Frequent Miler on the Air - Turn hotel status into airline status | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep367 | 7-17-26

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

In today's episode, we'll talk about how Wells Fargo shut down Greg's checking account, we'll ask "Did Marriott devalue again?", and we'll look at the many ways to turn hotel status into airline status.Giant Mailbag(01:12) - Rick shares a note about Bilt Cash at WalgreensCard News(04:25) - Chase Freedom Flex® dropping foreign transaction fees, but also losing cell protectionCrazy Thing(06:22) - Capital One Shopping: 95% back at Instacart (new members)Awards, Points, and More(12:05) - Rove adds QantasRead more about Rove adding Qantas as a transfer partner here(13:30) - Choice points on sale through July 20(14:21) - Greg's Wells Fargo shutdownLearn more about Greg's Wells Fargo shutdown here(24:58) - Nick's Sapphire Reserve® Exclusive Tables Blunders(31:07) - FHR Las Vegas observances(35:10) - Marriott devaluation... or not?Read Stephen's thoughts about the supposed devaluation here(37:43) - How to apply Marriott free night certs to upgraded roomsLearn more about this hereMain Event: Turn hotel status into airline status(42:29) - First up: New Airline + Hotel partnerships(42:58) - Read more about the Hyatt / Aeroplan partnership here(53:00) - Read more about Marriott and Japan Airlines here: https://frequentmiler.com/marriott-japan-airlines-launch-deeper-partnership-earn-bonus-points-get-status-match-earn-status-points-more/(1:01:00) - Key hotel/airline match-ups (and other hotel/airline tie-ups)...(1:16:35) - Special topic: Airline hotel portalsSubscribe 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:Frequent Miler's Best Offers Pagehttps://frequentmiler.com/best-credit-card-offers/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 Network

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. On today's show, Wells Fargo, shut down my checking account. Are my points in danger? And we ask, did Marriott devalue again? And finally, we discuss many ways to turn hotel status into airline status. Frequent Milo on the air starts now. Today's main event,

turned hotel elite status into airline status. This week, both Marriott and Hyatt have launched new partnerships with airline programs, making it possible to get airline status from your hotel status in new ways. And there are, of course, several other ways to do similar things. And so in today's main event, we're going to be talking about all the ways that you could turn your hotel elite status into meaningful airline status. Yeah, and remember if you want to jump ahead to that or you want to come back to something later,

just expand the description box to see all of the timestamps there in the show notes. Wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this, give us a thumbs up, leave us a comment, some stars for a review. We appreciate all of those things. Let's drag out this week's Giant Mailback. Today, Giant Mail comes from Rick. Rick writes in and says,

Hey, Greg and Nick, as we are all trying to figure out how to leverage as much built cash as possible before the end of the year. I want to encourage everyone to redeem the Walgreens credit every month, even if they rarely go to Walgreens. Unlike many of the other credits, the $10 Walgreens credit is in the form of a digital Walgreens gift card that doesn't expire at the end of the month. I've been redeeming them every month since I discovered this, and recently I went into Walgreens and successfully used multiple $10 gift cards from previous months for a single purchase. Gift cards are saved in the gift cards section of the everyday rewards part of the built app. Just make sure to mark them redeemed after using so your app doesn't get cluttered.

That's a great tip. That's when we discovered, I think, early on, but it's a good tip, I think. And I wish I had done this. I regret it a little bit. I haven't been worried about using all of the built cash necessarily. I mean, that's not to say you shouldn't. If you have the brain capacity to dedicate to it. Please use all of the built cash you can. I haven't worried as much about it, but I regret it a little bit because, so backing up, there's a Walgreens that was about half a mile from my house and was a place where would frequently go to pick up things we needed because I live in a very small town where there aren't a lot of other places to shop. And unfortunately, that closed just before Bill 2.0. So I'm in that situation. I rarely ever go to

Walgreens now. But then I was just in Las Vegas. Vegas and ended up needing to go to Walgreens to pick up a bunch of things. And so I redeemed for one $10 gift card as I walked into the store, but immediately wished that I had redeemed for multiple $10 gift cards. So Rick, you're absolutely right. Definitely make sense to do this. And I'm going to make it a habit to start doing this. By the way, you can also add it to Google wallet. That's what I did. I added it to Google wallet as soon as I redeemed it in the bill tap. and then you pull it up there with a barcode. And I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to use in store.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a great tip. And like you, Nick, I'm not overly concerned about trying to use up all my built cash by the end of the year. I basically want to have it available for the accelerators, for a transfer bonus that I'm interested in to make the transfer bonus bigger. And, you know, hotels, when I book hotels, using the Palladium cards $200 hotel credit. You could throw in another $100 if you have elite status with built. And so, you know, those kind of things I do care about,

but whether I have, you know, $200 in built cash, $8 million in built cash by the end of the year that doesn't roll over, I actually don't care, as long as I'm getting good value from, good enough value to make up for the card's annual fee and then it earns all those points. so it's it's well worth it okay not living rent free in our brains built cash all right yeah same same let's move on to card news then so in card news this week the freedom flex is dropping its foreign

transaction fees so that's good news it's also losing cell phone protection so if you've been using the freedom flex to pay your cell phone bill you'll probably want to change to a different card for that this is effective september 20th 2026 so i don't know i mean i feel like losing the cell phone protection is kind of a bummer, although Chase's cell phone protection is not as good as some of the others out there. If you want, if cell phone protection really matters to you, I think the answer is to get a Wells Fargo card, even though their cards with no annual fee have the best cell phone protection. Yeah, totally. But getting rid of foreign transaction fees, I think that's great. Yeah, I think that's great too. You know, and it'll be interesting to see are the, will the quarterly categories that the

Freedom Flex offers, will they be relevant to international purchases now that you're not going to have to pay the foreign transaction fee? So that would be cool. I would think that Chase would be even more interested, I mean, well, that Chase's customers would be even more interested in having the freedom unlimited drop its foreign transaction fee because, you know, that's the card that earns a base rate of 1.5, Chase points everywhere, and then has a few 3x categories. But you know, to be able to go internationally and get that base 1.5x for no annual fee would be pretty good. So let's hope that that happens, but no word yet. Yeah. And while I'm hopeful for that, if I'm not, am I incorrect about this? The Freedom Flex is a master card now, right? And the Freedom

Unlimited is still a visa. So I wonder if that might mean that we won't see this expanding to the Freedom Unlimited, but I have the same thought as you. I would love to see that on the Freedom Unlimited. So if you're listening, Chase, make the Freedom Unlimited get rid of those foreign transaction fees. Next up, let's talk about what crazy thing? What crazy thing did Capital One shopping do this week? They do some crazy stuff, so you've got to narrow this one down for me. Yeah. So, of course, Capital One Shopping is that shopping portal that you don't need a Capital One card or account in order to use. And instead of earning cashback, it earns credit that you can redeem for gift cards, but it's, but it often targets people with amazing deals. And what happened

this past week is some people, including me, got targeted for Instacart 95% back if you're a new Instacart member. And the maximum amount you could earn from that was $1,000. So, you know, my first reaction when I saw this was, you know, oh, I, I, I'm not a new member, Instacart member. I've been using Instacart, so it doesn't apply me, but great for new ones. But of course, you could set up a new Instagram account and become a new member. So 95% back, I mean, means you could buy things. You could buy iPads.

You could buy, you know, whatever. The maximum $1,000 rebate means your purchase can be up to $1,052 and still get the full 95%. of course their math is sometimes funky it might actually end up being more or less than 95 percent but still anywhere in that range is an unbelievable deal yeah i mean that is that's absolutely amazing like you said i think of instacart primarily for buying groceries but instacart has other stores on there i mean they've Costco on there target best buy so plenty of things you could buy with 95 percent back that would work out to be a pretty solid deal so So yeah, that's incredible. And, you know, there are probably some skeptics out there. And fine, I will agree with you. Be skeptical because that does sound absolutely nuts. But the thing is, most of those places have pretty good return policies. So if you buy something and it never does pay out, just don't open it. Wait and make sure the tracks and the, you're on track to get it and wait to open it until you know you're getting your 95% back. And if you don't get it back, just return it. But yeah, I absolutely think that it would be worth.

finding someone who's a new Instacart customer even if you aren't yourself and you, you know, there you go. There you go. I'm interested in a new Instacart account. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great deal.

Great deal. I've gotten some other good ones too lately. I started getting those homepage activation offers again. So I got another 100 back on 100 for rental cars, 100 back on 100 for hotels and my wife's account. So it's just, it's worth keeping an eye on Capital One shop because I keep throwing good offers out there. It's kind of a pain because.

So it used to be that the key was to install the extension on a browser. Don't put it on your main browser and pretend to shop from that browser where it's installed. And then you get these targeted great offers for different things. But now there's also the fact that it's necessary to log in the Capital One shopping and see your homepage offers because some of those are fantastic too. And so I don't know. there may be other great ways of getting offers as well that I'm not aware of, but at least those two are definitely worth pursuing. Yeah, and I do log in and look at it almost every day

because you never know what crazy thing like that is going to pop up. I will say I had a fail recently. I wrote about this briefly and I post about our trip to Las Vegas. I had clicked through from an offer for 100 back on 100 in event tickets and went to vivid seats and bought tickets that were $100 per ticket. I made a couple of different purchases through different accounts. And the short version of the story that I might have told already before is that I didn't look at the cost breakdown because now they give you just the full price with everything.

And so it was $100, $105 a ticket or something. And I didn't realize that only like 75 of that was the ticket and the rest was the vivid seats fees. Yeah. And so a track is ineligible. And that was a bummer. But I had bought two tickets in one account. So that one was good. I was eligible for the $100 back because it was $150.

or whatever and ticket cost. And so I thought that was great, but then the event got canceled. And so I had to get sort of a refund from Vivid Seeds, but they actually didn't refund me. So I obviously had to chat and wait for the email and blah, blah, blah. But they wrote back and they were like, okay, we're really sorry. The event was canceled.

So we've automatically credited your account with 110% credit and like, you know, store credit. If you would prefer a cash refund, then you can email us and tell us that. So I expected that I would ask for the cash refund, but without getting into the weeds as to why, I ended up buying new tickets through vivid seats and using the craft. I figured, whatever, let's just leave it alone. I've already got the Capital One shopping cash. Let's just use that credit. And maybe I'll use the extra 10% someday. Maybe I won't.

Whatever. Well, little did I know that when the event was canceled, they apparently must have reached back out or clawed back the cash back from Capital One shopping. So Capital One shopping clawed back my $100 back. So yeah, taking the cash refund is the moral of the story on the vivid seats. So yeah, on a tangent here about Capital One shopping, but figured maybe worth knowing for anybody out there

who has a canceled event, take the cash refund. They're going to claw back your cash back. All right. Sad story. Next stop. All right. Awards points and more.

In good news, happier news, Rove has added a new transfer partner. Yeah, I mean, they've been on a roll just adding one transfer partner after another. The latest is Qantas, which is, you know, it's not the most exciting, but it has some good uses. It has this distance-based award chart, which in some cases can lead to good value and sometimes really good value. They also have a few notable, you know, non one world partners. They're a one world airline, so they partner with all the one world carriers,

but also partner with Air France and KLM and Emirates. And so sometimes, for example, Qantas can be the best points to use to book Emirates in certain situations. And they have reasonable change in cancellation fees. You can use points. You can use 5,000 points to change an award ticket or 6,000 to cancel.

So a lot of, you know, decent stuff there. And then Rove is also kicking in, as they seem to do. Each time they introduce a new partner, they're introducing a transfer bonus through August 14th, 50%, which is a very, very nice transfer bonus. So all that, good news. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome to see them continue to expand the program. Next up in awards points and more, choice points are on sale through July 20th. So choice privileges points, you can get a 45% discount when you're buying choice points, which actually means.

you can buy for a little less than six-tenths of a cent per point, 0.57 cents per point to be exact. And that's pretty well below our reasonable redemption value of three quarters of a cent per point. So you can easily do pretty well with this point sale. So what do you think? You buy in points? Yeah, I might, but it's going to depend on what happens in our next segment, where I'm going to talk about what's going on with me and Wells Fargo. So I will, if I remember to, remind me if I don't, I'm going to get back to this point sale. A few weeks ago, Wells Fargo sent me an email saying they were closing my premier checking account because they suspected my account was impacted by identity theft.

Now, that is very unlikely. there haven't been any kind of alerts about anything going on with my account. The only activity in my account was when I loaded $500 to it after signing up for it, and then it's just sat there. And so I don't know why they really want to close my account, but they are. And when they sent the email, they said July 10th was when it would actually shut down, So they gave me a few weeks to kind of deal with it.

So my first reaction was one, well, they're saving me a step because I was planning on shutting down this account anyway. And the account costs something like $35,000 a month if you don't have $250,000 in savings with Wells Fargo. And so I wasn't planning on paying that. Luckily, they waived that fee for the first, I think, six months of your account. So I haven't had to pay the fee, but I certainly was going to before I got charged. So that was my plan. Anyway, from that point of view, that's good news. But the bad news is often with banks, if they shut down one account, they're going to shut down all accounts.

And that's where things get problematic for me. I have two Wells Fargo credit cards. One, I haven't done hardly anything with. It's the autograph card that was the changeover. from the old built 1.0 card. That's a nice card, but I just haven't done much with it. And then there's the Premier Autograph Visa Infinite card, which is the whole reason I had signed up for the Premier checking account

was because I thought it would help me get targeted for that card. It's a variation on the Autograph Journey card, but it has some extra features and a much better, welcome bonus. And so I had signed up for the Premier account. Two weeks later, I finally got targeted for that credit card. I signed up. I quickly met the minimum spend and had 104,000 Wells Fargo rewards points pending. Okay. So now I get the email. Yeah, I get the email. My checking count's going to be closed. I'm wondering, is my credit card going to also be closed? If it is, then that means those 104,000 points are gone if I don't spend them first. So I, of course,

log into my count. I look. Everything looks fine with my credit cards. My points are there-ish. And what I mean by is that they say they're pending. Expected to be available July 4th. So this was back in June. So I nervously waited every day looking at my account until July 4th. July 4th, they still weren't available. July 5th, the points became available. My plan was to transfer to choice privileges, one to two. And so the first step is to connect your account from Wells Fargo to Choice.

Try to do that. Yeah, you would think that would be easy. Try to do that. Nope. Error. I noticed that Wells Fargo had my first name as Gregory and Choice had it as Greg. I call Choice, get them to change my name to Gregory. That doesn't fix it.

I go round and about with Wells Fargo support. I end up changing my name with Choice like three times in total. It never fixes the problem. Wait, wait, so Choice. Choice didn't suspect anything the third time you called to change your name in a single day. There was no identity theft concern there. I don't know how to feel about that. Choice was amazingly easy to work with.

I mean, Wells Fargo was okay, but it was, it was hard with that first rep to explain what transferring points was. I mean, that was a whole thing. I'm not going to party with that. But, yeah, so I've been sweating buckets that this whole thing has been going on for weeks. And so I was trying to get rid of my points before July 10th, but that didn't happen. struggling with this issue. For some reason it didn't occur to me till afterwards. Why not just change your mind and transfer to something else? So finally, this week as we're recording this, I tested all the other transfer partners to see could I transfer to the other ones and all the other ones worked fine and

Wells Fargo let you transfer one point. So I tested one point with each one. They're all instant except for JetBlue. JetBlue has exact same problem as choice. I just won't let me connect my account. Then I started writing up a post about it and I did post about it on a Wednesday night. And as I was writing up that post on Wednesday afternoon, I thought, I wonder if it would work if I create a new choice account and connect that. And it does work. So now I'm like, hey, I could do it. I could transfer my points of choice. Meanwhile, there's this choice sale. And I'm like, wow, you could buy points for 0.57 cents each.

Transferring even one to two is not that great of value. Like, if I really wanted that many choice points, I might as well just buy them. And so I'm in a quandary now about what I should do. And so what do you think I should do? I looked at all the transfer partners. The ones that look most attracted to me are choice, Wyndham, because that's also one to two,

and Air France, Kael I'm Flying Blue, what do you think I should do, Nick? Well, when you said you looked at which ones were most, most appealing to you, I thought you were going to list all four of them. Because Wells Fargo doesn't have very many transfer partners, so there are very many options. I joke, there's more than four, but not very many more than four. Right. Anyway, so, yeah, you know, the point that Greg is making here is if you can buy the choice

points for 0.57 cents per point right now, then that means that, so if he's got a hundred and, let's call it 100,000, Wells Fargo. points. So it'd be 200,000 choice points. So it would only cost you about $1,000, a little bit more than that, 1100, whatever, to buy 200,000 chase points. That means he's essentially cashing in his Wells Fargo points for just a little bit more than a penny a point in value in terms of that that's the cash that he could be using for the same number of points. So yeah, I think that that's pretty questionable in terms of transferring, because I think you can do much better than just over one cent per point with some of the other partners. So I'd be pretty hesitant about the

choice transfer right now too, though it's easy for me to say that because I bought a bunch of choice points on a sale earlier this year to book some hotels for upcoming trip to Europe. And then a family memorial got planned right in the middle of that. And so all of my choice redemptions are getting canceled. So I'm going to end up with a whole bunch of choice points because I needed multiple rooms and things. So I'm in a situation now where I definitely don't need any more choice points for a while. So it seems even less appealing to me. So perhaps my perspective is tainted by that.

But additionally, I say, well, you know, Wyndham points are, I find a lot of opportunities to get a penny a point out of them. I know the reasonable redemption value is lower these days. But at the very least, I know they can be transferred to Caesars. And I can use them for, you know, dinner or rooms or whatever if we go to a destination where there's a Caesar's property. just ate at Nobu, Las Vegas, Caesar's Palace, and I used a bunch of reward credits, some of which came from Wyndham in the past, and, oh, it was fantastic. It was very expensive,

so I was very glad that I was able to use a bunch of those points transferred from Wyndham at one cent per point. But, you know, so if you get to Princeton 1 to 2, that'd be 200,000 windom points, it'd be $2,000 off of like hotel stays or meals at Caesars. So that would be pretty appealing to me, but I know you're not a Las Vegas through Caesar's destination type of a person, So that wouldn't be a particular appeal. And I don't think there are actually probably all that many Wyndham redemptions that you've been pining over. And if there were, you can earn eight points per dollar at the gas station with your old Wyndham earner business card still. And you're getting points every year thanks to the annual fee.

So I think for you, I would pick Air France, KLM flying blue because I know you'll do better than a little over one cent per point with your Air France miles, whether you're booking domestic Delta flights or even stuff like, you're just in. Toronto and a flight from Detroit to Toronto is really reasonable with Air France, KLM flying blue points. And so you've got lots of those types of opportunities. And then, of course, obviously for business class to and from Europe and you go to Europe almost every year, it seems. So I would, I would transfer your points to Air France. I think if I were, if I were Greg DeFriko Milo. If I were me, I might transform him to wind him to be truthful because I've got my Caesar status for a while. And while we're not in a hurry to go back to Las Vegas, since I'll have status again next year,

I think there's a non-zero chance. We'll go back. And so I would probably do Wyndham, but I think you should do Air France. All right. Well, I am still undecided despite that, but I'm going to make my decision very soon, probably before the show airs.

But feel free to write in to the giant mailbag anyway, to mailbag at Freakomiler.com, to let me know what you think I should do. Yeah. Okay. And by the way, I should mention, I, I talked about using it for $2,000 worth of, of Caesar's credit by taking your Wyndham points. And I kind of glossed over the fact that Wyndham and Caesars have a partnership whereby you can transfer your points from Wyndham to Caesars. But there's a limit on that. Normally, it's 30,000 points per year. So that'll only be $300 worth of points. Right now you can do $60,000 points through September something or others. So you could do $600 worth this year and do another $300 worth next year, blah, blah, blah. up. So just to be clear, you couldn't actually move all 200,000 points right away. I wanted to clarify that. Okay. So that's that. Back to Las Vegas for a second. I wanted to talk, actually, not only Las Vegas. I wanted to talk quickly about my Sapphire Reserve, my Sapphire exclusive tables blunders. So I made some mistakes with Sapphire Reserve or the Sapphire Reserve cards, Sapphire Exclusive

tables. So the Sapphire Reserve card comes with up to $300 per year in statement credit. it's for Sapphire Exclusive Tables Restaurants, which are on open table and that special list of Sapphire Exclusive tables. So it's 150 January to June and 150 July to December. Well, I had plans to use my January to June in Salt Lake City. And then very last minute, we canceled the trip to Salt Lake City, which was happening at the end of June into early July. And so we canceled that very last minute. And I completely forgot until June 30th that, oh, that means I'm not going to use that Sapphire exclusive tables credit. Now I've got, we've got two household Sapphire Reserve cards. And it's June 30th. It's the last day to use the 150 from the first half of the year.

So I realized that. And I said, oh, well, I know I've heard of some people having success buying gift cards from restaurants that are on there that sell their gift cards through like toast, the toast tab checkout. And so I figured, well, maybe I can find a place where I can buy a gift card. So I went to Google Gemini to AI to ask it about where that might work. And Gemini knew exactly what I was talking about and cited some stuff and said, yeah, you know, you can, certain places. So I started asking for specific places where I could buy gift cards. And one of the places that came up was this Scars Pizza in New York, which I haven't double checked to make sure it's still on the list because they did change restaurants, but it has been on the list anyway for

a while. And I figured, well, one day I'll be in New York and I'll get pizza. So I asked Gemini, do they sell their gift cards online? Are they going to qualify for the credit? And Gemini told me, yes, they would. And I said, okay, great. I went to go try to find a gift card. I couldn't find any way to buy a gift card on the restaurant website. So I came back to Gemini and I was like, hey, can you get me a link to buy that gift card? And so Gemini I was like, oh yeah, sure, here you go and gave me a link. So I clicked the link, went through and yeah, okay, this is from Toast and the, you know, everything looked right initially. I looked quickly and I started to fill in all my information, including filling in my credit

card number. I was about to check out. And I noticed something looked a little off in the logo of the restaurant. And I realized it was not Scar's Pizza in New York. It was a different pizza place in Philadelphia that also started with an SC and had a similar looking logo, but it was not the right restaurant. So thankfully, I did not hit. you know, place order by the gift card because, yeah, that was, so I almost bought a $150 gift card

to a pizza place in Philadelphia. Thankfully, I did not. So word of warning, don't, don't always trust Gemini. Because then I went back to Gemini. I was like, Gemini, that's not the right restaurant. That's a place in Philadelphia. And they were like, oh, yeah, my bad. I'm sorry about that. You're totally right. It isn't. Doesn't look like there is a way to buy those gift cards online. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for that, Jim. So anyway, so that's the first part of the blunder. that was a near, near miss there. But the second part of the blunder is that I went ahead and I bought a gift card for a place called Esther's Kitchen in Las Vegas that was on Sapphire exclusive tables and a gift card for

a place in New York City, a Thai place in New York City that was on the list. So this was on June 30th. It was relatively late at night, but both gift cards were instantly delivered. So I got both gift cards in my email inbox on June 30th. And so I thought, oh, this is awesome. Great. should should get the credit. And then when we were in Las Vegas, we went to Nobu, as I mentioned a little while ago, Noobu, Las Vegas at Caesar's Palace, which was on the Sapphire exclusive tables,

no longer is. It's been since been removed, but it was on the list when we went there. And, and it was terrific. And so we split the bill. And I put 150 on my wife's Sapphire Reserve and 150 on my Sapphire Reserve and paid for the rest with lots of different things. I use my Diamond Plus free drinks there. because you get up to four free drinks, up to $25 a piece. So that saved us almost $100. There I used my $100 Caesar's Diamond Celebration dinner. I used a bunch of Caesar's reward credit.

They were great at letting me stack stuff at the restaurant. But it wasn't until a couple days later that I actually logged into my Chase account. And I realized, I didn't see a credit for the no-bo charges. And I thought that was weird. And I realized what happened is those gift card purchases that I made on June 30th that were delivered to my email inbox on June 30th, showed up with July 1st dates on my Chase statement. Both of them. And so I didn't even think to look before I went to no post.

So moral of the story, if you're going to try that trick, it can work. But do it before the last day of the month or the last day of the window. Because I really thought when the emails came through instantly, I thought, oh, obviously the charge is going to show up with a June 30th date. I knew it was a little risky doing it on the last day of the month. We've all learned from past experience that that's always a. a bad idea. But I thought, well, if the gift card doesn't come through until tomorrow, until July 1st, then I'm probably in trouble. But if it comes through tonight, I'll probably

be good. And I couldn't believe that the charges showed up a day after I received the gift cards. But there you go. So that's that. By the way, Esther's Kitchen in Las Vegas, almost impossible to get a dinner reservation at Esther's kitchen. It's like, it's off the strip. It's in like, sort of like near the arts district and downtown Las Vegas. If you were look at it from the outside. You wouldn't feel necessarily compelled to walk in. If you walked in, you wouldn't necessarily think this is going to be a terrific place. But let me tell you why, if you got a Sapphire Reserve card and you can't get a dinner reservation, you need to go for lunch because it is very good. I was really impressed. So Esther's Kitchen in Las Vegas, I would never have gone

there if not for the Sapphire Reserve tables thing. But we will go back the next time we go to Las Vegas. It was that good. It's worth getting off the strip. So, so. So, There you go. That's that. Finally, I'm going to kind of go through this kind of quickly because I feel like we've taken a lot of time on that. I wanted to just mention a couple of observances from my fine hotels and resorts bookings in Las Vegas. I booked stays at both cosmopolitan Las Vegas and Palazzo, Las Vegas, using fine hotels and resorts. And I wanted to mention this because if you've never used MXFHR before and Las Vegas is your first experience with fine hotels and resorts, you're going to get. at the wrong impression as to how FHR generally works because the Las Vegas resorts are really stingy about letting you use your credits and they're just not good at delivering the benefits. It's a very

different experience than what you get elsewhere. And so if you know that going in and I do, then you won't be wildly disappointed with it. But if you don't know that going in, you'll either be disappointed with FHR or really frustrated with the hotels or both. And so briefly, I mentioned, when I checked into Cosmopolitan, I had multiple back-to-back reservations, three separate nights. And so I knew I would only qualify for a single $100 resort credit. But at check-in, the check-in agent told me I would only get FHR benefits at all on the first day. And I was like, well, but I get breakfast each day, like with each day. And she was insistent that they just did a training and definitely not. I only get the FHR benefits on the first night. And so I had to get a

manager involved and the manager looked at it and said, well, it looks like breakfast is on all three. So you should get it. And, you know, so they misunderstood the benefit to start. Right. Right. I also went to the desk on the last day to make sure I didn't get charged for breakfast. They told me I didn't. Sure enough, I checked my credit card bill yesterday and I did get charged for breakfast. They didn't take the credits off. So now I'm going to have to try to deal with that. And while you get the $100 credit at Cosmopolitan, for instance, can be used at almost any of the MGM. properties. That's really nice. In the past, when I've stayed at what was Delano and now W at Mandalay Bay, there were specific restaurants where you could use the $100 credit. Cosmopolitan's letter

says that you can use it at almost any MGM place that you can charge to your room. So that's great. By the way, I didn't get the letter at check-in. That's another weird thing. Usually you get a letter at check-in with an FHR stay. Didn't get it to check-in. Had to come down to the desk later on to get it. And that explains where you can use all your benefits. So it's important to get that. Anyway, the $100 credit can't be used at any of their breakfast venues. So I knew we would use more than the $60 credit that they give you for breakfast, but you couldn't use the $100 resort credit to cover the overage from breakfast, which, again, that's just not typically the way that that works at a venture properties.

So, yeah, it's just an odd restriction, just built for breakage. At Palazzo is a totally different experience. They have a dedicated check-in area just for MX Vine Hotels and Resorts, which is really nice in Las Vegas. because lines get ridiculous sometimes. So having a separate check-in area just for FHR, great, really awesome there. The hotel emails you on your check-in day with a link that shows you exactly which restaurants you can use for the $65 breakfast credit.

They give you $65 there and which ones for the $100, you know, other resort credit. And there's no overlap, unfortunately. So again, you can't use your $100 resort credit towards breakfast if you go over the $65, box, which is annoying. And again, not the way it typically works at most FHR places. However, at least they email you a link and it's really easy to see online. I really appreciated that because in Las Vegas there are often a lot of restrictions on those things. And so having easy access on my phone to know which places all the time was super convenient. So I'd totally go back to Plazzo on an FHR stay. I wouldn't go back to Cosmopolitan. The view was fantastic from a Fountain View room there.

If you haven't done it, you want that Fountain View someday. It's worth doing it for a night for the Fountain View. But I probably wouldn't stay at Custom Paul. And again, otherwise, not a terrific experience. All right. Good info from Vegas. Yeah, there you go. All right, Marriott devaluation or not?

What's up with this? Is there a Marriott devaluation that happened when I was in Las Vegas? What's going on? A bunch of blogs reported that there was. and they all cited certain hotels that they'd been tracking, and they saw that the point cost for those hotels had gone up. Stephen wrote a great post questioning this. So I don't feel like we have a definitive answer yet,

but he had some compelling data to suggest maybe there's actually nothing to see here. He looked at all of his recent Marriott book and saw that the, for future stays, that the point price hadn't changed. He saw that for past days, that he was still able to get the price that he had previously booked or better. He looked at point prices for a number of specific hotels that other blogs have said, you know, look how much more expensive they are. And he found, you know, a mix of prices from those high new ones, but also lower than they had said was the previous low. So it's a really good, it's worth reading his post

about this. And we'll put, we'll put a link to it in the show notes. But we are waiting. Gondola is the site that makes available to us actual hard data about the value of points versus cash rates. And we're waiting for them to update their data with me. Marriott so that we could see objectively, is there a devaluation compared to cash rates? Because that's the other thing that even if point prices are going up with Marriott, which, you know, again, Stephen sort of questioned that. But even if they are, if cash rates are going up too, it's not necessarily a devaluation of the value of your points, right?

Because you're still maybe getting as good or maybe even better value for your points compared to cash rates as before. So we will hopefully soon have a definitive answer on that. But either way, we, you know, waited to report on this devaluation. And I'm glad we did because when Stephen ran the numbers, it's not looking negative at all. But we'll see. Yeah. All right.

And last but at least, you found a or became aware of a great trick for using your Marriott free night certificates. for upgraded rooms. Yeah. A friend had commented on a blog post saying that he was able to use a free night certificate for a upgraded room. And that's something that I didn't think was possible with Marriott. Now what's an upgraded room?

Sometimes with Marriott, not all hotels do this and not for all nights, but sometimes you'll see the option to book a room upgrade with points or with cash. above the standard points rate. So I'll give it a real example. Like the base room rate with points might be, let's say, 65,000 points to book the room. And so you'll see an option to say, okay, well, you can move into this maybe junior suite

for a $200 cash upgrade or for a $20,000 point upgrade. And if it's the latter, it would then be $85,000 points for the night and start. instead of 65,000, right? So in the past, like, we haven't known of any way to book those rooms with upgrades with a free night certificate. It just, the system just won't work. And it still won't work if you're trying to book it from the outset like that. But after a back and forth with the person who wrote in, I discovered that how he had done it, he had kind of just lucked into it. He had made a booking of the base room and then later changed it because he knew he would need

need a bigger room, he changed it to an upgraded room and it just charged him the upgrade and kept his certificate on the reservation. And so that's the trick. You book a standard room and then go back into your reservation and change it to an upgraded room and boom, you can use your free night certificate for that. A bunch of details and caveats about it. Please read the post that details how to do this. We'll have the link in the show notes. One really great thing about this trick is sometimes you'll go, you know, to look to book a particular night at a hotel. You want to use your free night certificate, but there are no baserooms available for that night, but there are rooms with upgrades. So it can be really frustrating.

With this trick, you could book a different night where the base room is available and then change it to the night you want as long as rooms with upgrades are available. I mean, that's the key. That has to be available. So, yeah, you know, it's a really cool workaround. Hopefully, Marriott won't, you know, kill the deal. I mean, hopefully they'll make it all nights eligible for doing this. But, you know, for now at least, it's a good workaround. Well, I think the nice thing is that the IT fix for this would probably be complex,

because however they have this coated on the back end, obviously this is working. And I just don't see Marriott rushing to do much about that because it probably would require more work than it's worth to them. At least I hope so. I hope that's the way it is. To be clear, when Greg says upgrades, like some hotels, and it's not super common. It's not the rarest thing, but it's not super common either. Some hotels do offer the – when he says an upgraded room, he doesn't just mean the existence of a new. another room that's available to be booked with cash, but rather there are sometimes rooms you can

book either with more points or with a combination of points in cash that are higher level rooms. There are also then sometimes rooms that can only be booked with cash. Those rooms that can only be booked with cash, you're not getting with this deal. This is the rooms that are available just for more points. That's right. And one aside, this isn't in the post, but this is not a workaround to get past the 25,000 point top-off limit. So for example, let's say you have a 35K free night certificate. You're allowed to add up to 25,000 points to that in order to book what, up to a 60,000 point room. I thought maybe you could book a 60,000 point room and then do this change trick to book a 65,000. thousand point room, but now it won't, it changes it to an all points stay at that when you try to do

that. Good to know. All right. So there's an interesting trick for you. 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, turn hotel status into airline status. As we said at the

outset, both Marriott and Hyatt are out with new partnerships with airline programs. And those make it possible to get airline status from your hotel status and in some cases vice versa as well. But this show on today's main event, we're going to talk mostly about the former. How do you get from your hotel status to your two airline status? All right. So first up, we've got Hyatt and Air Canada. They just launched a brand new partnership whereby Hyatt members can redeem 50,000 Hyatt points for a 30,000 point aeroplane award discount. Is that worth it? No.

Okay, good. You can now convert points from Hyatt, two Hyatt points to one aeroplane point. Worth it? No. Okay. All right, moving forward, you can optionally earn aeroplane points on your stays at a fixed 500 points per stay. Well, that one, come on.

Sometimes that might be worth it. Maybe if you have like a $12 stay, but otherwise just on your Hyatt points, you'll do better. Hyatt elite members can now earn a name. annual 20 Canadian dollars Air Canada flight credit. How much is 20 Canadian dollars worth, Greg? Yeah, not not the amount of time we're talking about this. No kidding. Fourteen dollars and 25 cents based on it. It has been measured and proven to be better than a hole in the head this $20 Canadian flight credit. I was told that if you have multiple of these flight credits, you can't combine them for one booking though. So not that you could get multiple

from this, but apparently there's other ways of getting Air Canada flight credits. So, yeah, it's of limited value, but definitely not zero. So that's the first thing we've mentioned here that has value. But now let's talk about the thing that I think could potentially be really interesting. Yeah, so there's a status challenge coming later in 2026. Explorists and globalists can do a status challenge to Air Canada Aeroplane status. Interestingly, you can do this every year. That's an interesting little bit. And you can earn up to 75K status with Air Canada Aeroplane. But you tell me, how does this work? I mean, what do you get?

Do you get status right away? Yeah, the details haven't been released yet. We have inquiries out to our contacts, but haven't heard back yet. So, you know, I think from from what, I was at a launch event for this and got to ask a bunch of questions. The person I talked to, I don't know that he was totally in the know of everything. He made it sound like you start, no matter what Hyatt status you're starting with, Explorists or Globalist, you're probably starting at the lowest level of Air Canada status with this match. And it will have certain thresholds within 90 days to get to higher levels. of status up to 75K.

So at this moment, that's as much as I think I know, but to be continued to flesh that out. I find this interesting because it's one of those things that if you have Hyatt status anyway and you're coming up on a period where you know you're going to be flying Star Alliance a decent amount, then this gives you the opportunity

and you say, okay, I'm going to do this status match, you know, so that the 90-day window I have for the challenge comes during the time where I'm doing all this paid flying and credit it all to Air Canada, and then I should have a higher-level elite status. And so that could be great. Now, that's true in general of status matches or challenges. What's different is this ability to do it every year is not something you usually get. Usually when you do a status challenge with an airline, you know, there's some rule like you can do it again in five years or whatever, but not every year. So this is nice.

You know, it's not mind-blowing, but it's nice. It'll be interesting if you actually do get the benefits of low-level air Canada status, because if you can do that every year, that seems surprising. But we'll see how that shakes out and what you have. actually getting what you need to do. But, but interesting to see a tie up there because, you know, those who are kind of deep into the hobby here know that Air Canada has had a partnership up until now anyway with Marriott, right? So is it weird to see them partner with Hyatt here? Yeah. I mean, as when I, when I asked about this at the, at the launch event, they were like,

well, you know, Marriott's not exclusive to us, so we're not going to be exclusive to them. Yeah, that makes sense. Wow, all right. Yeah. Yeah. Now, backing up, so we just described the benefits that Hyatt members get from this tie up. I'm going to briefly cover what Aero Plan members get. And first, let me say that most of these benefits are really intended for Canadian members who have Canadian Aeroplane credit cards. But the first part is available for anybody. Aeroplane Elite members. members can do a status challenge to Hyatt so you can get Hyatt status. And so if you have, if you want Discoverist status, once you, once you enable this 90-day status challenge, which you need to have Aero Plan elite status to enable, once you enable it, you can earn discoverist, high a discovery status after four nights, which, is worth nothing, or very close to nothing.

Explore status after 10 nights, again, not super exciting. But globalist status after 20 nights. And this is, you know, this is the same as, again, like status challenges we see every now and then. Some people through their work can get access to these status challenges that let you get globalists with 20 nights. But here's a fixed way of getting it, which is kind of interesting. And as we'll talk about later, your Marriott status might be a path to high a globalist status through this new thing. Which is a lot of fun. I look forward to that. Canadian premium aeroplane card holders get a bunch of benefits. I'm not going to go through that. Check out our post about it if you want to know.

you can redeem Aero Plan points for Hyatt Free Night Certificates. So you can redeem 25,000 arrow plan points for category 1 through 4 certificate. Is that a good deal, Nick? No. No, I mean, Highett Category 1 to 4, the most you're going to use that for is 25,000 points. You know, a hotel that costs 25,000 points. And that's if they're priced at the upper level of category 4. otherwise you would use even fewer Hyatt points.

So essentially the best you're doing here is sort of a one-to-one transfer of your aeroplane points to Hyatt, which is a bad deal in most cases. Yeah. Or I would say like, you know, in that exact example, it's not a not really a bad deal, but it's not exciting. But, you know, for people who have access to transferable points but not chase or built. I guess it could be a decent way of getting that 25K free night. But the next thing, you could get a category one through seven certificate for only 75,000 aeroplane points. What do you

think about that? What? 75,000 arrow plan point. You fly business class to Europe for that. No, I'm not trading a business class to Europe fly. I mean, from the East Coast, you can get New York to Frankfurt for like 60,000 aeroplane points in business class on Singapore Airlines or of course on Lufthansa. No, I'm not trading away 75,000 aeroplane points for it. Come on, Nick. We just talked about how if you wanted a category four at the top most award price, that it would be an okay value. So what about here? What if you want a category seven at the top award price? Wouldn't that be a good deal? Pay 75,000? No. No, it wouldn't. Because the upper end of category seven is only 55,000 points.

So, you know, even if you're looking at points as being equal value, you're essentially losing 20,000 points worth of value. And that's a very generous look at the points as being of equal value. Right. And that's in that rare, that's even in that rare situation where it's where it's a category seven and at the highest possible price. Yeah. Right.

Just not a good deal at all. how about this? You can now convert your points two to one. So two aeroplane to one Hyatt. What do you think? Nope. I think no. You know, again, like the point you made before,

I guess if you've got a lot of aeroplane points and or a lot of other transferable currency points, but you can't get chase or built points for some reason, then I guess there are situations where maybe I would say, okay, take your 60,000 arrow plan points and turn it into a cat, category seven night somewhere at 30,000 points. And, you know, maybe you're doing okay because it's a pretty expensive. I mean, if you're staying at the park high at the Maldives, for instance, you know,

maybe you would, you would find that to be okay. But that's a stretch. It's a stretch. There aren't very many situations where I don't think I would ever be doing that myself. Right. Right. Right. All right.

And again, as I said before, if you want to learn about the benefits to aeroplane card holders, check out our post on this to get those details. All right, let's move on. So the other new partnership is Marriott and Japan Airlines. Tell me about that. So Japan Airlines and Marriott now, well, they've had a partnership for a while, but they've expanded it and strengthened it. Now, if you've got elite status with Japan Airlines, don't get excited because you're not going to get very much out of Marriott. But if you are a Marriott member with elite status, which is probably far more members of our audience, it's kind of interesting here because you're going to get Jowl fly on points each year, which is their term for like elite qualifying points,

their status points based on your status with Marriott. As a base member, you'd get 2,000 of their status points. Their fly on points again are the status points. So these are not airline miles you can redeem. These are like status points. Think them that way. So base members get 2,000 fly on points. Marriott Silver gets 5,000 fly on. Gold members get 10,000 fly on points, and then it gets pretty interesting. If you got Marriott Platinum status, you get 20,000 fly on points, titanium, 30,000 fly on points, and Ambassador, 40,000 fly on points each year. Now, that's pretty interesting.

Why? Yeah. So, you know, in all the other hotel to airline status situations, you're talking about matching to a predilear elite level, and that doesn't help you get to the next elite level, because it's not giving you, you know, airline status points in almost every other situation I can think of, except there's a little thing with a core that you can do. But in most cases, you're talking about just a match. And so that's good when it's just a match. But if your goal is to get higher than that, those other ones don't help you. This one, it's exactly like, you know, flying to get that many status points with JAL. And so, you know, if your goal is Japan Airlines status and that also will give you one world status,

that, you know, this is going to help. And so that's really, really interesting. The another thing that's interesting, to reach different Japan Airlines elite levels, the thresholds are half as much if you earn your fly-on points through Japan Airlines group, Jow Group flights. And we've seen at least one data point suggesting that these points issued by, you know, that you get from this Marriott partnership count as gel group flights, which I have to say, I'm skeptical about that because, you know, maybe this, maybe this was like an introductory, like,

bug, you know, as they first hook things up. But if it continues working that way, then you're talking about getting, like, Marriott Titanium status, which gives you 30,000 points each year, if it really counts as JAL group points, that means you would automatically get JAL Sapphire status. And that's, you know, that's pretty good. That's their second level. That's of status. And I think that gives you what one world?

One world, Sapphire. Saffire, yeah. Yeah, which would get you into business class lounges and flung. a one world carrier the same day. So theoretically, that would get you into American Airlines lounges when you're flying American Airlines. So it'd be awesome if that is how it works out. But even if it isn't, even if these don't count as JL Group points, the interesting thing is that, again, this gives you progress towards the next level. People often wonder when they see these status matches or status challenges, I think it's very common, or even the status that comes

with credit cards. If you have an MX platinum card, for instance, and you get Marriott gold status as a platinum card holder, people often, I think, initially, anyway, assume that that means they get credit for the elite knights for gold status. And so it's like a shortcut to getting platinum, but it's not. It doesn't work that way. Normally, when you get status through anything other than the traditional means, you're just getting the credit for the status. You're not getting the underlying elite credit. You're not getting the underlying elite credit. You're not a shortcut to the next level of status with most programs. This is really unique in the shortcut to higher levels of status with Japan Airlines. So however it shakes out, I think this is pretty

interesting because if you have Marriott Platinum, there really hasn't been a lot of incentive to go after titanium, some, but not a ton of incentive to go after titanium. If this works out to give you one world sapphire status suddenly titanium becomes i think really interesting for a lot of people much more compelling than it was before and even if not the leg up towards one world sapphire is significant enough that i still imagine that there will be people who would fall between platinum and titanium who will maybe chase titanium over the extra 10 000 status points but even if not i mean that's the 20 000 from platinum is a nice jump on getting status. Right, right, right, for sure. And so to be clear, when you have status with American

Airlines or Alaska Airlines, that doesn't automatically get you into their own domestic clubs. Like that status you get, when you get one world status from them, that only works for clubs internationally. But since you'd be getting this one world status from an international, airline. I think that means, correct me, I'm wrong, Nick. As long as you put your, as long as you use your JAL status, you can get into American Airlines and Alaska Airlines clubs when you're flying a one world carrier, Alaska or American, that same day. Yeah, I mean, I would expect that to be the case. And so, I mean, suddenly, for me anyway, I would be looking at crediting all my American Airlines flights to JL if I also had a pretty nice heads, a pretty nice.

kind of boost, I guess, I would say, or head start on status, that I'd be happy crediting probably my American Airlines flights to gel anyway. And now I say happy, probably. I haven't looked at what the, where to credit.com is the place to go to look and see what the earnings would be if you credit your American Airlines flights to jail. And I haven't looked at that. So I don't know that the earnings are reasonable in all cases. But if they are anyway, then yeah, I'd be pretty happy to be putting my gel number on anyway. And yeah, if you were able to get One World Sapphire status, then yeah, I think if you put on your gel number on your reservation, you would get or should get access to lounges. So, so yeah, I find that pretty compelling.

That's an interesting tie up that now makes Marriott titanium, even if you don't get the One World Sapphire, you just get the One World Ruby here out of Crystal status, then still makes one Marriott titanium, I think, more interesting because now you've got with Marriott's. titanium status. You've got potentially one world at least rupee status and maybe a nice head start on Sapphire status. You've got United Silver status that you got out of Marriott titanium. And you get Aeroplane elite status as well with your Marriott titanium. Yeah. And that brings us right into the next section of the show where we're going to talk about, we're going to back up from these specific deals and talk about the key hotel airline matchups that makes it possible to turn your hotel elite status into airline status. And so Nick just covered the three statuses now.

You can get from having Marriott titanium status, which titanium is achieved with 75 Marriott nights a year. But check out our show on shortcuts to Marriott Elite status because you don't have to do anywhere near 75 actual nights to get to 7,000. 95 nights that count. And so you get those three, United Silver, Air Canada Airplane 25K, and now potentially JAL Sapphire status. You also, now because of the tie up with Air Canada and the rules around it, you can now take

your Air Canada Aeroplane 25K status that you got from Marriott Titanium and do a status challenge to Hyatt and 20 nights will get you Hyatt Globalist. So this is this really funny thing where getting Marriott titanium might be a shortcut to Hyatt Globalist. I kind of love that. That's fun. I like that. Well, it's fun, number one, just because that's not the way these partnerships are probably intended, but it kind of is a neat way that it works out. It's also fun because so you could use your Marriott titanium status to get Aeroplane elite status to match to Hyatt and get yourself high a globalist status and then you can get benefits on American Airlines right that's true you can yeah let's talk about those in a

minute because what we what we skipped talking about is Marriott platinum status does that give you anything it gives you some of those gel fly-on points which might equate to crystal status if if they count as a Giao group status points. There's a tie-up with Singapore Chris Flyer, where when you join your accounts together, you'll get silver status with Singapore for 12 months. Now, that's not every 12 months. This is a one time.

You get it for 12 months. And you get a fast track to gold status, but that requires four Singapore Airlines flights within six months of linking your accounts to get that. Still, if your goal is Singapore gold status, that could be a really quick way of getting it. There's also a tie-in with Emirates, and so with Marriottin status and you link your accounts, you'll get Emirates priority airport check-in and boarding. Yeah, not terribly exciting there. The Singapore thing could be cool.

If you're going to Asia, you can probably get some reasonable Singapore Airlines flights within Asia and pick up those four flights that you need relatively inexpensively. So if you're going anyway, it might be pretty inexpensive to get yourself gold status for a year. And of course, Singapore gold status is desirable because that's Star Alliance gold, which would get you into United lounges when flying United provided that you use your, well, I think with Star Alliance, now that I think about it, you can just provide your Star Alliance status at the lounge. I don't even think you need to credit your United Flight to Singapore necessarily for lounge access. Don't quote me on that, but I used my A&A status from a match years ago to get into a United

Club that way. Yeah, yeah, I think that's true and possible. All right, let's talk about what Hyatt elite status can get you in terms of airline status. We've already talked a lot about how you can do a status match to aeroplane now. So, you know, that's something that, again, well, I shouldn't say now. It's coming sometime later this year, so we don't know the full details yet, but it should be possible to accelerate up to 75K status with Air Canada, which would be very good. And I think that's Star Alliance gold, maybe even past gold, I'm not sure. then the other thing that Hyatt status gives you is multiple ways to be elite or elite-ish with American Airlines.

So there's different things you get. So for example, if you have Hyatt Explorist or globalist status, you can redeem points to get status for a day with American Airlines. So you know you have American Airlines flight coming up. where status will be important. You can just redeem points. And so 5,000 points for American Airlines gold status, which is equivalent to silver status with every other airline. You could redeem 8,000 points for advantage platinum status,

which is like gold status with other airlines, or 12,000 points for advantage platinum pro status. So, you know, I think that's just a really nice sort of transactional opportunity. because if you don't fly American enough to have status with American, but you are going to fly them every now and then, why not just redeem some points and get the status you want for that flight, right? Yeah, yeah. And American Airlines gold status comes with a free check bag for you

and however many companions is on your reservation. I can't remember with the maximum number of companions. But it could work out. If you need to check multiple bags and you've got multiple people on your itinerary, you redeem 5,000 points for just you to have gold status, and you're going to get several free-checked bags on that itinerary anyway amongst the people on your reservation, assuming you're flying with multiple people. So it can become well worth using your 5,000 points for that or more, obviously, if you need a higher level of status. So, so yeah,

I agree. I think that if you're only going to need it very occasionally, that it certainly makes sense to redeem for the days when it's going to be valuable to you. Keep in mind, my understanding, at least, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that this status is only going to, to offer you benefits when flying American. So I believe if you, yeah, if you redeem points for your American Airlines gold status, you're not going to get one world benefits when you're flying thin air in Europe, for instance. You'll need actual American Airlines status for that. I think that's right.

And also you need to do it pretty well in advance. There's a time limit. I think it's like two weeks before your flight. You have to apply this thing. So make sure you don't do it last minute. as I once accidentally mistakenly did. Okay, the other thing you could do with Hyatt is, so Hyatt, as you get to more and more nights each year,

you get milestone rewards. Starting at 20 nights, every 10 nights, there's different milestone rewards you get. And there are milestone rewards that are related to getting American Airlines status or benefits. So at 20 and 30 nights, you could choose two preferred seat coupons, for flying American Airlines.

At 40 and 50 nights, you could choose two main cabin extra seat coupons. At 70, 80, and 90 nights, you can choose American Airlines gold status that's valid for the full status membership year. So the rest of this like AA elite year and all the next. So that's, you know, pretty good. Now, you wouldn't pick it at multiple milestones. You would just pick it at one of them because it doesn't do you any good to have gold status twice and you can't gift it to anyone else. So you pick it for one of your choices during those

three or if you get to 100 nights, you can pick platinum status. And if you're planning on doing that, again, don't pick gold status before you get there because then you would have wasted that gold status pick. But still, that's a solid way. If you're spending a lot of nights or earning a lot of nights with Hyatt, a solid, easy way to get elite status for with American Airlines. For sure, for sure. And, you know, those 20, 30, 40, and 59 thresholds, those benefits might not seem terribly valuable,

but those main cabin extra seek could potentially be useful, particularly for longer flights. If you're looking for a long flight, you want an exit row or something, there are times when those can cost quite a bit more. I just recently booked a flight that I'm not going to take, but it was a New York to London. And because I have American Airlines status,

I was able to pick main cap. an extra for free. But those main cabin extra seats, they were selling for, I think, $170 a seat. So, and I was able to select them for all five of us on my reservation. Now, you're not going to be able to do that with two of the seat coupons. You'd be able to do it just for two people. But nonetheless, it could be a real savings, is my point. And for like a daytime flight from New York to London, that's, I think, a pretty nice way to make the flight relatively comfortable without having a redeemed for business class. So, so some potential value to be had there. I don't know that those are the, to be clear, I probably wouldn't pick those in 40 or 50 nights. I'm just saying that I could see where

they might be valuable for some. And the American airline status, again, might be valuable for some folks if you're if you know you're going to hit 70, 80, 90, 100. All right. So that's interesting. So you got ways from Marriott to get a couple of status of several different status from Hyatt to kind of give yourself American Airlines status. What else is there? Yeah. And and and and and and and uh, it also gives you, uh, status or a way to get aeroplanet status coming up soon. Yeah, so the other options, less interesting, but we'll go through briefly. The most interesting of the others, I think, is Accor.

A core has partnerships with Qantas, Qatar, and Air France, KLM. And in most of these, these are really the opportunity to double dip, meaning when you fly, these airlines or you stay at Accor Hotels. It's the opportunity to earn both hotel points and airline miles for those things. But there is a little bit of status matching type of opportunities going on with Quantus. It's really about going from Quantus elite status to a core. You can get a core silver status after one or two stays. It depends on what your Qantas elite status is as to how easily it is to get your silver status for what that's worth.

With Qatar, you can elevate your airline status after your first flight. So this actually does help you go from a core status to Qatar status. If you have a core gold, one flight with Qatar will get you, silver with Qatar. If you have a core platinum or diamond, then you can get gold status after your first flight. So that's pretty darn good. Yeah, that's one world sapphire status.

So that would get your business class lounge access. And business class lounge access is the marquee benefit that we most often mention. But Qatar, interesting here, just came up via email with a reader who was mentioning the inability to select their seats on a British Airways Award. They were flying on British Airways booked via, actually, I think Cathay Pacific, and British Airways now charges a seat selection fee

in business class unless you've got one world elite status. And so with one world sapphire status here, one would get free seat selection in that case. So there are times when that comes in handy beyond just lounges. So if you've got a core platinum or diamond status, one guitar flight for gold status seems like a decent deal. Although on the flip side, you get the $499

guitar cardless card or the cardless guitar card however you want to say it and get yourself a euro status as well so you'd have to weigh that out but interesting yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and you could also get go the other direction and go from your guitar status to

to silver or gold status with with a core they also have a tie up with Air France Kaelim Flying Blue and this one's interesting because they describe it as a welcome gift. When you connect up your accounts, you're eligible for two status nights with a core

and 10 experience points, XPs, with Flying Blue. You get half of these status-y things after your first stay and half of them after your first flight. this is interesting because it gives you the opportunity to kind of time it so you know so for example if you're looking for a certain level of flying blue status and you know you're going to need five or ten XP's you can plan when you merge when you connect your accounts up and when you take your first qualifying stay and flight that that make you eligible for this these things. So it's not a lot though, right? I mean, 10 XP is not not a lot, but, but it could make

the difference for someone who's who's trying to get to that next level. Well, when you consider that the XP levels for flying blue status is like a totally different elite status metric in terms of like the quantity, because if you're used to other airlines, you're used to needing 20,000 or 30,000 or 50,000 points for status or more. So you might say 10, 10's nothing. But, but with, Flying Blue, of course, what is it, 180 or 200. It'll get you a relatively meaningful level of status. So 10 XP is not nothing. It's not as nothing as it sounds if you're not familiar with the program anyway.

It's not a lot, but it's not as nothing as it sounds. All right. So, yeah, interesting. Like you said, time it out. If you're going after status, it could be useful. And finally, IHG is launching a partnership with A&A, right? Yeah. Yeah, it is specifically launching after October.

So sometime from November. But not necessarily from November or later. I almost wonder if that's a mistranslation. Yeah, probably. My guess is it's like October 1st or later. But anyway, the opportunity there is sort of similar to the core things. It's mostly a double-dip opportunity to earn both. hotel points and airline miles with A&A.

If you have A&A elite status, then you could get meaningful IHG elite status out of it. There doesn't seem to be anything worthwhile in the other direction. So this one I'm not too excited about for our audience, unfortunately. Okay, so those are the ones where having hotel status can give you something with airline programs. I do think it's worth just because we're talking about how to go from basically staying in hotels to get airline elite status, that there's a whole other category we didn't touch on, and I'm not going to dive into it deep here. But almost every airline program, certainly almost all the U.S. airline programs,

have portals where you can book hotels through their portals. And when you do that, you usually earn some kind of status points, whatever they, airline has. Delta's kind of weird in that they offer MQDs only as a promotional thing through the Delta stays portal, but they frequently do that and they're doing it right now as we're recording this. Most of the other programs, you know, American, Alaska, I think United, certainly JetBlue. I think they all have a pretty permanent thing where you earn both miles and status points, whatever their equivalent thing is to that. And so that's a way. of getting airline elite status by booking hotels,

but it doesn't give you any hotel status because none of those stays will count to advance your hotel elite status. So then if you're interested in hotel elite status, then you're looking at matching the other direction, matching from your aeroplane to Hyatt, for example. Yeah, it's interesting because these partnership tie-ups seem like they encourage hotel elite,

elite members to kind of bring them over to the airline side. But then, yeah, the airline, of course, would prefer that you book your hotels through their hotel booking portal. But if you do that, you're not going to get any elite benefits when you do that either. And so it's kind of a weird thing. Although I guess you'd probably have to do the math, if you're going to be having a lot of stays, right, if you're going to stay a whole bunch of nights and particularly like, let's say you're traveling a lot for business and your employer is reimbursing your stays, I think it's interesting to consider, well, which is better? Should I be booking direct and earning elite status with the hotel and getting elite benefits and then matching that to some sort of an airline thing? Or should I be booking

through the airline portal foregoing the elite benefits, particularly for somebody who's got a per diem that's going to cover the cost of breakfast and things like that anyway? And then earning airline elite status based on the hotel bookings. I don't know that there's a universal answer to that. I think you're probably not. Probably not. I do the math, right? I do think, that, you know, especially American Airlines stays is particularly compelling because not only are you earning status points from that, you're earning a lot of redeemable miles from those bookings. And the prices, when they first launched it, the prices were not good, but the prices are competitive now. And so, you know, it's a good way to earn a lot of American Airlines miles

that are redeemable for flights and status with American Airlines by booking through there. So that's something, I mean, it's true in a lesser way with all of these, I think, but I just think that they have a particularly compelling version of that. Yeah, very interesting. So lots of different ways to match over hotel status, airline status or earn airline status or your hotel stays or even get some level of status with a hotel thanks to your airline program. So this is, I think, just kind of one of those things that appeals to us because it's fun to play the game and see how far you can stretch your status. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder.

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