Frequent Miler on the Air - Top 10 Tips for Last Minute Award Travel | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep259 | 6-14-24

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Greg and Nick have been consumed with last-minute travel the last week and a half so it's great timing for them to summarize 10 important tips for last-minute award travel. (01:17) - Standing ovation for the annual challenge! (Mailbag) (06:43) - Annual Challenge recap and overview Watch the Stage 1 recap video here: https://youtu.be/bMt_NfuuINI?feature=shared Watch the Stage 2 recap video here: https://youtu.be/gyJPtTZN1EE?feature=shared Watch the Stage 3 recap video here: https://youtu.be/HTmEAicB3dw?feature=shared (34:15) - Curve overview (Card Talk) Find out more here: https://www.curve.com/en-us (37:56) - Hilton SLH integrated testing phase (Award Talk) (40:26) - Preferred Hotels / Choice devaluation (55K to 87K) (Award Talk) (42:34) - Aero plan credit card & elite members status match to iPrefer Titanium (before June 28) (Award Talk) (44:18) - Book Oman Air w/ Flying Blue miles (Award Talk) (44:30) - Book El Al with Virgin points (Award Talk) (44:51) - Points Path adds support for Air Canada & Alaska Airlines (Award Talk) Main Event: Top 10 Tips for Last Minute Award Travel (47:00) - General advice (52:38) - Great awards often open last minute (ex: Lufthansa first) (57:16) - Diversify. Having different types of points and miles helps. (58:28) - Become adept at award search tools. Huge time saver. (1:00:26) - Don’t rely entirely on award search tools. They don’t catch everything (no Virgin Atlantic on a couple, no BA / QR Avios, didn’t see LifeMiles for my redemption, etc) (1:03:41) - Consider keeping stashes in programs you use often. This only applies if you have a lot of points and miles, but it could help avoid a failed transfer. (1:05:27) - Watch out for transfer times (1:08:10) - Get a good VPN. I wonder if some of my problems could have been averted if I’d used one all along. (1:11:22) - Know that Aeroplan’s contact center isn’t 24/7. This can be a big pain when you’re overseas. (1:12:37) - Beware the phantom menace. Tons of Swiss space that isn’t real. (1:17:02) - Have some tricks up your sleeve. This could alternatively be called "persistence pays off". Don’t give up right away. Examples include searching Avianca’s site multiple ways, forcing a stopover with Aeroplan to get a flight to show up, booking a refundable something as a backup, etc. (1:20:10) - How do you go about finding activities while you travel? (Question of the Week)

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, top 10 tips for last minute award travel. Nick and I have been doing a lot of last minute travel lately. And so this is top of mind for us. And so we assembled a list of 10 great tips so that your last minute travel can be as good as possible. The top tips from the top of mind from our travels over the last couple of weeks. Yeah, I think we'll have some good tips in here, some that you've perhaps seen and some that we probably haven't even gotten to discussing really yet in posts or in podcast form. So hopefully you'll get a few good tips out of this. But in the meantime, I want to remind you that you can always check the

show notes for timestamps. So if you want to go back and check out one of those tips again, or you want to jump ahead to a specific tip, you can just expand the description and find the show notes and the timestamps there wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this a thumbs up, a like, subscribe, enable notifications, and go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list and follow us in all the various relevant ways. But now it's time to drag out this week's giant mailbag. All right. Today's giant mail is in response to our team challenge, which for the past week and a half before recording this show, we've been flying all over the world doing our last minute travel challenge that was called Flying by the Seat of Our Points. And Kathy writes in and says her subject line was standing ovation. She says, I'm sure you've heard this a hundred times by now, and I wanted to add my voice to the chorus. Your annual challenges are always awesome, but you really

knocked it out of the park this year. Among the things that really worked, it was so engaging. Between the Instagram stories and video recaps, invitations to comment on the blog posts and the live streams, I felt like I was able to not only follow along but participate. Huge kudos to Carrie and Annie on the social media content. It was exciting to see. Oh, by the way, she mentions Annie. So Annie is Carrie's twin sister, and Annie helped with the Instagram stories that they put together, the videos for Instagram and YouTube. She says, it was exciting to see news stories pop up and watch them soon after they were posted, and also super fun to wake up in the morning on the West Coast to see a whole

bunch had built up so I could catch up like watching an episode of my favorite show. It also ended up being extra informative. I always learn at least a little tidbit or two from watching your challenges. I'll be searching for Alaska Awards via British Airways and adding my loyalty number on Finnair thanks to Tim's tip, but this time it was next level because I found myself searching along with you guys to see what was available, and then it was even more fun to see what you ended up booking. Another thing I felt really worked was the divergence slash convergence combo. It brought together the best parts of past challenges. It was cool to see the competitive solo parts

and have three different examples of booking challenges. And then when you were all in the same spot, the videos and live streams were three times as fun, largely because it was obvious that you guys were having a blast together. And that's true, by the way. I feel pretty confident Greg is still having random bursts of spontaneous giggles

when he catches himself thinking of the fish torture chamber slash actually spa. So just as an aside, which he's talking about there in case you missed it, I brought these guys. I was tasked with bringing the guys to something relaxing in Kuala Lumpur. And so I brought them to a fish spa, the cute fish spa, to relax by putting our feet into water with piranha fish that eat. They're not really piranhas, but they eat the dead skin off your feet. And it tickled so much that I was just giggling hysterically. And when I was trying to retell the story on our live stream, I couldn't help but laugh. I was laughing so hard. I couldn't

tell the story. And if you're picturing those little tiny fish that you've probably seen at those before, let me just hop in and tell you, these were not those little tiny fish. These were the biggest fish I have ever seen at one of these fish spas. So they were sizable for a fish spa. Just putting that much out there. I mean, bigger than an average adult's hand, these fish. And so, yeah, you're not talking little, cute little fish at all,

even though it was called cute fish spa. There's nothing cute about those fish. That's absolutely true. Anyway, back to the mailbag. She says, the whole concept was so well-conceived and I loved all the elements that were part of the game so that it wasn't just the flights and hotels now i'm wondering if it could be applied to the long game type of travel booking like could you assign each other itineraries way in advance and keep a diary post where you show how you can find

something that's good enough to start with then update it when you find better options and then we see how it all shakes out i think that's a great idea, Kathy. I know Nick does too. And for everyone listening, if you have ideas for future challenges, I wrote a post where I invited people to post in the comments your ideas, and we've already gotten some good ones. And I'm sure you have better ones. So let us know through the comments of that post. We'll link to it in the show notes. And then finally, Kathy wraps up with, for now, I hope you're all enjoying some well-deserved rest, bonus points all around. So thank you. Thank you very much, Kathy. Great, great letter. You know, I love that people enjoyed this and I love hearing the feedback from Kathy because I know that she's been reading for a long time. So it means a lot to hear, you know, that she's enjoyed this one,

particularly. And we heard a lot of positive feedback on this challenge. So that's great. I mean, we, we have a great time doing these challenges. And, and I can't tell you how much time we spent discussing different ideas about what to do for a challenge. And, you know, to then eventually settle on one and find that it turns out to be something people really enjoy is a lot of fun for us. I think beyond just the challenge itself, it's enjoyable that people enjoyed it too with us. So thank you. Yeah, we did have a good time and no, I'm not getting enough rest yet. For the record, we, we, uh, Nick and I both got home a Wednesday night and we're recording this

Thursday morning. I slept really well last night. I don't know about you, Nick. Well, I got home pretty late and the kids woke me up at six o'clock. So I yeah, which was, you know, it was good. It was good to see them. So yeah, not enough sleep yet, although I have no excuse because I did fly home pretty comfortably. So I did get some sleep on the planes anyway.

So all right, that's that's good. That's great feedback. Let's move forward though and discuss the challenge just a little bit more because flying by the seat of our points is now done. So we should kind of recap what it was, what we did and, you know, maybe a couple of highlights, right? Yeah, absolutely. So at a high level, well, first of all, just to say our team does a challenge like this

of some sort every year, once a year. And each year we've been coming up with new challenges to keep things interesting. And this year it was a last-minute travel challenge. We called it Flying by the Seat of Our Points. And the idea was that there were three stages. The first stage, we all had to converge to a mysterious destination. We were told 48 hours in advance and we were told, all right, everybody has to be in LA no later than 6 p.m. on Wednesday. And there was sort of a bonus incentive to get there, to get to LAX airport as soon, by 3 p.m. or later, but so as close to 3 p.m. as possible without going under.

And so that was a fun element that Stephen and Kerry, the judges and game masters, created for that day. Then that night, we were told the international divergence location. So stage two was us all flying to different places. I got assigned Croatia. Tim got assigned Switzerland and Nick got assigned Morocco. So everybody agreed Nick got the toughest assignment there. Well, tough just because there are fewer flight options to get in and out. And, you know, to be honest, I don't think that it's necessarily a difficult destination to get to,

but on a time constraint and, you know, given the rules of the game, so to speak, it was more challenging. Had I started in New York, like as things stood, had I just started in New York,

it would have been, yeah, it would have been a totally different ball game in the end. But, you know, that's so, yes, it was more challenging in this specific circumstance, but not necessarily impossible either. Right, right. So we all made it to our respective divergence locations and we had many challenges to do at each location. I don't think

I'm going to go into details. Please see our posts and recaps about that. And then our final destination that we were told was Kuala Lumpur. So we had then what, 48 hours or something to get to Kuala Lumpur from our intermediate destinations, and we all met up there. So let me first say, you're not going to get a good feel for this challenge from what we're saying today, but where you can get a good feel from it is on YouTube, because Carrie's twin sister, Annie, made these video recaps of each stage of our contest and they're posted on YouTube. We will put links in the show notes to those. So if you missed the action as it was going along or you just want sort of to recap and see it all again, that's a great place to start.

Very good. Yeah. All right. So final score is in the end. So we had points. There were a bunch of points to earn for various stuff. And like greg said you can find more about the details in the post that will link in the show notes but at the end of the day final scores were that i had 27 points 27 whole points uh which was slightly behind uh greg's 36 points in second place so So I was nine points behind. And Greg was very, very close at 36 points to Tim,

who was the champion of the 2024 Flying by the Seat of Our Points Challenge. Tim, with 37 points, edged Greg out by a point. Yeah. So, Tim, this was his first time doing a challenge as a solo competitor, and he takes away the crown. So great job, Tim. Congratulations. Hats off to Tim. Yeah. Yeah. So now we're going to talk about some, um, just some notable award bookings that we

made during the trip. Uh, why don't you, uh, well, actually, yeah. Why don't you kick it off, Nick? All right. So, uh, Tim actually kicked things off with an 11 K award. So he used 11,000 Avios, British Airways Avios, I believe, to fly from Seattle to Santa Barbara. And that was particularly notable because he was able to add his Alaska Airlines frequent flyer number to the reservation in order to take advantage of his Alaska Airlines benefits. So he was flying on Alaska Airlines, but used British Airways Avios to book it. And because he's got 100K status, I guess, with Alaska, he was able to book, I think, right into getting like a premium select seat or whatever that may be. And eventually got upgraded as the short version of the story to the first class seat that

he really wanted to have, thanks to putting his Alaska Airlines frequent flyer number on it. Now, that's not straightforward because when you're in the booking process at British Airways anyway, you can't do it. And I don't think you can change it on the Alaska Airlines website. But Finnair, if you go to the Finnair website and pop in the confirmation code, you are able to switch the frequent flyer number. And that's a trick, by the way, that works with some other airline combinations too, not the Finnair website specifically, but using some of the intermediary, other alliance carriers. Different ones are operated on different reservation systems. So whether or not that's going to work,

it's going to depend on which reservation system the specific airline you're using is using and whether or not you get the right confirmation code for that. But there are times when I've been able to do that kind of thing with other airlines also. So that was a great trick. Yeah. And we have a post about how to select seats on an airline when you book with one program but fly the other. And so that's related. I mean, by looking at that post, you'll see how to get the code and everything you need and some tricks for doing that.

I should mention, too, that for putting the right frequent flyer number on a reservation, another way to do it is often to direct message the airline you're flying and ask them if they can put your number onto that reservation and they often will do it that way. So the reason he booked with British Airways, obviously I should mention too, is it was a lot cheaper, far fewer points to book it that way than through Alaska or AA miles. Okay, next one that's notable is I flew from Detroit to San Francisco. I could have done LA too, but I did San Francisco for another reason. I flew United First Class through Houston to California. And what's notable about

all that is that I paid only 15,000 Turkish miles. This was my first time using Turkish miles and smiles. And so I transferred points from Citibank to Turkish. I transferred 15,000 points. The transfer was instant, luckily, because I was booking on Tuesday afternoon and the flight was later Tuesday afternoon. So it was a bit hectic, but it worked. I got it done. And there happened to be, at the time, a 50% transfer bonus from Citi to Turkish, but it didn't take place immediately. So I had to transfer for the full 15,000, but I'll be getting 7,500 Turkish miles into my account very soon in the next few days, if I remember the dates right on that. So that was just a great deal. I also, because I have

the rewards plus card with Citi also got uh 1500 city bank points back um from doing that transfer and overall i was just excited i finally got to to do the turkish welcome to the dark side nick's been talking about forever yeah and now you're gonna have some turkish miles in your account so you're gonna have to use them again at some point here so uh that's the downside good luck yeah well you know Well, you know, but it's a tough deal to beat though, really at 15 K for a domestic business class ticket. That was a great redemption there. So well done. And you were able to book that on the Turkish Airlines website, by the way. Sorry, what?

Were you able to book that on the Turkish Airlines website? Did you have to call or? Yeah, no, I booked it on the website. The first time through, I realized that the number they had on my profile, the phone number they had wasn't the one I wanted them to have. So I tried changing it in the checkout process and it all errored out. And then I went through to try to book it again. I thought, well, I'll try again, see what happens. And I couldn't find that award space anymore.

And finally, and I was like, I was sweating like crazy. And finally, I realized that probably that first time they were still holding the award space from the first time when it aired out. So I waited about 20 minutes and then it showed up again, the award space. This time I didn't change the phone number and I was able to book it successfully. So just a little tip, if checking out on the Turkish website, make sure your profile is all up to date before you do anything because you definitely don't want to make any changes during checkout. That's a good safety tip for, I think probably more than just Turkish too, because I think Avianca Life Miles is going to be a similar story. If you're trying to change details, you're just going to increase the chances of having

trouble checking out. So you want to have everything up to date. Okay. So that was that one. Let's see. For me, I used 22,500 World of Hyatt points in stage one there for the... Well, actually, it's stage two, I suppose. Stage two. For the Riyadh C1 in Marrakesh, Morocco. Now, this was a Mr. and Mrs. Smith property. So using Hyatt points wasn't a particularly good redemption, if that were the total story. But I had gotten targeted for a promotion to get 20% of my points back on redemptions for 90 days. And I had registered for that just a couple of days before the trip kicked off. So I'm getting 20% back. So you know, 5,000 4500 miles, I guess back from from that redemption. So 4500 points rather back in that redemption. So it'll be a net 18,000 points, which was somewhere around one and a half cents per point, basically, which is not great for

Hyatt points. But also it was respectable enough for me to try it out, particularly because I wanted to check off Mr. and Mrs. Smith from the brand explorer and see what it's all about. Is this a good substitute for losing SLH? Now, of course, one individual property in a collection of boutique properties is not going to be representative of the overall selection of Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties. But I got to be honest, I was pretty disappointed. It wasn't really a great stay. It was I mean, the room itself was fine. The place was pretty enough. But service wasn't particularly good. In fact, I might even say it was kind of not good. And, and overall, not much really impressed me. There were a number of things that I thought were not up to par with what I would expect from a boutique luxury brand. So

I wouldn't stay there again. Personally, I would try someplace else. There were less expensive and more expensive Mr. and Mrs. Smith properties in Marrakesh. So I would try one of the other ones out next time. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And why don't you go ahead and talk about also your American Airlines booking? Yeah. So the other thing I wanted to mention is how I kind of got in the direction anyway of Marrakesh. I had some trouble, as Greg mentioned, kind of getting all the way to Morocco. But I knew that if I could get to Europe, that would be half the battle. So I had been looking for awards to anywhere in Europe.

And what I ended up stumbling upon was flying from Dallas to Paris to Madrid, priced at 57,500 American Airlines miles in business class. Now that's the typical American Airlines partner award price anyway, for business class, for their own flights, it's not always the case. And this was flying American Airlines from Dallas to Paris. So the long haul was an American Airlines flight. And if you only looked up Dallas to Paris. So the long haul was an American Airlines flight. And if you only looked up Dallas to Paris, then it priced at like 150,000 miles one way for that nonstop. Now, we've long known that adding an American Airlines connector within the United States can sometimes change the price. Like if you were flying, I don't know, Indianapolis to

Dallas to Paris, it might price lower. What I didn't necessarily know, wasn't shocked to find out, though, is that in this case, adding an Iberia connection on the other end actually dropped the price significantly. So like I said, Dallas to Paris alone was about 150,000 American Airlines miles. But Dallas to Paris, along with Paris to Madrid on Iberia, that dropped the price by almost 100,000 miles to 57,500 miles one way. So I didn't end up making that last flight from Paris to Madrid. So I flew in the end Paris to Marrakesh, but it was good to know that that would drop the price significantly. Well, yeah. So adding on that leg, even if you didn't intend to fly it,

you originally intended to, but if you didn't intend to still, obviously makes it a great deal. It sounds like adding that little partner award, that little segment forced it onto the partner award chart, perhaps. Perhaps that's what it was. Which is great either way. And just as a side note, we see that all the time with Flying Blue as well, where adding segments to somewhere else can drastically reduce the price of what otherwise would be a nonstop award. And so it's just worth trying that. And in that case, it's almost like you've got to flail around, just try a lot of different destinations to see what drops the price the most. It truly is. Yeah. And that's almost exactly what I was doing is flailing around to find whatever I could that would go to a city in Europe that would have... Because Madrid had flights to Marrakesh. That's why Madrid was on my radar in the first place. But now, knowing what I know now, Madrid would be on my radar because I would know that there's a partner flight going there. I would probably also try Helsinki because Finnair is another American Airlines partner in Europe. And then of course, in other parts of the world, I would try other things like that. Right. So we just inadvertently gave away a secret tip of award

booking professionals, flail around. Flail around. That's your secret tip of the day. But I mean, seriously, it's non-int intuitive, but often looking for destinations beyond where you intend to go does yield good results. And case, One World Alliance and show me from my starting point, wherever that is, to Europe in general, for example, and just see which ones go through the city you want to go to and are cheapest. And then that might be a good place to start looking at awards as well. Okay, back to some of the notable awards in our trip. Tim flew from Seattle. So he did a positioning flight from LA back to Seattle, his home airport, in order to fly Lufthansa business class to Frankfurt. And his original booking was 70,000 points to go from Seattle to Frankfurt to Zurich. He got out of the airport at Frankfurt to take a train to Switzerland, not because there was

anything wrong with his flight to Zurich, but because he wanted to make it a better trip. And his train ride was cheap and he was able to stop in Basel. Is that how you say it? Switzerland. So he got extra sightseeing in there as well. So that was a good deal. But I'm bringing up this not because it's an amazing booking or anything, but because what his intention to do, what he really wanted to do

is take advantage of the fact that Air Canada allows you to add a stopover for only 5,000 additional miles. And he was betting that our third location was going to be somewhere in Southeast Asia. So what he intended to do was book a flight to Zurich, have the stopover for two days, and then fly onward to Bangkok for only about 22,000 total miles more than what he paid. And so the idea was, oh, and that's all on business class. So the idea was that he'd pay a bit more for stage two flights, but then essentially have

already paid for stage three flights. And as it turned out, Kuala Lumpur is very, very close to Bangkok. There are very cheap flights between the two. So he could have literally just paid an extra hundred bucks to get from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur if that had worked out. But he couldn't get Air Canada aeroplan to actually ticket it, even though all the ward space was there. So he ended up out of frustration just going out and booking to Zurich. Yeah. Yeah. So that was an interesting one. And actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if that was related to Yeah, so both Tim and I ended up flying to Bangkok, actually to get to Kuala Lumpur. So that was our route to get there. And both of us ran into troubles actually

getting the flights from Europe to Bangkok booked. So that's kind of funny. They were on different airlines and different routes, but both had some difficulty there, but it was a great idea because for 22,500 more miles, he could have had a really long, I mean, that's you're up to Bangkok. It's like a 10 or 11 hour flight. So that's a really long business class leg to add on for not very much more. Yeah. Yeah. Great idea. All right. Um, go ahead. The next award I want to, yeah. Next one I want to point out is flying from Croatia to Kuala Lumpur. I was able to book for 75,000 Qatar avios. I was able to fly business class on Qatar to Doha, and then that arrived late at night. I stayed at a Hyatt Regency, a very, very nice near the airport for 5,000 points only. And then flew onward on Malaysia Airlines business class. They have a new, well, new to them, A350, which is a very nice modern jet that flew Doha to Kuala Lumpur. And that was so cool for two

reasons. So, I mean, 75,000 points is not, I mean, it's a good redemption. It's not like amazing. Like no one would be like, wow, you got it for only 75,000. But the quality of this trip was outstanding. I've flown Qatar now a number of times, and this was probably the number one in terms of service level and catering. So even though it was only about a six-hour flight and it wasn't Q Suites or anything like Q Suites, there were only about four of us in business class, and there were two dedicated and one part-time flight attendants in first class. So we each had a lot of attention, and so the service was spectacular. And the food offerings, I got lobster thermidor, and it was great.

It was delicious. The dessert they brought out was like a masterpiece, both artwork and flavor. So that flight was one of my favorites. Well, I think the favorite flight of the whole trip for sure. And then Malaysia Airlines was fantastic too. I would be raving about their service if it wasn't for having just flown the Qatar one. Like it was great service, but Qatar, yeah, it was even better. The food was delicious. It was true Malaysian food. So I got my first taste of Malaysian food on that flight and the seats and everything were very, very nice. So that was a terrific trip.

Yeah, that's a great redemption. I had also looked at using 75,000 American Airlines miles for a similar itinerary of some sort from Europe to Kuala Lumpur because I wasn't getting much from, well, actually also from Morocco, but just timing wise, I couldn't make them fit together to reach Kuala Lumpur in time. But that's definitely, you said it wasn't a price that would amaze and I understand why you said that, but it's also one you know, you said it wasn't a price that would amaze and I understand why you said that, but it's also one of the better values. I mean, there aren't very many ways to get between Europe and Asia for a much better price. So it's certainly a, I think a pretty solid value just. Yeah. Yeah. I was very, I was definitely very happy with it. I just,

you know, I just, I just think we, you know, we don't look at a 75,000 point price and be overwhelmed by that. It's about anywhere in the world. But the value for what I got, the kind of flights I got, one-stop itinerary, point-to-point, it was all really ideal. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you guys did really well also in Kuala Lumpur when she got there in terms of lodging, right? We did. So we were tasked with staying somewhere close to the, what are the towers called again?

Petronas Towers. Petronas Towers. And there happened to be a Mandarin Oriental Hotel that was steps away from the towers. And it was available through Fine Hotels and Resorts for just a bit over $200, so in the neighborhood of $230. And because Tim and I both have platinum cards and still had an available $200 credit for booking through Fine Hotels and Resorts, we each independently booked this hotel, paid with our platinum cards in order to get $200 back. So our net cost is essentially around $30 for it.

We each got $100 property credit. We each got room upgrades and early check-in. We checked in, I don't know, around noon or something. And late checkout, which we fully took advantage of. They gave us all kinds of like little welcome gifts, including these mysterious eye pillows. We're not sure how to rest our eyes on and chocolates and drink vouchers for any cocktails at the bars and things like that. So we had a fantastic stay there. Yeah, it was a great place. It was a beautiful looking property too.

You know, it was what you might envision for a Mandarin Oriental. I hadn't actually stayed at one before. Well, I still haven't because I didn't stay there along with you guys, but it's not mind-blowing the way I've read about some experiences at Mandarin Oriental hotels. I've stayed at a lot of really nice hotels, and this seems up there, but not amazingly better or anything. Until one of the experiences that I thought was really notable was the valet that is waiting by the taxis to help people with their bags. When Tim and I came back in a taxi one time, he greeted us. He said, hello, Mr. Tim. Hello, Mr. Greg. And I have no idea how he remembered our names. We did see him when we first checked in, but wow, that was really impressive. So they do a very good job there.

Yeah, very good. Very good. Excellent. Well, speaking of excellent service, I had some great service on my way home. This was not part of the challenge. Our challenge ended in Kuala Lumpur, but I was still challenged with getting back home. So and I certainly wanted to do it as comfortably as possible, especially after a busy week of travel. So I booked Japan Airlines first class for the way home, which was pretty phenomenal. And in fact, I ended up with two separate redemptions,

kind of a long story as to why. But so I ended up spending more miles than I would have needed to had I found all of this at one time. But I booked for 40,000 American Airlines miles from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok on Malaysia Airlines. But then Bangkok to Tokyo was Japan Airlines first class. So that was a 40,000 point redemption there with a nice, decently long seven hour shower first class flight on Japan Airlines. But the really special one was from Tokyo to Chicago and then onward to New York on Japan Airlines. So Tokyo to Chicago was on Japan Airlines in first class for 80,000 American Airlines miles and like 50 or 60 bucks. That was a great, great redemption for first class.

American would charge 60,000 in business class. So it's only 20,000 miles more for first class. And I would say that it's worth spending the extra 20,000 miles for Japan Airlines first class. So it's only 20,000 miles more for first class. And I would say that it's worth spending the extra 20,000 miles for first class. So it was a pretty phenomenal experience. There were only two of us in first class. And I think there were at least four attendants. So service was on top of everything. They were always watching and paying attention. I had a separate seat that was my bed versus the seat that was for dining and, you know, getting my work done. And, and they serve champagne on

that flight that the salon 2013 goes for like $1,200 a bottle or more, I think if you're able to, to find it somewhere. So it's a pretty incredible little treat to have on, uh, on board on the flight. Could you tell? So when you taste it, could you tell that it was like way better? It was very smooth. So champagne, it depends. I like champagne, and I do find that better champagne in general, or I guess higher-end champagne, tastes significantly different to me.

So yeah, I noticed the difference in taste. What I noticed in this one is usually with champagne, I can do like a glass, maybe a second glass, but I don't usually enjoy the flavor enough to keep going beyond that. This was very smooth. So I extended beyond two glasses on this one, you know, because there were only so many opportunities. Good for you. You had to get your money's worth. Right. Well, right. Right. Right.

Exactly. I'd say I got my 80,000 miles worth of champagne. So that was nice. And food, of course, was fantastic. Like I said, service was very good. And actually, another thing that I hadn't known about Japan Airlines first class is that they have they have some sort of alcohol on board that you can purchase from duty-free that apparently is very difficult to find. It's called, I think, Mori Itso and Shochu or something like that. I guess it's a, and I probably mispronounced that, so somebody will correct me,

but it's a distilled beverage that is apparently made from sweet potatoes. And apparently this stuff is available to Japan Airlines first and business class passengers, but that's basically it. So on board, it's like $20 for this bottle. But I guess if you can actually find a bottle somewhere in Japan, it's like 120 or 150 bucks. And getting it outside of Japan is like, I think impossible to do. So so so I ended up buying one, the flight attendant kind of like talked to me, she's like, Oh, we have this on board. And she showed me the page before we even took off. And she said, So if you want a bottle, I'll save a bottle for you. And I was like, duty free alcohol, I don't usually buy anything out of the duty free, right. But I googled it. And I came across the flyer talk thread. And I read people

talking about it. And I was like, Oh, this is actually something like this is something that people get excited about and hope to be able to buy. And it's usually sold out by about midway through the year. So apparently I was lucky that they still had it at this point of the year because usually it's gone by now. Oh, sweet. Well, I can't wait till you have me over to enjoy that. Okay. Next up, card talk. Today's card talk is about the curve card. The curve card is dead. The curve card was originally sort of a point collector's dream. The idea was that you have this one card and you connect all your credit cards to it. And you just use this one card anywhere you're paying with a credit card. And the idea was behind the scenes, you could route it to whichever card would earn the most points for that transaction.

And it kind of worked that way. But in the U.S., they never got support for Visa cards or for American Express cards. So you were stuck with just MasterCards and Discover. And then the Built card, which is a master card, stopped giving points for purchases that went through curves. So you had another thing going on. And this was also forever in beta testing, and it never worked 100% of the time. So it was kind of a pain in the butt to use. Anyway, it's dead. They sent out emails to people saying, your cardholder agreement with Hatch Bank, which I guess is the underlying bank, will be terminated on July 8th, 2024. And effective June 7th, your credit limit will be reduced to $100.

And by the way, I never got this email, but I checked my account and my credit limit was reduced to $100. So I assume I am not immune to this shutting down. Now, the somewhat notable thing is they're pretending or I'm sorry, they're saying that Curve is not really dead, that there's something new coming and we can join the wait list for the new Curve wallet. They don't say what the Curve wallet is and the Curve card. So what they say is that they're going to be coming out with these with a new bank partner, so not Hatch Bank. And if you want to join a waiting list for that, they promise extra goodies

as a big thank you. So if you want to join the waiting list, you could go to curve.com forward slash en-us. So they're closing down your card account. They're like, but hey, we're going to come out with a new card. And if you want to apply for that one that may or may not last, then we'll give you lots of extra goodies. Yeah, extra goodies. Well, who doesn't want extra goodies? I mean, I like my extra goodies as much as anybody.

So we'll see. We'll see what happens with that. But that's a bummer. Bummer to see that, you know, it had such promise, it seemed from the beginning, or at least it was exciting to us whether or not it actually had promise from a logical standpoint. I don't know. Right.

The main thing for me is I've been using it as a way to juggle multiple city custom cash cards. Each custom cash card earns $500 each billing cycle on the category you spend most up to $500 max. So what I've been doing is having all of my Curve charges go to one custom cash card. And then when I see I've charged more than $500, Curve has this neat thing where go back in time, you can actually move the charges to another card. So I'd move those extra charges above $500 to another custom cash card and so on. It was a great, very easy way to juggle that $500 limit on 5x spending with the custom cash card.

But now I'll have to find a different way to do that. There you go. Unfortunately, that will be the case for those people who are hanging on to a curve card, because I'm sure several folks out there who've been hanging on to a curve card have been using it in that sort of way. And so that's a bummer. See that go. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Let's jump into this week's award talk. We've got quite a few things for award talk, and we haven't even made it to the main event yet. So let's get through award talk here. First up, Hilton is finally integrating SLH, or at least on a testing basis, right? award talk and we haven't even made it to the main event yet. So let's get through award talk here. First up, Hilton is finally integrating SLH, or at least on a testing basis, right? Yeah. So they announced a testing phase where they introduced three small luxury hotels of

the world properties. And at the time of recording, they're not actually available for booking yet, but they should be any time. The good news in a way is that each of these three, especially two of them, there's two in Spain and one in England. The two in Spain are very, very cash expensive. So when I look up like Google just hotels to see how expensive they are, we're talking often well over $1,000 a night. And the reason that's good news is those of us who have Hilton free night certificates, we should be able to, if we can find award space at these hotels, we should be able to use our free nights. And so that could guarantee great value for our free night certificates. So that's really good. They've also officially announced what benefits you get

as a Hilton member at these hotels. I'm just going to mention a few. As a general member with no status at all, you get some benefits like late checkout, bottle of water per stay, and no resort fees on reward stays, which is a guarantee of all Hilton bookable properties with points. Silver status adds the fifth night free benefit and gold status adds complimentary breakfast for two guests, space available upgrades, and diamond, let's see, is there anything additional over gold? Not really. So if you're paying cash for these through hilton you get uh more and more bonus points depending on your status level but

that's that's true in general so anyway uh pretty good i mean that that's what it's true we were told these things before about like the complimentary breakfast but uh that's good news to see it in writing good news to see in writing that you get the free breakfast and also the late checkout. I mean, nice to be able to get that too. That's for even members that don't have any status at all, get the late checkout. So that's kind of nice. Hopefully that'll work out to be pretty good. If we can find availability on everything, then hopefully we'll be reporting more on that soon. Right. So that's SLH, Small Luxury Hotels of the World. And let's talk about a similar program where there's not so good news, which is Preferred Hotels,

which as you probably know, you can book Preferred Hotels using your choice privileges points. And until very recently, the top price for these Prefer hotels with choice points was 55,000 points per night. But overnight, recently, that jumped up to a top price of 87,000 points per night. So we have a bit of a devaluation in that. I will say that I had a chance to dig in a little bit, and I did find some good news in this. So, for example, Lisbon, there are two properties that offer very, very good value with your choice points. They went up, but only by a couple thousand points per night per property. So, you know, that was good news. Another good news is that some of the properties that never seem to have any nights available to book with points, some, not all, now are showing availability.

So maybe at these higher prices, they are now willing to open space up. So that's good news. The other good news, and I don't know how long it'll last, but at least one hotel that I looked at that had jumped up to 87,000 points in the search results. When I click through to the booking screen, to where you have the booking calendar, it still showed 55,000 and let me select. And I didn't go all the way to finish booking, but it looks like they didn't do all their homework and get it all in. So this is definitely not true for all of them, by the way. I checked some others that when I clicked through, it did say the 87,000 points. But it's worth checking. Don't be deterred at that first results screen where it says what the price is. Maybe advertise at a higher level than is actually implemented.

That's interesting. Very good. Good to know. And so it's worth checking into. All right. Well, that's bad news, but as good of a spin on it as we could get, I guess, in terms of the bright side, looking on the bright side of it anyway, whatever bright side there may be. Speaking of bright side, though, there is some bright side out there for people who want to have status with preferred hotels, right? So if you have an Aeroplan credit card or you're an Aeroplan Elite member, you can status match to I prefer titanium as long as you do it before June 28th. Now, you have to have, again, an Aeroplan credit card or Aeroplan Elite status. And if you do, then you should have received by now, I think, an email with a link to register for this status match again by june 28th to get i prefer titanium status and i prefer titanium it's going to give you more bonus points early check-in late checkout a welcome

amenity which can be pretty good in some places i guess a food and beverage voucher some sort of digital anniversary gift whatever that may be and space available room upgrades is it worth getting i preferred titanium status, Greg? Is this a big deal? I'm not sure I would say it's a big deal, but getting the early check-in, late check-out, welcome in, and all that could certainly make your stay more enjoyable. And I will point out that if you book through Choice, if you book a preferred hotel through Choice, you can connect your I Prefer account to it. In fact, by using the same email address in both systems, when I booked a couple of them,

I got an email saying, it looks like you are booked at this preferred hotel. Click through to basically link it to your I Prefer account. And so that's great. They make it very easy to link them up. And so you should then get your status benefits for your stay, even though you paid with choice points. So that's, that's great. Excellent. Very good. All right. A couple other things to mention here. You can now book Oman air flights with your Air France KLM flying blue miles. So that'll be appealing potentially anywhere worth hunting around for opportunities to use them. And also on the same by the same token, you can now book LL flights with Virgin points or you will be able to soon.

I think anyway, we'll have more about both of those things coming on the blog. We've of course been traveling and on the road quite a bit. So these are bits of award news that you'll find more detail about on the blog very soon. Yep. And finally, in award talk, PointsPath is the plugin that plugs into your browser to supplement Google Flights. And I really like that. I use Google Flights all the time. And what PointsPath does is it shows you the point prices for the same flights that come up in your search results, because Google Flights only shows you the cash prices. So now you can see the point prices as well. And they've been slowly adding additional airline loyalty programs to their program. So recently they added Air Canada and Alaska. And what's notable about this is you might say, well, I so rarely fly Alaska or so

rarely fly Air Canada, that doesn't matter. But it does matter because they're adding support for those loyalty programs, not just the flying the airline itself. So you could be searching for a reward to fly across Europe or something. And Air Canada might have the best partner award pricing for a flight you're looking at. So you'll see how much it would cost in Air Canada aeroplane points to fly that flight across Europe. And of course, Aeroplan points transfer from a bunch of transferable points programs. So you could get those points pretty easily. Alaska also is transferable from BILT. So both of those are great additions.

Yeah, awesome. That's very good news. PointsPath was instrumental in my searches in order to get to Los Angeles and stage one of our flying by the seat of our points competition. It was really, really helpful to be able to see flight point prices alongside cash prices. And I often do look up cash prices and kind of cross reference, but being able to do it at once with a single search is nice. So actually, I fell in love with Points Path just over this last week and a half.

So that's awesome to me that they've added some other useful programs. But OK. Absolutely. I think that wraps up our award talk then. And I think that means it's time for this week's main event. It's about time. Main event. Top 10 tips for last-minute award travel.

We're going to start with some general advice. So tip one is just several pieces of general advice. Backpack, for example, or your personal carry-on, your personal item that you'll bring onto the airplane for free when flying. And keep it stocked with things you're going to need when you're traveling. Just keep it stocked all the time. Things like your phone and laptop chargers. Things like a universal adapter for when traveling internationally. Your passport, any drugs you use regularly, like ibuprofen, thumbs. Not recreational drugs.

Okay. All right. You scared me there, Greg. Yes. Okay. That you may need. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. The drugs you could buy at CVS, not the drugs that you can buy on the street corner. Tim brings Cipro with him in case he gets food poisoning and things like that. Bring, if you have a global entry card, it's rare, but sometimes it's actually useful to have that in physical form with you. Bring a water bottle so you can carry water around, sunglasses. I bring a sunscreen stick, a little tiny stick, so that's always available if I need it. I also bring a little tiny raincoat that rolls up and fits in my backpack. That comes in handy all the time. And I recommend getting a little towel. I have this microfiber towel. I mean,

it's not that big. It unwraps pretty big. It's not that small. Sorry. It unwraps pretty big it rolled off onto my pants and my backpack. I whipped out the towel to wipe things up really quickly. Just as a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy says how essential a towel is, I agree with that. Very good. Very good. I don't get the hitchhiker's guide, of course, reference, but I'm sure that it's one that those who have know i haven't and i don't travel with my hitchhiker's guide but some okay i want to do that but it may come in a similar similar general advice is to keep a toiletry bag always stocked and ready to go so that you're not like flailing around before a trip trying to you know remember

you know oh i need this or that or the other toiletry item. You know, I keep like duplicate, like, uh, razors, you know, razor blades. I mean, in with my, um, toiletry kit, I keep a, uh, separate thing of deodorant and hair gel, whatever I need. I keep, you know, I have, I have one set that's at home in the bathroom all the time, and then another set that's always in my toiletry bag so that I'm always ready to go. Finally, for general advice, if you're doing last-minute travel, you think you're going to be varying things up, only do carry-on bags. You don't want to check your luggage if you're going to be doing last minute travel. If things go wrong and you've checked your luggage, then things are going to go very, very wrong. Yeah. Well, and it's just going to slow you down. That's definitely an issue with

it. I had a lot of tight connections or situations where a flight was delayed and where I barely made it or even some where I didn't, of course. But certainly if there was a checked bag involved, it would have greatly reduced my chances of making it from point A to point B along the way. So it was very useful for me not to travel with a checked bag. Of course, this is great advice for last minute travel, but advice that my family doesn't ever follow. We always travel with checked bags when I travel with my family. So I get that that's not practical for everybody. It's a, yeah. When traveling with kids, especially you've got so much stuff that it can be like nearly impossible. Yeah. I'm pretty sure not even my wife would ever do carry on only just, it was just the two of us. Yeah. I don't, I don't think so. I don't think we're ever going carry on only in this family. But it would be nice. It certainly is helpful. It makes you really breeze through the airport. And in fact, actually, along those lines, I was really surprised at the number of times that I was able to check in entirely online, even for international trips. My past experience had always been that I was going to

have to go to the counter to show my passport anyway. But on this trip, there were quite a few flights that I checked into online where I did end up showing a passport to somebody at the gate, but I did not need to do that in order to pass through security and get to my gate. So that was actually a useful thing. So again, traveling carry-on only meant I didn't have to stand in a line to drop off a bag. So that was nice. Right, right, right. And yeah, I had the same experience on our last minute travel challenge.

And it was also like, it was kind of a bizarre feeling to, because we were booking travel last minute, to book a flight and immediately check in, like write them because we were often booking flights within 24 hours of actually flying it. And just felt very surreal from day to day on that challenge. Agreed. Agreed. All right. So on award travel, on the award travel front in general, we've got a whole bunch of different things. So first of all, great awards often open up at the last minute. And so if you're able to travel at the last minute, or if you're able to book things in a refundable way, so that you can change plans at the last minute, lots of great awards show up in the couple of days before travel. saw tons of Lufthansa First availability for the way home. There were a number of different opportunities. And in fact, I could have flown Lufthansa First. I decided not to, in part because sometimes they open up four or five, six seats in Lufthansa First. It's amazing some of the

availability that I saw. So there's a chance that I will do that with my family one day by booking some refundable award and then switching to Lufthansa First Class at the last minute, because I know it does pretty reliably open up within a few days of travel. But that's not the only one. Japan Airlines was very similar also. So being prepared for that, I think, is good to know that those things do open up at the last minute sometimes. Yeah. United too. They frequently open up their award space very last minute, sometimes same day. But yeah, a lot of airlines do that. I think it's once they realize, oh, we're not going to sell these tickets. Let's go ahead and try to get something.

So they open it up to award travel, which is great if you can do it. So a related tip on that. And yeah, the United one is a good one also. I saw eight seats on the nonstop from Tokyo to New York in business class the day before travel. But at any rate, I didn't book that. But the American Airlines flight that I did book home, or not rather, I should say the Japan Airlines award that I booked with American Airlines miles. I forgot to mention before I got that because I set an alert with seats at arrow. So I, I had actually found a business class award. And when I went to book it, it was gone. And so then I set an alert at seats at arrow. And when I set the alert at seats at arrow, they allow you to specify the maximum number of points because I didn't want to get an alert for a flight that was going to cost 300,000 American Airlines miles on American.

And I knew that the first class price should be about 80,000 miles one way. So I just capped the number of points at that 80,000 or maybe I did 90,000, I think, as a maximum award price, because I thought, well, maybe there'll be a domestic connector on there that'll increase it a little bit over 80. And I'd be willing to pay a little bit more, but I didn't want to pay more than 100, let's say. So I put in that maximum amount and sure enough, they found a first class seat. And as soon as I got the alert, I put it on hold to book. Yeah, that's awesome.

Alerts are so important for this kind of thing. All right. Another thing, sort of the flip side of the fact that programs often open up award space last minute is that a lot of programs have very last minute unfriendly rules. And so you need to watch out for these. So for example, on our trip, this isn't really about award booking, but Tim wanted to buy a cash fare from an airline to get to, I think it was Taipei on his way home. And the airline would not let him pay for a ticket because it was less than six hours before the flight. Ironically, he was able to go to a third

party booking engine and book it there. And he had no trouble checking in on that airline's website. But beyond that kind of thing, I mean, there are various rules and things that you need to be aware of. A number of programs don't allow changes or cancellations within 24 hours of your flight. So the entire cost of your flight would be forfeit if you didn't fly it. Air Canada won't let you to check in with less than two hours before your flight, even if you have a confirmed ticket and just haven't checked in yet. There are things like that that you just really need to watch out for if you're traveling very last minute. Yeah. And that's tough to know about. It can be difficult to know what those rules are going to be until you run into one.

That's true. So we're not going to be very helpful with that, are we? I mean, not very apart from those that we just shared, I guess, or the fact that you do need to be aware that there could be things. And so maybe look and see, can you book it and do that research about, I think, kind of a cutoff before you transfer any points anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, those rules I just mentioned, except for the 24-hour one, are about international travel. Like often the rules will be less rigid about within country travel. All right. Some other tips for award travel.

Diversify. Having different types of points and miles really helps. I think that any one of us would have been very challenged if we were, you know, with fewer options. I think that the bottom line is we each had lots of different miles and points. And so we had lots of different options. And even when things went wrong, you know, because Tim transferred to Avianca Life Miles, and I think ultimately booked through Lufthansa maybe on one of those or and I ran into that

kind of thing, too, where I transferred points and then couldn't book what I wanted to book. And thankfully I had other points. And so I was able to do things in another way, but having different types of points and miles helps. So it may be worth also, you know, prepping for that. I'll, I'll get into that, I guess, in a second in terms of keeping points in different programs. So having a diverse collection of points and miles is super helpful. It really is. And I'll just mention quickly, I already had Avios and Flying Blue miles, and those two combined made up the vast, vast majority of what I spent on this trip. So it was great to just have them ready to go.

And that included my return trip home. Yep. Yep. Very good. Next up, become adept at award search tools. They can be a huge time saver. How much did you use award search tools and which ones did you use the most? Yeah, quite a bit. I used Points Yeah a lot. It's just quick and easy and has good alerting capabilities. I even used it for hotels, searching for hotels, because it has a new hotels feature that's pretty good. And sometimes I switched over to a word tool because it has the power to let you pick, if you're looking for like one or two days, you can pick a lot of different airports you're flying from or two. And so that was really helpful for this challenge, especially because we often knew the date we needed to fly, but not necessarily what airport would give us the best destination result.

So those two were what I did mostly. I did use points. Yeah. I mean, I'm sorry. I did use Points. Yeah. I mean, I'm sorry. I did use me or no, the the one which points path a little bit in Google Flights. And I also used seats. Arrow to to look for, you know, the some of the international nonstops like what's available there.

And but it turned out that I think I think most of my good findings were from points. Yeah. It just, just happened to me. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Yeah. I used quite a bit of a word tool myself because I was like scattershot, like you said, flying around for different airports. And so because we were limited to like one specific day of flying in general, it was very helpful for me to be able to search multiple airports on both ends, you know, from the origin and destination standpoints. So that was hugely helpful for me. And, and all of the other things you mentioned, I've used all of them. One thing that I did run into though, with those tools, well, a couple

things. So I'm going to say become adept at award search tools is one tip, but another related tip is don't rely entirely on those award search tools. And there's a few reasons for that. One is that I did so many searches that I ended up getting like locked out a couple of times from one tool or another where it said, Hey, you've done too much searching, chill out and wait. And, uh, and then maybe you can try again later. So you can apparently run into that. So if you do too many searches, so that was number one. But number two, more importantly,

is they don't catch everything. There's not a single award search tool yet that's perfect, that searches all of the various programs. For instance, if you want to book Air France flights with Virgin Atlantic miles, those are Virgin Atlantic, I don't think shows

up in any of the major search tools except for seats.arrow, but not in points. Yeah, or award tool. Maybe it does show up in point me I can't recall. Maybe it does there. But at any rate, one one using one tool is probably not going to be the all and the end all. And in the end, I booked a flight on Thai Airways from Frankfurt to Bangkok via Avianca LifeMiles. And none of the search tools showed that that would be bookable with Avianca LifeMiles. And for good reason, it was complicated to make it kind of force the site to show that availability. But at any rate, my point here is that if I only use the search tool, I would have missed a few of the things that I booked or looked at booking during the course of the challenge. Yeah. So, and so for me,

none of the tools do a good job or some of them don't do these at all, uh, using Singapore miles or, uh, Cathay Asia miles. And so I have a lot, I have a lot of points in both of those programs. I did a lot of searching just on those websites. I didn't end up using anything I found there. Um, I really want to use my Singapore miles, but Singapore, man, they, they do not appear to release a word space last minute, uh, on the, for their own flights, which, uh, was a huge bummer. And, uh, so yeah, I, it's, and the reason I'm bummed about that is, is I have miles expiring in six months, so I do need to figure out what I'm going to do with them. But apparently I'm going to have to look further out than next day because I checked like virtually every Singapore

route that was relevant to my travels and nothing, nothing useful was available. It was crazy. Yeah. That's too bad. That's frustrating. I had also wanted to use my Virgin Atlantic miles and you know, the time constraints of the challenge made it such that we had to be in specific places on specific days. If I had an extra day to play with, I often found that I would have been able to use Virgin Atlantic miles. They just weren't available to use on the days, specific days when I needed to be able to use them. But at any rate, again, the point is that the search tools are really, really good, big time saver. I mean, my goodness, the time I would have spent searching these awards on all of the different individual websites would have really added up. But I still did use some of the individual websites because

there are limitations on the search tools. They can give you a really good idea in general of what's out there. And if you're not locked into a single specific day, maybe it won't matter all that much to you that you don't see quite everything that you could, but it's worth being aware anyway that you may be missing some things. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. All right. Consider keeping stashes and programs you use often. I kind of alluded to this a while ago, and you said that having some Avios on hand and having American Airlines miles on hand was helpful. And it really is. And I think that that point was driven home to me on this trip because I had trouble transferring to Avianca LifeMiles. And if I had existing Avianca LifeMiles,

then life would have been easier for me. So I think, you know, it's worth considering anyway, keeping stashes in the programs that you use most often. Yeah. Especially ones where the miles are easy to keep alive if you don't use the program for a while. So for example, I would avoid Singapore. I mean, well, they don't have good award pricing anymore anyway, but I would avoid them for this type of thing. I'd avoid ANA. I'd avoid, I think, EVA is another one where, unfortunately, your points expire after about three years, no matter what you do. Like having activity in the account does not keep them alive. But most other programs outside of these Asian ones have some way of keeping them alive. But most other programs outside of these Asian ones have some way of

keeping them alive. And so make sure that's true before you park a bunch of points in them. Yeah. And I think this is only relevant if you've got a lot of points and miles, because I wouldn't really want to be locking my transferable currencies into individual airline miles if I had a really limited supply of transferable points. I would rather keep them transferable because the power of having transferable points. I would rather keep them transferable because the power of having transferable points is being able to cherry pick the award that fits your situation best. But if you're somebody who's sitting with many hundreds of thousands or millions of points in various transferable programs, then I think it might make sense.

And this is kind of going to turn me to the dark side a little bit in the speculative transfer bonus world, I think, in considering a little more carefully, well, maybe I would take advantage of a speculative transfer bonus here or there to stock up in a program that I would find useful in this type of situation. Of course, there aren't too many times where I'm going to have to spontaneously travel all the way around the world, so I don't know if it's super relevant. But if you are the kind of person who does travel last minute or plan your trips last minute, then it makes sense. Yeah. The next tip we have is to watch out for transfer times. If you're thinking of transferring transferable points to a rewards program for last minute travel, then you better be sure that the transfer is instant or within about 10 minutes or so,

because there are a few where it can take a long time. And so before I booked my Turkish thing, I did some research to see what frequent miler lists, and I actually checked some other sites too to see what is listed out there as how long does it take to transfer from Citi to Turkish. And we list it as instant, a number of sites listed as instant. AwardWallet, though, their page on this says it takes, I can't remember, a day or two or something. So I had to do extra, like checking other places just to be sure before I did it. And it did turn out to be instant. And another one where it's listed, what I would have used or maybe would have used was Eva Air during this trip, because Eva Air has great award space for their own members.

If you transfer from city to Eva Air, you can use those points and travel. But the problem is that takes over a day to happen. And so it'd be useful for last minute travel. Useless, you mean, for last minute travel? Useless. Yeah. Did I say useful? You did say useful for last minute travel. Useless, you mean, for last minute travel? Useless, yeah. Did I say useful? You did say useful, yeah. So yeah, it'd be useless for last minute travel

because it takes too long to transfer. Just hear the opposite of what I say. There you go. When relevant. Only when relevant. That's the advice I'm going to give my kids. Only when relevant. Listen to the opposite of what I say.

So yeah, but that's important because some programs aren't any good at all. ANA is a program I didn't look at at all for this challenge because it takes too long to transfer points. It takes days to transfer points to ANA. And even when you think you know the transfer times, it may not work out that way because my Avianca LifeMiles were still not there. I transferred those, what, Friday night and they still weren't there. When we were all together in Kuala Lumpur on Monday, I pulled up the app, and they still weren't there. They're there now. I don't know when they finally went in, but it took many days.

And that's not typical. Avianca LifeMiles is usually an instant transfer. Just unfortunately, I ran into it not being instant on my account. It was instant on my wife's later on though. Same, you know, same day they transferred instantly for her. So anyway, that's that. Get a good VPN. Speaking of my transfer, my failed transfer and my wife's successful one, what may have come into play there was using a VPN. So virtual private network, there's a bunch of different sites out there where you can buy this service that essentially lets you connect to a computer in a different location to kind of fool other computers into thinking that that's where you're actually located.

And I wonder if some of my problems could have been averted if I had just used a VPN right from the beginning because I was logging into various programs from Morocco. And I think that perhaps that flagged my accounts as being not ordinary activity because I'm not usually in Morocco. And so logging into all of those accounts from Morocco, I think caused me a number of problems and not only the ones that I've published, but with American Airlines, I had a lot of difficulty. And I think it was because I was logging in from Morocco to book awards. So my wife had to call to ticket a couple of things because I couldn't pay to ticket anything on the American Airlines website. It would just bring me right back to the payment page over and over again. And I assume it was because of my location. And I had that exact same problem with American Airlines.

I got to the airport in Croatia in Zagreb to fly to Doha and then on to Kuala Lumpur. And the person at the check-in counter said that I had to show proof of leaving Kuala Lumpur. And so I stood to the side and tried to book an American Airlines flight home that was intentionally just a throwaway. I would cancel it afterwards. And I got one easily and tried to pay and it wouldn't let me pay for it. And I tried a number of times. Finally, I gave up and used United's app and that ticketed fine. And I was able to cancel that later. But yeah, the point is, I think that had I had a VPN on my phone saying I was in the US, American Airlines probably would have had no problem at all ticketing it. Yeah, yeah, I think the same.

So once I did start using a VPN, I had much better luck. And in fact, with Avianca LifeMiles, I mentioned that when I transferred to Avianca LifeMiles from my account, it got hung up for days without going through. Before I did that for my wife, I did log on to a VPN from New York and, you know, that made my location look like New York and that transfer to LifeMiles went through instantly. So I have to think that that had something to do with it. So, so there you go. There's a tip. And, but of course, one of the things that always makes me nervous is I don't know which places, because some countries using a VPN isn't legal and I don't know which countries it is or isn't.

Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I'm always a little nervous about, you know, am I going to have like the police roll up on me all of a sudden because they'll find my location from the cell provider or something, you know, because I don't know where it is and where it is and I haven't looked into it. So there is that consideration, I guess, you may need to look out for. Though I have not heard of anybody getting arrested on the spot for turning on a VPN. If ever it was going to happen for you, it would have been this trip, though. Well, I mean, it did make me look over my shoulder. So anyway.

Nick ran into a lot of bad luck on this trip. So, yeah. All right. So the next one says, know that Aeroplanes Contact center isn't 24-7. What's that about? Yeah. So they're not open 24 hours a day. If you need to call Air Canada Aeroplan, you would think being a major international award program with more airline partners than So you can book awards and be anywhere in the world just about on an Air Canada award. But my goodness, if it's nighttime in Canada, wherever you happen to be, then you're not going to be able to get ahold of anybody because they close at 10pm Eastern and they don't open again until 7am Eastern, which isn't a big deal, probably if you're within the

United States or Canada. But if you're flying on one of their partners and you're somewhere in Asia, for instance, or you're in Africa, maybe you're in Morocco, then you can't get a hold of anybody for like nine hours. And so that can make a big difference. You might not be able to book something you want to book, especially at the last minute. If it's something that can't be booked online, like Tim wanted to be able to call and book a stopover, I ran into the same kind of a thing where I wanted to be able to call to figure out a stopover situation, but I couldn't because nobody would be in for hours. Yeah, yeah. All right. Our last tip is beware's phantom space. Now this happened to you and Tim encountered this, right? from a few different airports in North America to Europe. But at least on the days when we needed to fly, that space was phantom.

And you would run into it over and over again. It would show up in all the search tools that there were these Swiss Airlines flights to Europe that just didn't exist. They weren't actually real space. You couldn't book them. It was really annoying. Yeah.

I mean, I don't know that there's any real way to solve this other than to, you know, I don't know. I mean, the last thing you want is to transfer points over to book something only to find out it's not bookable after you've transferred. That's the annoying piece. So let's back up to this Swiss thing. So Tim ran into this where he transferred points to Aeroplan in order to book this. And then he is the one who initially found that, oh, no, it's not actually bookable because they couldn't do it on the phone, which is where he was trying it first. And then he eventually tried to do it online and couldn't book it online and realized that, yeah, they were right. It's not actually there.

It was just phantom space. Now, subsequently, I was eventually searching later on, and I was getting desperate. And I found more and more seats were showing up on these Swiss flights as they got closer to departure. And at some point, I figured, you know, maybe now these added seats actually aren't phantom, maybe the original seats were, but there's so many more seats now, maybe some of these added seats aren't phantom. And so I actually transferred from Chase Ultimate Rewards to United to try to book one of these same Swiss seats that Tamar had already struck out with. So I should have known better that these were not going to be bookable. But once I had enough miles in my account to book with United, then when I clicked and selected the award space, it didn't let me even get to the checkout page. It errored out and said that that was no longer available.

Now, if I didn't have United Miles in my account, I wouldn't have gotten that far because it just said, you don't have enough miles. Once I had enough miles, then I could click over and over again on different Swiss award space and see, oh, no, none of that is actually bookable. Not just the stuff from Chicago, but the stuff from Montreal also and everywhere else that I was seeing, Swiss award space. So that was annoying. This is very interesting. This is just a hypothesis at this point, but it does appear from some of the stuff I've done as well, that United has started sort of showing on their site when you try to book an award that actually is phantom space, that it's no longer available. Those are the words that show up, no longer available. And so when you see that on United's website, it might be, it's not 100%, but it might be that, okay, that was phantom space anyway, is what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. Really annoying

though that that shows up that way. And I think it's particularly annoying because in the past, we would have said, okay, we'll go to this website and search to make sure that it's not phantom, you know, to verify availability, right? I would have said, you know, go to ANA's site or go to this site or that site. But these days, one of the most frustrating things I think that we didn't even put in this list, but is that award availability, like I've started a post a few times on the sad state of award available partner award availability, because some partners have access to more space than other partners. And it's really annoying because you would think that an award seat available on one, for instance, if American

Airlines has availability on their own flights, you would expect to be able to book it with any one world program. But that's not the case. Sometimes there are seats on American that are bookable via Qantas or via obvious that are not available via Asia miles or lots of other situations like that, where, you know, it depends, it might be available to one and not to others. So it's harder to know now, I think it's what's phantom space versus what's just extra space. That's available to special partners. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Yeah. All right.

And then one last thing is to have some tricks up your sleeve. And this is just a note of persistence. Persistence can sometimes pay off not giving up right away. Now, I mentioned before that I had booked a flight on Thai Airways via Avianca LifeMiles that didn't show up in award search tools. And this is an example of what I mean when I say have some tricks up your sleeve. Because if you just searched on the LifeMiles site for that specific flight I was looking for, it showed that it was only available in economy class. But if you knew the trick, which is to select the specific airline that you're flying out of

the drop-down menu, in my case, Thai Airways, then you would find that, oh, wow, actually, it is available in business class. I don't know that, oh, wow, actually, it is available in business class. I don't know why, but on the default search, it only showed the Thai flights in economy. But if you searched just for a Thai Airlines itinerary, then the same exact flights were available in either economy or business. So knowing that trick is useful. So having some of those types of tricks up your sleeve or thinking outside the box a little bit by the same token, Aeroplan did not show that flight available. But if I booked a connecting itinerary and added Bangkok as a stopover point, well, then Aeroplan did show that flight as available to book. So having a few tricky things like that up your sleeve to say,

OK, well, I can't do it the way I want. But instead of just focusing on what I can't do, what can I do? Because if I just think all day long about, oh man, I can't book this with Aeroplan, then I'm just going to drive myself crazy. Instead, what can I make the Aeroplan site do or the LifeMiles site do or whatever it is that you're working on? What are the out of the box ways I can think about the problem? Yeah. I'm going to mention one more LifeMiles one, which is, uh, let's say there's some award space that you think should be there because maybe, maybe you saw Star Alliance award space was bookable on United and Air Canada, but you really want to book it on LifeMiles because they have better pricing, but you're not seeing it. Uh, a weird thing that sometimes works is to,

is to have LifeMiles search for a different destination, one that actually has award space, and then change to the destination you really want. It's almost like it greases the wheels or something. I don't really know what's happening there, but I have seen that happen, that sometimes just running multiple searches like that can make stuff appear that wasn't appearing before. Yeah, weird. It's weird, but being persistent can pay off sometimes. So have some of those tricks up your sleeve, be persistent and be willing to try different stuff because they say the definition of insanity is trying the same thing and expecting a different

result. Although like Greg said, sometimes you do get that different result. The American Airlines website's another good example of that, where we've said before, it's kind of like a slot machine, right? You keep pulling and every now and then you'll hit the jackpot and get a better award price. That's right. That's right. So yeah, that whole idea that, you know, doing the same thing over and over again results in the same thing, even with computers, that's not true. Right? You would think with computers, it would just be like, well, there is a result. And this is it. Not so much. So keep trying. Simple. Yeah, keep trying. All right. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. So there you go. You got at least 10 tips in there, probably one or two bonus if you add it all up.

But hopefully there's at least 10 anyway. That brings us, I think, to this week's question of the week. So this week's question of the week is related. It's one that came in a couple of times throughout the challenge. And maybe we've discussed this before, but I don't remember your answer. So I think it's a good question to discuss again if we have. And that is, how do you go about finding activities? What do you do to find things to do? We talk a lot about how to get places and how to find award availability.

We discussed all that type of stuff. But when it comes to what people might call excursions or activities, how do you find stuff to do in the places that you go to? How did you find stuff you did in Croatia? Or how do you approach that in general in your trip planning? Yeah. So what I do is I often look at things like trip advice or whatever, just to see what the top things are to do in a particular city, because this is not going to be off the beaten path type of stuff. But often in cities, there's a few things that everybody's going to want to see. And so you'll quickly get a sense of that. And then you can decide whether or not to see that thing the way that TripAdvisor tells you to see it, like with a particular tour or whatever. But at least you know to put that on your list.

Another thing that I like to do is go to our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group and just say, hey, I'm going to Zagreb, Croatia, who has some ideas of what I should do, what I should see, where I should eat. And I've gotten great responses that way. So that's really more and more become my go-to. It's a great way to get really personalized recommendations because you could have back and forth. You could say, oh, well, yeah, I look that up and it's only open on Fridays and I'm not going to be there on Friday. And you could have back and forth, you know, you could say, Oh, well, you know, yeah, I looked that up and it's only open on Fridays and I'm not going to be there on Friday, you know, and you could have a back and forth conversation that way. Yeah. Yep. I think that's a good tip for this trip. I didn't, you know, time was limited. So, you know, Googled some things and looked up some

things. How did you find the fish spa? Like, where did that come from? I'm trying to remember now. I somehow, so, so I was assigned to come up with a relaxing activity for, for these guys. And, and so the, the obvious thing is to go to like a spa and get a massage or whatever. And I didn't want to do the obvious thing. And, and I just thought of it that like, oh, I wonder if they have those things where the fish eat the dead skin off your feet. And so I Googled that and I found this cute fish spa. I loved the name of it. I found it to be a very funny name and it turned out to be a really fun activity. But no, there was nothing special about how I found that one. No, I see. I see. I've often heard people talk about using Reddit because that's where people, like ordinary folks that live in a particular place are probably more active on a Reddit

message board. In the past, I've used TripAdvisor not for the main top 10, 15. Like Greg said, oh, I should. Let me change that. I will use it exactly the way that Greg said. I'll look at the top 10 or 15 things to get a sense for, okay, what are the famous things to do? But I have found more success in terms of getting more personalized stuff by using their forums because there are specific forums for different regions and countries and cities. And so I'll dig into the forums a little bit there sometimes to ask questions every now and then. It's probably not as useful, though, as finding where local people would be like a Reddit or something like that. It's probably even more useful in terms of getting recommendations or certainly, like you

said, Frequent Miler Insider is either way, you're more likely to get some local recommendations. Although really my answer to this is I just outsource. I know I've mentioned this before. I let my wife do most of the planning in terms of what we're going to actually do when we get to a place for this particular trip. Obviously that wasn't an option, but normally that's more my go-to. So we'll put Nick's wife's phone number in the show notes so you can contact her to outsource your activities. She'll find some fun stuff to do. Let me mention one more thing. Both Tim and I do this independently.

We didn't work together to come up with this. But both of us with our wives, when we go to a city, we try to often do one of those free walking tours. It's like one of the first things we do when we're there. If you get a good walking tour guide, you, I mean, not only do you get a good sort of lay of the land during the actual tour, but usually they're great at giving local recommendations to like, you know, don't miss out on this, you know, for this type of food, go here or here, or even like tips like, oh, you want to go into the Louvre. Here's the best way to do it to avoid the long lines. And,

uh, all those kinds of things are, are really great to get that kind of personal recommendations right from the get go. So that's, uh, that's often what I do is I don't really plan in advance so much, but, um, show up, do that and then, then decide what I do is I don't really plan in advance so much, but show up, do that, and then decide what to do. And we booked a food tour in Kuala Lumpur, like sort of after the challenge was done. But that was done on Viator or Viator, however you say the name of that company. Yeah, yeah. That one. Yeah.

And when you book those kind of tours, it can be hit or miss as to how great the guides are, how good the whole situation is. I generally prefer to do these free tours because they work on tips. And so they have to be good and entertaining to maintain their livelihood. And it seems to me that on average, I get better tour guides that way, I think. Yeah, that's fair. That makes some sense. All right. That's a lot to think about anyway.

That was a long show today. So hopefully those out there mowing the lawn to this week's show had plenty to listen to. So that brings us to the end. If you've enjoyed this stuff and you'd like to get it in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequent miler dot com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. If you weren't following on Instagram, you should be because there were lots of good reels and stories and things from this last challenge. And you can still check out many of the reels there anyway, on our Instagram feed and join our frequent miler

insiders Facebook group. Like Greg said, you can ask and answer questions about a lot of different travel related things all the time there. And if you have a piece of feedback that you'd like to be considered for a future giant mailbag or a question that you'd like to be considered for a question of the week, you can send that to send it to mailbag at frequent miler.com. Bye everybody.