Frequent Miler on the Air - Transferable Points Changing Fortunes | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep357 | 5-8-26

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

In today's episode, Nick owns up to his mistake: Yes, you can lock in Hyatt prices with Points Advance. Then we'll talk about paying rent with the Alaska Atmos Summit card, and which points programs are trending up or down. Mea culpa(01:23) - Oops: Nick made a mistake about Hyatt Points Advance in the originally published version of our Question of the WeekFind the (now edited) Question of the Week here: https://frequentmiler.com/can-i-save-points-on-a-hyatt-award-with-a-date-change-trick-question-of-the-week-ep2-5-4-26/Learn more about Hyatt Points Advance here: https://frequentmiler.com/hyatt-points-advance/Giant Mailbag(05:44) - Ben discusses paying rent with the Atmos™ Rewards Summit Visa Infinite® CardFind our podcast episode about big bonuses for huge spend here: https://frequentmiler.com/best-bonuses-for-huge-spend-frequent-miler-on-the-air-ep356-5-1-26/Card News(09:10) - Chase Chase Sapphire Preferred® Card/Chase Sapphire Reserve® Card application rule changes(13:32) - Barclays JetBlue Premier MastercardRead more about the Barclays JetBlue Premier Mastercard here: https://frequentmiler.com/JetBluePremier/#GotoAwards, Points, and More(15:20) - Rove adds Aeroplan as transfer partnerRead more about Rove adding Air Canada Aeroplan as its newest transfer partner here: https://frequentmiler.com/rove-miles-adds-air-canada-aeroplan-as-its-newest-transfer-partner/(17:10) - How to combine Citi ThankYou accounts (and what might be getting in your way)Learn more about combining your Citi ThankYou accounts here: https://frequentmiler.com/how-to-combine-citi-thankyou-accounts/(22:43) - Qatar is limiting Avios redemptions in terms of who you can redeem forMain Event: Transferable Points Changing Fortunes(25:36) - "Trending up" doesn't mean it is now a better program than one "trending down". It might be, but it also might just be closing the gap a little.(26:54) - Programs we think are trending down...(41:07) - Programs we think are staying about even(44:32) - Programs we think are trending up...Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast NetworkFrequent Miler's Best Offers Pagehttps://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-offers/

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyscape.com. On today's show, I own up to my mistake. You can lock in high at prices with points advance. We'll talk about paying rent with the Alaska Atmos Summit card and why you might want to do that. And we'll discuss which programs are trending up and which are trending down. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, transferable points, changing fortunes.

You know that we love transferable points. These are points where you can transfer them to airline or hotel programs so that when you see a great award that's available from one of any of many programs, you could transfer those points there and book that valuable award. But things have been changing a lot in the transferable point space. So what we used to think we knew about which programs were great, maybe aren't as great anymore, and some that we were not too excited about are getting better. So in today's main event, we'll talk about how those things are changing.

And remember, if you want to jump ahead to that or you want to come back and revisit something, just expand the show description, the show notes, in order to get all of the timestamps with links to that information and links to more information that we've written on the blog. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to give this a thumbs up, a like, leave us a review. We appreciate hearing from you. Leave your comments on this wherever you. watching or listening. All right, let's jump in. Before we get to the giant mailbag this week,

I have a semi-major Mayaculpa to share. So a few days ago, before we publish this podcast, we published a question of the week episode where we talked about whether or not you could kind of avoid Hayek's category increases by making a reservation now and changing the dates later. And the answer to the question we got right, that that, that, won't work when you go to make a change to the dates, it'll cause the reservation to reprice. However, I went on in that answer to mention Hyatt points advance, which is a feature that perhaps fewer people are aware of. Certainly if you have globalist status and possibly even with other statuses, you can call Hyatt and make a points advance reservation, even if you don't have

enough points or this really is for when you don't have enough points in your account. So for example, let's say I want to go to the Park Hyatt, Paris next spring, but I don't have enough points yet. Maybe I'm working on a new card bonus or I'm anticipating earning more points in some way. I can make a reservation now without the points over the phone with Hyatt, and then I need to have the points seven days in advance of the reservation. That's when Hyatt will look to pull the points out of my account. So that's an awesome feature that works, like I said, definitely for Global I'm not sure about other elite members, but we've done it before. But on the show, on the question of the week, I said that if you do that and the hotel that

you've booked goes up in price, maybe it changes in category or once Hyatt launches their multi-tiered award chart, if it changes within the category to a higher price, I said the reservation will reprice and you'll have to pay the higher number of points. it turns out that as Greg the Frequent Myler has written in the past, that is not the case with Hyatt. You can actually lock in today's price. So if you're listening to this before May 20th, 20, 26 especially, and you have a hotel you'd like to book that's going up in price, maybe going up in category, or you anticipate that it's going to be priced at one of the new peak levels that's higher than the levels today, then you might want to call Hyatt and make a reservation now, a points advance booking now, because you can't. can lock in that rate. Now, you need to not have enough points in your account to make the booking. You can't do this for hotels that you have enough points to book, but the easy solution there is

just make some dummy booking that uses up all of your points. You can always cancel it later on. And then you could make one of these points advance reservations. So that is a way to lock in the price now. You can't change the dates, though, later on. If you make any changes to the reservation, it is going to reprice. And you can't apply a sweet upgrade award, is my understanding. to a points advanced reservation. So if you have one of those, and you want to use it, you have to have enough points in your account.

So my fault on misstating that, we edited the podcast already, but if you happen to have listened to it in like the 24 hours before we fixed that or took that out anyway, then may I goop on that. And if you didn't listen to it, hopefully you just learned something new.

Yeah, it's a really good, useful, timely correction to make. I just got a message from a friend just this morning as we're recording this. He was listening to the podcast on his drive into work and, and messaged me. He's like, I don't think this is right what you said. And so I think that probably he has the podcast auto downloaded. And so the correction did not get onto his, onto his phone, unfortunately. So, yeah, so anyway, I'm sure he'll listen to this episode eventually and find out he was right.

That we were wrong. Yes. He was right. We were wrong. Yeah. Yes, yes. And I should, in my defense, I'll say that Marriott used to work differently when they used to have this. So I'm going to blame my confusion on the fact that Marriott used to work the way that I sat on the show. But Marriott got rid of that feature like three years ago. Like three years ago, like, three years ago. They got rid of it. So, yeah. So that's that. All right. So moving forward now, let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. All right, today's giant mail comes from Ben. Ben wrote in, I was listening to the episode about big bonuses for huge spend and wanted to add something to your commentary on the Atmos Summit card. If you're interested in getting that 100,000 point companion cert, one way that makes it much easier to spend $60,000 a year is using the card to pay your rent with built. I live in New York City, and while my rent is insane, I don't make enough money to spend $60,000. to match that spend on other purchases on a built card. Thus, I wouldn't be able to maximize my point earning potential for rent using a built card under the built 2.0 system. However, if I link my Atmos Summit card to pay rent, yes, I have to pay a 3% fee, but I earn

three Atmos miles per dollar, and the spend counts towards not only the welcome offer, but the required spend for the 100,000 point companion certificate. kit. I don't really mind the 3% fee because I'll buy atmus points for a penny per point any day of the week and it makes working towards status and also earning a boatload of Atmos points much more attainable. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, this really does make a lot of sense for a lot of people. Amos points can easily be worth well over one cent per point. You know, the interesting thing here is paying the 3% fee, you know, you have to think about it. I guess, well, I don't know, now that things have changed. Let me take that back. I, yeah, I think. I, I think.

think this is probably a decent deal for people who have high rent or high mortgage, perhaps, that want to be able to use their Alaska card to earn some points and status. I don't know. I thought this was a great point. Well done on that, Ben. Yeah, I don't have any criticism about it. You know, he points out that he can't maximize built, you know, kind of the free points you can earn on rent, which is one of the tradeoffs that you have to think about when doing.

But if you don't, if you're not concerned about that tradeoff, the idea of just basically buying Atmos points for a penny per point plus that's helping you get towards the big spend bonus of the 100K Companion Certificate and is helping you get more elite loyalty points so that you can earn, you know, elite status with Atmos. If those things matter to you, as they clearly do to Ben, then, you know, I think that's a really good tradeoff. I would I would also buy Atmos points for a penny a point all day long if I was in that situation. All right, I'm going to challenge you on all day long. There's a

point where you would stop, but probably not a threat is my bet. So I because I look at it and I say especially if he lives in New York, then you're talking about a business class flight to Frankfurt's like 55,000 points one way on Condor. And there are some routes you can book to Europe for 45,000 points in business class, etc. And so I look at that and say, well, If you're paying a penny a point, you're talking 450, 550 bucks plus the taxes for a business class flight, that's a good deal already if that's something you're looking to do with your Atmos points anyway.

So, yeah, it's not terrible to be paying a penny a point and then also getting elite status and the companion certificate. So, yeah, I can be down with that. If you got rent, that could be a solution, I think, to making that spend, particularly in a market with high rent like that. All right, let's move forward to card news. So first up in card news, Chase is out with new application rules for the Sapphire Reserve and Sapphire Preferred. What are they?

Yeah. So they used to have two things. They used to have exclusionary language if you had recently gotten a bonus for one or the other, meaning if you're trying to sign up for the Sapphire Reserve, they used to not allow you the bonus if you had gotten the bonus for the Sapphire Preferred. in some amount of time, I think 48 months, that language is gone. Now, you could even have the Sapphire Preferred, for example, open now and apply for the Sapphire Reserve and potentially qualify for that and for the bonus. That's the good news. The bad news is that they've made the exclusion on the same card be lifetime.

So what I mean by that is if you've ever had the Sapphire Preferred. card before and you're interested in signing up for it. The terms suggest that you probably won't qualify. Same thing for the Sapphire Reserve. So specifically, the terms on the applications now say, this credit card is unavailable to you if you currently have this card open. The new card member bonus may not be available to you if you previously held this card or received a new card member bonus for this card. We may also consider the number of cards you have opened and closed in determining your bonus eligibility.

Yeah, all right. Well, so that's potentially a big bummer in the long run in the sense that potentially you wouldn't be able to get one of those cards again. I might suspect that like MX, there might be a seven-ish year window of what a lifetime means, just because I'm going to assume that once it's gone from your credit reports, that perhaps the system, the computer system, I'll forget you've had it. And also, I like the may not wording in there. It doesn't say you are not eligible. It says you may not be. I prefer that over you are not because it leaves open the possibility that you could be eligible. But, I mean,

overall, net negative news on the disappearance or excuse me, rather the appearance of a lifetime language there. Good news, though, for people who do want to get both cards or want to be able to get the other card, whichever one they don't currently have. Right. Yeah, especially, you know, maybe you signed up for the Sapphire Preferred in the past couple years, and you previously thought you were excluded from the new Sapphire Reserve bonus. Now it's open to you. Funny enough, I had a friend who's kind of just getting into the Points of Miles game who was asking me about the Sapphire Preferred the other day. They said that they didn't feel like the reserve is for them. They wanted to get the preferred. And I said, that's fine. It makes a lot of sense. I think the Sapphire Preferred is

a better fit for a lot of people. The Sapphire Reserve is really hard. You've got to jump through a lot of hoops to make sense of the, or really to get enough value out of the coupons to make it worth it long term. But then I said, but if the $800 for the annual fee is not a huge obstacle, it, if you're picking between those two, it can make sense to go for the reserve right now because of the elevated bonus at the time we're recording this. If you cashed out 70,000 points to cover the $700 difference in annual fee based on the bonus at the time we're recording this, you'd come out ahead with the reserve over the welcome bonus on the preferred plus you'd get the coupons that can be double dipped in the first year or triple dipped depending on the type of coupon

and whatnot so it can make more sense to go after that card if you're debating between the two particularly because at the time we're recording this the sapphire reserve is that i think it's matching the best bonus we've seen on that card right so yeah i don't think we've seen uh better than 150 000 points for the personal sapphire reserve card that's really fantastic And so, and if you're starting fresh, it means you could consider signing up for the Sapphire Reserve now under this enhanced bonus. And then later on, maybe you product change that to a Freedom card or something and wait for the Sapphire preferred. Every now and then, there's a 100K offer. So that would be 250,000 points in welcome bonuses from just two cards, which would be pretty terrific.

Yep, yep, absolutely. All right. Next up in card news, we got the JetBlue Premier card. Now, the JetBlue Premier card, we had previously covered the fact that there were a bunch of changes coming to it, that they've polished their Premier card. And we did an entire coffee break episode, I think, about JetBlue, or rather about Barclays and JetBlue, kind of refreshing this card. But we wanted to mention that now the new benefits are live.

So you can take advantage of the various new benefits, getting the new tiles. That's not going to be anytime soon. We'll come back to that in the side. second, but things like the companion certificate you can get now our companion certificates, I should say, since there's more than one on this card and the rebate on awards, et cetera. And it's got a new welcome bonus. So it's got 100,000 points now after 5,000 spent in the first 90 days. So that's an improvement over the previous 80K bonus. I think that 100K makes a lot more sense on this card because it's a pretty expensive card. But I mentioned the tiles. And so one of the

benefits of the card is that you get 25 tiles each year, but those tiles are not going to be awarded during the first year. They're not going to be awarded until next year. So if you get the card now, you will not get 25 tiles this year towards earning status this year. That's a bummer. I don't really get that. Yeah. You know, I think it's a fairly typical type of thing. I think the Atmos Summit does the same kind of thing where you don't get your 10k status points the first year you obtain the card. But anyway, yeah, it's a bummer. But good news for anyone who already had the card and for some reason was putting a lot of spend on it, that spend will count towards the spend bonuses that you get with the new

structure of the card. Yep. So that is good news. I will agree with you there. All right. Awards points and more. First up for awards points and more, we have Roeve adding another. transfer partner Air Canada Aeroplane is now a Rove Miles transfer partner, of course, one to one,

like the other airline programs. And there's a 25% transfer bonus through June 6th. So just like when they've launched other partners, they have launched this one with a transfer bonus. So if you've been collecting Rove Miles, getting a 25% bonus to Air Canada Aeroplane can be a great deal since Air Canada Aeroplane does have some really strong values, though I have to mention that some of those values are changing on June 1st. So you should be aware of the Air Canada Aeroplane changes coming June 1st. If you haven't read our post about that yet, check that out. So you know what's changing and whether or not that's going to have much effect on your desire to have Air Canada Aeroplane Plan points. But I think this is a great addition for Roe. It really starts to round it out and make it

feel more like a competitive transferable points currency. A hundred percent. There's, there's, I can't think of anything that's like a big miss anymore. And they have some really strong things that most other programs don't have as well. But yeah, one of my criticisms of Rove before of their transfer partners was that they didn't have any good Star Alliance program that didn't pass along surcharges. And now they've, you know, they've fixed that issue and pretty impressive where they've come from. I mean, you know, they've been adding transfer partners like clockwork rate lately and I love seeing that. Yeah, it kind of feels like Wells Fargo should have hired the Rove team to run their transferable points as things stand right now because

the Rove team has certainly been much faster out of the gate in that regard. But we'll come back to that a little later, I'm sure. Next up in awards points and more, we've got city thank you points. So we published a post this week about how to combine your city thank you accounts and what might be getting in your way. And this was kind of based on something. I think something you either wrote, whether it was in a post or it was just in team conversation on Slack, I'm not sure. But I had trouble trying to help my wife get her thank you accounts combined. And it was something I'm pretty sure I picked up from you one way or another where you said check the profile information and make sure all the profile information matches. And sure enough, that's where the problem was. A couple of her

City thank you cards had both a home number and a cell number listed, and her double cash card only had a cell number listed. Now, the home number was the same phone number. So it was the same phone number as the cell phone number. It's just one of her cards didn't have any information in that field and the other two did. Once I made sure that that matched up, boom, able to combine the accounts, no problem. So I published that in a post this week to explain how it works. And several readers wrote in to say, wow, this worked. They weren't able to do it before, but now they were able to do it themselves online without having to call. anybody. So check out that post if you've got multiple city thank you accounts and you want to pool together your own city thank you accounts. Yeah. And a couple little details about that. Fixing your profile on the city.com website does not fix this. You have to go over to the thank you rewards website and fix your profile there. Even though I was the one who I think told Nick the solution a long time ago about this. I had forgotten the details of it and I went several weeks ago to combine my my, what is it, strata leap card with the rest of my cards and I got an error and I went for some reason I went into the city profile and tried to fix it there and didn't help.

And then I realized, oh, duh, got to change it in the thank you account. So make sure to do that. And also from the comments of the post that Nick put out there about this, it sounds like there are some situations where there may be some fields that you can't see from your thank you account. So if you're still getting an error after you've made sure that all the fields that you can see are exactly the same, then it looks like you may have to call the thank you rewards people and ask them to fix it. that everything's the same. Then once you combine your points, you get the full power. So for example, if you have the city double cash, it does allow you to transfer points, but at a poor transfer ratio. So if you combine it with a strata premier or strata elite,

those points that you're in in double cash, then have the full power of the full transfer, you know, one-to-one transfers that the better card has. Yeah. And you know, I guess I should probably led with the fact that this all is coming up now because on May 17th, city is going to end what they call points sharing, which is when you transfer points from one city thank you account to another. So, you know, for instance, it has historically been possible for me to transfer my city thank you points to Greg, for instance. And so I could share them, which means to transfer them to someone else, but you can also share

between your own accounts. So like my wife shared points from her double cash to her strata premier card because she didn't have them already combined and pooled. But with the post, is about, and what you want to do, because they're ending the sharing that I just talked about, the post is about is combining your thank you accounts, which is different than sharing points. Sharing points is ending soon. Combining accounts is not ending soon. However, it's probably a good idea to get your city thank you accounts combined if you've got multiple cards that are in city thank you points so that you can take advantage of the power of the higher card in your wallet, so to speak. Though there are some caveats to that. You don't want to

cancel any of those cards that are managed or that are merged rather combined in that way probably because if you cancel a card, then the points earned on that particular card will expire after 60 days and it's really hard to know which points come from which card once they're combined. So instead of canceling any of those cards, you just want to downgrade those in the future and keep them open. That's possible for you anyway, unless you're absolutely positive. You have no points from that card, which is kind of hard to know. Product change to any thank you rewards card that has no annual fee.

If you really wanted to cancel it, don't do that. Just call City and see what they'll allow you to product change to. Usually you'll have some option that will preserve the thank you points. Even you might not realize, and even the call rep might not realize that the AT&T cards are thank you point earning cards. So that's an option too. if none of the others sound good to you or none or if it's possible that none of the others would even be offered to you because they decide somehow which which cards are available through product for a product change yeah and final clarity point here as greg mentioned if you want a

product change you're in a call city if you want to get your thank you points combined you want to call thank you, which probably sounds like the same thing to you, especially other issuers don't seem to divide things quite in the same way. But with city, they really do. So if you want to get your thank you accounts combined, don't call the number on the back of your credit card. Call 1,800 thank you, or look up the number on thank you.com in case it's changed or something like that. Make sure you get it from the source, I suppose. But you got to call the thank you rewards people. If you have one of those, like Greg mentioned that a reader commented and said, oh, they found there was some hidden field that they couldn't see, but the rep, the phone rep could see in at it. And again,

you'll need to call thank you for that. So yeah, yeah, you're welcome. A little bit of useless trivia about that. Many years ago, the thank you rewards program was available not just to city, but to other institutions like I think Expedia had rewards through thank you. So I had a, I had my, I think it was Expedia. I had my Expedia account. connected to my thank you account. And so anyway, that is no longer a thing, but it probably explains why city reps can't really do anything. Well, thank you for that. All right. Our final piece of awards points and more here is Qatar. Qatar Airways Privilege Club is limiting obvious redemptions in terms of who you can redeem for. So now essentially the short version of the story is you

can redeem for a maximum of, I think, 10 other people. And this is probably aimed at kind of preventing mileage brokers from selling tickets using miles. But it's a restriction that you probably want to be aware of if you're in the habit of redeeming awards for family members and friends, because there's going to be a limit as to how many people you can redeem for. And then it gets even more complicated because there's a certain number of people with Privilege Club accounts that you can redeem for and certain number without the gym for so you'll have to check out the post for all the details yeah yeah one of the thing to note is like this is starting if i remember something like june first or something around that time um and another thing that's going to change is if you want

to link your guitar and british airways accounts together uh they're going to make it so that your uh accounts have to have been open for at least 30 days uh something along those lines And my guess is it to prevent people from creating new guitar accounts in linking as a way of getting around this 10-person limit. So that makes sense. But anyway, if you don't already have both of those types of accounts open, it's a good idea. Just go ahead and open them as soon as you hear this and make sure all your account details are exactly the same in both programs. And that's a good safety tip for obvious programs in general. make sure that your details, your account details, your profile, like email address, phone number, et cetera,

match in all the obvious programs to avoid problems moving your obvious around. Okay, we'll be right back after this with our main event. Hey, Nick, I just got a text from my cousin. He's asking me about a credit card offer he just got in his email and asking if it's any good. Yeah, well, your cousin ought to go to frequentmiler.com and click the link at the top of the page for our best offers page. That's the best way for your cousin to know whether or not they're getting a good offer because we're committed to publishing the best publicly available offers. So if you see an offer for a credit card anywhere on the internet, you should always compare and make sure you're getting the best possible offer. And we're back with today's main event, transferable points, changing fortunes.

We're going to be talking about ways in which different transferable points programs have been getting more or less valuable research. And I do want to stress, though, we're going to be looking at how they're going up or down. And just because a program is like going up, maybe it's like way better than it was before, that doesn't mean we like it better even than programs that have been going down because it might have been starting way, way down from where, you know, the ones that are going down started at. And so maybe it's just closing the gap. But in some cases, it may indeed be getting better. But the point of this is more to talk about the trajectory that we're seeing in various transferable points programs. Yeah, because it does change. And this happens from time to time.

I always love these posts when you write about the changing fortunes of points because there are changes. That's the constant in this hobby. And that's something that you'll hear us talk about from time to time that things constantly changed. And it's just about adapting and understanding what's changing and how that fits into your own redemption needs or wants or patterns. patterns, et cetera. So we're going to talk about those that are trending up and down. Let's start out with the bad news so that we can climb out of this later on. So let's talk about which programs are trending down. First up, we've got City Thank you. Trending down, way down. You have written down here. Why is that? Yeah. Well, you know, we talked earlier in the show about how

they're ending point sharing. And that was a significant part of the program. It made it possible before to, you know, in a two household, you know, situation, you could have had been earning points on different cards, you know, owned by different people, and then put them together by using point sharing in order to transfer to whatever program you wanted. Now it gets more complicated because you can't do that. You have to transfer separately. And that's a big bummer. But maybe even worse is like some of the things that made city like a really excellent program of late have gone away. In fact, around the time just a few months ago, when city enabled American Airlines transfers, at that point in time, I would have said city is a reasonable nominee for like having the best transferable points program at that time.

because at that time, they not only added super valuable American Airlines, and luckily, they still have them, but they also had one to four transfers to preferred hotels and one to two transfers to choice, as well as some other things that they still have that are valuable like one-to-one transfers to EVA and transfers to leading hotels of the world. So they had an extremely strong program, but transfers to preferred hotels. have been cut in half. Either transfer ratio has been cut in half. Transfers to choice has been cut down as well. Transfers in Emirates has been cut down to five to four. Now that is in common with many other programs, but still that that lowers the value. You know, so yeah, so they still have some strong value, American Airlines, EBA, leading hotels the world. And they still have a pretty good track record of transfer bonuses. So we've seen four for decent transfer bonuses so far in 2026.

And that's pretty good. But there's no question that the direction is down, like to me, way down. Yeah. I mean, I feel decent about the fact that I didn't get heavily invested in city now because I was starting to feel bad about that at some point where I was like, oh, man, maybe I am missing out on these preferred hotels. And, you know, as fate would have it, We have plans this summer to meet up with friends that live in Europe and they had picked out

the location, the area. And of course, the property that I found that I was like, oh, that'd be a perfect place to stay. It's a preferred hotel. And so I was like, oh, my goodness, what are the chances? The time that I really need this program is now after they've cut the transfer ratio. So I was immediately unhappy with that just recently here within the last few days. But at any rate, I mean, they do still have American Airlines. And that's going to be huge for a lot of people to be able to have that.

And they've got their other uses. I mean, there are other partners that we didn't even mention here that continue to be good. I was never terribly bullish on City, though. I wasn't super excited about choice because they sell their points on sale for, you know, a decent price pretty often and preferred hotels I hadn't until recently found a lot of needs to use them. So I was never wildly bullish on it to begin with. And I agree with you. They definitely have decreased significantly.

So that is trending downward. They're not the only ones, though. No, they're not. So kind of quietly, American Express is trending down, in my opinion. So, you know, we know that they also lowered the Emirates transfer ratio to five to four. but they also are lowering Cathay Pacific transfer to five to four. So you've got two downgrades there. A little bit more of a problem, in my mind, a little more of how it's trending down,

has to do with transfer bonuses, though. They've been the rock in the transfer bonus space. Like, you know, it's common to see 12 to 14 transfer bonus. in a given year, and often they're really good. And so, like, you would look to them as, like, the place to go for transfer bonuses. But as I look at what's happened so far this year, it's, like, really, really weak. I mean, yes, there have been three transfer bonuses, but they are sad little transfer bonuses. The saddest of all is 10% transfer bonus to JetBlue.

Now, that sounds like kind of weak, even if you know nothing about their transfer ratio to JetBlue, but if you learn that their transfer ratio to JetBlue is less than one-to-one to begin with, and that 10%- Still isn't one-to-one. Still not. Right. 10% doesn't bring you anywhere near one-to-one. You know, when other programs, not all other programs, but some other programs have one-to-one, And it just, it's almost hysterical to me that Amex would want to kind of shine a light on how poor

that option. And for one week only, Greg, for like one week only, you can get still less than one to one if you want to transfer to Jepley. Terrible, terrible transfers. And the other transfer bonuses they've had this year haven't been wildly exciting either. No. So you've got a, we've got a 20% transfer bonus to Hilton, with. which in the past it's been common to see 30%.

And even at 30%, it's kind of like, yeah, okay, in certain circumstances you should transfer, but mostly we didn't recommend it necessarily. 20% is right on the edge of where, I mean, it's much better than no transfer bonus, but still, it's weak. The third one was a 15% transfer bonus to Avianca Life Miles, which is not even really from Amex.

This was one of those that Avianca is providing from certain banks, and Amex was one of them. And so it was really on the Avianca Life Mile side. Of course, 15% isn't that high, but it's pretty typical for life miles. Still, so, yeah, three-week transfer bonuses, Zick. Yeah, you know, I think Amex has really been kind of, like, living on memories of the past here, like the glory days for a long time with their transfer bonuses, because it's not even just this year that the transfer bonuses are weak. All of last year was weak also because I know going into our annual challenge, our 100K vacay challenge, we all assumed that I would have a big advantage because

Amex typically has tons of transfer bonuses. And meanwhile, Citi had had far more than Amex. And I think Capital One even had offered more than Amex during the time period when we were planning our challenge. And in years past, in September, specifically we had seen several programs come up with transfer bonuses, but not in 2025. So this is something that's kind of been a trend for a while now that their transfer bonuses have pretty much been weak sauce. And the decrease in transfer ratios, the fact that they still charge a fee to transfer to U.S.-based programs. So if you want to transfer to Delta or JetBlue, oh yeah, by the way, we didn't mention, not only will you get less than one-to-one when you transfer to JetBlue with the limited time transfer bonus, you'll pay a fee to do it.

Oh, my goodness. I mean, that's a good. I mean, that's a lot. kind of ridiculous, right? That's right. Craziness. Of course, you know, they still have A&A as a unique and valuable transfer partner, but it does have that issue of like it can take several days for the transfer to finish and, you know, whatever award you were hoping a book might be gone by then. And unfortunately, A&A has a very strict cancellation policy where after three years your points are gone if they're not used. So, yeah, so even so even that one super strength is, you know, is questionable for a lot of people. Yeah. And, you know, like Greg said at the beginning, the fact that it's trending down

doesn't mean that I think it's worthless. I still love collecting MX points. You know, I still transfer to Avianca Life Miles from time to time for awards there, Air Canada Aeroplane, Air France, Kallam Flying Blue. We see a transfer bonus almost every year to sometimes more than once, even, to British Airways Avios or to Virgin Atlantic. So there are still plenty of good uses. of AMX points, but their competitive advantage is definitely doing. Yeah, yeah, because all of those programs that Nick just mentioned are available from almost every other transferable points program. So, you know, it's, so it's, so it's, the point is that what makes Amex unique,

there's, there's not a lot going on anymore, at least so far this year. Right. All right. Finally, our third program here that's kind of trending. downward is Chase. And I don't know if this is fair, Greg. Why do you think Chase is trending downward? Yeah, not really their fault, but with the Hyatt devaluation coming very soon, it's looking very likely that the great value you can get and transferring Chase to Hyatt is going to go down. And that's many of us, you know, transferring to Hyatt was the key use for

Chase Sultimer awards. I still think there'll be plenty of occasions where transferring to Hyatt, it will be offer really good value, but it will almost necessarily be less value than you would have had before the Hyatt devaluation. Yeah, you know, I said I don't know it's fair. And the reason I'm saying that is because we're kind of preemptively declaring it trending downward because we expect Hyatt to become less valuable. And it hasn't happened yet. So at this point, It's not yet down for me. However, I did write a post a couple of years ago saying that Chase needs to stop leaning on Hyatt. That was essentially the bedrock of the value of ultimate rewards points, in my opinion,

and I think in the opinion of a lot of people. And I had said within that post, if and when Hyatt ever goes dynamic or devalues significantly, the advantage that Ultimate Rewards has is going to evaporate because they don't have other. I should, I'll take that back. They don't have many other unique and useful transfer partners. And I'm sure some people are going to say, wait, but they do. Southwest is useful and unique. And I'll say, okay, yes, they are unique.

And sometimes they're useful. But the value, the max value, you're going to get out of a Southwest point is pretty limited compared to most foreign airline transfer partner program. So that's why I say. And I know United also is almost unique to them. But anyway, yeah, I agree it is trending slightly downward, or it will soon. trend downward, I think, is even more accurate. But, you know, they still have some bright spots. They do. And, you know, I think that United, the way United has been changing their program

to where cardholders get better value with United Miles than non-card holders, it opens up opportunities to use United Miles for better value as long as you have a United card. And so if you also have Chase Altimer Awards points, I think there'll be more, uh, valuable opportunities going forward to transfer your chase points to United, where it would make sense to do that. So in that way, that semi-unique partner is making chase, you know, slightly better in a very indirect way. And by the way, before anyone complains about us saying unique, There's some programs like Hyatt and United that we're going to say are unique but aren't really unique because like Built also has them, for example. So if we use the word unique in this whole conversation, take it to mean that it's sort of unusual to have this, not that it's really the one and only.

Great point. The other thing that Chase has that is unique is that if you also have a Chase Aeroplane card, transfers to Aeroplan from Chase Ultimate Awards get a 10% extra bonus. And that's even true when they offer, they frequently offer a 20% transfer bonus to Aroplan, you know, once or twice a year. And if you have the Aeroplane card, it becomes 30%. So another thing that is going in Chase's favor is they are doubling down, it looks like, on transfer bonuses. I saw, I counted eight transfer bonuses this year so far.

And, you know, we're not even halfway into the year, including a 40. Yeah, yeah, including a 40% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic. So, you know, not all of them are weak-sauced transfer bonuses like to IHG, although. that is counted in that total. So it's a little mislating when we say eight. How many useful transfer bonuses have they had? I didn't try to count that, but there were definitely some useful ones in there. Yeah. Some. Yeah. All right. So trending slightly down overall, but there are some ways in which they maybe are strengthening a little bit, particularly with regard to transfer bonuses. I will agree with that. All right. What about programs that are kind of staying even, staying in the middle, not really trending

upward or downward, just kind of staying where they are? Yeah. Capital One, I'm not seeing much happening there one way or another. I mean, they have some strengths and those are still strengths. I'm not seeing much change. I don't know if they have had four transfer bonuses this year, so that's a really good thing. And two of them were to Japan Airlines to bring transfers to Japan Airlines to very close to one-to-one because they don't start off at one-to-one normally. You know, Capital One, you know, some of their strengths are they have this uniqueish transfer partners like EVA and Japan Airlines.

Neither of them are one-to-one, but it's great that they have them. They did, like others, though, drop Emirates and in this case to four to three transfer ratio. Their transfers to JetBlue are pathetic, a thousand to 600 points. But on a plus side, they still offer excellent point sharing. You could share your points with anyone in the world who has a capital one miles earning card. So, you know, anyway, that's the way I see it. I'm wondering, Nick, did I miss anything? Is there anything you see going up or down there?

Well, you know, I think that the near one-to-one transfer ratio to Japan Airlines when they run these bonuses, I think it's at least the third time in less than a year here that they have run a transfer bonus to Japan Airlines that makes them close to one to one. I mean, I think that that is an upward trend, and now you're going to compare it later to Rove Miles, I'm sure, but compared to the other credit card transferable currencies, nobody else has Japan Airlines at anything. So close to one to one three times in the last year,

that's actually pretty good, I think, by a lot of measures, particularly when you look at things like 42,000 miles one way for France business class from the East Coast to Europe, with no surcharges, and Emirates at 61. 1K or something like that one way and even a better deal round trip, I think, on Emirates, if you're going to fly like JFK to Milan and something like that. Anyway, so I mean, I think that Japan Airlines is definitely a big ad for them. And when you say they've only had four transfer bonuses this year, we're just over four

months into the year. That's averaging one a month. I don't know. Don't get me wrong. They're not like on an upward, a strong upward trend. But when you compare that to Chase and Amex, I feel like, well, They haven't lost much. The Emirates has decreased.

They haven't lost a lot. JetBlue's always stunk with them. So that's really, you're right. That stayed the same. But give them a little bit of credit there. Yeah, I guess you have a good point. I was thinking, Japan Airlines, them adding that it as a transfer partner, I think, happened around a year ago. Yeah.

And so I was not really seeing that addition as part of what I was including in my thoughts. But, you know, I'm happy to change this to trending slightly up. Very slightly. Very slightly. That's my opinion. I'm capital. I think particularly since people have now paid a little bit more attention to things like the Air France Redemptions, I think, you know, when you look at things like that, there are some really bright spots to having Japan Airlines.

But they're not the only folks that have Japan Airlines, because now we got to talk about who is trending up. Yeah. The biggest trend upward has got to be rove. I mean, Rove is just killing it. And in recent months, they've added Japan Airlines one-to-one, SAS, Scandinavian Airlines one-to-one. Who else has them? Nobody. Nobody.

They finally added Virgin, and then Aeroplan is the most recent. So, you know, having Japan Airlines one-to-one, that's absolutely huge. They filled the need for transfers to Aeroplane and Virgin, like those are things that are common in many other transfer. points programs and so they filled that need they already had mostly the other common ones and you know and they have unique partners even beyond scandinavian airlines they've got like lefanzas miles and more they've got vietnam they've got air india they have one decentish hotel transfer partner which is a core which goes three to two where when you compare to some transferable points programs

go two to one to core. So that's better than most. And they've had three transfer bonuses this year. And, you know, they've been really valuable transfer bonuses, especially that when they started off in Japan Airlines offering a 50% transfer bonus to Japan Airlines was stunning. I mean, considering we're excited about having one-to-one to Japan Airlines being able to get one-to-one and a half for a while was amazing. So yeah, they're in a terrific upward trajectory. One thing I'd love to see is some way to share points with others. But aside from that, I think they're clearly trending in the right direction on transfer partners and things like that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's no doubt. Completely agree with everything Greg said. Roeve is certainly going up. And they're

going up fast. They're not, they're, they're really, I think, the big headline program out of all of this to be making the biggest and best and most noticeable changes. So I would agree with everything you've said there. I would add that what I really would love to see now is a Rove Miles credit card, to be honest with you, because I don't pay for enough hotel stays with cash to earn as many row of miles as I want. Now, yes, they have a shopping portal. And so I have been using that somewhat lately, but I would earn far more Roe of Miles if I could be earning them with a credit card. And I have to imagine that they're hopeful to launch that at some point. Maybe we haven't talked about it with them or anything. So that's not any sort of inside baseball there. It's just I would

like to see it because I want more ways to earn Roe of Miles than what I currently have because I find myself wanting these more and more because of those unique and interesting transfer partners that have some really good use cases. Now, if you do have the need to book paid hotel stays, Rove can be great for that because if you're making like an advanced purchase, booking, you're booking the advance purchase rate, you can get the miles in many cases right away. So like you can book your hotel and get the miles right away to book your flight for the trip, which is so unique and so interesting. I think Rove definitely is doing things that excite me because it's not what we see from everybody else.

It's a little different. So I'm getting more bullish on that. My main criticism, I'd love to see them be more competitive on the hotel prices. So every now and then, I do find a really good rate through Rove, but often I find their prices are inflated. And I would love to see that change. Now, that said, even with inflated prices, it can be worth it because of how many points you can earn.

But you really need to do the math. in those cases to see what's going on. Yeah, I think a credit card would be really interesting. I think a rewards debit card would be super interesting. I would love to see that as well. Yeah, maybe that'd be easier to do. So, yeah, I think you've got a good thought there. So, yeah, interesting.

So Rov Miles certainly on the up. But they're not alone. They're not the only program that's trending upward. Who else is going upward? Yeah, you know, Wells Fargo has been sitting in the basement of the transferable points world for quite a while since they introduced their program pretty much. It's just been sitting there, not doing much with very few transfer partners. But they've been on a role the last few months adding new transfer partners. They're not as exciting as, you know, the type that Roe is

adding, which is why we didn't lead with Wells Fargo. But, you know, they now, they transfer, Well, when they kicked off originally, they were able to transfer one to two to choice, but now they've added one to two to Windham and they've added other programs like Cathay, Asia Miles. So it's great to see stuff happening in that world. Still not an exciting program at this point. You know, I wouldn't look at it and say I'd rather have Wells Fargo points than any other transferable points that I can think of, you know, unless I really had a lot of Wyndham need going on. But still, it's clearly getting better.

I want to see, you know, to make them competitive, they need like Air Canada, for example, they don't have that. They don't have any unique airline partners. So they have the ones that are in common across most programs, but nothing unique going on yet. And we're not seeing transfer bonuses. So I'd like to see them kick that up. Yeah, I mean, I'll agree with you that Wells Fargo is trending upward, but I mean, the bar was really low to start.

They didn't have to do much to trend upward. So that's, you know, yeah, it's getting a little bit better. It's like going from negative 20 degrees to negative 19 and a half degrees. Yeah, okay, it's getting a little warmer, but you got a long ways to go. So I think that I, in addition to all the things you've said, we also need to see some more exciting credit card bonuses from Wells Fargo, I think, to make their program more compelling because I find myself not using. So my wife has the autograph card, the product changed from a built card. And I find myself not choosing to use it because the autograph card doesn't have great travel protections. So even though

I could earn three points per dollar on travel, I'm hesitant to book travel with it. And I'm not excited about going out to get a new Wells Fargo card right now because it's not enough transferable points to draw me in versus what everybody else is constantly offering. So I think they need to first improve the transfer partners. That's that's number one. And then if they can do that and also make a splash on the credit card side with a new, whether it's a new welcome bonus, a new card, a new something that makes it exciting. I think they need to do a lot more to become truly competitive with everybody else. But as we've talked about recently, that a tune card that has the multiple 4x categories could make Wells Fargo really interesting.

I need something else before I go after in a tuned card, though. What they've got right now isn't enough for me. Yeah, yeah. To me, they're getting really close, and I can see it getting there. I'm intrigued by, there's also a version of the autograph journey card that is only for their premier customers.

I'm intrigued by that, because a few readers have commented that it has very good travel protections. I haven't found the benefits guide specific to that version of the card anywhere online, so I can't confirm that at this time. But if that's true, then, you know, if you could get that card as well as like the attune, I think that can be a really compelling combination, again, especially if they keep adding more transfer partners so that they become more competitive overall. The good news for Wells Fargo is there's a lot of room from improvement. So they have a lot of chance to continue trending upward with the right tweaks.

I mean, as much as that's kind of funny, it's also sincere that if they make the right tweaks, they have the ability to become a major mover and compete with everybody else. But right now, Roeves beaten you to it Wells Fargo, so it's time to light a fire. Yeah, yeah. But for those, you know, looking for a traditional banking situation with low fees, like City used to be the one, you might look to to get like good multiples, low fees and good transfer partners. Now, you know, Wells, I think, has a chance to grab that market away. So we'll say, but yes. Great point. Great point.

Need to do some moving there. All right. Finally, I'm going to declare that built is moving, trending upward. And it's going to be, take a bit of an argument here because for a few reasons. One, their points were already fantastic. I mean, they have some amazing transfer partners like, you know, one-to-one to Alaska, to Japan Airlines. They kept Emirates one-to-one. They have Hyatt and United, you know, and I mentioned a Corps three to two before. They also have that.

So they have a lot of really valuable transfer partners as things stand today. They continue to do regular huge transfer bonuses on rent days. But counteracting, before I talk about why I think they're going up, I mentioned before I thought Chase was going down because transfers to Hyatt will become less valuable with when Hyatt devalues later this month. Why isn't that true with Built as well? And I think that it kind of is true with Built, except that with one big distinction that you can look at build and see lots of valuable uses for built points that have nothing to do with Hyatt.

Whereas with Chase, it's harder to see that. And in fact, if what attracts you to build is their huge transfer bonuses, you weren't concerned about Hyatt at all before because they never did a transfer bonus diet and never will. So anyway, so what's trending upward is that with Built 2.0 and with some changes with the Rack and the Shopping Portal, built has added lots of ways to earn a lot more built points than were possible before. So you can get, you know, you could get a big sign up bonus with a play name card. you can earn, you know, a base rate of 2x everywhere with the Palladium card or up to 3x for certain purchases with the, what is it called, the obsidian card or something? Yeah, Obsidian card. Is that what it's called?

I'm sorry, so the obsidian is the grocery or dining card. Yeah, the one that gets up to 3x, yeah. And then you could get many more points on top of that by trading and built cash for accelerators or by paying. for housing through built. And then, you know, I ever mentioned the big transfer bonuses. So I think all those things make it like the points are much more available than ever before. So the ability to take advantage of things like these big transfer bonuses is suddenly, you know, people can do it. Because before it was very hard to earn big quantities of built points.

So that's what I see mainly as the reason I think they're trending up. Yeah, you know, I think actually I'll give you one more, I don't know if it's an argument. One more thing that you could view as trending upward is that authorized users now can earn built points. So while built doesn't offer sharing exactly, if you add someone as an authorized user, they can earn built points on their purchases in their own built account and make progress towards built elite status in their account based on the purchases that they're making on the authorized user card. So, you know, through that lens anyway, there's sort of points sharing-ish in that way.

And that's, that's been a good change that I think does trend them upward a little bit. You know, within my own household, I would like to have built status. I don't yet, and I'm not an authorized user yet. But my wife has the Palladium card. I don't. And we could just have her add me as an authorized user and make all the purchases. on my card and I could earn the points in the status. That'd be one way to sort of make that happen if I don't want to or can't get a palladium card myself. So I think that that's a positive change there too.

I would probably have held built more in the no change category along with Capital One kind of staying about even. And the trouble here is that unlike Wells Fargo, where I said that, I mean, there's nowhere to go, but up for Wells Fargo, right? there's a lot of room for them to improve. Built has a much narrower window in terms of how to trend upward because they already have really valuable points and great transfer partners and huge transfer bonuses. It's hard.

It's a lot harder when you're at the top to go any higher. And, of course, Bill's not without its drawbacks. Let me be clear. We were pretty unhappy with the launch of the Built Card 2.0 and some of the stuff that happened there, some of the complexities, some of the challenges. some of the challenges people have had with mortgage payments and rent payments early on and whatnot. So there are plenty of negatives also with Biltz, and I want to recognize that. But the points themselves are very valuable.

They're still very valuable. And there's only so much more they could do to make them any more valuable. They could add, I guess, another partner or two. But, I mean, who would you add to their lineup? What transfer partner would you like to see that Bilt doesn't currently have? You know, I think then you're getting into niche programs that, you know, maybe some of the ones Rove has, like, I don't know if built has Lufthansa miles and more. I don't think so.

You know, I don't think they have Ayr India yet. So, you know, there's some, or SAS is another one. So, you know, I think there's some that would be very nice to have. But, you know, I'm looking at this overall list of all these transferable points programs that we listed thinking to myself, you know what if I had if I could only have two types of points between built and and rove I can't think of any programs that I'd be you know missing out on maybe EVA I guess you wouldn't have any access to ANA you know you get that okay so there are several there actually are several you wouldn't have preferred hotels I don't think which which now Capital One and

City both have but only wanted to do yeah yeah yeah but yeah yeah but yeah yeah yeah small they're small they're things that we need to kind of reach for and be like yeah i mean those would be nice to have but we don't yeah and the only other thing that you'd be missing is sort of the confidence in the stability that you probably have in an emmx or a chase that you wouldn't have in a new startup like roe for built uh or you might question at least in in in those regards because they're not as well established as the major players so they do need to compete they need to have great programs in order to be competitive because if they had wells fargo's program and they were new, then we wouldn't be talking about them at all, right? So that makes sense, I think that,

but I agree with you. I think if I had to pick two right now based on how everything's working today, those would probably be the two that I would pick too, because they are working the artist to be the most competitive, I think, and doing well at it. So I think that's exciting because it, you know, it goes to show that as we always say, things change. But if you're looking for where you can have some good opportunities, those are always out there somewhere. You just need to look in a different place, perhaps than you did in the past. If you've enjoyed today's episode and you want more of this in your email inbox, you can go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list.

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You can send those to send it to mailbag at frequent miler.com. Hey guys, Aaron Miller here from Armchair Explorer and I just wanted to let you know that our new series is out now. We've got kiteski across Antarctica,

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