Frequent Miler on the Air - Tips for booking Positioning Flights | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep253 | 5-3-24

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Sometimes you book an award ticket that requires you to do some positioning in order to catch that flight - for instance if the flight doesn't depart from your home airport. There are a few best practices to keep in mind when booking these "positioning flights", which we'll discuss in today's Frequent Miler on the Air episode. (01:08) - One reader writes in: "If you have Platinum Honors, I would rank the BofA Premium Rewards Elite card the highest for Priority Access by far. The airline credit offset is very easy to use and you get them all at once so there's no obnoxious coupon book"... (Mail Bag) (03:20) - BOA Premium Rewards (not elite) card (Card Talk) Learn more about this card: https://frequentmiler.com/boaPR/#Goto Revisit Frequent Miler on the Air Episode 204 here: https://frequentmiler.com/how-would-we-spend-1-million-dollars/ (04:57) - Bank of America Premium Rewards Elite card (Card Talk) Learn more about this card: https://frequentmiler.com/BOAPremiumRewardsElite/#Goto (11:17) - Cardless launching two Avianca LifeMiles cards (Card Talk) (12:35) - Marriott Homes & Villas 50K (Mattress Running the Numbers) (16:12) - Transfer bonuses (Award Talk) (21:29) - United increases prices on partner biz class awards within Europe & Asia (Award Talk) (24:06) - Nick: able to change Aeroplan award (Award Talk) (29:50) - Daily Getaways (Award Talk) Main Event: Tips for booking Positioning Flights (32:26) - Award discovery tools like PointsYeah DayDream Explorer tool and Seats.Aero make it easy to find awards such as "business class for 4 from "North America" to "Europe" (36:22) - Avoid checking bags! (37:37) - Departure positioning tips: what NOT to do Read Greg’s mad dash story (What NOT to do) here: https://frequentmiler.com/my-award-alert-flight-change-and-a-risky-layover/ (40:33) - Day before is best (41:36) - Non-stop is best (less chance of delay) (41:56) - If not night before.... book primary positioning flight with long airport layover (43:15) - Useful to have lounge access for layover (46:02) - Book freely cancelable alternate positioning flight (49:20) - If back-up positioning flight isn’t an option, consider booking back-up for entire one-way trip (50:18) - Best options for free last-minute cancelations (56:48) - Back to Greg’s story. How he somewhat protected myself: (1:08:29) - Are there any certificates (like companion certificates) that disappear when you cancel the card? (Question of the Week) Visit here to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. You’ll find all other Frequent Miler on the Air episodes here. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

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, tips for booking positioning flights. Sometimes when you book great award flights, they don't go from the airport you want to start at or to the airport you ultimately want to go to. But nevertheless, they can be great deals. And in order to get to them or from them, you need to book positioning flights. And we've gotten a lot of questions from listeners about how best to do that. And so we'll dig into that in today's main event. But before we do, don't forget that you can always find the timestamps in the show notes.

So if you want to jump ahead to a specific segment or come back to something later on, you can find that there. And wherever you're watching or listening to this, don't forget to like it, give it a thumbs up, leave a comment.

We appreciate all of those things. And also I'll mention at the end, but don't forget to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list and you can get all of our posts in your inbox and get more information that

way too. But right now it's time to drag out this week's giant mailbag. Today's giant mail comes from Zef who wrote, if you have platinum honors, the big F, and that's by the way, that's a Bank of America thing where if you have $100,000 invested with Merrill and Bank of America, then you could get this elite status with the bank. Anyway, Zef says, if you have platinum honors, I would rank the Bank of America Premium Rewards Elite Card the highest for priority access by far. Now, I should say this is in response to a few weeks ago, we did a show about best ways to get priority pass access. So Zeph is basically saying the premium rewards elite card, they think is the best by far. The airline credit offset is very easy to use and you get them all at once. So there's no obnoxious coupon book. The lifestyle

credits cover a broad range of things that get used organically. Fitness app, wife's fitness subscription, kids karate dojo, streaming, ride share, food delivery. It would be hard not to use these in my experience. So you're left with a $100 residual fee, the same as the altitude reserve. And for that $100, you get incredibly generous priority pass access, not just for yourself and guests, but for four total memberships. So yeah, so Zef's pointing out that, as we talked about on the show, that this card, it's very unique in that it doesn't just give the cardholder priority pass access, but actually

gives you four separate memberships that you can use. And those four memberships, jog my memory here, you can give them to anybody? They don't have to be authorized users, or do they have to be authorized users on the account? They don't have to be authorized users. So that's really different. Right. Right. That's quite a bit, quite unique, right? Because we've talked a lot about the Chase Ritz card in the past because you can add an unlimited number of authorized users, I guess. And each authorized user gets a priority pass membership. But that's a little different, A, because you do have to add them as an authorized user, and B, because as you know, the Ritz is losing, the priority pass that

comes from the Chase Ritz card is losing restaurant access on July 1st. So yeah, that's an interesting point. So we should talk more about that and dig into it. Let's get into this week's Card Talk Doubleheader. Yep. Today's Card Talk is about exactly that card, the Bank of America Premium Rewards Elite card. But first, in order to talk about that card, we have to first talk about the lesser card that has almost the same name, the Bank of America Premium Rewards card. So it doesn't have elite in the name. That's the only thing that's different. Well, it's not the only thing that's different. That's the only thing different about its name. Name, name, yes. It's the only thing different about the name. So, okay. The Bank of America

Premium Rewards card is what we're talking about first, right? So that card has, what, $95 annual fee, no foreign transaction fees, $100 annual airline incidental fee reimbursement. And that's different than some other cards in the market and that it is automatic. So as soon as you pay for something airline related, it gets reimbursed. You get 2x travel and dining, 1.5x everywhere else. That's two points per dollar travel and dining, 1.5 points everywhere else. But if you got platinum honors, which is what we were talking about at the beginning, if you have 100K invested with Merrill or in your savings with Bank of America or some combination thereof, then you end up earning 3.5 points per dollar, 3.5% essentially on travel and dining, and 2.625% back everywhere else. So that's a pretty good return on a card that essentially kind of feels almost like a net zero cost.

Yeah, it really is. I think Nick and I both have this card and it's really valuable. We talked about it in depth in episode 204, which was about a year ago. And so it's important to talk about that because the Elite card is very similar, but it has a much higher annual fee and much bigger credit. So it starts with, you have a $550 annual fee for the Elite card. It's a Visa Infinite card instead of a signature, which the non-Elite one is a signature. But you get the same 2X travel and dining, one and a half points per dollar everywhere else. So the earning rate is exactly the same with platinum honors. It goes up to 3.5x and 2.62.x. So yeah, so earning rates, you know, identical, but it varies where the perks come in. So instead of $100 annual airline incidental that the non-elite card has, this one gives you $300. So if you have $300 of things like seat upgrades,

baggage fees, airline lounge fees, in-flight services, and a lot of other things that aren't listed there. Yeah. Almost any airline charge in my experience has triggered this. Yeah. Like award fees will usually trigger it, things like that. Then you get $300 back of those kind of fees. And $150 lifestyle conveniences reimbursement. So what this means is if you pay for things like various streaming services with a card, food delivery with a card, fitness subscriptions, rideshare services, you get $150 back per year. So that one seems super easy to use up and you get up to four Priority Pass Select accounts. You do not have to, if you want to give someone a Priority Pass account, you don't have to set them up as an authorized user. So that's really unique to this card. And, you know, so if you want your whole family to have them, or if you want your friends to have priority pass, then this makes it super easy to do that for up to four people total. And then it has one more

perk that's different from the non-elite version of the Premier Rewards Card, which is that it gives you a 20% discount when you redeem points for flights through the Bank of America Travel Center. So what you basically a 20% point discount means you're getting 1.25 cents per point value when booking flights. So that's unique because without that feature, points are just worth exactly a penny each, no matter what you do. But with this feature, you're getting 20, 25% more value for your points as long as you're using them towards flights. And so now let's go back to that earning rate, which we said was exactly the same. But if you decide in advance, you're only going to use your points for flights, then you can calculate a higher earning rate, right? So

if you're going to use those points towards flights, then what you're getting is 5.38% towards travel and dining. Oh, this, if you have platinum honors, 3.28% everywhere else. It goes up that high if you have platinum honors and use the rewards towards flights. So that's pretty darn good. It is. It is. But I think you misspoke. You said 5.38%, but it should be 4.38% with the bonus rate because 20% bonus. I think you just misspoke when you looked at it. So yeah.

So either way, yeah. I mean, those are pretty good earning rates. So what do you think? I mean, is this the best card to get for priority pass? Do you like this card? Do you think it's worth spending $550 a year on the premium rewards elite card from Bank of America? Yeah, I mean, for someone who doesn't already have priority pass in other ways or really wants the full priority pass that includes access not just to airport lounges but restaurants and experiences, which this allows all of that, then this is a really great option. It probably is the best, like, standalone option. You know what I mean? Because we talked in the past about how you could do some

kind of hybrid thing, whereas if you already have a card that has limited priority pass with just lounges, you can tag on something like the U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve card to have a limited amount of time to do restaurants and experiences. But this one gives you all that all in one. I like it for that. I don't love that to make it worth the annual fee, like you have this $300 in airline incidentals that you have to use up because I don't tend to use my Bank of America cards as a default when I'm booking flights because I like the better travel protections that come with like the Chase Sapphire Reserve or the Ritz card. But if you're not worried about that, then I think the combination of getting those fees back and getting better value for your points for airfare makes a great

combo. Yeah, it's interesting because I don't really consider this card ever. And even as you're going through it and explaining it, I thought to myself, I don't really think I'd want to spend $550 a year on this. But mathematically, I guess it does work out okay. You know, the $300 in airline incidental fees, I actually think it'd be pretty easy because I know like, you know, Travel Bank works. And I know I could use that with Southwest to kind of rack up some credit there. The $150 in lifestyle conveniences is actually the part that seems least convenient to me because I'm going to have to like move

something over to this card that like, I'm not going to use it for food delivery and ride share because I have cards that'll give me a better bonus on those things. So I don't really want to use it for those. I don't have a fitness subscription. So then it's down to streaming services and I subscribe to Spotify. So I could put my Spotify membership on this and I guess I would get that for free. So I guess I should. I just wouldn't be something that I would think to do, I guess. So I would have to do that and maintain Spotify and know that I want to maintain that. So if I did, then I guess, yeah, I could see the argument here because it certainly could be good, particularly if you're going to use

the points towards flights. If I'm not going to use the points towards flights, I don't know, there's enough ways to piece together restaurant visits that for the number of times I visit a priority pass restaurant over the course of a year, it's just not worth it to me. But if I lived by like Dulles, which has a few priority pass restaurants or an airport like that, I'd probably feel significantly differently about that, especially traveling with a family of four where I could get a meal for everybody. Each time we go through the airport, I'd probably feel a lot differently. Yeah. All right. Okay. So that's not the only piece of card talk this week. We have one more piece of card talk and it's a short piece of card talk because there's not much to say yet, but cardless is out with yet another new card

launch. They announced this week that they are going to launch two Avianca Life Miles credit cards and you can sign up for the wait list now. And if you do, you can get up to 10,000 additional points when the card launches. If you decide to apply, you're not like committed to apply. All you got to do is put your email address in or whatever, and you'll get your extra points when the card launches. If you decide to apply, you're not like committed to apply. All you got to do is put your email address in or whatever, and you'll get your extra points when the card becomes live. So there's no harm in signing up for the waitlist. Interestingly, these are going to be Amex cards. I was pretty surprised by that. Yeah. I don't think this is the first Amex cards that Cardless has launched, but- No, I don't think so either.

Yeah. So yeah, I don't know what to make of that but they're amex cards and you know i i went ahead and signed up myself and my family members in the email just because why not maybe we can get a bigger bonus but whether or not it'll be worth you know signing up for we'll wait and see what the details of these new cards are there you go all right so jump on that wait list if you're interested in at least giving yourself a shot at extra points. There's no harm in it. Same thing with the Qatar cards. There's no harm in signing up for the wait list just in case you decide you want to apply for one reason or another. All right. That brings us to Mattress Running the Numbers. So for this week's Mattress Running the Numbers, we've got a new promotion out from Marriott

Homes and Villas. You can get up to 50k with just a two night stay. So Marriott not up to you get 50k. So Marriott is offering 50,000 Marriott Bonvoy points as a bonus. That's 50,000 bonus points. Biggest promotion of the year is how they are billing this with a two night homes and villas stay. So you have to book your two night homes and villas stays. First of all, you got to register and registration for this ends, I believe, May 10th, and you have to book your stay between May 2nd and May 10th for a time period between May 6th and December 31st of this year. So essentially, over the next few days, you have to book this, but got to book by May 10th, and it's got to be first day between May 6th and December 31st.

If you complete a stay of two or more consecutive nights, boom, you get yourself 50,000 bonus points as long as your minimum spend for the stay is $2,500 or the foreign currency equivalent or more. You know, that was the part you were waiting for, wasn't it? It really was. Yeah. Because when I heard two nights stay, I was like, wow. Because last year they had a four nights stay. You got 40,000 points. And I jumped on that and booked. I found some four nights stays that only cost $200. And so I was basically buying points for about half cent each. but this is quite a bit

more expensive. So you can't just book throwaway hotels and expect to get good value out of that with this promo. No, it's not 50K with just any old two nights stay. It's a 50K with a fairly expensive two night or more stay. I mean, I guess it might not be expensive if you're staying a lot of nights and it just happens to come to $2,500. But at any rate, you're going to have to spend $2,500 in order to get the 50,000 bonus points. So is this metrics run worthy, Greg? Would you go book a stay that you don't intend to actually make just to buy the points like you did last time? Not even close. Not even close. So even if we generously said Marriott points are worth a penny each,

then you're talking about $500 rebate on a $2,500 plus stay, which is a nice rebate on the stay, but it's not even close to enough to go out of your way. Plus, keep in mind that often Marriott charges more for these types of stays than if you book through other sites. You could book often the same exact homes through other sites like VRBO. Yeah, and I believe, to be fair, I believe you do also earn five Marriott points per dollar spent on this day.

So you will earn a little bit more. But Greg's right. I mean, often they're more expensive when you book through Marriott homes and villas. And I think it made sense for us to talk about this because they don't have that $2 hundred dollar minimum spend like front and center. It just front and center on the promotion is fifty thousand points with a two night stay. And I could totally see someone booking a two night stay, assuming they're going to get to fifty thousand points who didn't scroll through the fine print looking for that minimum spend requirement.

Because, you know, we've been trained to know to look for that. But I totally I think if I was a regular member, wouldn't have seen that. So that's definitely important. Like you said, great rebate or very good rebate anyway, if you're actually just looking to book one of these because it's the best option for your stay. And keep in mind,

if there happens to be a card-linked offer that comes out, it might be even better because we've seen Amex offers and occasionally I think Chase offers too for Marriott Homes and Villas. So maybe you may, again again get a decent rebate, but it's not going to be worth going out just for this. Totally agree. Okay. That's Matt returning the numbers. This week's award talk. We've got a number of things up for award talk. What do we got lined up first? All right. First, a whole bunch of transfer bonuses sprung on us just the last few days.

So we have, I'll just run through them and then I'll stop briefly on the ones that are worth talking about, I guess. So we have American Express has a 20% transfer bonus to Aeromexico through May 31st. That normally Amex transfers, I think, 1 to 1.6, something like that, to Aeromexico. And so this brings it closer to a one to two type transfer, but Aeromexico points don't tend to be valuable. Lately, it's been hard to find any partner awards through Aeromexico, according to our friends at Seeds.Aero. So that combination tells me, no, skip that one. Thumbs down. Yeah. Nick gives it the thumbs down. Next one.

Chase has a 40% transfer bonus to Marriott through June 15th. So, you know, Marriott points. I mean, again, if you're generously say they're worth about a penny each, then you're talking about getting about 1.4 cents value with your Chase points, which is not great. I mean, you could do better with your chase points for sure. So this one is one I would only, only, only do if like you're looking at a specific award and you're short on the points. And so you want to get some more that way. Yeah. You know, I just thumbs down to it, but I just last night booked a stay where as compared to the cash rate, I was getting like almost one and a half cents per Marriott point. So I just thumbs down this, but recognize in hindsight that, yeah, there are those situations where I suppose it could make sense, particularly if you're flush with Chase points and not with Marriott points, which would be reasonable since you probably aren't spending on a Marriott credit card these days.

So, you know, maybe, maybe. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely maybe. Next one up is Chase. Chase again has a transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic, 30%. And that's through June 15th as well. As we've talked about before on the show, like those Virgin Atlantic transfer bonuses can be a good deal in the right situations because Virgin Atlantic has some really good sweet spot awards, but they're very specific. So, you know, don't just do this thinking, oh, I'm going to use these points for whatever my travel is in the future. Instead, get to know the Virgin Atlantic sweet spots. And if you're getting ready to book one, then this definitely can make a lot of sense. Or if you

know that you'll be booking them in the future, it makes a lot of sense. Speaking of the Virgin Atlantic sweet spots, this week they came out with a new round of Virgin Voyages cruises that are bookable through Virgin Red. So you could take advantage of this and book one of those Virgin Voyages cruises. And I've heard good things from numerous people about the Virgin Voyages cruises, particularly at the prices that they charge. And then when you get a 30% transfer bonus like this, it could be a very, very good value for one of those. It's great value for those. And unlike most like award type things, there's no like taxes, fees, anything that you have, you know, I believe I'm wrong. Well, that has been the case in the past. I haven't actually checked this for myself, but somebody

who is also in this space sent me a message yesterday morning when it came out and said, oh, this time the taxes are not included. And I said, oh, really? And later on, they followed back up and said it's just the cruises out of Miami where the taxes are not included and you have to pay the taxes additionally, apparently. Now, I didn't double check that for myself, so take that with a grain of salt. But the person who sent me the message would likely know better. So one way or another would have known to have checked. So I assume that they were adding those on the Miami ones, but not on the Europe ones, apparently. So I guess that would be a better deal. All right. And then if you're into a Virgin Atlantic, Amex also has a 30% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic. So these are running concurrently,

except the Amex one ends May 31st, whereas the Chase one again ends June 15th. Finally, we have Citi has a transfer. Well, it's actually Qatar has a 30% transfer bonus when you transfer from various foreign programs or Citibank. So if you transfer from Citi to Qatar, on the Citi side, you won't see a transfer bonus, but Qatar will add 30% in as long as you've done the transfer before by May 31st. And in the terms, they say the bonus will appear by June 15th. And we've had mixed reports in the

past on these similar types of bonuses. Some people report them coming in right away, and some people report them taking the full amount of time that was in the terms. We'm not going to say great, but there's good. And one big advantage of transferring to Qatar Avios is that you can then move your points to British Airways Avios, to Iberia Avios, and so on. So it makes the chance of being able to use it in a broad range of circumstances much higher because you can move it around these different programs that have Avios as their currency. Very good. Okay, so that's another one that may be of interest for you. But that's not it for award talk. We've got more award talk. We've talked about some sweet spots there, but a sour spot coming up this week.

United has increased prices on partner business class awards within Europe and within Asia. So they're even more now than they were before. And before they might have been OK-ish, but not good necessarily. And now they are more not good. So, yeah, that's too bad. Yeah, there's some really bad pricing in there. And it's not consistent. Like, we can't say the price is this. United United doesn't have word charts anymore and and you know until recently they they even though they didn't have a word charts for their partner awards they did have fixed prices they just didn't publish what they were but now it

seems like they're changing so fast that that doesn't necessarily seem to be true anymore so yeah so you know maybe we should consider a new segment on the changing so fast that that doesn't necessarily seem to be true anymore. So, yeah. So, you know, maybe we should consider a new segment on the show. Which awards did United devalue this week? Right. Everybody needs to know. Well, you know, it's funny because I was searching this week trying to redo a trip that I'll talk about very briefly in a second.

But I was using the United site because I got a great tip over the weekend. I was at the Travel Summit in Toronto, and I got a fantastic tip that apparently ANA awards may be bookable over the phone with Air Canada, even though you don't see them on the website. So I was searching United to find ANA space specifically. And even before this got published, I was running into all these weird prices. And I was, what is United doing here? Because I couldn't figure out what indicated that there was partner space. That was one of the first few things I noticed, that the pricing was just really wacky. It wasn't at all what I expected for the intra-Asia flights.

And then I couldn't tell which days had partner awards and which days didn't because the prices were not, again, what I expected. They didn't match what I had known to be the case for a long time. So yeah, too bad. It stinks. Although truth be told, I don't really think very much about United these days for award booking. I know a lot of people are invested in the program because travel United very frequently for business or whatever, but I have become less and less and less and less invested in United over the last several years to the point where I just use their website search for awards. I don't really use United Mileage Plus for much of anything anymore, which is too bad. But that's the way it's going. So, all right.

United increased their prices. Wah, wah, wah, wah. But I have another piece of award talk to share this week. And that is that I encountered a really surprisingly good experience with Air Canada Aeroplan on a few different levels, actually. Because first of all, I called Air Canada Aeroplan. And if you've called Air Canada Aeroplan, you'll understand why it took me all day to muster the courage to get on the phone for the long haul that I was expecting and waiting for. And by the way, that came up in conversation at the travel summit over the weekend, both with other attendees and with Air Canada Aeroplan leadership. So it is something they're aware of.

But anyway, so I got, you know, rung through and entered my information and I was shocked and awed when somebody picked up on a single ring and I said it out loud. What? I can't believe one ring. I can't believe this. And the person kind of laughed a little bit and then the line cut off. So almost like they left and hung up. I know they didn't, but it was almost seemed like they laughed and hung up on me. I was like, oh my goodness, you've got to be kidding. I thought I hit the jackpot here. So I had to call back a second time. And you know what? Somebody picked up on one ring again, again, twice in a row. And that was at like four 35 o'clock in the afternoon. It wasn't, but it was at a non peak time. So I was really, really shocked. I don't know. I definitely don't

think that that's a norm from anything I heard from anyone else, but I was pleasantly surprised by that, but that's not where my pleasant surprise ended. I had a really complicated award booked, and I'm not going to get into all the details, except to say that it was like it was an Atlantic Zone to an Atlantic Zone award. And it had five or six segments. And I wanted to keep one segment because I have four seats in business class. And I wanted to keep just one of those segments somewhere in the middle. And I wanted to get rid of everything else and change it to an Atlantic Zone to a Pacific Zone award. So totally changing the award type, the pricing, all of the various parts and pieces, except for this one leg that I had four seats on because there were no longer four seats available, of course.

And I was somewhat concerned that if I canceled it, that those seats might not go back into inventory. So I, first of all, tried to price out the award I wanted because it was a little complicated. I wanted to make sure it wasn't going to break the pricing engine. And the agent was happy to humor me as they always are and listen to everything I had written out in terms of which flights I wanted and just write it down and try it. There was no pushback, which I always love about Air Canada Aeroplan agents. And so sure enough, it was going to price the way I wanted. So I explained what I wanted to do. And I thought from talking to other people that know more about Aeroplan than I do, that the agent was going to have to essentially cancel out the booking and

hope that the seats went back into inventory and scoop them back up. And people told me they usually do, but you never know, different carriers, different things. And so I told her that I wasn't really excited about that, but I was going to have to cross my fingers and hope. And the agent said, well, maybe we can just change it. She said, hold on a second. Let me look at it. If it's not a married segment, we might be able to hold that one leg.

And so she looked at it and she said, no, it's not a married segment. She said, I think I can hold that leg and change everything else the way you want to. So I was shocked and amazed that yes, absolutely, they were able to do that. So she was able to change the award type, the award price, all of the other legs in the award, and just keep that one leg that I wanted. And that was easy to do. And actually, she even waived the change fee without me asking. So that was a huge win too, because I expected to have to pay a few hundred dollars for that. And I didn't. So it was amazing. I was very, very happy with that. Yeah. I don't believe anything about that story.

They answered on one ring twice. They made changes without, without charging you. They were able to make changes without, without losing the awards. Yeah. I think you had a good dream, but you better check your, your account because there's no way. I didn't get the notifications that I got charged from my altitude reserve card. I might not have believed it either. I didn't even think. When she said that she thought maybe she could do it, I was pretty skeptical, actually, because I had asked some people who booked a lot of aeroplane awards, and they didn't think that it could be done. And I thought, well, they've probably booked and changed and canceled more airplane awards than anybody. I'm even going to get on the phone here probably. And so anyway, I was, I was surprised, pleasantly surprised, very happy.

I continue to get excited about airplane and these complex awards you can book and the way that they're able to set that up. Now, I'm not hopeful. I'll say that the call time, the call hold time is going to improve. I'll say that much. I don't necessarily think I got lucky there. I don't necessarily get the impression that there's going to be an improvement on that front anytime, particularly soon. So, so that's too bad. You not only got someone to answer on the first ring, you've got someone who understands what married segments are, really, you know, understands the whole system well enough to make all these changes. It just seems, you know, and it seems like unbelievably lucky, right? But every time I've called Aeroplan, I have been pleasantly surprised by the person I reach. Now, I haven't been pleasantly surprised by the wait time. Oftentimes I had to wait two and a half hours to get somebody to either call me back or pick up the phone or whatever. And that part is very frustrating. And I communicated as much along to Aeroplan. But

that said, every time I get to an agent, they seem to be really well trained. Whatever they're doing, they've trained these people well. So yeah, they always are willing to try it. I laughed at myself because I fed a pretty complex itinerary there. And I thought, boy, if I was doing this with an agent, with another airline, I can just imagine the pushback I'd get with, oh, that's not going to work. Oh, this can't be done. There's no way kind of a thing or, oh, that's going to be too long or this or that, or, you know, layover is not right. There just would have been so much doubt, but I never get that pushback with airplanes.

So I enjoy that about the program. But anyway, so worked out well. All right. I droned on about that more than I intended to. So let's move on to this week's daily getaways. So daily getaways for another piece of award talk. Did you buy anything, Greg? Yeah. So I put on my calendar, the choice points that were on sale for about a half cent each. And so, you know, when they came on sale on Monday, I was ready right then to refresh the screen. I tried to get the biggest package, like that was my first, I was rolling the dice to get the biggest package, but that was sold out as soon as I clicked. But the second biggest one, I was able to nab one of those. And I was, and after buying it, I actually bought third or fourth

biggest after that. And so, you know, buying choice points at half cent each, I actually bought third or fourth biggest after that. And so buying choice points at half cent each, I find myself lately going through them pretty rapidly, especially now that I can book preferred hotels online. So I'm a buyer at that price. How about you? Did you buy anything? Nope. Nope. Nothing at all.

I did intend to try to buy choice points, and I'm marginally disappointed that I didn't get them, but only marginally because the preferred hotels just haven't been working out for me. There's been some that I've looked at and said, oh, it looked very nice, but none of them have fit my needs for the specific situation I've had yet. So I haven't yet had a situation

where I've needed or wanted to book one desperately. I've seen some that I thought looked very nice, but nothing's fit. So I was a little bit disappointed not to get the choice points, but only a little because I don't think it would have been a near term use for of them for me anyway. And so I might as well just collect city points probably in the meantime. But no, I didn't try anything else. I mean, the Hyatt points would have been nice if you could buy them, I guess, except I knew that they would sell out right away. I did check on, you know what? I, I take that back. There was one other one that went live and I did, oh, the Marriott gift cards. I, I didn't try hard to get one, but I did refresh at one o'clock and, you know, give it a shot just

to see if it would work. And it was almost immediately sold out. So, so anyway, yeah, no, I'm not that excited about daily getaways anymore, but so goes it. Yeah. So for anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about, daily getaways is like several weeks once a year where they have all these like travel deals that are released at 1 p.m. each weekday. And the good ones that people care about sell out instantly. So as Nick said, like, you know, Hyatt points on sale for a good price. It sells out before in less than an instant. And so it's like a lottery ticket. You know, your chances are about as good as winning a lottery prize. Yeah. And so that's kind of depressing. But choice points are sort of on the edge where I think I think they haven't been like

so incredibly popular that, you know, in the past it's been easy to buy them, but it's getting harder and harder. So I felt lucky I was able to buy some. Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. Okay. That wraps up award talk and brings us to this week's main event. All right. Main event time tips for booking positioning flights. So, you know, award discovery tools, I mean, just sort of doing an aside before I dig into this. Award discovery tools can make it easy to find awards where you're looking for like broad range of things like, I just want to fly business class with my family from North America to Europe. And these award discovery tools will help you find what's available to meet that kind

of parameter. I especially like Pointia Daydream Explorer and Seeds.Aero. So the first one is very user-friendly. The second one is much more thorough. It has everything in it. And so those two are great for finding those kinds of awards. But of course, if you're doing broad search like North America to Europe, the awards you find are probably not starting from your local airport and may not be going to where you really want to end up in Europe, for example. So if you book one of those awards, you need to also book positioning flights to get to the airport at the start and from the airport to wherever you want to end up. So we're going to give you some tips. For sure.

And I mean, this works in both directions. And I'm trying to now thread the needle and get a flight back from Asia, back to the United States. And so I was using Seats.Aero yesterday, looking at various routes from anywhere in Asia to anywhere in North America to try and find four seats. And one thing I like is that with a number of the programs, the Seats.Aero, I was able to filter to just flights with four seats available. So yeah, it can be a good tool for that sort of thing, for sure. I'm finding that useful. I did find something that is not ideal, but easily cancelable. So I found something that I thought, okay, well, we can lock something in and at least get back to the United States and then go from there. But, but if I'm going to do that, I'm going to need a positioning flight because it's not from the place that I intend to be in Asia. So what are our tips for positioning flights? What's the first thing to keep in mind?

Okay. I'm going to get to that, but first I just have one more tip for Nick. Okay. When you're looking for things, I recommend doing both SeedSideAero and Poincia Daydream Explorer because SeedSideAero is more thorough, but what it doesn't do is check all the flights to small airports. And we know that programs like American Airlines often has great award deals, but you have to end up in Wichita or somewhere, you know, and, and points, points you as daydream explorer can find that if, you know, if, if someone has searched for it and it cashed that, but SeatSideAero won't find that. So.

Oh, that's, that is a great tip tip because I was on the American Airlines website yesterday, also searching for flights to El Paso and Albany, my local airport, picking out different smaller airports to try to see if anything would price funky like that. So that's a good tip that points you. I can save me some time there. So very good. OK, so if you're going to book these positioning flights, what are some of our tips? Yeah. So most of the tips are about how to avoid the problems that might come up. So, because when you're booking, when you're booking flights with a different

carrier than, you know, what you're, than the flight you're trying to get to, and the positioning flight is delayed or, you know, there's weather problems, who knows what, neither airline is going to want to help you in that situation because you didn't buy a ticket that went all the way through to your final destination. You bought two separate tickets. And when I say bought, I mean that loosely because you may have used points for one or both. So the first tip is avoid checking bags. Because if you've checked your bag on a positioning flight to get to your departing airport and the bags get lost, you're out of luck. The bags, if you have to, if there's something, if your flight, your departing flight is delayed and you want to hop on a different flight, but you've already checked your bags, you're probably out of luck.

So there's a lot of reasons that checking bags can be a problem. Another thing is if sometimes the bags just take a long time to come out at the other end, you may have to leave security to go get your bags and then come back in to get your next flight. So a whole host of reasons why checking bags can be a problem. This is the episode my wife needs to listen to. Are you listening, honey? Are you out there? Hopefully on the treadmill this week, she's listening to this episode. Yes, because we always check bags and definitely that's a risk. And so we'll talk more about what I do to try to alleviate risk there, but there's only so much you can do. So avoid checking bags if you can is certainly a good tip for that. All right. So that's step number one. So number two would be to make sure

you do this far in advance, right? Make sure you're positioned well before your flight. Isn't that what you do, Greg? Yeah, that's what I would like to do. I'm going to tell a story of what not to do, and that'll inform you what you should do. So I recently, in fact, I'm in England right now, but I had booked a flight on United, an award flight that flew United from Newark to London. And it was a morning flight, 8.30 in the morning departure from Newark. But I don't live anywhere near Newark Airport. I live near Detroit's airport. And I could not, I wanted to fly to the Newark area the night before, but I had an event to attend the night before. And so there were no flights that night late enough

for me to go to the New York area at all. So there was one flight. There was one option. There was a United flight at six in the morning that would get me to Newark sort of in time. But I had a 12 minute layover in Newark. What? 12 minutes? Get out of here. So it was really a 42-minute layover. If you look at when my flight to Newark was scheduled to arrive and when my departure flight was scheduled to depart, there's 42 minutes in between. So that sounded doable. Crazy still. No, that sounded crazy still for an international award.

Sounded kind of doable to me. But United says for these international flights, you've got to be at the gate 30 minutes in advance or else they don't guarantee you get to keep your seat or get on board at all necessarily. So that 30 minute advance thing brought my layover down to 12 minutes. That was not a sort of legal connection. Like United will not sell you that morning flight followed by, well, the two morning flights. When he says legal, he means by like their booking rules. Okay. Greg didn't break the law. He's not going to jail. Don't worry. Right. I'm not talking about the places where I broke the law. I just broke United's rules in doing that. I did not book an alternate positioning flight. And so that's what Tuesday morning I got up to go to the airport to hope to make this 12 minute connection.

And we'll talk about what happened in that flight at the end of this main event. But spoiler alert, Greg mentioned that he's in London. This is a big example of what not to do. What not to do. Don't do what I did. But it's also an example of that these things can work out. And so if you know what you're doing a little bit, well, we'll talk more about it anyway. It's a good example that regular operations happen regularly. So everything, you know, is like a well-oiled machine for you, maybe.

But we'll see. We'll find out more about that. All right. So that said, of course, I wouldn't do what Greg did, probably, in circumstances, perhaps. But generally speaking, if you're looking to position, when I'm looking to position, I try to do it the day before. Day before is best. I would like to be at the airport where I'm going to depart. It's a valuable award to me.

If I'm flying something where I got a good deal or be good availability or see a product I'm particularly excited about or D just a trip, I really actually want to make it to then I'll try and position the day before and I'll use a hotel free night certificate. I find those like Marriott 35K free night certificates useful for this or a 25K if you got one of the older cards or an IHD 40K cert or even one of those high category one to fours sometimes. I find those things often useful for this because it'll be a hotel for a single night. And if you have one of those credit cards where you have just one single free night each year, you're not going to spend a weekend away with one single free night,

but it can come in handy as like an insurance policy that you plan to get there the day before your major flight is going to take off. Nonstop is of course best. Obviously, if you have to connect, then you've got more parts and pieces that can fall apart because of course you could have a delay in one section that throws off another section. And the farther you get from being where you need to be, the worse that it is. So obviously you want to ideally position the day before and ideally on a nonstop flight, but if not, then what? Yeah. I mean, so if you can't, if you can't book the day before, then you do want to try to book one that has as long of a layover at your airport as possible so that if your positioning flight is late, you still have plenty of time to make

your connection. And that's especially where having a nonstop flight to that connecting airport is so important. I will one up that and say that not only will I book one with a longer layover, but if I'm booking a positioning flight, when I do this, I always make sure that it's not the last flight out of that airport to get where I need to be. So, for instance, if I were positioning from Detroit to Newark like Greg, I would make sure to not book the last possible flight that leaves Detroit for Newark before my international award. I'd make sure to leave one in between. So, in other words, what I'm saying is, let's say there's two flights to Newark a day. I'm going to book the one that leaves earlier. So if that one gets canceled or something happens, I still have the ability to book the flight that's leaving next after that, or at least theoretically do

if it's still available for sale and their seats and what have you. So I try never to book the last possible flight out before my international award. I try to leave room for a backup plan. Yeah. Yeah. And so if you are going to be spending a lot of time at an airport, this is not like a necessary step, but I think it's really useful to have lounge access. And you want someplace comfortable where you can hang out, get food, do work, whatever you want to do. So that's where having the right credit cards that give you priority pass access. If you're going to be in an airport that has Capital One Lounge, the Venture X or Venture X business card would be

good. If you're in an airport that has a Centurion lounge, the Amex Platinum or business Platinum is good. If you're flying, if your positioning flight is one of the domestic airlines, then you may want to have access to the American Airlines Club with the American Airlines executive card, Delta Sky Club with the Delta Reserve card or an Amex Platinum card, or a United Club with a United Club Infinite or United Club business card. So all of those are, those are just examples of, of cards that you can have that would get you into these. Most of the ones I mentioned are domestic lounges, although priority pass are everywhere and can be really useful to have. And I think at times, like if you know, oh, I'm booking this great, you know, Emirates flight and I can't wait to do it, but I'm going to be, you know, Washington Dulles for 12 hours. That's going to be really painful. What will I do? You

know, maybe sign up for an appropriate card ahead of time, get the welcome bonus. Then you have access to the lounge and you don't have to keep it after the first year if you don't want to pay the annual fee past that. Yeah, yeah, that's a good tip. You know, safety tip with priority pass is that quite a few priority pass lounges will only allow, and this is also true with Centurion lounges, will only allow access up to a certain number of hours in advance of your flight. Now with Amex, maybe it's different if you're connecting. I can't remember on the Centurion if you're connecting, maybe you can get in earlier. But at any rate, I've been turned down a priority pass lounge location before because I'm there too early before my flight. So if you do plan that 12-hour layover, priority pass

may not help you for quite a while. So having something like one of these other A executive Delta Sky Club United Club cards could come in handy if you're flying on an appropriate airline to be able to get access to them. But that tip about the connection is important because, yeah, it's true that at least with Centurion lounges and probably priority pass, but I'm not sure. If you show them that you came from somewhere else first and we're connecting to the next flight, they probably will let you in earlier. So it's worth, even if you didn't book them together, so we're showing the earlier boarding pass and see if they'll let you in. Okay, good. All right. So lounge access would certainly be nice, but okay. When it comes to

actually booking the positioning flights, you want to consider a few things. And probably the first thing to do is to consider booking freely cancelable alternative positioning flights. Now I mentioned before that I don't book the last possible flight. Let's say my international awards at 4 PM and there's a flight that comes in at noon. So it'd give me four hour layover or a flight that comes in at 10 AM. They give me a six hour layover. I usually book the 10am but I might also book the one at noon just in case that 10am does not come through. But that that backup the noon flight, so to speak, there has to be something that I can cancel for free. So you're going to pick a flight that's later than your primary positioning flight. So I just gave two examples there. So my noon flight in that example would be my backup, my primary backup. And on that flight, you don't

want to book basic economy probably because basic economy, well, there's a number of reasons you probably would want to book basic economy. But first and foremost, I don't think it's necessarily freely cancelable with everybody. Is that right? With most programs, it's not. So that's the main issue there. Yeah. And also, of course, if you don't have a seat assignment, you may end up far back in the plane. And if you got to hurry between flights, that would be unideal. All right. But so you pick a later flight. You don't book basic economy. You want to set a reminder to cancel your backup flight once boarding. Now, we're talking about backup flights here because there are programs where you can book a flight that you can cancel for free. And so I would book my 10 a.m. preferred positioning flight and then book a noon

positioning flight in case that 10 a.m. flight gets canceled and I have a seat. I know I have a way to get to my international award. But of course, if my 10 a.m. flight goes off without a hitch, then I want to cancel that noon flight. So you want to pick something where you're going to be able to cancel that and set yourself a reminder to do so because there's at least one time where I remember just in the nick of time, I was like, oh man, I almost totally forgot to cancel my backup flight. And then I would have lost my points for that. And that would have been a bummer. Yeah. I've had that happen to where I've said I've used Google Gmail to do a schedule send to remind myself to cancel based on knowing when I'd be approximately when I'd be boarding the first positioning flight, assuming everything went right.

So that would be a good time to cancel the backup one. So I like to cancel the backup one once I'm on board the first one because by the time you're on board, even if it gets delayed at that point, you're not going to be able to probably get off the plane and make it to your other flight anyway at that point. So yeah, I've had times where I've sat down in my seat at the regular scheduled, you know, the first intended positioning flight. And then I get an email to myself saying, cancel the American Airlines flight or whatever it is. It's like, Oh, that's right. I got to do that now. So you just do that from the phone. Yep. Very good. So you want to set yourself some sort of a reminder. Google is pretty good. My, my phone, it gives me the reminder of my flight. And so I've had that

kind of thing, the reminder that pops up at the top that I have a flight boarding soon, or that sort of thing remind me. So yeah, whatever whatever it is you use, your plan or your system for that, make sure you have a system in place. All right. So what about if you can't do that, if it's not easy to book that type of backup positioning flight? Yeah. So there may be times you're coming from a small airport that you just don't have enough options. So you can't book a second flight. Another option is to use these freely cancelable programs and book a whole nother itinerary, like all the way. So the idea is like, if you realize that your connecting flight is not going to, you know,

oh, it's delayed. So I'm not going to be able to get to New York in time for the, you know, this Emirates flight that I've been looking forward to. Well, maybe you can take the whole different backup trip basically to get to where you ultimately want to go. And at that point, if you don't make it to that Emirates one, then you have to deal with like, what are the cancellation rules for that flight? And hopefully you're able to cancel it and get your points back. But at least you have something that can save the trip in that situation. Yeah.

If you need to get to where you're going, then having that backup plan makes sense. So what are our best options? I mean, we're talking about last minute cancellations, booking backup flights. So what programs would you recommend using if you're going to book a positioning flight and be importantly, a backup positioning flight that you are hoping you'll be able to cancel? Yeah. So for the backups, again, as Nick said earlier, it's so important to have ones that you can cancel and cancel like last minute. And that takes away a lot of programs, mostly foreign programs where they often have 24-hour

rules, like you can cancel up to 24 hours in advance. And that's not going to help you in this situation because we're talking about having a backup flight that's an hour later or somewhere in that range. And so you're not going to know for sure that you could cancel until pretty close to departure. But luckily in the United States, we have programs that do allow that. So American Airlines allows free cancellations right up to departure. Delta up to like 10 minutes before the flight. Southwest allows the same thing. And United. Hawaiian also. I don't think a lot of people are going to be using Hawaiian for positioning flights, but I guess people in Hawaii may.

I had one actually on my last trip to Hawaii. I didn't book it with Hawaiian miles. I booked it with American Airlines miles. But still, I booked a backup positioning flight on Hawaiian. Yeah. All of those are good choices. Alaska's a good choice too, especially for its own flights. For partner flights, you are going to lose the, what is it, $1,250 partner booking fee or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. But that's a pretty small price to pay for essentially an insurance plan that is not going to give you very much headache if you have to implement it. So that's the way I look at something like that. It's a very easy claim on the insurance and the cost is okay with me. But yeah, so those are programs to consider because like Greg said, you can cancel for free up until departure. And if you book an award, for instance, you book a Southwest award as a backup flight, then up to 10 minutes before departure, you can cancel and the points are just right back in your account immediately.

There's nothing tied up in a voucher that needs to be used in a certain amount of time. And the same can be said for American and Delta and United in those cases. So that's super duper helpful. And that's how I will book a backup positioning flight. I don't know if I want to say often, but when I have to position anyway, using one of those programs, certainly, almost certainly. Now you could also alternatively, if you don't have the miles to do it, there's other ways to do it, right? Yeah. So, you know, most airlines will let you book a freely cancelable rate. So, you know, it might be more expensive than what you want to pay, but this is a backup. So, you know, hopefully you won't be paying it, but if you do end up needing it, it's probably cheaper than actually buying a ticket last second. So,

you know, book the, just book the fully cancelable rate and you should be good to go. I've done that before too. I would look at the terms for that though, make sure that you can do it to last minute. Yeah. And that refundable means refundable like in cash, because I know like with low cost carriers, sometimes they'll give you what kind of looks like a refundable fare, except it's really refundable in the form of a voucher. And so you want to just check the terms on that. Yeah, Spirit's like the worst in that because not only do they give it that, but it's only usable for a short amount of time, like 60 days or 90 days or something like that.

I forget what the details are, but, you know, it's not that likely you're going to end up using it. Here is specifically what I was thinking of when I said that, because I've looked at it before and said, oh, that's not really refundable. Come on now. Let's not mince words here. You get it back as a voucher. So you want to know that it's actually fully refundable to your original form of purchase or payment. Right, right. Or if you're booking with a carrier that you fly regularly, American, Delta, whatever, you could just with a carrier that you fly regularly, American, Delta, whatever, you could just book the regular rate. Again, as long as it's not basic economy, it should be refundable in the form of a flight credit. So if you know that you're likely to be flying them within the next year and can use that flight credit, it's probably fine to do that as

well. Yep. And I've also done that with United Travel Bank money before, or United bump vouchers. I've certainly done that and use that technique before too, for a backup flight. So, all right. So those are a few ways to book backup flights. So, well, you know what, I had a question in mind, but maybe we should talk about the rest. Is there, well, no, you know what, before we get into any more, I mean, is this all worth it? Like, you know, is it worth the hassle to have to, you have to remember to cancel it. You have to find the thing. Do you book backups often? I mean, is this something that a technique that you're just talking about or one that you actually use? I do book backups often when I'm in this situation. So I don't always have this situation where I've booked an award separate, you know, with positioning flights involved. Or sometimes I like purposely bake in extra days. It's like, well, I'd be happy to go spend some time in New

York beforehand. So I'll do that and then I'll fly off the kind of thing. So in those cases, I won't book backups. But yeah, when things are tight and it's important that I take the trip, absolutely. I do it. That's a really good point though that you made with New York because we'll do that kind of thing too. And I've frequently done that kind of thing where I say, oh, well, this is an opportunity to see a place, spend a couple of days in a place that we like, and we'll get there a couple of days before the flight. So that's another technique that won't work for somebody who doesn't have the flexibility to add the extra time onto their trip. But if you do have the flexibility, then I often will say, oh, well, let's go to Chicago for a couple of days or DC or New York or wherever the

case may be and do something else related. And then I don't have to worry about it because we're there for a couple of days before the trip even starts. So then you don't need the backup at all. But if things are tight and you've got a valuable award, if you're looking to travel to Europe in the middle of the summer where you're not really going to be able to save that with another business class last minute award necessarily, it can be tough during a peak time. So if you don't make that long haul flight, you're going to be in a situation where you're going to be forced to book a last minute economy award that you didn't really want to fly or an unideal routing or whatever. I mean, then if it's important enough, of course, yeah, I've booked my share of backups before and would continue to do so. And I've booked them for family members, because, you know, if you're dealing with somebody who doesn't travel as often, then you really do want a backup plan just in case something goes wrong. That's not even related to the flight itself, but more so related to the, you know, the traveler themselves not being accustomed to it. So certainly worth it. but okay. So that all out of the way, then

are we going to jump into what happened with your story here? What do you mean? How'd you end up where you got? Well, first let me say why I was willing to take this crazy adventure with this 12 minute layover. I had protected myself in a way. I didn't have an option to protect myself with a backup positioning flight because there just was no other flight to Newark that was early enough to get to my flight and I couldn't leave the night before. So what I did protect myself is I booked a whole nother flight to London altogether. So I was able to book an American Airlines flight that was Detroit to Chicago to London. And for various reasons, I wanted to do the United flight, but the American flight would

have been fine too. So I felt good about either one. The American flight departed or was scheduled to depart 40 minutes after the United flight from Detroit. So it was very lucky because American, as we talked about earlier, has free cancellations. You get canceled right up to departure. And so that was the first thing I did to kind of protect myself. The next thing is I booked that positioning flight to Newark in first class. I was lucky that first class was really cheap and I was lucky I had an expiring United credits. So I was able to fully cover the first class flight with things. One is that I didn't want a chance getting on the plane and not having room for my carry-on bag to go overhead. So I wanted to board first. I just didn't want to take any chance whatsoever. Don't have to gate check that. Yeah. Then stand and wait

for the bag. Yeah. So by being in first class, I knew I'd be able to board first or at least after people who needed assistance. Second and more importantly I knew I'd be able to board first or at least after people who needed assistance. Second and more importantly, I wanted to be able to get off the plane first. So the last thing I wanted is if it was tight and we landed close to the departure of the next one, I didn't want to be stuck behind a whole lot of people slowly getting off the plane. So I literally booked the, you know, the front row of the plane, the aisle, and I was absolutely the first getting off that plane. So that's really smart. There's so many times I've been in that line waiting on, you know, like looking at the clock and, and the fact that the next flight is boarding. I've numerous times I've been in that situation where I've just been waiting to get off the plane and it kills me how long you have to wait sometimes. So that was really smart. A great play there.

Yeah. And the third thing I did was I packed everything into a really tiny carry-on. It's so small that like if it had to go, well, if there was a seat in front of me, there wasn't, but if it had to go like under the seat in front of me, kind of thing, it would fit maybe. But it was sort of extra insurance that if the overhead bins, you know, maybe I got late to the airport and said, what wasn't able to board first, if the overhead bins were tight, I'd still be able to cram it in there. Or if they had small

overhead bins, some of these regional flights have really small overhead bins. So I'd be able to cram it in and it would also make it easier if I had to run from the gate to just pick up the thing instead of rolling it behind me. So that's why I did that. And finally, the last thing I did was I called United. It was lucky and sort of unusual that my positioning flight, it was the same airline as the flight, the main flight I was trying to get to. So because they were the same airline, even though they're booked separately, I was able to call United and say, can you basically marry these two together, that this is one itinerary? And the reason I did that, they can't really do it officially. What they could do is put notes in the itinerary about it.

But the reason I did that is I thought there'd be some hope, and there's no guarantee, but I thought there'd be some hope that if my morning, if my flight to Newark was delayed, that maybe United would be willing to put me on a later flight to London that day. They have a bunch of flights out of Newark. So, you know, the hope is that they could help me. Another hope would be if they were like had closed the boarding doors, but I was still on time. Maybe if I showed them that, you know, Hey, it was United that got me here late. Maybe they'd be willing to reopen the door. So again, those were, those were things. I don't know if, if that one helped at all, but that was

the idea behind it. It wasn't going to hurt you. It wasn't going to hurt you to have that. Exactly. Exactly. So, all right. So here's what happened. So, so I got up 4 a.m. that morning, went to the airport. I thought I had plenty of time, but the screening TSA official. Oh yeah. Go ahead. Sorry. Well, she was, she was so into her job. She was just checking every angle of every single bag, you know. So even though the line wasn't that long, it took a long time to go through screening. But by some miracle, I wasn't pulled over for random screening or anything along those lines. time. I was able to board first and the flight did when we boarded and the pilot said what was happening. They said we were going to be landing 10 minutes early in Newark. So that was really good news. The bad news is we were going to be landing in terminal A and my flight out was terminal C. So that was a bit of a surprise to me because in the weeks leading up to this flight, I had looked at where the same scheduled flight on previous weeks, where it had landed in Newark. And it seemed like it normally landed in Terminal C.

And then the next flight always left from Terminal C. So I thought I'd be good. So learning that I'd be arriving in terminal A was a little scary. To be honest, I learned that the night before, but I was hoping that what I'd learned was wrong until the pilot said that. So that had me sweating because I didn't know, would 10 minutes early be enough? Now I'm talking about a 22-minute layover. Would that be enough to get me across terminals in time? So I talked to the flight attendant during the flight and asked them, how can I go airside? So without having to go through security again, from Terminal A to C, he said, oh, it's real easy.

Go to near gate A28. There's a, you go down an escalator and there are buses that'll take you to the other terminal. Cool. So I do, I get off the plane first. I hurry over to that area. I should have ran. I didn't. And I say I should have ran because a bus just pulled away just as I got there. Yeah. So I got on the next one, had to sit there for five minutes while they were waiting for people to board. Yeah. Sweating away. They finally go. And I get to Terminal C five minutes before 8.30, before the 8.30 cut off. And at that point, I looked at the numbers to see where I was going to and everything. And I could tell it wasn't that far. So I didn't actually run. I just fast walked.

Wow. Wow. Look at you. It was maybe a little too confident because when I got there, they were saying, last call for boarding. So I got in line behind two other people and boarded last call. And so I made it. Well, truth be told, Greg is a fast walker. So I would be confident in his ability to walk to the gate also in that case. But yeah, so wow, last call. I mean, that's cutting it close.

If anything else had gone wrong, it sounds like you wouldn't have made it. Do you think they would have let you through still? Yeah, I don't know. The flight ended up getting delayed for hours, but they had already closed the boarding doors. And so we sat there for hours, but with, I believe the doors closed. So I don't know that they would have let me on. I do think there's a decent chance, but I don't have enough experience with United to know, but I think there's a decent chance they would have put me on the, I think it was 6 p.m. was the next flight out. So I would have spent all day at the Newark airport, but that would have been way better than not flying at all.

Because at that point, my American Airlines alternative flight, I'd already canceled that once I got on board in Detroit. So yeah, it worked out. Yeah, tight. Woo, woo. Living on the edge. So don't do what I did. board in Detroit. So yeah, it worked out. Yeah, tight. Woo, woo. Living on the edge. So don't do what I did, but. No, no. You know, what I try to do, and of course, this is a function of just what exists in

terms of the flights. But what I try to do is when I'm booking a positioning flight, it's normally relatively short distance, maybe Washington DC, about an hour flight from where I am. And so if it's something like that, anyway, I will book my positioning flight to take off after. So my backup flight, I will book one to take off after my main positioning flight is scheduled to land. Because I not only want to make sure I take off, I know you said you'd like to cancel as soon as you sit down on the plane. I like to not have to cancel until I've arrived at the airport that I'm my target airport. So once I've arrived, then I want to

kick because who knows what's going to happen in between. And like, you know, if the maintenance issue, I boarded a plane just this weekend and we got on and all of a sudden all the lights shut off and it turned out one of the engines broke that controls the air conditioning and they thought it was going to be okay. So we sat there forever. And then eventually they said, Oh no, we need an unbroken plane after all. And so we've got to move you over to a different gate and an unbroken plane. So everybody to get off and go to the other gate and wait again to board and all the rest of that. So if I had, if I was in a backup situation there and I canceled it as soon as I sat down, well, then I, you know, I may have canceled it

too soon, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, that's a really good point. And if you're, you know, the, the problem is sometimes your next flight might happen while you're in the air. And so unfortunately in-flight wifi is not always a hundred percent reliable. So you're risking a little bit that way. Yeah. I wouldn't rely on that. And there's so many different factors, of course, you know, obviously it depends on having a flight option that even fits that description, because that's not always going to be the case for everyone. But the bottom line is, if I were faced with a situation of, okay, am I going to spend 200,000 United miles to fly from my home airport and have the itinerary all as one, or I can book a positioning flight for 15,000 miles and get a business class award that only costs me 60,000 more. So I'm going to pay a total of 75,000 miles with this positioning flight.

I'll save the 125 K and book the positioning flight. I'll just use some of these techniques to have a backup plan to save myself 125 K over what, you know, United would charge me to have it all together, so to speak. So I find positioning flights to be worthwhile, but of course there's a cutoff, right? I mean, there becomes a point where you say, okay, well, if it's American Airlines, then the pricing is all dynamic. How much am I going to save with the positioning flight? Is it worth paying a few more miles to make sure that it's all together in one? And those are calculations you kind of have to do on your own. We didn't go over how to do that and make that decision. But I think it probably varies by situation quite a bit in terms of how much hassle you're willing to deal with. I'm booking a family member, a flight to Europe and running

into this where I say, Oh, well, I could book her a cheap spirit flight to Boston and then get a great deal on an award from Boston. Or I could just use a few more American airlines miles and get her a flight that leaves her home airport and not have to mess with, with the potential problems of a positioning flight. So you got to do that math and figure out what's best for you. Okay. Sounds good. All right.

That brings us to this week's question of the week. This week's question of the week came in from someone while I was at the Travel Summit. I had a great time at the Travel Summit in Toronto over the weekend. Enjoyed speaking there and meeting a whole bunch of readers and listeners. I was really surprised at how many of you showed up and came and said hello. So thank you for that. I appreciated that. And I had a really good question of the week come in from somebody live that I didn't know

the answer to. And I said, you know what? I don't know the answer to this off the top of my head. This is going to become this week's question of the week because I know that Greg will be able to answer your question. So Greg, I know he's hoping that you're going to answer this right. So the question, fantastic one, I thought. Are there any certificates like talking the companion certificates that come with credit cards, hotel free night certificates, et cetera, that disappear when you cancel the credit card?

Specifically, he mentioned the Alaska companion certificate. Now, the first thought that came to my mind was hotel free night certificates. And I can answer that part for you very easily. No, the hotel free night certificates, once they're in your account, they're yours. That's it. If you cancel the card, that's fine. So don't worry about it. If you've got a Hilton free night or a Marriott free night or a Hyatt free night, you can cancel the card and you're going to keep that certificate. What I didn't know the answer to is how does this work with certificates like the Alaska companion certificate, the Delta companion certificates, the American Airlines

companion certificate? Do you know about any of those? We're not going to be able to address all like the Alaska Companion Certificate, the Delta Companion Certificates, the American Airlines Companion Certificate? Do you know about any of those? We're not going to be able to address all of the various, you know, the British Airways travel together and the Virgin Atlantic, this and that. We're not going to be able to answer all of them. But which ones do you know that stay in or don't stay in? Delta is the only one I know 100 percent. And that one stays in. That one's, you know, just loaded to your Delta account.

And at that point, it has nothing to do with the credit card. Just like your miles, by the way. We always get people asking us, oh, an agent told me if I cancel my American Airlines card, I'll lose all my miles. It's not true. And it's not true with the Delta miles or the companion certificate once they're in your Delta account. I would expect Alaska also. That's true. What I'm less sure about with American Airlines, you have to call to use these things and having the card might be a necessary piece of that. Yeah. So the American Airlines one, that's actually one I didn't think about before I threw this question out. So I don't know the answer on that one. The Alaska one, I thought

what you're going to say is what I'm not sure about is that the terms of the, so the Alaska companion certificate, if you have an Alaska Airlines visa signature or the business one, I think also you get an annual companion certificate and it used to be, you just got that automatically. If you've applied over the last year or two here, I think then you have to spend $6,000 a year in order to get that companion certificate. And it used to be, you could use whatever payment method you wanted with that companion certificate. So I, years ago, would have said the same thing that Greg said. It just stays in your account because it's something that's in there in your Alaska account. It's not in your credit card account. So you keep it when you cancel the card. And that surely was the way it was for a long time. But what I didn't know now is, well,

nowadays you have to use your Alaska Airlines credit card theoretically to pay for your companion certificate. So if you cancel a card, can you pay for it? And I ran into several data points on Reddit when I tried to do some research on this, where people said that they canceled the card. And when they tried to use that campaign certificate, of course, does stay in your Alaska account. But when they tried to use it, they got an error saying, whoops, an error has occurred because you need to use an Alaska Airlines credit card. So what I don't know for sure beyond a shadow of a doubt is could you use Alaska wallet money still? Like if you have Alaska wallet money in your account, because we know from past experience that that will work to pay for it. You don't get away with not using a credit card. If you've got the Alaska wallet funds, I don't know whether that will work, though,

if you've canceled the card, because like I said, people said that they've run into this error. So I'm far less certain. I think I'm going to say I think you will lose the ability to use that one when you cancel the card. But if any readers have direct experience with that, and particularly with the timeline, if you know how long it is before you're unable to use it, love to hear any more data you have on that. So leave a comment on this wherever you see it or send us an email at mailbag at frequent miler.com because we would love to hear your data points in terms of how that works with the Alaska certificate or the American Airlines certificate also that and I say the American Airlines certificate numerous different American Airlines cards come with a

companion certificate with spend so like the aviator red for instance if you spend $20,000 during a card member year you get a companion certificate where you can bring a companion for 99 bucks plus the taxes. And there's slightly different versions of that concept with other American Airlines cards. So I'd love to hear your data points on those two because I had not considered that. I just initially assumed it all worked like Delta. Even though I haven't had the Delta one before, I knew that the Delta one stays in your account whether you have the credit card or not. And then I got to thinking about it and said, well, I don't actually know that that's

the case for the other airline cards. So that's a resource. That's really interesting. I hadn't really thought through all that before, but I think, yeah. Me either. I thought it was a fascinating question. Yeah. So the short answer is we don't really know except for Delta. Sounds like we suspect Alaska, you probably do need the card. Yeah, yeah. But now the fact that I assumed that probably you'd be in the same boat I was, scratching our heads a little bit on that because it was an interesting question.

So now we need to come up with a post. So I need some reader data points in order to be able to put this post together. So I wanted to put that call out there. So thank you for your help with that. That, I think, though, brings us to the end of this week's episode. And if you've enjoyed this stuff and you'd like to get more of the posts in your email inbox each day or each week, so you can find out once I know the answer to that for all of the various

airline companion certificates, you're going to want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social medias. You can join our frequent miler insiders, Facebook group where you can ask and answer questions like this one and get reader input from lots of other people. So you do all of those things. And again, if you have a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered

for a giant mailbag or a question, you can send it to send it to mailbag at frequent miler.com bye everybody.