Frequent Miler on the Air - US Bank's Mysterious Transferable Points | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep371 | 8-14-26

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Get 15% of on Saily E-SimsThis podcast episode is sponsored by Saily. Saily is an ESIM service app created by the security experts behind NordVPN. Instead of paying absurd daily rates to your home carrier or swapping SIM cards on arrival, Saily gives you flexible prepaid data plans in over 200 destinations worldwide. Download Saily from your app store and use our code FREQUENTMILER at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase. https://saily.com/frequentmilerOn today's episode, we'll share a reminder to check your credit card travel portal if you're renting a car. Nick will share tips about renewing passports, and we'll see how the Altitude Reserve has added 4 - no, 2 transfer partners.Giant Mailbag(01:26) - Podcast failed to download Friday evening and most of Saturday, so now we're experimenting with a release schedule to drop podcasts during working hours(04:39) - Mitsu: Regarding booking rental cars through CREDIT CARD portalsMattress Running the Numbers: IHG(11:09) - Targeted IHG promo: Earn double elite night credits (limit 10 bonus elite nights)Read more about this targeted IHG promo hereBonvoyed: Amex Offers(14:31) - Multi-card trick appears to be deadThis Week in Points(18:24) - Miles, points, and more changes(19:23) - Amex adds 350+ FHR/THC added in 2026(20::58) - Select Tock restaurants available for Amex Resy credits as of 9/15(23:16) - Avios.com award calendarRead more about the Avios award calendar herePersonal Points(28:25) - Greg: Overcoming Virgin award booking snafu(34:38) - Nick: trying to book a cruise cabin for a family member(38:06) - Greg: SAS award booking snafu(46:43) - Nick: Online passport renewal data point(50:05) - Read about rental car loyalty programs hereMain Event: US Bank's Mysterious Transferable Points(51:56) - Altitude Reserve card is a collectible, but has been a bit of a dud until now(52:54) - Altitude Reserve Before Dec 15 2025(56:25) - After Dec 15, 2025(1:02:54) - Altitude Reserve Now(1:13:54) - Questions for Nick and GregSubscribe 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 YoderCheck out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of the Voyascape Network, a collection of some of the world’s best travel podcasts. Explore more at Voyascape.com. For advertising or sponsorship opportunities on this show and across the network, email [e-mail] or you can find more information at Voyascape.com/advertsing.

This podcast episode is sponsored by Saley. Saly is an ESIM service app created by the security experts behind NordVPN. Instead of paying absurd daily rates to your home carrier or swapping SIM cards on arrival, Saly gives you flexible prepaid data plans and over 200 destinations worldwide. Setup takes just a couple of minutes on your phone before you leave, and your data activates automatically when you touch down. Plus, in order to reduce your data consumption, Saley actually blocks malicious sites,

trackers, and annoying ads while you browse. Whether you need a quick gigabyte for a weekend away or unlimited data for a longer adventure, Saly keeps you connected without any surprise bills waiting for you at home. Ready to upgrade your international roaming? Download Saly from your app store and use our code frequent miler at checkout

to get 15% off your first purchase. Details are in the show notes. This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at boyescape.com. On today's show, renting a car, check your credit card travel portal. And Nick shares tips about renewing passports. Finally, the altitude reserve adds for, nope, two transferable points partners.

Frequent Miller on the air starts now. Today's main event, U.S. Bank's mysterious transferable points. As we're recording this yesterday, the old collectible U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve Card suddenly gained the ability to transfer points to four different transfer partners. And hours later, it was down to two transferable points partners. So we're going to talk in today's show about what's happening with the Altitude Reserve Card. where it might be going. What is going on with this mysterious program? Yeah, I'm interested to hear what you think and to discuss that a little bit because this certainly hit us out of left field, just the fact that it came out, and then the partners that they launched with too and how it changed

so quickly. So we'll talk more about that. If you want to jump ahead, then you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. Just expand the description box. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to subscribe, enable notifications like the video if you're watching on YouTube or give us some stars if you're listening in podcast form. Now let's drag out this week's Giant Mailbag. All right. Before we get into the Giant Mail, I want to talk about what happened last weekend with this show.

So we released the show like normal, Friday evening, early Friday evening. And everything was fine on YouTube. But for those who tried to download the show on audio-only podcast formats, it failed. And this continued on through most of Saturday. What was happening? The podcast version of the show is hosted on something called Captivate.

And Captivate is undergoing a major technical, like, rehaul. It's going to be a much more capable platform soon, theoretically. But apparently there are problems with it. And so many, many podcasts went down over the weekend, including ours. Sorry about the frustration that caused. To confound matters more, captivates weekend support is kind of barely there. So it just made it a really frustrating situation for everybody. It seems like Captivate has fixed whatever that issue was, but we're still wary about this idea of releasing podcasts at times when captivates support.

isn't around. So we're going to experiment with changing our release schedule slightly with the podcast to try to release the podcast during regular business hours with a hope that if something goes wrong again, we'll be able to get support quicker. So the new schedule that we're going to try out is moving. Question of the week has been being released on Sunday afternoons or evenings. We're going to move that to Monday midday. The coffee break episodes, they've been being released Tuesday mornings. We're going to try moving that to Wednesday midday. And then this show, the Frigemiler on the air, full show had been being released Friday evening. We're going to move that to Friday midday. And that's based on Eastern time. Yeah, so pretty simple. We're going to publish

podcast Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in the middle of the day instead of Sunday, Tuesday, Friday night. Instead of publishing two outside of business hours, essentially, we're just going to move all three of them to weekdays. Why didn't I just say it that way? It shouldn't be too much of a show. It sounded like a big shift the way you described it, Greg. And I was like, Greg, all we're doing is moving the Sunday thing to Monday, the Tuesday thing to Wednesday and the Friday thing to still Friday. So it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Same thing. So hopefully that'll be fine with everyone. Longer term, we may look into bigger shifts with the schedule. And so if you have any thoughts about, you know, oh, I really wish that the longer show would show up on Mondays or something like that. Let us know. And we will consider that for sure.

All right. Back to the giant mailbag. This week's giant mail comes from Mitsu, who wrote in about the topic of booking rental cars through credit card portals. And Nick, I think you have mentioned this on the show at least once or twice about how sometimes you've found better car rental prices when looking through things like the Capital One travel portal or other credit card related travel portals, and that's what Mitsu is writing in about Mitsui.

And to be clear, it never used to be that way. And that's what's made that notable because, I mean, in the past, in past years, the credit card portals were always overpriced for car rentals, right? I mean, you and I didn't even bother looking at them for a long time. That's right. So it's relatively new that we've noticed. Yeah, as far as we know, anyway. And what our regular advice has always been is use auto slash.

It compares prices across lots of different systems and you could set it up to watch your car rental to see if prices drop. And so Nitsu's writing in about that whole topic and wrote, I've heard you guys report occasionally that credit card portals sometimes are giving excellent deals on rental cars. But I have to say, I think this trend may be accelerating. As a baseline, I started with AutoSlache for a two-day rental from San Francisco during a busy week. AutoSlaschel found $256 for a national car rental and $290 for Hertz. But then I thought, let's try. Try the portals. I was astounded.

$215 from Chase for national. $200 from Venture X and then get this, on city, it was $171. And on Capital One, and those were all national. And for Capital One, it was the same for Hertz on Venture X. Taxes and fees included all in. So basically to summarize what he's saying is that, really all the portals, all the credit card portals he tried had better prices than what AutoSlache found.

And then wrote, that's not even factoring in the 10x on the VentureX portal. So you're in 10X rewards if you book through there, 8X with Chase and 12X with City. Two more experiments. JFK, one week in the late fall, AutoSlache found $615.15. Chase found $458, Capital One, $441, and city $454. So all three of the credit card portals around $450 compared to auto slash $615. That's a huge savings. And then Mitsui writes, this one is an unusual one.

One and a half week, one-way rental from Seattle to Portland. In this case, auto slash wins. maybe because the portals are aggressively negotiating rates on typical same drop-off car rentals, but the more oddball cases don't get the same treatment. So the example is auto slash found a rate of $530 for this one-way rental, whereas the portals were all slightly over $700. Yeah, that's all really surprising. I mean, compared to the way things had been for a very long time, at least,

It's very surprising. And, you know, to be clear, obviously, you know, AutoSash is going to be looking at what's publicly available through different sites. And I say publicly available if you're a member of Costco or you're a member of Sam's Club or you're like affiliated with different things. They will check for all of those different discounts. But obviously, the credit cards could be negotiating even better deals for their customers. And, you know, I wouldn't have guessed this. This wouldn't have been on my predictions. for 2026. But I guess when I think about it, I think, you know, during the pandemic, car rental prices like went through the roof, right? And there wasn't enough capacity. Like, everywhere you went, they were, they were running out of cars left and right. And so they probably had to have gotten a lot of new cars during that time period when demand was really high. And maybe this is because car rental demand isn't the same as it was and they can afford to cut some deals on the credit card portals, you know, perhaps are just offering a better deal for them. I don't know why. I'm total speculation there, but it's interesting. I don't know. What do you

think's going on here? Yeah. No, I think probably the rental car companies, or at least some of them, are looking at, well, how can we feature more prominently in the Chase portal and the Capital One portal and so on. And so in order to do that, in order to get more bookings from those platforms, they make deals with them. And it makes sense to me, as suggested here, that those deals might be for regular, you know, round trip travel where you pick up and return in the same place and one way might be a totally different thing. So that all makes sense to me.

So cool, in a way, the downside is now we have to check all these different portals again. It's kind of like hotels that way now. You can't. There's no one place you could look for the book. best deal because these credit card portals are kind of are behind logins and so tools don't aren't very good at you know checking across these these these things where you have to be a card holder in order to get access to to those deals so more work for us but potentially better deals yeah yeah and of course it's not going to be universal and in fact I just as we were having this discussion

checked one for an upcoming trip where I've been unhappy with the sticker shock of the price of the different rental companies I've been looking at. So I just, I just as we were recording this, checked city, and it was about on par with the same thing I had seen through AutoSla. So I'm sure this is going to vary from one rental need to another. But, but I have found situations where city and Capital One were better than what I found anywhere else. So Chase, I haven't noticed that as much, but hey, yeah, you got to check now. I think you have to look around. Right. Thanks, Metsu.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that. More time spent shopping for car rentals. But good to be able to get, I mean, the savings there is significant. Yes, absolutely. All right, let's talk about mattress running the numbers. IHG is out with a promotion to earn double elite night credits, up to 10 bonus elite nights. This end September 30th and importantly, reward stays do not count. So this has to be paid stays. What do you think? Is it worth? mattress running, is there any reason to go after these bonus 10 elite nights? Yeah. Well, first, we should mention this is targeted. Not everybody gets us, but if you, if you do, and if you're chasing IHG status or milestone rewards, it could be, I mean, it's definitely worth signing up. The question is, what is it worth going out of your way and booking stays just to get double elite nights? You know, the one carrot that I can think of, why would you

do this is because at 20 nights, IHG gives you a milestone choice. And one of those options is a suite upgrade award where you can upgrade a stay of up to five nights with this sweet upgrade award. And so, you know, if you have your heart set on booking a regular price and staying in a nice suite, then I guess that's a bit of a carrot, but you would need 20 nights to get there. So that would be like maxing out this promo. If you didn't already have any nights on your account, it would mean maxing out this promo with 10 paid nights in order to get one suite upgrade. What do you think, Nick? Should you go out and book 10 hotel rooms, hotel nights? Probably not.

I mean, for the most part, no. I mean, I've seen some really cheap properties in like Bali or that kind of thing before. And I guess if you're going somewhere like that and you've got like a really cheap IHG, still no. No. Probably. Yeah. And I think they do have a minimum if I'm remembering right of like 30 bucks or so. Yeah.

So, you know, I mean, that's really cheap. But still, I mean, that's paying. 10 paid nights, right? Yeah. So it's paying at least $300, but then you've got to add taxes and fees and stuff like that. You know, I mean, could it be worth it for a suite? I mean, sure, but if I remember right, these suite upgrades can't be applied until 14 days before your stay. And so how do you even know that it would be available when you need it?

I would not even consider this. No. But if you're chasing status anyway, I mean, take advantage. Why not? Wouldn't consider mattress running it, but you would register for it if you were targeted, probably. 100%. yeah me too and i i have to emphasize that because i just ran into this recently where i meant to check and make sure i was registered for hilton promotions and then like on checkout morning i realized

oh no i think i forgot to register for the the recent promotion and i i was kicking myself saying you know i should have just done that when it came out when we published the post i should just registered because there was nothing harming me from you know there's no harm in registering right and if I ended up with a Hilton's stay, I would just automatically earn the points without having to think about it. And I prefer that. So get in that habit, folks. Do as I say, not as I do. Right. All right. Next up, Bonvoid. We've been Bonvoid by Amex offers, apparently. What's up there, Craig? Okay. So you know how Amex has Amex offers, which are these offers that you can add to your Amex credit cards that are things like, get, you know, $20 back when you spend $100 at such and such store, or sometimes you get points.

And it varies a lot what the offers are, but they're all, most of them are merchant specific. Like, you know, spend this much at Marriott and get this much back or spend this much at Macy's or where at Home Depot, whatever. they it used to be like if you go way back it used to be possible to add amex offers one by one to all of the cards where they appeared so if you have multiple amex cards yourself you could just like go into one card and add add the home depot offer there and go into your other card and if it was targeted for the home depot offer add it there at some point amex decided to cut that out and only allow you to register one card with one exact same offer. But over time, there have been multiple ways around that. And the ways around it have changed over time, but most recently, and it's been working for a long time now, tools, there are tools that will automatically add Amex offers to all of your cards, and they were able to get around this limitation and add the same offer to all your cards.

But apparently that's broken now. So now that won't work. And that also means that tools like card pointers and save wise, which are set up to automatically add offers to your cards, I'm not really sure what's going to happen with those because I don't know that you'd want now, Amex offers automatically added to whichever card those tools decide should be the card to add them to. Instead, you're going to have to think about where, you know, which of my Amex cards do I want that Home Depot offer added to? You don't want it added to a card you never use. Yeah, yeah. I will say that one of the things that I still

could see being useful with a tool like card pointers, for instance, is I know card pointers, there's been a few times where I've wanted to know, does this offer exist on any of my cards? and I can look at all the offers across all my cards and one drop down or then, you know, look down through the multiple cards and it's a little faster than having to go through and search through the MX offers. So I do like it for that. I didn't really get into adding the multiple MX offers thing. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did.

But, you know, we'll see. Yeah, yeah. And I didn't mean to say that tools like card points were not useful still because they'll still add to all your chase cards because there's no similar restriction on Chase's side. Bank of America cards there you just have to add the offer once sort of to your account and it applies to all your cards. You know, so things like that, it's still going to be really useful. I find I just, so I do use it.

And I find like I just sort of automagically sometimes get cash back from, you know, in my Chase account or my Bank America account or wherever. And I don't even know exactly why. Like sometimes, I often chase it down, but, you know, it just magically happens. So I love that about those tools automatically adding the offers. It's just too bad. It's become hobbled with Amex now. All right.

Next up, Miles Points and More. So maybe you should talk about what's going on here with Miles Points and More. Okay. We decided to break this section up into two new sections. So previously, we would lump into Miles Points and More all the news that was happening around Miles and Points, like new happenings, as well as whatever was going on with, like, us personally, regarding Miles and Points. And we decided to break out those things into two separate sections so that it's a little clearer what they're for. So we've got a section now called This Week in Points, where we're going to talk about the new stuff that's happening in the Miles and Points world in general, and then personal

points. And that's where we'll talk about what's happening with us. Did we sign up for any new credit cards? Have we redeemed points for something interesting? Is there a new way that we found to use our coupon credits to get good value from them? That kind of thing. All right. So let's talk about this week in points.

first of all, Amex has announced that in 2026, they've added some 350 plus fine hotels and resorts and the hotel collection properties. Now, that's in 2026, recently, not necessarily all

like in the last week or two, but they've added a bunch of new properties. And that kind of tracks with my experience. I feel like I've had an easier time or seen more properties available in at least some of the places where I've looked. So I'm, I'm not terribly surprised to hear that.

Right. I totally agree. And it's great because, you know, since the platinum cards changed their hotel credits to be $300 every six months, the, you know, that's way more than it used to offer. It's actually gotten easier to use the credits than before because there's so many more properties you can use them. So places you're interested in are more likely than ever before to be on either fine hotels and resorts or the hotel collection. And, you know, they don't always have great pricing, but they, I'd say, they more often have very good pricing than if you compare, for example, Chase's the Edit.

Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely true. And just more availability than if you compare against Chase's the Edit, you know, there's just so many more properties, like you said. Yes, so many more. It's a big difference. Yeah. All right, well, so that's good news. Glad to see that or hear that or know it anyway, that there are more there. In more good news on the MX side, select talk restaurants are going to be available for the MX Rezi credits starting September 15th or as of September 15th.

So if you don't recall or if you're not familiar, Rezi is a restaurant reservation platform owned by Amex. And the platinum cards, the consumer platinum cards offer $100 credit each quarter or up to $100. dollars each quarter for purchases made at restaurants listed on the Resi platform. They kind of changed the wording on that to now restaurants noted as eligible on the Resi platform. It used to be everything on Resi. And then they bought this platform called Talk. And Talk is a restaurant reservation platform, just a competing one, another restaurant reservation platform that has some really good restaurants. And then Gregs mentioned that in some areas, it's just more prevalent, like in Ann Arbor where he is. It's more prevalent than

Rezzi. But we knew there'd be some tech involved in getting those talk restaurants that are now on Resi eligible for the Resi credits. And it sounds like some of them are going to be eligible as of September 15th. So when you're looking at a restaurant in Resi, check for that little thing that indicates that it's eligible for the credit. And thankfully, we're going to have more places to use those credits soon. Yeah. One of the things that happened this week was that all of the talk restaurants now appear on Resi, if you search for restaurants on Resi, you see them, but when you go to book them, it says, you know, finish this booking on Tok. So it's still not 100% integrated, I think. But at some point, well, starting September 15th is what Amex announced. Some of those, or maybe many,

we don't know, talk restaurants will be available to get Resi credits, which will be great. I opened my Rezi app yesterday as we're recording this and almost all my favorite restaurants in Ann Arbor are now showing up in Rezzi, but it's a little frustrating knowing that I'm not going to get the credits until hopefully in September I'll be able to get credits for those. But you'll still probably go out to dinner in September and October. So there'll be time probably, right, to use them if they become eligible. If they do. Yeah. Yep. If they do, hopefully.

All right. next up obvious.com now has an award calendar this is kind of interesting because in the past it's been sort of a pain to look for awards that are available through british airways and iberia their websites are kind of difficult to use they only show a week of availability at a time aer Lingus obvious i'm just not as familiar with searching through their website because i've only done it a handful of times but avious dot com now allows you to search and look at a full month of availability on any one of those three airlines at least on non-stop routes. I don't think it handles connecting routes at all. But this is kind of nice because it helps you find availability and you can choose whether you want to look at economy or premium economy or business or everything or what have you. So it's a much easier way to find when things are available. And then you still unfortunately have to go to British Airways, Iberia or Air Lingus to book, but at least you can see the availability. What do you think about that? Yeah. Yeah. No, this is great. Award tools,

don't seem to regularly do a very good job of searching for these particular programs own award space. So, and what I mean by that is when these programs release award space to partners, you could usually pick that up on different award search tools, but not when they're keeping award space for their own members. And I pulled up this tool just yesterday, and I was a little bit. because I've been looking at a return, finding a return home for two of us from Europe. And what I did was, like, I looked at, I looked at flight connections to see what are all the routes,

for example, that Iberia serves. And I see they have a number of flights from Madrid to the U.S. And some flights from Barcelona to the U.S. And then I was able to use this tool to pretty quickly see, you know, are there any, were there any flights available to book through Iberia on the dates we wanted? I did the same thing with Aer Lingus and a little bit less with British Airways because most of those flights are from, well, I think all of them that are across the Atlantic are from England where you have these huge departure taxes. But it was great to be able to see the availability really quickly. The downside is you do have to put in a specific start and endpoint. And so if you don't, you know, if there's a lot of routes you want to check,

it can take a while to keep changing them. I did find that I could simplify things a little bit by just changing the destination airport in the URL instead of having to sort of back up in the interface and change it there and keep going. So a little bit faster that way, but it's still, it's a bit of work. On the other hand, especially if you're flexible with dates, being able to see a whole month at a time this way is a huge, huge advantage. I think this helps to unlock a source of great award availability. I shouldn't say great, but a source of award availability that is kind of hidden. And, you know, I mentioned that the tools aren't very good at doing this.

And that makes, I think, this award availability more likely to be around than if the tools could surface this easily. And so it's definitely worth checking when you're trying to, especially when you're trying to cross the Atlantic. Yeah, I couldn't help but notice how similar this looks to a search tool that we covered a long time ago called Seat Spy. Yeah. So I was very curious as to how this came to be because it looks very, very similar. to their interface. I noticed that too. I was wondering if they bought that tech from them.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So useful and hopefully that works out well. And the nice thing here is that, of course, obvious.com is free. It's easy. Logging with one of your obvious accounts. And so, you know, it's a very simple option for searching.

But again, you can only find the availability there. You do have to still go to the airline site to book it. And also, I think at least when I looked, it doesn't show the award taxes on avios. That's right. It doesn't show that. It also doesn't cover all the Aviso's programs. It doesn't cover Finare. It doesn't cover Qatar. So it'll be good if they expand it to all of them. That'd be great. Right. Right. So keep in mind if you're not as familiar with the Avis programs, that surcharges on British Airways are going to be really high. And so, you know, if you see a great award price on British Airways, don't forget, it's going to cost you, you know,

$7, $900,000, $1,000, it depends on the situation, I guess. But a lot. potentially, whereas if you find availability on Liberia or Air Lingus, it's going to be far more reasonable and manageable in terms of the amount you're going to pay on top. And you're not going to know that by looking at obvious.com. You just know that by being familiar with the obvious programs. Okay, let's move on to personal points. So this is, again,

our section where we're going to talk about our personal stories, successes, failures, playing the game, things that come up. You know, every week, Greg and I are booking things or changing things or just stumbling on little things that we think, ah, that might be useful to somebody in the audience. So let's see what Greg has uncovered first. What came up for you this week? All right.

I've been booking some domestic Delta awards. And I've been finding that these flights are often available through Delta's partners at much better rates than Delta itself will charge with miles. And as a general thing, especially for short distance flight, Air France, KLM's Flying Blue Miles have the cheapest rate, and then Virgin Atlantic second. Because the Air France ones are not fully refundable if you have to cancel, you have to pay 70 euros to cancel and get your points back. I've been preferring to book with Virgin Atlantic miles. Virgin Atlantic has a undocumented feature where if you cancel an award that was booked with

a low number of taxes. So like, for example, the $5.60 that it costs to pay for a domestic award, then if you cancel, you just lose that $5.60. You don't lose the full whatever they normally charge for canceling an award. So to me, it's like Virgin is almost fully cancelable, whereas, you know, Air France KLM is not. So even though Virgin costs more in these cases, I've preferred to use my virgin points. I also happen to have a very large stash of virgin points.

Anyway, so a lot of background there. But then I ran into a very frustrating situation where I go through on my browser, on my Chrome browser on my desktop, go through the process of booking the award. I even like pick seats and everything and get to the last checkout screen and to pay for the thing. And the only option shown to me is to sign up for a new credit card. There's no option to use to use your existing credit card to pay. And this happened to me... That sounds very Turkish, very Turkish version here. That's true. It is very Turkish. This had happened to me a few weeks ago. And then, what I had done was switch to the Virgin app and through the app I was able to book it and pay for my

with my credit card this time I opened the Virgin app and it says there's a new Virgin app you have to download the new app so I download the new app and guess what the new app did exact same thing finally it occurred to me to just use a totally different browser so I used a different non-chrome browser, no cookies and anything, and it worked fine. So I don't know why. Other people have said on the Chrome browser, it's worked fine for them recently. So I don't know why for me, it probably has something to do with cookies that are stored in there. But anyway, I got through it. So what, you know, it's so annoying to have to take so long to just book a simple, what should be a simple domestic flight. Yeah, you know, it always seems to me to happen that way.

when like I'm just trying to quickly book it before I go do something else. I'm in a hurry and I'm like, I just want to get this booked and done. And then it turns into that. That's inevitably what happens. But that's interesting that just using a different browser work, that's a great tip. Using the app is a great tip too,

because sometimes we run into that kind of situation where the app works and the website doesn't, which is odd, but true. And I made the comment about Turkish. If you're not familiar, I suppose I should explain that the Turkish Airlines, their website is, infamous for sometimes going months or a year without a button to submit payment methods. So when you try to buy an award ticket. So that's why I said it's very Turkish of Virgin to take away the ability to pay for

the award that you want to book. Right, right. So one other thing about this, there was another SNFU in that same booking where, so what I've always done is after booking through Virgin, I've pulled up the like manage booking thing in my Delta in Delta and removed my Virgin number from the reservation and added my Delta number and that way I get all the elite benefits that I'm due as a Delta elite. This time, when I did that, I was able to pull up the booking and everything, but it gave an error every time I tried to remove the Virgin Atlantic number from the booking. So I had to, I went into

Virgin's website was able to change it there to my Delta number, but it didn't carry forward. I waited days to see if maybe it took a while. So ultimately I had to call Delta and they apparently fixed it, although I didn't get an instant upgrade to Comfort Plus, so I'm a little bit unsure about how good that is. They were able to move me up to comfort, but, you know, am I on the upgrade list for first class? I don't know. Not that it's a big deal for a really short flight, but it'd be nice to be. So the next time I booked a domestic flight the same way, instead of putting myself, when booking through Virgin's website, instead of putting myself as a passenger, I said, I'm not traveling.

And I put myself, you know, I put my name and my delta number in directly there, and that works fine. that's a great tip and a great way to get around that from time to time is a book for someone else who has the same name and birthday as you right it just has a delta number so yeah good tip there uh all right one from me so this one i don't know necessarily how useful it is i think it was a useful piece of knowledge as i know a lot of readers got into the cruise game with all the cruise matching and i know i was someone who didn't cruise at all before that and then started cruising some anyway still with the matches, but I've done a lot of them. And I know I've heard from some readers who've said, oh, you know, actually we like this. We booked another cruise, blah, blah, blah. So here's just a tip that maybe is well known in the cruise community, but I didn't know this would be the case.

So I was going to book a cabin for a family member for an upcoming cruise where my immediate family already had a cabin. I just needed to book another cabin for another family member, and I dragged my feet on that for a pit because there were plenty of available cabins or so I thought. And then I went to book it. And despite several different booking platforms all showing prices for some of the different cabins on the ship, I couldn't get a booking to go through. Every time I tried to book, I just got an error message.

Sometimes I didn't even get all the way to the payment page, depending on the platform I was using. And I was using everything, price line and AA vacations and JetBlue vacations and Costco and blah, blah, blah. Just try to get a cat because I needed this cabin. And so I was trying everything, and I just kept getting the error, kept getting the error. the JetBlue vacation site said to call to book, and I saw that somewhere else too that was like, oh, last few cabins called a book. But I didn't put any stock in that because I was trying to book cabins and it wasn't working. So I got a bunch of error messages. Eventually I gave up. I was like, okay, I'm going to have to come back to this later. Maybe there's just something weird going on with the computer system because it looked like a couple of cabins might be available. And then I got an email from JetBlue Vacation saying that they've been trying to call me. because the cabin that I tried to book was booked by somebody else. And so that cabin was no longer available, but that they had reached out to the cruise line, Norwegian in this case,

and could get me a guaranteed cabin. If you're not familiar with cruising, it guarantees when you book a room in a category, but you don't get assigned the cabin at the time of booking. They assign it later. So you might end up getting upgraded. It just depends on what ends up being available when the cruise goes out. So that was fine.

the guaranteed cabin. And I called and there were some back and forth over that. In fact, Norwegian had canceled it. And so JetBlue had to call Norwegian again after they had canceled it. But that JetBlue agent was able to call Norwegian again and get a cabin booked, even though it didn't show up as available or work anywhere else. Now, I can't imagine that the Jet Blue agent had some special superpower on that. And after I did that at some point, I said, you know what, you can save a lot more money by going through a cruise agent than by booking directly with the cruise line or booking the price you see on price line or whatever. So I knew that to be the case. I just didn't think it was going to be helpful here because I actually thought it might have been sold out and it does

appear to be sold out now. So anyway, moral of the story is if you're looking to book a cabin on a cruise and you're unable to book it online, it is worth calling when they say, oh, give us a call so we can help you out. Take them up on that because they might actually be able to help. I was surprised that they were and and relieved by the way because this is a cabin for my mother-in-law that I said I would take care of a long time ago and didn't drag my feet. And so I'm very relieved that I was able to get this worked out. But yeah, there's the tip there. Yeah, that's a good tip. All right. Now we're going to talk about skin and even airlines. So a last year, I think it was, or maybe two years ago. We did the Million Mile Madness Challenge.

where we Nick, Stephen and I, competed to see who could do the best job at earning a million miles from SAS, because SAS had that great promotion where if you fly 15 other partners within a fairly small amount of time, you'd get a million points. We all did earn the million points. And since then, my points have just sat there. And so, you You know, every now and then I look like, can I use them? Whatever. Finally, I was looking for flights to get to Europe with my wife. And it occurred to me to look for, you know, Skin and Air Airlines itself,

whether awards were available on SAS. and I was able to find Chicago to Copenhagen and onward to Berlin, where we're going, for 60,000 points each, which is a great price for business class, and it looks like that's on a nice jet, so it should be a very comfortable ride. So I'm excited about that flight. Anyway, things didn't go so smooth in the booking process, though. what happened was I I click through and got to the seat assignment page where it doesn't or it didn't tell me that it was going to charge me for the seats. It did list them as extras, but I picked seats thinking that they'd be included.

And it's still at the bottom of the screen, like where it showed the price. It just said something like 60,000 points plus extras plus and then it had the taxes and fees, which were around 60 bucks. Like it didn't show any price. So I figured it was included. And then I get to the last final checkout screen and it shows like it. They'd added like $200 something to the price just to pick seats. Like, all right, that's not good. I wonder what would happen if I add my Delta Sky Miles number to it.

So I back up. I change it to my sky miles number. Anyway, the long story short, it ended up by the time I got to the checkout screen again, like the second or third time, trying to get it to not have, not charged me for seats. It then like aired out and said, your seats are no longer available. And then I did an award search immediately afterwards. And sure enough, business class for the same route was now like over a million points. I thought, okay, maybe it takes half an hour to clear out of the buffer.

Like those seats are still in a cart somewhere in the computer's memory, right? So I come back an hour later. Nope, still not available. Okay. Forget it. I'm going to go out and see The Odyssey, which I did. Nice, nice. That wasn't because of this, but it was the order of things.

Very fitting. Very fitting, I'm sure. And it turns out the Odyssey is a long enough. movie for SAS to clear out its buffer because when I came back from the movie, I re-ran the search and was able to book it and just didn't pick seats and it's fine. Boom. Yeah. Wow.

That's, so there's a couple of interesting things there and a piece that reminds me is something I wanted to mention about my cruise, actually. But let's, uh, let's, let's break out a few pieces here. So first of all, I had the same experience as Greg when I booked with SaaS last year and that it looked like seat selection was free. It didn't say anything about a charge. And then, yeah, you get to the final page. And all of a sudden, in my case, it was even more because I had four or five or six or seven.

I can't remember how many people we had. I had a bunch of people flying. So, yeah, it was a lot. And that was a surprise. In my case, I was able to select for free 30 days in advance. Now, Greg's got Delta Elite status. So I'm sure that either you have or are intending to get your Delta status attached so that you'd be able to get free seat selection sooner than that. But that 30 day number, I had gotten from somewhere on flyer talk.

I don't remember exactly. where, but I had read it somewhere that 30 days in advance is when they become free. And that was the case for mine. So, um, so if you're booking SaaS, if you have SaaS miles or you're transferring from Roeve, it's worth being aware that seat selection is not free at booking. That's rare with business class awards. It's like these guys and I think British Airways maybe now charges, uh, for seat selection right at the beginning. There's a couple, but it's not. Yeah, I think there's a few, but yeah. Um, yeah. So my plan is to, uh, uh, call sass and see if you know hey will my delta sky and miles help with this my wife's on there as a

delta diamond already um but that didn't help automatically right so maybe someone has to pull a lever or maybe seat assignment isn't free for sky team elites i don't know um possible yeah but it's worth calling to find out and if not i'll try the 30 day trick and if not i mean i'll try the to check in as early as they allow check-in, and I'm sure we'll be fine because we tend to light, you know, it's the window seats that tend to get snagged first. We tend when we're traveling together, take the middle seats. Middle seats, so that we're together, you know, so that'll be fine. Yeah, yeah. Good point. Good point. The other thing that came to mind is you're talking about how the seats kind of came out of inventory because you was clicking around and selecting them and then going back.

and then eventually they just weren't there. And you sound like you were pretty confident that there was at least a good chance that they would come back whenever it kind of cleared its mind. Yeah, you have to go watch The Odyssey or a similarly long movie. Right, right, right. Well, and you know that, though, because we've all run into that before. Those of us who book a lot of awards where we've done that. We've messed up, kind of, and taken the seat out of inventory from ourselves

and had to go back and wait for that to happen. So I've had that happen before, too. and I meant to emphasize on the JetBlue thing again that as I mentioned but didn't emphasize properly, when I tried to book my cruise that I mentioned before, it erred out and said that Norwegian wasn't able to confirm the cruise any of the handful of times that I was able to get payment information in. And when I got the email from JetBlue Vacations later on, which was just one of many platforms that I had tried to book through, they had said that they would have to cancel and refund me if I didn't call them back. And I was like, cancel and refund me.

And then I pulled up the credit card, and sure enough, even though it had said that it didn't go through, they had charged me. And that's like a rookie mistake. I should have been checking every time after the errors to make sure I hadn't been charged. Right, right, right. Are you earning tiles for yourself with JetBlue for booking someone else? I don't know yet. That was why I used, I mean, okay, I tried to use JetBlue vacations in part because of the ability to earn tiles mostly because I was getting desperate and it wasn't working. anywhere else. And so, because Costco would have been a better deal. You get a Costco shop card. Going through a cruise

agent would have been even better, but I was kind of in a hurry to get this done and didn't have time to mess around. And especially once I tried to book it online and it didn't work, then I was like, oh, these cruise agents, I'm going to have to wait for somebody to get back to me. And like, I just need to try to get something to put a booking through. So I gave up on that idea. So I did in the JetBlue vacation's booking flow, I put in my true blue number and the email confirmation. Everything came to my email. But I don't know because she's the passenger on it. Do I still earn the tiles? Because I paid for it and attach my number. I'm not sure. We'll find out. So, yeah. And for those who don't know, uh, JetBlue tiles are basically loyalty points towards elite status with JetBlue. Yeah. And if I do earn them,

that'll get me really close to Mosaic too. So I'm, I'm hopeful. But I assume that they aren't awarded until after travel is complete. So I don't see anything yet. I've been checking just in case, but we'll see after that's done. A couple other quick hits I just wanted to add. I recently did the online passport renewal. Now, if you haven't renewed your passport in a while, which since you only have to do it once every 10 years, you might not even be aware that you can do it online now, or you may have been aware they did a pilot program, but now everybody can renew online. And so that's nice. I wanted to do that in part because I had read data points of it being really fast. A lot of people and Frequemiler Insiders that have reported on this over the last year have reported.

It took like a week from the date that they submitted their renewal until they received their passport. In my case, it was about, well, not even about it. It was two weeks to the day from the day that I submitted it. So much faster than the four to six weeks that they estimated, which was good because I needed it quick. But worth knowing that anybody can do it. And it's easier than I expected. and easier than doing it the old-fashioned way. And I say that because in the past,

I had to find a place where I can get a passport photo done, which for me is not as easy as it is for some people. But even if you live somewhere that's really well populated, still it's time and effort and maybe how to wait and everything else. And you don't have to do that anymore. You can just do it online. And I thought that would be hard, but there's actually just a tool in the renewal process.

So you do it from your phone as you're doing the renewal submitting. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. It's a much improved. process. So easy to snap from my phone. No need to mail in your old passport, which I know they always mail those back with the holes in them, but don't even have to worry about losing it if you're, you know, if you've got some visas in there or things that you know, yeah, well, even bigger. It means that so it used to be you had to wait till an opportunity where you weren't going to be

traveling internationally for like four weeks or more, you know, because you didn't want to mail in your old one because you're going to need it. Um, but now it sounds like, you can use it. No. No. No. No, I knew where you're going with that, but I figured I'll let you finish the thought. No, what it says is, and I didn't test this, but what it says is that as soon as you submit the renewal, they deactivate your old passport. So you can't travel with it is what it says. So I didn't test that out. But I did think that like, I don't know, I want my old passport because I've got a whole bunch of cool visas in there and things. Nowadays, you're not even going to get a stamp anymore pretty soon going in and out of a lot of places. it's all electronic. So, you know, I thought it was cool to not have to mail it in anyway. Not have to go to the pole. I didn't have to go anywhere. I was able to do this like in pajama pants and a shirt.

So that was, that was nice. So definitely I think that that's a good system. I did pay, by the way, for the overnight shipping back to me. So two weeks to the day, but I did pay the extra $25 or something for them to overnight it back. So it might have been a few more days if I hadn't done that. Yeah. Now, last time I got my passport, I paid for the bigger. booklet for more, so there's room for more visa stamps. But as you're pointing out, that's happening

less and less. So is it even worth doing that anymore? I don't know. That's a good question. You know, I didn't even think about it. I just paid for it because I'm in the habit of getting the bigger one. I'll probably do that anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. I don't know. Maybe that was a waste. But yeah, I probably still would just because we, you know, we travel a lot. So, yeah. So I haven't run out of one yet, but I've come pretty close. So. So we'll see. All right. That's that. So if you want to do an online renewal, there's my data point for you. And then the last thing I'll mention briefly is that I recently republished a post. I updated and republished a post about getting car rental elite status and using elite benefits and free days and that kind of thing. And part of what drove me to do that. No pun intended. See what I did there. It drove me to do that, the rental car post. Okay. All right. Enough dad joke there. So part of what drove me to do that was that I recently was renting from Avis and I was like, oh, you know, I can get preferred plus through my JetBlue account.

And then I didn't want to do that for one reason or another. And I said, oh, well, I've got a bunch of credit cards. Probably one of them offers preferred plus status. And so sure enough, I went through and a bunch of them did. But the upgrade with Avis is not instant. It takes some time. You have to actually email somebody if you want to upgrade with your card. actually pretty easy to do. And when you go on the website, if you find this, the link you click,

if you're on your phone, actually opens up your email software and pre-populates all the stuff you need. You just need to enter, like your zip code and your Avis number, but like it writes the email for you. So it's pretty easy to use. It took five days for me to get my Avis preferred plus upgrade. So if you do want to do this, plan in advance if you're looking to upgrade your status because I didn't plan in advance. I did this on the way to go pick up the car. And it took five days, which actually, this was like a seven day rental. So I thought, oh, maybe I'll still get extra bonus points on the rental or whatever because I'll have preferred plus status by the time I return it. But sadly, no, I did not get any additional points from my preferred plus status.

I think I probably would have needed to have it at the time of pickup. So, so there you go. All right, we'll be right back after this with our main event. And we're back with today's main event. And we're back with today's main event, U.S. Bank's mysterious transferable points. Okay, we're going to tell a story here, basically, about U.S. Bank's altitude reserve card. It came out years ago. It was initially intended for, like, U.S. banks, like, best customers, and so it was only available to certain people that already had a relationship with a bank, and then later became available to everybody. And it was a really cool card, except that it didn't have transferable points. Basically, we're going to talk about how cool it was back when, what happened to it in the meantime, and then what's happening now with it.

I think it's a pretty interesting story, and it's kind of a mystery where it's going from here out. but to back way up, altitude reserve card before December 15th, 2025. It was a $400 card, but it had $325 in credits for all travel and dining purchases. So it was effectively a $75 card, really, because it was so easy to get that $325 back. You didn't really have to think about it. Just use it for things you would be using it for anyway. It came with and still does come with eight priority passes each year, which can be used either for one person eight times or for four people, two times.

And it does include restaurants, so that's good. You were able to redeem points for $1.5 per point for travel, either through US Bank's travel portal or better, real-time reward. where you set up your account so that when you use your card for any kind of travel purchase, you would get a text saying, do you want to redeem points for this? And if you just replied redeem, it would take points out and pay you back at that value of 1.5 cents per point. And there were two very valuable 3x categories.

earnings categories for this card. One is all travel, and the other is mobile wallet. It means that you're using Samsung Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay. You're getting three points per dollar. And remember, we're redeeming them for one and a half cents each for any kind of travel. So basically this card was giving four and a half cents back towards travel for pretty much all spend. Certainly all spend I ever put on the card because I would only use it for when I'm tapping my phone or paying for travel.

Right, and it was really easy for me to add the card. I didn't even have to add my wife as an authorized user. It just added this to Google Pay on both of our phones. And so then anything we were paying for in person was tapping this card. And it was my general travel card also because, again, the four and a half back was pretty good. Now, I mean, I like transferable points. And the drawback of this was that for years and years. There was no way to transfer to anybody else.

So that was your best value was using them for travel. But it was nice to you book a Hyatt directly through Hyatt and earn your Hyatt elite credit and get your elite benefits and earn Hyatt points and still get one and a half cents per point out of your U.S. bank points. So yeah, I mean, it was, I'm going to say great. It was a great card for a long time that flew under the radar for the most part of me. We talked about it, but you didn't really hear much about this. I don't feel like in the blogosphere.

It didn't make that much of a splash or a mark across most blogs, I don't think. Yeah. Yeah. Then somewhere along the way, it became no longer available for new signups, right? November, November of 2024, they pulled it. So it's no longer available. Yeah. Yeah.

And so, you know, those of us that still had it were very happy with the card. And then what happened in December of last year? Yeah. So about a year ago in August of 2025, so the card had already been. unavailable for nine months or something at that point, almost 10 months, I think, at that point. They announced that as of December, they were making big changes.

So December 15th of 2025, they made the following changes. They capped the 3X mobile wallet to up to $5,000 in purchases per month. In other words, you could earn 3X when tapping with your phone and using mobile wallet payment, but only on up to $5,000 in purchases per month. Now, if that were it, then it would be a bummer for anybody who spends a lot, but probably reasonable still for a lot of people, I would think.

But that wasn't it. So the other changes were that $325 travel and dining credit changed to a $325 credit for travel booked through the U.S. Bank Travel Center. So no longer could you use it on any travel or a restaurant at all. You had to use it to book travel through U.S. Bank. And that's a bummer. It went from a no-brainer to a coupon that had to be used. used each each year. Right.

And then where you have to find a deal that's not, that's enough not bad that you're like, okay, I'll use it for this. Right, right. Because the U.S. Bank Travel Center isn't known for having the best prices and everything. But that wasn't the worst change, right? It wasn't.

And I'm going to come back to the U.S. Bank Travel Center in a second. But no, that wasn't the worst change. Probably the worst change for most people was the fact that the redemption value dropped from that one and a half cents per point that Greg was mentioning to just one cent per point, whether you used it for real-time mobile rewards or deposit to your checking account, best you were going to do is one cent per point. Yeah, yeah.

So now we're looking at, you know, this is just a cashback card basically, earning 3x in some limited categories, which is, you know, good, but there are other cards that are better where you can actually get them for free or cheaply without having to jump through hoops to use $325 of, you know, through the travel center. Yeah, you know, the Robin Hood gold card is a flat 3% back everywhere. There's not a $5,000 per month limit. It doesn't, I don't have to use my phone to pay for stuff if I want it. I don't have that card yet, by the way, to be clear.

But just as a comparison point, if 3% were enough to excite me, then I would use that card and be happy with that or obviously there are cards now that offer you know that built palladium you can be earning three transferable points per dollar if you're using the accelerators potentially so so this three x at one cent per point wasn't interesting but they had said again a year ago in august of 2025 they said as of december 15th they're going to add transferring points to to airline and hotel loyalty programs you'd be able to transfer your points to airline and hotel loyalty programs. And then I was like at that time, I was, okay, well, this is interesting. Built Palladium, built 2.0 wasn't out yet. So there was no easy way to earn three transferable points on

most purchases. And I thought, well, I mean, up to $5,000 a month and tap to pay here at 3X. I could then transfer to airline and hotel partners. You know, hold on. Maybe this is going to be good news. But then December 15th came and they tossed up a little message saying, coming soon, transfer points to airline and hotel loyalty programs. And that, that stuck on the site for weeks and months. And then eventually they scrubbed that too and they just stopped mentioning transferring points at all to airline and hotel partners.

So we just assumed that that wasn't going to happen. Yeah. I mean, in fact, in our predictions, didn't you predict that they weren't going to do that at all? Yeah, because I was pretty annoyed. They announced this officially in August of 2025, and it had already been leaked for, I don't know, a month or two before that. And so they announced it in August.

they gave themselves more than four months. It was four and a half months until December 15th. So you would think that by the time they announced it, they probably have the tech in place or they were close enough that four and a half months is enough time to finish that up and have it ready to launch. So when it didn't launch on December 15th and they didn't give a date in December 15th, they just said, coming sometime soon, guys. That to me seemed really suspect. I thought, well, they should have a target date in mind by now. If they weren't ready already, they should know when they're going to be ready by. So, yeah, I became really skeptical. This was going to happen. So when we did our 2026 predictions, I thought, you know, I think they must have abandoned the plan and they just didn't want to admit that. So that was my prediction. And then May came around.

And what was interesting in May is that my annual fee came due. And I was looking at that going, all right, the coming soon message had disappeared. Nick was right about that this isn't. happening. There's no way I'm paying, you know, $400 for the benefit, you know, for shaky amount of benefits. So I product change to the altitude connect, which is a fee-free card that has some good benefits to it. I don't know if it's possible to product change back if I want to, but it could be that I gave up a chance to have what might turn out to be a very interesting collectible card.

Yeah, and my annual fee didn't come due until July. And when that rolled around just a little more than a month ago, I very seriously considered doing the same thing as Greg and product changing to the Altitude Connect card for some of that card's benefits, got no annual fee, easy keeper. So I very seriously considered it. I ended up product changing my altitude go to an altitude. connect and keeping the altitude reserve sort of begrudgingly but you know we we thought what if this happens we want to be able to write about it if it actually does happen we want to know how it works and

be able to report on it and i thought you know i'll give them one more year you know i'm not going to i wasn't going to go more than that but i said i decided all right i'll go one more year i can probably use the three hundred and twenty five bucks so really this is a loss of 75 or 100 or whatever you want to call that. So, you know, not terrible. I'll hang on to it. And, and as, as fate would have it, coming soon turned out to mean eight months because earlier this week, they launched those transfer partners. So the altitude reserve today still has the $400 annual fee, still has the $325 credit for travel booked through the U.S. Bank Travel Center. I said I was going to mention that, and I just mentioned, they've re, they've overhauled that. It's new. It's different. It looks

exactly the same as cities and Wells Fargo's now. And Wells Fargo was just very proud of their launch of the new travel center recently. And so, uh, and it looks exactly the same as cities. And so does U.S. banks. I haven't checked to see if prices are the same or not. So I'm going to have to dig into that a little bit now. Because I don't know if they're just all run by the same back end. But, but if they are and if, you know, we mentioned earlier in this episode that city has had some good prices on car rentals lately, that that's why I'm curious. now about the US Bank Travel Center. Yeah, it could be.

Maybe you could get some good value to that $325 coupon. So that would be great. Maybe. Maybe, yes. So, all right, so $400 annual fee, $325 travel credit through U.S. Bank Travel Center, still got the eight priority pass lounge visits per year that can be used for restaurants. Still offers 3X on travel and 3X on mobile wallet on up to the $5,000 in purchases per month. If you book travel through the U.S. Bank Travel Center, 10x hotels and car rentals,

5X on flights. You can redeem points for one cent per point for a deposit to your checking account or with the real-time mobile rewards. And now you can transfer to partners. Now, who can you transfer to, Craig? Well, the answer depends on what time of day or what day and what time of day you asked that question. Because when we first were alerted to the fact that transfer partners had appeared, a reader, had written in saying the transfer rates are one to one to Air France, KLM, that's one, Quantus, Ethiopian, and Accor.

And so those four. Now, Accor, I wrote back to the guy saying, wow, that's great that these appeared, but basically that can't be right about one to one to a core. because a core points are worth two euro pennies, euro cents each. And so one to one would be like too valuable. Like you wouldn't see that. But he later sent a screenshot showing, in fact, he was able to transfer a thousand altitude reserve points

to a thousand a core points. And he really wished he had done more because when Nick logged into his account, things were a little different. Yeah. So when I logged into my account, not all that long after that reader had emailed. I found the partners that Greg mentioned,

Air France, Kalam, Flying Blue, Quantis, and Ethiopian all at one to one. And a core was at two to one. So half as good as it sounded, half as good as the deal that that one reader got. I have to say I'm a little happy that it worked out that way, because I would have been really unhappy

about the fact that I used most of my altitude reserve points if I missed out on one to one to a core. But yeah, that made more sense. It was a more sensible sort of a transfer ratio, the two to one, especially with this card earning three points per dollar on a lot of purchases. That's still a pretty good deal because one and a half a core points is pretty valuable. It's about three and a half cents almost US cents towards travel. So that's pretty good.

It's better than three percent back anyway on the card. So that's what they said initially. that's what was there when we wrote about it. But by late, sometime later that day, like late that night, early the next morning, whatever, they already removed two of the transfer partners. Air France, Kail, and Flying Blue and Qantas are both gone already. What's up with that? Yeah.

I mean, my assumption is that they ran into technical difficulties, that they weren't quite ready. Soon came too soon for them, even though it was eight months. from when they said soon. And it wasn't quite ready. So they took them off line temporarily. They added a quote saying, more partners are coming soon.

So I think that's their, you know, basically their placeholder saying we're working on this in a way. That's my best guess is what's happening. But we don't have any inside knowledge. So, you know, who knows what's going on? Are they working on, you know, adding others as well. Did they change their mind about the transfer ratios of those two?

You know, there's all kinds of possibilities. But at least as we're recording this, we've got the two. We've got Ethiopian Shiba rewards and a core at that two to one ratio, which with the current exchange rates, I think that's, that means exchanging each point for about 1.15, something like that. per point value towards a core stays somewhere in that range. So it's better than, so the core one, it's like, yeah, it's better, you know, it's better than cashing out for one cent each, if you're gonna stay at a core property anyway, but it's not terribly exciting.

Ethiopian is super interesting because I don't think there's any other program that transfers to Ethiopian, at least none that I can think of. And we looked into a bit what can be done with Ethiopian rewards. And, you know, first glance, looks like award prices are really high, but they are a Star Alliance partner. You can book Star Alliance awards through them. Some long-distance awards within a continent can be a good value because they seem to have fixed value awards.

And so you could book, you know, for example, United from Maine to Hawaii for the same price. Unfortunately, that same price isn't like a startlingly good price. You know, you would think it would be like that Turkish deal from way back, but it's not. And business costs would be a great deal for that, or maybe it would, but United never releases any business class to Ethiopian or to any partners as far as I know anymore. So that's of a limit. But there are some decent awards that we stumbled on, right? Yeah. So they have a lot of fifth freedom routes.

In fact, I think you'll have to fact check me on this out there. But I think they might have more fifth freedom routes than any other airline in the world. And a fifth freedom route, if you're not familiar, is connecting two countries that are not the home country of the airline. So for instance, they have a flight between Zurich and Milan, I think, if I'm, if I'm remembering correct, And so that flight, you can book that, just that lag, the Zurich Milan. And again, I'm pretty sure it's Zurich Milan on that. And the nice thing is that the pricing is reasonable. It's $10,000 in economy or $15,000 in business.

Now, within Europe, you normally wouldn't care about flying business necessarily because business on most European airlines is just a blocked middle seat. It's the same economy class seat. You just don't have anybody sitting in the middle seat. But because these would be long-haul aircraft, you'd have a live. flat seat for 15,000 points. So that's a good deal for what you're getting if you care about the extra space and reclining and being comfortable on the plane at 15K. I would probably pay that if I had to fly that route. They also have, I think, Oslo to Stockholm. So they've got some others like that

where that could be a good deal. And then they also have other interesting Fifth Freedom Roots that you just wouldn't probably otherwise have many options on, like they have routes between a couple of US cities and places in West Africa like Ivory Coast and Togo that, again, you're not generally going to get there nonstop from the U.S. with an award ticket. So this is pretty unique. Yeah. And the prices, whether it's the Fifth Freedom or the regular ones to Otis business class from U.S. to Africa, around 80,000 point, you know, range, which is not the best you'll find anywhere, but it's, but it's competitive with, with other programs. So, so that's pretty good. Assuming Air France, K-LM Flying Blue comes back, that's, you know, probably the best all-around

Sky Team program that you could transfer points to and every transferable points program includes them. So it would be kind of surprising if they don't bring that back. But that's a, very solid choice. Quantus is a one-world program with distance-based awards and specific award charts for different. They have other partners that are not one-world. And there are certain situations where they can offer good value, but it's not, it's definitely not across the board. Like if I was looking for a single one-world partner to add, it wouldn't be that one. Right. Well, it's interesting, though, because obviously they were intentional about this, right? They launched one Sky Team, one, one World,

and one Star Alliance partner at launch, which coincidentally is exactly what Wells Fargo did when they first launched their transfer partner program. They did one of each of the major alliances, which at least tells me that somebody at U.S. Bank knows what's up. Now, I don't know how much they know, because like you said, they didn't have a particularly useful one world partner,

and they took a Star Alliance partner that none of us are familiar with, at this point, right, basically, you know? So, and I say none of us. I mean, like, the vast majority of people interested in points of miles aren't going to be familiar with Ethiopian because nobody else transfers to them. So they were odd picks, but obviously very intentional. They do that they, it has to be intentional that they picked one from each of the major alliances.

So that gives me some hope, I think, that they'll continue to expand, that at least they recognize that there's value in having a variety of partners. and not only going after the, you know, the Air France and Virgin that partner with just about everybody, you know, and it's good to have those, but also good to have some out of left field. So, so I'm glad that they are looking in left field. I just hope that they find something in center field too. Right. So now, assuming that those two programs come back and let's actually assume that they don't expand their transfer world points partners much. much anytime soon. Do you think with the current crop, if they come back to those four, does this make the altitude reserve a keeper

for those who already have it? No. I mean, flat out no. And the easy answer as to why is because you could just get a built palladium card for the same cost and have and earn potentially 3X on a lot.

lot of your purchases anyway with the accelerators and transfer to Air France KLM if you want. And I mean, you're going to lose out on transfers to Ethiopian, I guess. But, you know, that's of such, like, potentially limited use that I don't know that that's going to be, you know, the draw to keep the altitude reserve card and a core you can transfer to from built. I think Qantas is a built partner, though I'm not positive. And I'm using built as a comparative product here, because because it is sort of easy to earn 3X on a lot of purchases with built in it. I feel like I got to qualify that when I say it because you have to enable the accelerators with build cash. You can only do it up to five times per year on the primary card, but then you can do it five times per year on the authorized user.

Blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of qualification there. But overall, if I were looking to pay $400 for a credit card, I'd probably be looking to pay the $4.95 for the build palladium overkeeping the altitude reserve if this is all that the altitude. reserve cats. Right. Now, of course, we don't know. So maybe it's worth keeping if you suspect or are hoping that they're going to add more partners. I think if this had happened before I had canceled, I would have kept it for another year. I'm intrigued by the fact that they added Ethiopian, even though it's not like a program that I would, you know, ask for. More and more airline programs are keeping the best award availability for their own members.

And I don't know if Ethiopian is doing that already, but they probably will at some point. So if you want to fly Ethiopian, having the option to transfer to them is really nice. And it would give you the ability to unlock something that you can't get from any other transferable points program. Imagine if they did that with some more programs that aren't available elsewhere.

That would be really interesting. So I like that at the same time. I think you're right. As far as like, let's say they reopen the altitude reserve for applications to others, would I recommend people, you know, go out and get this card based on what it has now. I don't think so. Yeah, you know, so that brings up a few interesting things. First of all, it's hard to imagine that they launched a transfer partner program only for a card that's no longer available and that they don't intend to. bring back, right? So the eight of us that still have an altitude reserve card or however many card holders out there still have an altitude reserve card, I can't imagine that they're developing a transfer partner program just for us. I say just for us. And actually a few people commented, I think old flex perks cards, the old flex perks travel rewards card also has the ability to transfer

to partners. But nonetheless, it's only defunct cards right now that can transfer to partners. And it doesn't seem worth the hassle for them and the cost. for them to create a program for defunct cards. So one has to think something's going to change. It does seem like either they're going to make the altitude reserve available again or that they're planning to add transferable points as a feature of other cards and they're just starting with this one almost as a test because they have limited footprint. It would be a good way to test it out.

another you know it an intriguing possibility would be if they they have several cards that are called altitude cards in some way there's altitude connect altitude go business altitude power and then this altitude reserve that we've been talking about the altitude connect and go in particular they they have no annual fee and would be interesting if they ever made it possible to move your altitude go or connect points to your altitude reserve to transfer them or if they just made them directly transferable because the altitude connect gives you 4x for travel and gas and evie charging and altitude go gives you 4x for dining so you would get some really good 4x categories to tag on on top of the 3x that the altitude reserve offers that would all then be transferable

points and that's that's a pretty good combination yeah i think the altitude go the four x on dining and everything is limited to two thousand dollars a quarter so for you know big eaters that might not do it but uh but it'll be nice for people who are willing to to take advantage and rotate cards out and whatnot yeah i mean it'd be great if you can transfer those right now there's not a way to move those to the altitude reserve there never was i mean people always would have been interested in that if that was possible back when the Altosurer offered the one and a half cents per point via real-time mobile rewards. People wanted the ability to transfer, but that's not something the U.S. Bank ever gave us. So I'm not hugely optimistic about that happening.

At the same time, though, like I said, I can't imagine that they put the time and money and investment and continue to work on this for a year plus already, I'm sure, just to add it to a card they're not going to try to sell anymore. So I imagine that they are going to try to either relaunch the Alchue Reserve or make something else transferable. And I imagine they probably will expand the transfer partners. And if they get, like Greg said, you know, Ethiopian was really interesting because it's something nobody expected. If they get some other things, I mean, they issue the Korean Airlines cards. So if they get Korean as a partner, that would be great.

That would be amazing. You know, we can all hope on other things like that or, you know, they're maybe positioned to get some of those or have some of those relationships to transfer programs that we just don't often think about because others don't transfer to them. So I'm rooting for Amtrak personally, but I know that that's probably not going to happen. Fingers crossed. Well, Amtrak, what if Amtrak came at, if they came out, it would probably be two to one. And then it's still interesting. But. Oh, yeah. It's pretty good then, right? Two to one. because so one point fourish cents or one point four five cents value per point something like that

something like that that's not bad that's not bad i would i would probably take that anyway i'd probably use the card at three points per dollar or some at least so i'd add it back in but right now it's not even my tap to pay card because this isn't enough to move that needle yet we'll see so is it possible to product change to the altitude reserve you said you haven't tried yet right to see you could transfer back. Yeah. No, you know, there's not enough there yet for me to be ready to do that. But, you know, if they, if they shore up the transfer partners and don't make the

altitude reserve generally available again, then it's definitely worth calling to see, hey, any chance I can get my altitude reserve back? Because it's, it's now at the point, you know, with transfer partners where, like, I hated to give up a collectible card, one that is available to keep, but is no longer available new in any way, which is the situation it's in. But it was just such a dog without transferable points. But now it's like, oh, man, maybe I should have kept it. It's a cute dog now. There you go. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm glad I kept it, but not glad enough to recommend keeping it necessarily. Though the point here is, I don't think you can product change to the altitude reserve card.

It wasn't possible in the past, to my knowledge. So I don't think you can product change to it from anything. If you do product change to it, let us know, because that would certainly be a piece of news that people would be interested in hearing. But I don't think you can right now. So if you don't have it, then this isn't yet relevant to you. But hopefully they will expand this to other cards. And then it will hopefully become more relevant and make US Bank a player.

I mean, I'd be happy to see some additional competition. this space. I had definitely thought that U.S. Bank had given up on this, but I'm glad to see that they're deciding they want to be in this fight. Someone's in there doing something. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Annie Yoder. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group. And we're you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this or give it a thumbs up.

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