything or very little. What it's giving you is a better experience and when you rent cars from national. And all. So you might say, well, yeah, you know what, Nick and Greg told me I could just match from my IHG thing. So that's easier. I'm just, I'm not going to value that at anything. So even though it gives me better experience and all that, I'm not going to value it because I could get it other ways. So that's an example. Or if a, a card gives you the airline card gives you the ability to pick preferred seating, that could be real savings. But. Again, like, the way to think about it is not, oh, I expect to save $300 over the course of the year, but rather, if the airline offered me a subscription to be able to pick preferred seating for free, how much would I pay? It should be a lot less than $300 because why would you pay in advance to save $300? Why would you pay $300 to save $300? You wouldn't.

That would be silly. What you know, what you might be willing to do is pay in advance $100 to save $300 to save. save $300. And so that, and when you're paying a card's annual fee, that's what you're doing. You're paying advance for these things that you may or may not use. So, yeah. So, you know, that's the way to go about it. And there's no question.

It's really complicated. There's no easy answer to that, but that's at least a step towards how to answer it. Yeah. And I want to plug that post that has that spreadsheet. It's called which premium cards are keepers, I believe, which premium cards are keepers. so we'll have a link to it in the show notes and that was exactly what i knew gregg would talk about and that's where you want to go marco is to that spreadsheet because that's going to help you and key importance there is i would start with a card that you think is a no-brainer

for you probably and that way every subsequent card that has an overlapping benefit priority pass is a great example you can just mark the priority pass at zero because you already have it and so then it'll help you do a better job of valuing the other cards like Greg said that's primarily aimed at those more expensive four, five, six, seven, $800 cards, though as they increase annual fees and add coupon benefits on various other cards, I think a number of them have been added now, even at the maybe 150 level, I think. So, um, and if not, then we'll, we'll work to continue to add that. But certainly you want to think conservatively about how much you value benefits. And so I think that as a beginner,

you want to, if you have the ability to do this, strategize, which cards you think you're going to want long term. Are you a big Hyatt fan? And so you want a high at card because you're going to spend towards the free night certificate and elite status. And whatever those things are like that, that you're like, okay, I want to or I'm a big Marriott fan. And so I want to make sure that both I and my spouse have a Marriott card and we get them around the same time so that the free night certificates post at the same time each year. You want to create that strategy for your first handful of cards. And then beyond that, like Greg said, it's mostly going to be the welcome offers that you're going to go after when you see,

oh, wow, there's a great new welcome offer out on A, B, or C, and I know I could use that in X, Y, or Z way. And so you're going to make your decisions based on welcome offers more so than long-term keepers, though then maybe the new ultra-premium card comes out and you say, okay, well, hmm, is this a better deal than the ultra-premium card that I thought I was going to keep? And that's when you go back to the spreadsheet and rerun your numbers. So the spreadsheet should hopefully help you quite a bit with that. All right, my friends, that brings us to the end of the

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