Frequent Miler on the Air - Two for the price of one: How to get a free companion ticket | Ep218 | 9-2-23

Episode Date: September 2, 2023

Want a companion to fly with you for free? There are many different companion tickets on the market, but some are far better than others. This week, we discuss which ones are worth it, how to get them, and they they are special. 00:00 Intro 01:08 Giant Mailbag 03:33 What crazy thing . . . did Bilt Rewards do? https://frequentmiler.com/no-official-bilt-welcome-offer-after-all/ 07:07 Award Talk: Booking Turkish via email within 6 hours https://frequentmiler.com/yes-you-can-still-book-united-flights-through-turkish-miles-smiles/ 13:12 Main Event: Two for the price of one: How to get a free companion ticket https://frequentmiler.com/travel-companion-tickets/ 15:28 British Airways Companion Ticket 21:05 Iberia Companion Ticket 22:27 Aer Lingus Companion Ticket 24:13 Cathay Pacific Companion Ticket 25:06 Virgin Atlantic Companion Ticket 29:30 American Airlines Companion Tickets 34:02 Alaska Companion Ticket https://frequentmiler.com/alaska-airlines-companion-fare-guide/ 41:18 Delta Companion Tickets 46:46 Southwest Companion Pass https://frequentmiler.com/complete-guide-southwest-companion-pass/ https://frequentmiler.com/no-southwest-airlines-is-not-a-valuable-transfer-partner/ 59:37 Air Canada Companion Ticket 1:00:56 Question of the Week: How did you earn a Companion Pass through a shopping portal in a month? Music credit: Annie Yoder

let's get into the giant mailbag what crazy thing did city this week it's time for mattress running the numbers ready for the main event the main event frequent miler on the air starts now today's main event two for the price of one how to get a free companion ticket you want to bring a friend for free right everybody wants to bring somebody along for free yeah well especially with uh the way prices are these days I mean airfare has been going through the roof so why not uh save half off basically if you're flying with two people anyway I like two so it's the one better than two for the price of two I know that. That's for sure. So yeah, so I am in deep vacation mode and Nick designed today's show entirely without me. So I'm sort of the passenger today. I'm going to be like just hanging out and like the companion, freeloading. I'm going to be like the companion.

Yeah, I'm the free companion for today's show. Now, this free companion did bring some bags along. In fact, he brought one giant mailbag along. See what I did there? Dad joke alert. Kelly. Kelly says, Greg and Nick, I thoroughly enjoy your podcast and look forward to my Sunday morning walk so I can listen to it uninterrupted. Here are the top things I appreciate most. One, all the great information. You're always the first to spread tips and tricks. Love the wide variety of topics. Two, that each of the topics are time stamped. I have been in the game since 2016, so some subjects I feel I know really well. I like the choice to skip ahead. Finally, your best offers page. I appreciate you always post the true best offer despite your loss of commission and the fact that you can drill down on each

offer helps compare cards, keep up the excellent work. I know you have helped save thousands off travel over the years. Awesome. Thank you. It's always nice to hear that kind of thing. I'm really glad to hear that. I'm glad you're enjoying it. We enjoy doing it. You know, like it's, we've mentioned this before, but when we started doing this, like, I don't know, more than four years ago now, right? We did it because we thought this will be fun. And we didn't know if anybody would listen, but we thought it'd be kind of fun. It was fun to meet face to face because before that it was just all via email. So it gives us a chance to sit and chat face to face every week. And it's turned out that people seem to enjoy it. So that's awesome. I mean, that's I love it. Yeah, I certainly try

to make it enjoyable for you to people do seem to love it. And one of the reasons I decided to read Kelly's mail, though, is because she points out that we have timestamps with the, uh, podcasts and the YouTube version of the podcast. And, uh, so for those of you who enjoy it, but not so much that you want to hear every little bit, make sure you look in the notes of the show and you'll find the timestamp. So you could jump ahead to, uh, what you really want, but you know, you're missing out on some, some, some some irrelevant banter. Secrets get dropped in between the timestamps is what it is. See, you know, like the big nuggets.

I don't know. Is that what we do? I don't know. I'm making it up. So. All right. Very good. Nick is the one who edits the show.

So if he was doing that, how would I know? You would never know. You never know unless you listen to the whole thing right so uh so clearly we know that greg clicks the time stamps and skips around now and now that we know that let's talk about what crazy thing did i don't know did built rewards do did frequent miler do i what happened here so we reported a few weeks ago that the built rewards card had a great new welcome offer we talked about it on this show but it doesn't anymore what's going on yeah yeah i put this one 99 on built but uh you can argue um so so yeah so so we got confirmation that the built built welcome offer of five X points for five days was finally something that everybody would get so that you can rely on that being part of a bonus that you'd get if you signed up. Because before

that, it was like they talked about like you might get this offer. So we couldn't really describe it as a welcome offer for the card. But we got confirmation from Bilt that, yeah, we can display it as an offer going forward because it was fixed and for everybody. And then sometime after we got that confirmation, we got what to me was sort of a cryptic email from our Bilt contact,

which it was hard to interpret. Or I misinterpreted it, I guess is a better way of saying it. And that's where part of the blame is certainly on me, if nothing else. Us. I think we both have the same interpretation. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, the point is, apparently we were being told that the offer was no longer available to everybody and would be more a random-ish surprise and delight type of offer that some people who sign up for the bill card would get and not everyone.

We did not understand that from the message. So we kept displaying the offer as we thought it stood. And then it turned out that no, they had reverted it to a lot of people get it, but not everybody. And so luckily for people who signed up before, do you remember the date? Yeah. August 28th. We changed it on August 28th, but as soon as we found out that it wasn't public anymore on August 28th, we changed our card page to reflect the fact that there was no more welcome offer. And obviously took a little time

to communicate with Built about what was going on with that and what would happen for the people that had signed up while we were advertising it on our pages, 5X for five days. And so they agreed to honor it for everybody who had signed up through the date when we

changed it. So that's August 28th. So if you signed up by August 28th and you didn't get the 5X for five days, you should reach out to Built Customer Service. They're aware and should take care of it for you. So that's the good news, at least, that Built stepped up to the plate and agreed to honor it for the time that we had it up there. So I give credit there. I like you said, I think that the misunderstanding or miscommunication or whatever it was, we both have the same

understanding that we thought it was public. And it certainly was for a while. So anyway, they're treating it as though it was because they're honoring it. So for all intents and purposes, I think that worked out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's too bad for anyone who is planning on signing up and had already. You might not get that 5x offer, but you might. It's just we don't know how they decide who gets it or not. Right, right. All right.

So that's our crazy thing for this week. Mattress running the numbers. We're skipping over this week. We're going to talk about award talk briefly. Last week, I published a post about how the Turkish miles and smiles sweet spot is still alive and well. And I want to just briefly mention that for anybody who missed the post, because I successfully booked a Turkish award last week. Now, the Turkish miles and smile or the Turkish Airlines website, when you log into your miles and Smiles account, has not been working for searching for Star Alliance awards for the last couple of months. So it's just the Star Alliance tool has been totally broken. It's not only not showing United flights, but it's not showing any Star Alliance flights at all,

which is really frustrating if you want to book Star Alliance awards, because obviously everybody would like to be able to transfer and book online because your other options are to call over the phone, which I do not recommend calling to try to book an award with Turkish over the phone. You might get lucky and get somebody who is capable of doing it, but chances are high that it's just not going to work and be an exercise in frustration. So the way to book a Turkish Miles and Smiles Award is via email. Now, email, to my knowledge, had been working. I hadn't heard any reports that it wasn't working, but I didn't have a confirmation of my own until last week when I successfully ticketed a Turkish Miles and Smiles Award that I got set up via

email. And I thought the interesting thing about this was that the entire process took about six hours. So from the time I sent the initial email to the time I had the hold to the time I had the award ticketed was like actually a little bit less than six hours. Now, is that going to happen every time? Probably not. Is it going to happen if you email one ticket office? Probably not. Almost definitely not, I'd say. So how did I do it? Well, I emailed a whole bunch of Turkish ticket offices. If you just Google Turkish Airlines ticket offices, you get the page that's got the list of all of the ticket offices at every airport. And luckily, Turkish serves more airports than any airline in the world.

So you can take your pick of ticket offices and what I do in a situation like that. In my case, I was booking a flight for the very next calendar day. So I knew I was in a time crunch. I had a backup flight booked in case I couldn't get this Turkish award booked. But again, I had one day to work with, so I knew I had to get it done quickly.

The offices in the United States typically close around 6 p.m. Eastern, and it was already approaching that time. So I knew emailing any offices in the United States was going to be just an exercise in frustration. They weren't going to see the email and respond in time. So instead, I picked offices where it was daytime. So I emailed a whole bunch of foreign offices, copied and pasted the same email to probably 15 or 20 different ticket offices around the world. Why not? It doesn't take that much extra time to copy and paste a few more times. And the worst case scenario is I get a hold from two different offices and I just don't

ticket one of them and the hold expires. So there's no really harm to be done there. And it showed me a few things that I lined up in the post. And number one, it's the fact that if you just email one office, then you're really gambling as to whether they're going to respond at all. And if they do respond, they might respond and tell you, sorry, we can't do this. You need to call over the phone. But they really can.

You just need to find a different office, right? I had an office that wrote back and said there was no availability, even though I knew that there should have been. And then an office later wrote back that put it on hold. So obviously, there was availability. And for some reason, the second office to email me back didn't see it. So again, emailing multiple offices increases your odds of getting somebody who knows what they're doing to set it up properly. Once they set it up, it was really

easy. I just called Turkish Miles and Smiles over the phone, gave the agent the confirmation number, and I was able to pay the taxes. Well, really easy might be a mischaracterization. First agent told me it couldn't be done that way. So I hung up and called back and spoke to somebody else. I'll leave a link to the post that lays out the whole story in the show notes here. But really, at the end of the day, a lot of people view the Turkish Miles and Smiles program as having to jump through a lot of hoops. And if you're new to this, yeah, all of that would be pretty difficult. But if you know what to expect, if you read the post that I wrote about it, then it doesn't have to be that hard. If you know what can be done, you can just kind of skip past the people that don't know what they're doing and

keep trying until you find somebody who does. So sure enough, 7,500 points per passenger to book a flight from Anchorage, Alaska to Chicago for travel the very next day. Cash prices were $330 a person. I was prepared to use United Travel Bank credit if I needed to, to get that United flight. But I figured first, let me try this and sure enough, it worked out. So, and transfers, by the way, from Capital One were instant for that. So very handy for that as well. Yeah, that's amazing. First of all, that Nick would try to get Turkish to book a United flight last minute like that. I think it wouldn't

have even occurred to me to attempt that. So kudos to you for that. I do want to mention to those who are new to all this, don't understand what's going on, that Turkish miles, because they're part of Star Alliance, can be used to book other carriers like United. And they have really great award prices. And you might say, but hey, I don't have any Turkish miles. Well, if you have Capital One miles or Citi thank you points, you could transfer one to one. Or Bilt Rewards. That's right. And any of those three, you could transfer one to one to Turkish in order to book what you need. And I should mention, I did transfer some from Bilt Rewards on that. Took six minutes for those to post.

Capital One was instant. Bilt Rewards was six minutes for the miles to transfer to Turkish. So if they don't go immediately, don't sweat it. Just give it a few minutes and they'll go through if you're transferring from Bilt. But yeah, so it's a great deal because they're domestic. The award rate for domestic Star Alliance flights is 7,500 miles each way. And so within the United States on United, if you can find saver availability that's available to other Star Alliance partners, it should be bookable via Turkish Miles and Smiles for 7,500 miles and $5.60 one way. So

great deal. And I was happy to be able to confirm that it still works. So that's my bit of a word talk for this week. I think that brings us to the main event. Main event time. Today's main event two for the price of one, how to get a free companion ticket. So we're going to be talking about a bunch of different ways.

And is Southwest the only game in town? Definitely not. Definitely not. There are tons of different companion ticket options out there. And now not all of them are like the Southwest Companion Pass, but there are lots of different ways you can get a companion to fly for free with you. And I'm not talking about, oh, you can earn more miles and get a second ticket for the companion kind of a thing. There are actual companion tickets and not all companion tickets are created equally. There are some that are really garbagey or very poor, let's say, like, for instance, the Hawaiian Airlines credit cards come with an annual companion certificate, but you have to pay full fare coach round trip for the first passenger

in order to get actually it's 50% off of the companion ticket. So if you're not familiar with full fare coach, full fare coach is really expensive. So you could almost always book two cheap discounted coach tickets for less than the cost of probably one full fare coach ticket. So that's really not much of a benefit unless you're like booking a ticket to Hawaii, like for tomorrow kind of a thing. And full fare coaches all of its left then. Okay, you know, great. You'll save half on a companion, but that's not much of a benefit. And there are others like that little tons of miles and more. One has another one that that requires buying high fare economy tickets departing the United States. And you're still on the hook for taxes and fees, which are really high on Lufthansa. So it's just not really that

appealing. So there are some that come with credit cards. Again, that's those two we just talked about there were from the Hawaiian Miles & More credit cards and the Lufthansa, or I'm sorry, the Hawaiian Miles credit cards and the Lufthansa, or I'm sorry, the Hawaiian miles credit cards and the Lufthansa miles and more credit card. Those aren't particularly exciting companion tickets. They are ways you could potentially get a discount. Probably not that useful year after year. At least you can't count on getting a lot of value out of those.

However, there are some that are pretty decent. So we've got some lukewarm companion tickets. The ones that I would say can be good in the right situation. So the first one I want to talk about is the British Airways companion ticket. Now, a bunch of these companion tickets we're about to talk about here require spending heavily on that airline's co-branded credit card. So if you've got the Chase British Airways visa signature card and you spend $30,000 on that card and a calendar year, you will get a British Airways companion ticket. That companion ticket can be used on British Airways, Aer Lingus or Iberia. And it's a little interesting in that it's flexible. It has some things that are unique over other airlines. First, the fact that you can

use it to book on Iberia metal and Aer Lingus Metal, of course. But then you also have the option to use this as a 50 percent discount for one reward or as like a two for one bringing a companion. Most of the companion tickets we're going to talk about today are only any good if you're flying two people. This is one you could use as a solo traveler. So it is possible to do that. However, the way this one works, this is a little different than a lot of companion tickets, is you have to use Avios to book the primary ticket, and then you get half off the number of Avios required for the second one. I'm sorry,, rather I take that back. I just misspoke entirely. You have to use Avios for the primary traveler

and then you get the companion ticket for free. That's the way this works. You do not get any discount on the surcharges. So you're going to pay the full taxes and fees for both passengers, which are notoriously high on British Airways. So you have to keep that in mind. Although Greg pointed out to me when we were talking about this, that you have the option these days to pay

more Avios for lower surcharges. So you can mitigate that somewhat. If you wanted to fly round trip from New York to London, for instance, you could do that for 160,000 Avios for one person. That's 80K each way. And you can bring a companion for free in the sense that you won't pay the 160,000 Avios for that person. However, you'll still be on the hook for about $700 in taxes and fees round trip per passenger. So you're going to pay that times two. So it'll cost you about $1,400 in taxes and fees round trip and 160,000 avios. So that's a discount of 160,000 avios, but it's still not exactly two cheap tickets round trip to Europe, right? Yeah. Yeah. I was going to jump in and sort of contradict Nick and say, well, wait a minute. When you're booking British Airways, you can save a little bit on fuel

surcharges by booking two one ways instead of a round trip but then you would need two companion tickets to to get half to to only spend half the obvious so yeah that doesn't help so yeah uh it's it's one of those things where i think there are situations where uh you know, like if you're flying from Europe to the U.S. Well, can you do that with this companion with this companion ticket? Oh, that's it. Yes. You know, you can originate anywhere in the world with the British Airways one. So they changed that, I believe, this year. So now you can originate anywhere in the world. So you could originate in Europe. So that might save you a little bit. The other thing is, if you've got

the British Airways visa signature card, which you would need to have in order to be able to do this, it does come with an annual statement credit benefit when you're using it on the taxes and fees for obvious rewards. So you can reduce your costs a little bit with that. So a couple hundred bucks, I think, with that. Right. So it does put a dent in it. And this could be a really good deal, depending on when you're going and what the cash prices are. It's just kind of lukewarm to me because we sometimes see round trip business class from those East Coast cities for $2,000 to $2,500. And every now and then we'll see a round trip price just below $2,000. And so depending on what you value the obvious at here, the savings just isn't massive. It's a savings. It's a decent deal, but it's not like, whoa, but still my heart,

I want to spend $30,000 on the British Airways visa, so I can sure to get it necessarily. It's the kind of thing that might work out really well for you, but might not. However, one thing I want to mention that we haven't mentioned yet is that it does work on Iberia and Aer Lingus, which we mentioned. What we didn't mention is that you'll pay lower surcharges oftentimes on some of those awards. So for instance, if you found Iberia business class Europe for 34,000 points one way, and I think it's like $120 in taxes that you'll pay departing the United States. You could use your companion certificate on that and pay that total of 34,000 avios, and then you'd pay the 120 each in taxes. So work out to 17,000 avios and 120 bucks each

to travel in business class to Europe. And that sounds like a pretty good deal, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, that is a good deal, but spending $30,000 to get that good deal to save like 17,000 or 34,000, depending on what you're doing. Yeah. It's, it's a stretch. It's a stretch. It's a stretch in the right situation, maybe. But it's not, that's why we put this in the loop form because there are situations where it might work. My problem is that I'd have a really hard time dedicating $30,000 spend for a well, maybe it'll work out kind of a benefit. That's a lot of spend to put on a card that mostly earns one X to just hope that you're able to get enough value to justify putting that much spend on a one X card.

So not super excited about the British Airways one. It'll work for some folks. Cut from a similar thread, but a little bit different, is the Iberia companion ticket. Iberia, again, on the Iberia Airways Visa signature card from Chase, you spend $30,000 on that one in a calendar year. And in this case, it's a little different. You get $1,000 off of two tickets in any class of service only valid on Iberia flights. So that's not necessarily a bad deal. You could take that $1,000 off of two economy class tickets or two business class tickets. Again, any class of service.

Premium economy is the one I didn't mention, I guess. And so if you value that $1,000 off at full face value, which you shouldn't, but if you did, then it'd be like an extra 3 point three percent back on thirty thousand dollars spent. If you know you're going to buy tickets on Iberia, then that, you know, even if you don't value it at face, if you valued it, half of that adding one point six five percent back on top of the regular spending requirement on the card. You know, if you're able to predict the future successfully and you know you're going to book a ticket on Iberia. That could work out to be a reasonable deal. Wouldn't like thrill me, but it'd be potentially a pretty good deal, I guess. Right. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, it's such a special circumstance. Yeah. Someone knows they're going to be flying Iberia. I mean, yeah. Yeah. All the stuff you just said. Yep. All right.

So that one's going again, lukewarm. Aer Lingus, same or similar kind of a deal. The thing with Aer Lingus is it can only be used on a round trip ticket between the US and Ireland. So you can't even connect beyond Ireland on that companion ticket requires $30,000 spend yet again for this companion ticket. So again, similar kind of a situation where you could save a lot of money. I believe the Aer Lingus one, I didn't write this down, but I believe is economy class only on the companion ticket, I believe. So you're going to save up to whatever an economy class ticket costs between the U.S. and Ireland for the route you're booking. And Aer Lingus serves,

I think, mostly East Coast routes. I don't know if they have any West Coast routes or, you know, like kind of like Chicago. I'm not sure if they serve Chicago or not. So this total savings here potential is not massive, but maybe not bad, depending on when it is you want to go to Europe. So, again, all three of those, it's kind of like you're going to put $30,000 spend a very suboptimal value, getting one obvious, you know, one obvious, is it an obvious that's singular? Is it still an obvious? I don't know. You need a one point per dollars. Pretty sure. I'm pretty sure obvious are obvious. Not accountable noun. Okay. All right. So you're going to have one obvious per dollar spent for $30,000 spent. You're giving up a pretty big opportunity cost. So it's hard to predict that you're definitely going to get enough value out of that to justify the spend. So same kind of situation on all three of those.

For some people that'll work out, I wouldn't probably recommend it unless you're really pretty confident that you're going to use it. I mean, if you constantly fly maybe for your employer and nonstop, they're covering your first ticket. So you know that you're going to fly on that airline, you know, you're going to fly Aer Lingus to whatever company thing it is. And you'll be able to use this to get good value. Maybe, maybe. Cathay Pacific has a companion ticket and this one confuses me. So I don't want to get too deep into the weeds with this one because I don't totally understand it. The way I think it works is I think you purchase a cash fare in business or first class, and then you can add a companion for fewer miles than it would

normally cost for an award ticket and you get access to more availability. So if you find a really good Cathay Pacific business or first class fare, then this might work out. This isn't the type of benefit that you need a credit card for. I don't think it's not like a one and done thing. The companion ticket, I think, is just a separate award chart that they offer. So this is something you could do again and again, to my understanding, right? Yeah, that's how I understand it, too. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. All right. But I don't buy a lot of cash business in first class Cathay Pacific Fairs. So I don't have any experience actually using that one. Virgin Atlantic offers a companion ticket benefit. This is another one that requires spend on their credit card.

If you got the Virgin Atlantic, whatever it is, MasterCard, then you have to spend $25,000 on your Virgin Atlantic card. And then you can choose what you want to get. You can get a one cabin upgrade from economy to premium economy, or you can get a companion ticket for an award flight. But it gets a little more complicated than that. What kind of companion ticket depends on your elite status with Virgin Atlantic. If you have just the red tier status, which means you have no status with Virgin Atlantic, then you can only redeem the companion ticket for economy or premium economy.

If you've got silver or gold status with Virgin Atlantic, though, then you can redeem in any cabin, including business class. So that or upper class, as they call it. So that could potentially be a valuable companion ticket. But this one is one that's a companion award flight. So it's going to save you the miles for the companion flight. But like British Airways, you're still going to be on the hook for taxes and fees and Virgin Atlantic charges high taxes and fees. So if you really want to fly Virgin Atlantic and you were going to pay for two tickets anyway, this is one where I say, well, maybe because the Virgin Atlantic MasterCard, I think, correct me if I'm

wrong, Greg, you're the expert on the Virgin Atlantic card. It gives one and a half points per dollar spent everywhere, right? It does. Plus, it gives you bonuses at certain spend thresholds. So you can actually average more than two points per dollar spent. So it's pretty good to spend on the card. And another thing that's kind of interesting here. So if you're big into flying Virgin Atlantic, if I remember right, they introduced elite earnings on award flights. So, you know, this is sort of a rare situation where you get you can get the miles from the spend on the credit card and they would go further because you would be adding a companion, at least a one flight a year. And then you'd still be earning elite status for the future going forward. have that many different routes uh to the u.s i mean i think a little more than than uh aerolingus for example but um still you know if you fly to london a lot and um and you live

near an airport that that virgin atlantic serves then yeah this could be interesting i think um yeah everything next set is true you still you're still on the hook for very big surcharges. But if you think of it as like, well, I was going to pay for airfare anyway, you're probably going to be paying less in surcharges than you would have been paying in airfare than you're flying in business class, which obviously would be much better than flying coach. Yeah, you know, Virgin Atlantic has pretty reasonable award prices for their own flights. So it's not going to be a massive savings on the companion ticket, but it certainly could be decently significant. And like you said, I think what makes this one a little bit more unique than the British Airways Aerolingus Siberia crowd is that this is a card where it's not unreasonable to spend twenty five thousand dollars. Also, I think you can get boost towards elite status with monthly spend, right? You've spent up to $2,500 a month and that gives you credit towards elite status.

So, you know, so you can spend your way towards, you know, or help your way towards elite status with the spend on the card. You get a reasonable return on your spend and you could potentially get the companion ticket. I've never paid the surcharges to fly on Virgin Atlantic. It's not my thing, but like Greg said, if you were going to pay for air to fly on Virgin Atlantic. It's not my thing. But like Greg said, if you were going to pay for airfare anyway on Virgin Atlantic, this would almost guarantee that you'd save some money, I think. So especially if you were interested in flying in business class. So this is one that I think could be reasonable if all of the things that Greg mentioned apply to you. Those things out of the way, those are the companion tickets that are like,

maybe in the right scenario, they could make sense. And I think those kind of increased as we went along in terms of the usefulness potentially. But let's talk about the companion tickets that are actually likely to be highly useful for a majority of readers, because there are quite a few different companion tickets we haven't talked about yet that are better than lukewarm values. Now, the least exciting of these to me, but potentially still quite useful, is the American Airlines companion tickets. So American Airlines offers companion tickets on some of their credit cards when you meet spending thresholds. So it varies a little bit. It's a little different. If you've got an aviator red or silver card, you have to spend $20,000. And I think it's a card member a year. I should have checked that whether it's a card member or calendar, you got to spend $20,000 on your aviator red or aviator silver, and you get a $99 companion fare where you'll pay 99 bucks for your companion plus the taxes and fees. That's only good on a domestic economy class ticket within the lower

48 unless you are an Alaska or Hawaii resident, then you can use it to fly from Alaska or Hawaii to the mainland. But if you live within the 48 contiguous states anyway, you can only use this within the lower 48. However, if you've looked at the cost of airfare lately, this actually might not be an awful value at $20,000 spend. Again, like everything else, it depends on how you use it. But, I mean, my goodness, I've looked at airfares lately on several different routes, and sticker shock has hit me hard. So it could save you enough to maybe justify the spend on the card, particularly when you look at the fact that nowadays you're also earning one loyalty point per dollar spent on your American Airlines credit cards. So it can also help you towards American Airlines elite status. So if you're tempted to be spending towards elite status anyway, you value American Airlines miles and you think you can use this companion ticket

might be worth the $20,000 spend. If you're a bigger spender and you have the city business card or the aviator business card with $30,000 spend. If you're a bigger spender and you have the city business card or the aviator business card, with $30,000 spend, you get a companion fare that I think is $0 plus the taxes. So you have to spend a little bit more. But with those, I think your card has to be open

past the anniversary date in order to actually get the companion fare. I think it needs to be one billing cycle past the anniversary date with the city card and 45 days past the anniversary date for the Barclays card. But check our post. I'll link to the post with all of the details in the show notes that has all the details on all of these companion fairs. So in either of those cases, again, with domestic airfares being so high, maybe,

maybe you could justify spending 20 or 30 000 particularly if you wanted to spend towards status right yeah um a couple things i don't think you mentioned and correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think that if you uh if you have elite status and book one of these companion fare things that you're eligible for a free upgrade on your flights i don don't know the answer to that. That's yeah. That's my understanding anyway. So that's a big downer to me. Yeah. On the, on the plus side, if you have the aviator silver card, the companion certificate is actually good for, I don't know if you mentioned this.

No, I didn't. It's actually good for two guests. So you can actually fly at $99 each. So you pay for them, you know, the main coach fare and then add up to two more people for ninety nine dollars each. So that makes that one a little more interesting. But still, I think it has that same restriction about. About upgrades. Right, right. Yeah. um upgrades right right yeah so i think that this one's useful for people who fly american airlines quite a bit particularly given really high airfares you know a few years back when airfares were much cheaper i would have been probably not excited at all about this but with the way airfares are nowadays this could save you enough money to justify the additional

spend on the card uh if you're somebody who wanted to spend on your American Airlines card already. So, all right. So, I'm still waiting to find out, just as an aside, whether Nick sorted these companion fares based on alphabetical order, which they do seem to be sorted in, starting with American Airlines, or usefulness going from least to best of the ones that we like. So I'm just waiting. So so we'll see as we go along. Well, you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to these last three. I think these last three really are going to vary based on your use case. Now, I guess they're no, they're not even in the order that I'd be excited about them.

Let's talk next about Alaska, because they well, the rest of them are enough, butabetic order, but that's not alphabetic order. That would have come before American. They were all an alphabet. Well, you had you had a that comes before Alaska. All right. Getting pedantic on me here. All right. So. So Alaska, you're right. No, you're absolutely right. Alaska. This is actually, oddly enough, probably the one that I get most excited about, but I don't ever really use. So I love the Alaska Companion Certificate. If you've got one of the Alaska credit cards, the Alaska Visa Signature or the Alaska Business Card, then you get an annual companion certificate if you've had the card for a while anyway. If you've been approved since January 8th of this year, that's January 8th of 2023. Now you have to spend $6,000 on the card in order to get the companion certificate. If you were approved before that, it's just a free benefit you get every year,

at least for now. I say free benefit. Maybe I shouldn't characterize it that way because the companion ticket is $99 plus taxes. So you'll pay 99 bucks for the companion plus taxes, which makes it sound very similar to the American Airlines one, but it's really not that similar to the American Airlines one, in my opinion, anyway, because this one will work either one way or round trip and including multi-city, which I'll come back to in a second and on any coach fair. And that is interesting to me because there are upgradable fairs. If you've got Alaska Airlines elite status, you can book with one of these companion certificates and then upgrade to first class. I've done that before, in fact, on an Alaska companion certificate. So

booked it into an upgradable fair and immediately applied guest upgrades and a guest upgrade for the guest. However, those upgrades work. It's been years since I had Alaska Airlines elite status, but we upgraded to first class right away. So that could be nice. That can be a nice benefit. Whereas most of these companion certificates, at least for the United States carriers, United States based carriers

are economy class only. This is one that you could at least book an upgradable fare. Now, the fact that it works on multi-city bookings is what I think is most exciting about this. If you're, I don't know, if you're interested in doing something wild and crazy anyway, you can book a really long convoluted itinerary with these companion certificates using

the Alaska Airlines multi-city tool. The definition of round trip is pretty loose and you can really kind of tie together a couple of different trips if you're willing to put in some other miles to connect different dots and, uh, and fly all over the place, you can use these to fly all the way to Hawaii. If you want to fly to Mexico, wherever it is, Alaska flies, they can only be used on Alaska metal, but Alaska flies to Costa Rica. They fly to a number of locations in Mexico, like we said, uh Hawaii. And then, of course, obviously, many locations on the West Coast. They fly, obviously, up to Alaska. So you've got lots and lots of different options for long flights that you could get really good value out of it, particularly with these multi-stop itineraries where you can have layovers of up to 24 hours if you want to visit different places. Or then you can have a stopover, I think, in each direction.

Still, if I remember correctly, maybe it's only one stopover. There's definitely an ability to do that there. So so the other cool thing is that both passengers earn miles on the ticket. And that can be great because if you're doing what I'm talking about, yeah, then you could fly a really long distance and earn a boatload of miles. I've shown examples in the past where I've written about this, where you could each earn like 10 or 11,000 miles with Alaska, which are valuable. That's a decent return and use one of these companion certificates at the same time. So that can be, I think, a great deal for a companion ticket because Alaska is still a distance based program. That's what makes that more interesting than, say, the American Airlines one where maybe both passengers earn miles. I'm not even sure, but if they do, it's going to be based on the fare of the ticket, not based on the

number of miles you fly. Whereas Alaska, your mileage earning is based on distance flown. So if you can put together a really long, crazy convoluted award ticket or rather companion ticket here, then you can earn a whole bunch of redeemable miles. Yeah, I find this really cool. If I think if I lived in Seattle where you can fly just about anywhere on Alaska or if I lived somewhere with good Alaska service anyway, I'd be tempted to like, you know, my wife and I each have one of these cards. And once a year, do each of us like be the main person initiating a big old trip to keep us in high level elite status? You know, that that'd be a fun way of of mileage running for two. Yeah, it really could be a fun way of mileage running for two.

Because like you said, it can certainly get you a nice chunk of the way towards elite status. And if you both have an Alaska card and thus you both have these companion certificates, you could nest together two different really wild round trips. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a post I've written about kind of maximizing the Alaska companion certificate. The post is a few years old, so the examples in it are old airfares and old examples. But to my knowledge, I think all of it still works. So it's worth taking a look at that. If this, you know, kind of puts up your antenna and makes you say, oh, that sounds kind of interesting to me. I'd like to fly all over the place, you know,

on a multi-segment trip and earn a whole bunch of miles, then this one might be worth looking at. Also worth noting, you can book that companion fare for anyone. It doesn't you don't have to travel as the cardholder. So for instance, if I have an Alaska card, I could book one of those companion round trip, you know, two person trips for Greg and his wife, for instance, if I wanted to. The one rule that is kind of a gotcha is that you do have to use the Alaska Airlines credit card to book the flights, which is kind of a bummer to me because, of course, I would rather be booking with a credit card that has good travel protections, particularly if I'm booking a really complicated multi city

sort of a trip. But you're going to be stuck using the Alaska Airlines credit card, though you can also mix in wallet funds from Alaska. So if you've got Alaska gift cards or funds from canceled flights, then you can use those towards the purchase of the main ticket or the $99 companion fare. And that's nice because Costco often sells Alaska Airlines gift cards for 10% off. So you can often get a $500 gift card for $450 and save yourself a little bit more. So I think this one's an interesting one. I live somewhere that has no Alaska Airlines service. And because I'm on the East Coast in New York State, very limited routes out of New York City.

And so that's why I'm never able to really take advantage of this. I just don't have many chances to fly Alaska. But if I did, I would have some fun with this. I just don't have many chances to fly Alaska. Uh, but if I did, I would have some fun with this, I think. Yeah. Um, for the same reason I have one flight out of Detroit to, uh, Seattle, uh, on Alaska. And so back when I used to have one of these cards, I never managed to actually use the companion ticket so i'd give it away each year and i finally just canceled the card um so uh i think i think you're right it's a great one but it's kind of limited in audience just because of alaska's reach is kind of limited right otherwise otherwise it would be one of the best yeah yeah but because we're not west coasters

ourselves it's not not an easy one for us to use. Yeah, Tim's probably listening. He's going, what are you guys talking about? This is great. Sorry, Tim. All right. So let me now talk about the one that's most relevant to me, which is the Delta companion ticket. Delta, you do not have any spend requirement to get the companion ticket.

What you need is to have either the Delta Platinum card or the Delta Reserve card. And it could be either the consumer or business one. And what happens is at each account anniversary, you get this certificate added to your Delta account. So what does that mean is that if you wanted to use one right away, you can't like sign up now for a Delta card and hope to use the companion ticket right away because you're not going to get it for a year. But once you have it, then you have a year to use it and uh the platinum card well both of them i should start with what's in common between both of them uh both of them will let you do um book a round trip uh cash ticket on delta within the contiguous 48 united states and add a companion for free-ish. And by ish, I mean,

you do have to pay whatever taxes and fees are required for that companion, but usually that's very little. It's usually like 40 bucks, somewhere in more like America the companion does not earn any miles the companion does not earn elite credit but the the primary flyer does and you can choose whose primary it doesn't have to be the card holder so you know if if you're the card holder, but it's your companion, who's trying to seek elite status, you can make them the primary, um, or you, you don't even have to fly at all. You could, you could book, uh, two other people to fly and pick whoever, uh, is seeking elite status to be the primary. Um, so that's pretty good. Uh, the one restriction is they only allow you to book when discount fare classes are available. So, uh, there's certain fare classes that,

you know, are the cheaper ones. And in a way that's good. You know, the, the flights are sort of on the cheaper end to begin with. So you get two for the price of one at a lower level. But it's bad because when you try to book last minute or even last few months for a very popular time, like you're flying around the holidays, you might have a really hard time finding any availability at all with these with these companion tickets. So that can be a huge bummer. The biggest difference between if you use the platinum card or the reserve card is the reserve card, you can book first class from the get go. So if you're flying wherever, if first class is in your budget to add the second person essentially for free is, can be extremely valuable. And sometimes that even helps with this whole fair class thing. Cause I've had times where the economy flights were not available to do the companion, but first class was. And so

for about the same price as economy, as full fare economy, I could book the discount first class and add another person. So that's nice when that works out. So let's see what else about that. You can upgrade. So unlike American Airlines, I believe if you have elite status, you are eligible for upgrades just like anyone else. You could apply upgrade certificates if you have them to these flights. You can apply Delta credit to pay for the flight. So they're pretty flexible as long as you're flying with a companion within the lower 48 states. Yeah, that sounds like it could be a great deal for anybody who flies Delta.

If you're not a super regular Delta flyer, but you've got a fair amount of Delta service from your home airport, then those could really work out to save you a decent chunk of money. They seem a little bit easier. They don't require any particular spend, just an annual benefit. And so to me, that seems like it could go a long way toward mitigating the annual fee on either of those cards. With the cost of domestic economy airfare these days, you probably mitigate the annual fee on the platinum card altogether. And then if you use it for the right redemption on the reserve card could be the same. Very easily. I mean, the platinum card could be the same. Very easily. I mean, like the, um, platinum card

is $250 a year. So you could so easily save more than that with, with one round trip. Absolutely. Um, the, the reserve card is five 50. Um, it's certainly, I have saved more than that. I mean, I haven't on every trip, not by a long shot, but it's still possible to do. Yeah, absolutely. So I think those are good because they're easy. There's not much difficulty in terms of, well, I say easy, might not be easy to find the availability, like Greg said, but easy in the sense that you don't have to really do anything. It's just an automatic card benefit. So that's pretty cool. That's right. All right. So that wraps up Delta. So that leaves, last but not least, the Southwest Companion Pass. And so the Southwest Companion Pass, Greg was wondering if I save this for last because it's the best one. I don't know if it's the best one necessarily. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's the best one. Of course, I think it's the best one. Of course, it's the best one. It's the best one because Southwest. It's in a whole it's in a whole different league. Yeah, it is. It's in a different league, a league of its own, so to speak. So the Southwest Companion Pass, if you're not familiar, is a benefit you can get when you earn 135,000 Southwest Rapid Rewards points within one calendar year.

Or if you've got one of the Southwest Airlines credit cards, then it's 10,000. You get credit for 10,000 qualifying points. So it only takes 125,000 points earned if you've got one of the credit cards in order to get the companion pass. And the nice thing is when you earn the companion pass, you can add a companion to your ticket for free, just the taxes, just pay the taxes on every flight you take with Southwest for the rest of the calendar year in which you earn the pass and the entire next calendar year. It doesn't matter whether you bought your ticket with cash or with points.

You can add your companion for just the taxes, which on domestic flights is going to be $5 and 60 cents each way in most cases. So $5 and 60 cents, you can add your companion. And let me talk more about that in a second. What makes this one interesting, I think for most listeners anyway, or most readers of the blog, is that credit card welcome bonuses count towards the 135,000 points that you need in order to earn this. So we'll talk about timing that out in a second. But why is it such a good deal? Well, like we said, it's unlimited use. You can add a companion

to your flight every single time you fly. And again, this applies in almost any situation, whether you booked your primary or the companion pass holder flight with cash or with your rapid rewards points or somebody else use their rapid rewards points to book your flight for you. You can add your companion. You don't have to add your companion at the time of booking. You can add your companion at any time up until about 10 minutes prior to departure. As long as there is a seat for sale on the flight, you can add the companion for the $5.60 in taxes or whatever the taxes may be, depending on the route you're flying. If you're flying internationally, it'll be a little bit more. But that's nice because sometimes we'll

book one ticket right away and then either forget or not know that we're going to add a companion until much later in the game. And as long as there's a seat for sale, it doesn't matter that you booked the primary seat, the first seat really, really cheap and fares are really expensive. Now, as long as there's a seat for sale on the flight, you can add that companion. It doesn't have to be in the same fair class, so to speak,

not that Southwest has a lot of fair classes exactly, but you could have booked yourself, for instance, a want to get away fair. And now all that's left is any time in business select. That's fine. As long as there's a seat for sale, you can add the companion for free. So that makes this a really good benefit, potentially a really interesting benefit for sure. So how do you earn it? Well, let's talk about earning it. So credit card welcome bonuses count. That's number one. Also talking about things that count miles earned through the shopping portal will count. So if you shop through the Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards

shopping portal and you're getting 10 miles per dollar at Macy's, let's say, or 10 Rapid Rewards points per dollar anyway at Macy's, those 10 Rapid Rewards points per dollar spent do count towards the companion pass. Now the short term shopping portal bonuses like spend $500 and get an additional 1500 miles during the back to school shopping period or whatever, those extra bonuses don't count, but the miles per dollar you earn on the purchases do count. So shopping through the shopping portal, you can earn points for your car rentals. You can earn points on 1-800-Flowers purchases. We have a complete guide to the Southwest Companion Pass that lists which types of points are eligible towards the Companion Pass and which are not.

So you need to earn a total of $135,000. So how do you time that out to get the best value out of the Companion Pass? I'm going to give you that pop quiz, Greg. Greg, how do you time this out to get the most value out of the companion pass? I'm going to give you that pop quiz, Greg. Greg, how do you time this out to get the most value you can out of the Southwest companion pass? Well, what you want is to earn all the miles like January 1st, basically, so that that way you instantly get the companion pass for the rest of that year and all the next. So I think you'll have to talk about how that works. Yeah, so you want to time out your credit card applications, essentially.

So like Greg said, you want to earn them as early in the year as you possibly can. So sometime after October 1st, and I'll mention why, I guess, in a second, but sometime after October 1st, you want to consider applying for one or two of the Southwest Rapid Rewards credit cards. Now, you can only get one of the consumer cards at a time and only maybe you can get more than one of the business cards.

I can't recall for sure, but one consumer card. So you can do this with one consumer card and one business card. Sometimes the offer on one of the business cards is high enough that you might be able to earn a companion pass with just one of the business cards every now and then. So you have to look at what the current offers are. The reason I say to wait until after October 1st to consider applying for Southwest credit cards is because then you can wait to complete the spend until January 1st of the next year. And the reason for that is once you complete the spending requirements on the credit cards, then you'll earn the welcome bonuses. So let's say just for argument's sake that they're offering a 65,000 point bonus. That's not the case as we speak right now. We're just imagining the situation where you could earn 65,000

points as part of the welcome offer on a consumer card and 65,000 points as part of the welcome offer on a business card. If you were to apply for both of those cards in, say, November and hold off on meeting the spending requirement until January 1st, you meet the spend, you earn the welcome bonuses from both those cards, you earn the points from meeting the spend on both of those cards. You're going to have more than enough points in January when your statements close to have earned the companion pass in January. And when that happens, the reason that's exciting is you'll get the companion pass for the rest of that calendar year and all of the following calendar year. So we're recording this in 2023. If you meet the spending requirements on your

credit cards, January 1st, 2024, you'll have a companion pass that's good for all of 2024 and all of 2025. Now you do have to earn all of the points in the same calendar year. So you do not want to earn one welcome offer in late 2023 and another welcome offer in early 2024. You need to make sure that you earn all of the points in the same calendar year. So not a rolling 12 months,

gotta be the same calendar year. But if you do that, then you can get almost two full years of a companion flying for free with you, which I have long said is one of the best deals in domestic travel. I mean, it's fantastic. It's terrific. It applies again, both to cash or points bookings. Now, I wrote a post this week that was kind of controversial.

So tell me, Greg, what's your take on this? I wrote this week about the Southwest Companion Pass and whether or not it increases the value of your points. Because let's say, well, let's say for argument's sake that Southwest points are worth 1.3 cents per point and you earn a welcome bonus of, let's keep the math simple, 100,000 points on one of these cards. If you can take a companion with you for free, you can buy $1,300 worth of airfare,

but you'll be able to fly two people. So it's kind of like $2,600 worth of airfare, isn't it, Greg? Has this increased the value of your points? Is this a great deal? What do you think about the Southwest Companion Pass? Yeah, I love this topic because it's something I wrote about many years ago. Nick wrote about it a few years ago. He wrote about it again. And it's something that people just can't wrap their minds around. But, you know think it's too complicated of a topic to try to state why I think it doesn't double the value of your points. In fact, your points are worth the same amount as before. What you have is a valuable companion pass. That's what you have. Well, there you go. So is the companion pass valuable? Let's talk about that.

Absolutely. I mean, there's no other companion pass except one, which you didn't mention, where you can fly with a companion for free for a whole year. If you're flying two people, it's like a 50% discount on Southwest that is repeatable as many times as you can possibly use it. Right. And it works whether you're paying with miles or with cash. And so it really is just like, however much you're flying, no matter how you book the ticket with Southwest, you can add your companion. And that's, that's incredible. There is to me one major, major downside to it. Can you guess what that is? That you have to fly Southwest. See, I said that as a question because I, I, I know lots of people don't like Southwest. I don't mind it at all. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. I don't mind standing and waiting in line to board the plane and picking my own seat. That stuff just

doesn't bother me the way I know it bothers a lot of people. I must be in the, I don't know if I'm in the minority because a lot of people fly Southwest, but in the award travel game anyway, I'm in the minority. I flew Southwest just a few days ago. It was great. It was fantastic, terrific little flight. But we use our companion pass in normal times pretty frequently, although these last couple of years we've used it less. So I really probably should reevaluate the value of it now that airfares are really kind of wacky and Southwest is just not always my cheapest option. However, getting half off of two tickets will make it a very good option. A lot of cases I've written year after year about the cost of award tickets with Southwest and how they frequently come out ahead of

competitors for two tickets when you have the companion pass in terms of the number of points you have to use. Now, again, it gets complicated as to the cash value of that. You'll have to see the post and then the comments of the post that They'll link here for more of that discussion because it's kind of a fun one. But but yeah, so it's a great, great deal. I think we both value the companion pass very highly. And if you live near an airport that's served by Southwest and you don't mind flying Southwest and their boarding process and the fact that there's no assigned seats, then this could be a terrific value. I love it also as a family traveler because we always check bags. And so

I don't ever have to worry about paying for that because you get two free check bags per passenger on Southwest. So it makes the situation really simple for me. And then speaking of the Southwest credit cards, if you're like, oh, well, there's three different personal cards. There's a couple different business cards. Which one or ones should I get? In my opinion, if you're like, oh, well, there's three different personal cards. There's a couple different business cards. Which one or ones should I get? In my opinion, if you're going to fly enough to make the companion pass worth it on Southwest, on the consumer side, the priority card is the one to get. Let me back up. Whatever has the best welcome bonus is the best one to get.

But if you're talking about which cards are worth having as a Southwest flyer, the Southwest priority card, I think, is a fantastic deal. Right now, the annual fee, as we we speak is $149 a year. And, uh, and it comes with a $75 annual Southwest credit. So you get 75 bucks towards paid airfares, for instance, or wifi or whatever it might be that you're spending on Southwest. And then also it comes with anniversary miles and 7,500 anniversary miles every year at anniversary. So between those two things that to me comes pretty close to wiping out the annual fee or really better than wiping out the annual fee. So I think it's kind of a no brainer for people who fly Southwest a lot.

On top of that, it comes with four reimbursements per year for a one to 15 boarding. Just use that on our flight earlier this week, or put the four of us in a one to 15, which is kind of unnecessary if you're a family traveler, because you board after a group anyway, if you're traveling with kids under six, but that's neither here nor there. Anyway, I like that card particularly out of the various cards. But if you catch a really great bonus on one of the business cards, that can be a great deal too. So lots of different options there and keep an eye out because after

October 1st, we will certainly be keeping our eye out on offers. The reason I say after October 1st is because typically Chase gives you 90 days to meet the welcome, to meet the minimum spend for the welcome offer. So if you wait until after October 1st, you can wait until after January 1st to meet the spend and earn the welcome offers. The later in the year you wait, the more time you give yourself in the new year to meet the spending requirement. It really just depends on how much time you'll need to meet the spending requirement and when they decide to increase the offers, if they decide to increase the offers. Air Canada. If you have the Chase Air Canada aeroplane card and you spend just just a million dollars in calendar

year I think it is then you'll be able to book I think it's like any award for to you know add a companion to to any word for for two for the whole another year you if I remember right you you can only name a single companion like you can't change it the way you can with southwest companion pass um oh yeah you could change the southwest one what four times a year or something like that or three times a year three three times three times per calendar year so if you've got it for effectively two years you could change it three times the first yeah so that's pretty nice but uh no uh just a million spend a million bucks you can get that huh just a million bucks that's all you need it's all you need all right okay so the airplane one needless to say is not

at the top of our list in terms of uh not really things that we're going after but you know hey you do you uh all right. So then I think that now wraps up our main event on companion tickets. You see, there's tons of different ways to get companion tickets. I love the Southwest companion pass, but there are lots of other good ones out there. Speaking of the Southwest companion pass this week's question of the week is related to that. So Parker writes in and says, I have a question for Greg about something he said in passing on the podcast a few weeks ago. Greg said that as part of his quest to earn one million miles in a month, this was something

Greg did years ago. He did like a million mile madness, right, where he spent one month earning a million miles and points. And I did that single month. So Greg mentioned in passing as part of his quest to do that, he'd earned a Southwest companion pass entirely through the shopping portal in one month. I have so many questions. What card did Greg use to get a high enough credit limit to do that?

What did Greg buy through the shopping portal? Was it 135,000 points worth of actually necessary stuff, or was it through a reselling scheme? Was there a massive opportunity cost, given the cashback rates can often be as high as 8 or 10 percent versus what a 3X via Southwest? I'm curious because I've done a good bit of reselling over the last few years. I'd like to branch out into some MSing stuff, but I just have to know, how did Greg do that? How'd you do it, Greg? I didn't. I'm not sure what's being referred to here.

Then it must have been me. Then it must have been me. I thought maybe you did, and I just didn't remember you mentioning it in passing. I thought, oh, maybe that was part of your million mile madness. So it wasn't. So then it was me that mentioned it, I guess, because I did earn it in about a month years ago. Oh, okay. All right.

This was through – so I knew I did. Yeah. No, no. I mean, I did earn a million miles a month, but I don't think a single one was a Southwest point. Why not, Greg? I know. I know. It doesn't make sense for you. So anyway, me, yes, I did earn it through the shopping portal entirely, but it was a little bit different. So I was reselling products on Amazon and eBay at the time. And back then, there was something Greg had written about a lot called the double dip and sometimes the triple dip, which doesn't tend to work anymore. I'm not aware of where it works, if it still does. But back in the day, it was possible to go through a shopping portal.

And what I did was I went through the Southwest shopping portal, clicked through it to go to Sears.com, and I would buy a Sears.com gift card. And I would earn whatever the rate was. Let's say it was 10x Southwest points, because that was not uncommon back then. So I would click through Southwest for 10x points, go to Sears.com, buy, say, a $1 dollars, Sears gift card and earn 10,000 Southwest points. Then I would go back to once I had my thousand dollars Sears gift card again, just, uh, I don't know what denomination they were, but I'm just making that up for the,

the purpose of the example. Then I would go back to the Southwest shopping portal, click through again, when it said 10 X for Sears and go to Sears.com and buy something for $1,000 or another 10,000 Southwest points. And I got 20,000 Southwest points and $1,000 worth of Sears stuff. And so I'd sell the Sears stuff. And if I sold the Sears stuff for even a slight loss, I got 20,000 points. So that could make up for it. If we value our Southwest points at the time, it was more like one and a half cents per point. So about $300, as long as I got significantly more than $700 back, I was pretty happy because

I was also earning towards a companion pass. And then at the time, Sears shop your way rewards used to also come back in a lot of different items. And sometimes you could earn a significant chunk in Sears shop your way rewards, which is basically Sears cash back that could only be used at Sears. And so there were some items that would give you 100% back in rewards or 50% back in rewards. And so then I get the rewards. And let's say I bought an item that got me 100% back in rewards, not common on a thousand dollar item, but maybe I bought a bunch of something, let's say. Then I go through the shopping portal again and use the rewards from a thousand dollars worth

of rewards and get 10 X again for another 10,000 points. Now, now I'm up to 30,000 Southwest points. Uh, and I've got $2,000 worth of serious stuff to resell. And sometimes the points rolled and you were able to buy another thing with the points, right? I mean, it was, you buy like something that got a hundred percent back in points with points and get more points. And it was kind of crazy. And so that continued to work for a while until eventually one day it didn't.

So that doesn't work anymore the way I just described it, but I described it because I think it's interesting sometimes to know about how things have worked in the past because that sometimes helps you find new things that work that way in the future. Like I said, I'm not familiar with anywhere you can do that right now, but for all I know, there'll be a new store that pops up next year that that does work

at. And so those are the types of experiments that are kind of fun to run now and then. And it doesn't take a lot to run an experiment. You click through a portal and buy a $5 gift card and say, did I get the miles? And then use the $5 gift card and say, did I get the miles? Exactly. And for the record, I did do exactly what Nick described now. It just wasn't part of Million Mile Mana. So I remember I bought a whole bunch of, I think it was tablet PCs or whatever, and resold them. And same thing. I was earning 20 points per dollar because of that double dip opportunity. And I had the same story i i had all these sears shop your way rewards

credits that that could be rolled into it's a long story but anyway uh yeah it's a long those were nice days yeah they were they were nice days and and actually there was a time that sears was great for dslr cameras man i was picking them up and i was selling them for profit and, and earning the points the way I just described and selling the cameras for a product bought these guys one Nikon clearance camera over and over again, I bought out the stock at every Sears store I could find there were a few items like that some smokers also, I actually got an enclosed trailer and drove to New Jersey and loaded up on smokers at different places. So there were a lot of different types of items that I did with that, that I was able to actually turn a profit on. So that worked out really well for me. But that's long in the past. And sometimes when I hear those past glory days

stories, I roll my eyes a little bit about hearing that kind of thing. But like I said, I think it's useful to learn about that sometimes because that'll help you discover new opportunities now and then. So there you go. It's not going to help you earn a companion pass today because you can't use exactly those same methods, Parker, but that answers at least what we were doing. And in terms of opportunity costs, it probably wasn't much because of the way we were doing that. And in terms of what credit card we were using, I was using whatever credit cards I had. Probably at the time, I was mostly probably using a a capital one venture card. That wasn't where the points were coming from. The points were coming from the portal. So, uh, so it just didn't matter which credit card or cards I was using.

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