Frequent Miler on the Air - When points wag the dog | Coffee Break Ep11 | 5-21-24

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Sometimes points and miles wag the points-collector dog... which is to say, sometimes the hobby changes your travel behavior. In episode 11 of Coffee Break, we'll talk about how. (01:40) - Rent day date nights (Greg) (03:32) - Going to baseball games / event tickets (Nick) (06:54) - Helicopter into NY (Greg) (09:15) - Vacationing where the award space is (Nick) (13:37) - "Forced" to travel due to expiring free nights (Greg) Read about the Kimpton Seafire here: https://frequentmiler.com/kimpton-seafire-grand-cayman-bottom-line-review/ Read about the Ritz Carlton Dove Mountain Tucson here: https://frequentmiler.com/ritz-carlton-dove-mountain-tucson-bottom-line-review/ Visit here to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media. You’ll find all other Frequent Miler on the Air episodes here. Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads

Here we go. This is not your typical Frequent Miler on the Air episode. This is a standalone segment we're calling Coffee Break. Each Coffee Break segment will cover a single topic related to miles and points. And each Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or your money back. Enjoy. Today's Coffee Break, when points wag the dog. We're going to talk today about how we often change our behavior because of the points and miles hobby. And I think it often leads to good results. So we've got some examples to talk about where, because we have points and miles and other stuff related to that,

we actually like do things very different than we would normally do. And I'm not just talking about how we collect points. This is about how we use them more. Yeah. And not only different than how we would normally do, but different than I think the average person, or at least the average person who's not collecting any miles and points, right? I mean, if you know people that aren't into this hobby, they, I would almost guarantee don't look at things quite the same way, or we do things

differently than they do for better or worse. But we'll talk about the ways that the hobby kind of forces us into behaving differently. But before we do, don't forget, you can always find information in the show notes if you're looking for more information about what we're talking about. And you can subscribe to our email list at frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Don't forget to like this video or podcast wherever you're listening. We appreciate that. But all right, let's talk about some of these things, Greg, that the way that the hobby wags you. Yeah. So the most recent thing for me is I put on my calendar with my wife date night on the first of every month where we're going out to a nice restaurant first of every month. Now, we go out to nice restaurants quite a bit, but I figured there's no reason why we can't do it on the first of the month.

And the reason for the first of the month is because that is rent day with the built credit card where they offer double points. And since that card offers three X for dining, normally you get six X on the first of the month. So might as well go out and earn those double points. Why not? That's the day to go out. Now, keep in mind, you have to have a minimum of five transactions a month in order to earn any points at all. So don't just go out for date night on the first of the month. You got to remember to use the card a couple other times, which probably you'd use it on the first of the month a couple other times, right? I do. And I also like, you know, just during the month when there's some small transaction,

you know, on my Apple Pay, select the build card as the option, because why not get those five in that way? It's pretty easy. It is. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. You're checking out the gas station for something small or whatever, things like that. Yep. Yeah. Smart. Good thinking. All right. Well, that's when I haven't adopted yet. It's, it's been kind of on the docket to do, but I haven't done it because of the Amex plus 10 referral thing. So that's only going for actually when by the time this publishes like another hot minute here, but but if you refer somebody from one of your Amex cards before May 22, maybe through May 22, you can get an extra 10 points per dollar on dining. So I've been using a business gold card because that earns 4x on dining to begin with one on your two, two

categories in which you spend the most each month. And so I've been using one exclusively for dining. So I get 14 X. So I'll start with the rent day date nights sometime in the future. There are other things that I do like going to baseball games. So I liked baseball when I was a little kid and then I didn't really watch baseball at all for years. I still don't watch baseball, but I've gone to a couple of major league games the last couple of years.

I bought tickets to a couple of games this year. I still don't know whether I'm going to be able to make it to, but why am I doing all of that? Because of course, Capital One has had some incredible deals for major league baseball. They have some sort of sponsoring partnership with major league baseball. And as a result, they have four cardholder exclusive seats

to every single game. And when they put those on sale, which you really have to be quick when they first release the seats, we always post as soon as somebody lets me know if they saw them or I found them available again, we post and then usually the best games are gone within hours. Certainly by the next day, the best games are gone, although we had people continue to report success for a while. So I'm talking about this because those good cardholder exclusive seats are 5000 miles each or $40 in cash back. If you have a consumer cash back card, you can use $40 worth of your cash back to buy the tickets. And they're special because these are usually in most of the park seats that are very close to the field or near home plate close to the field. They're near home plate, close to the field. In fact,

for instance, in Philadelphia, I know there are five rows behind the visitors dugout. So if Phillies are playing a team you like and you want to be able to see your players up close and personal, it's a great park to go to for that. I have gone to Citi Field and Yankee Stadium in New York for games. And it's just very cool because, again, you're in seats that you normally wouldn't pay for. Now, I should caution that Capital One does have lots of seats that aren't any good for sale through their partnership with Vivid Seats. So you have to kind of look at the post and read about how to find the cardholder exclusive seats because those are the only ones worth considering buying through Capital One. And it's only four seats for every game that are those cardholder

exclusives. But it's been a lot of fun. I mean, going to a live game, it's been a blast. I've been able to really enjoy that. And I've used also rewards from Capital One Shopping, which has nothing to do with Capital One except the name. Capital One Shopping is a shopping portal where you can earn rewards that you can only redeem for gift cards. And it confuses people all the time because just last week, I think I got an email from somebody who was like, oh, yeah, I can't do Capital One shopping. I have no Capital One cards. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's nothing to do with Capital One except for the name.

What a poor marketing job on that. Anyway, so that's also sent me to some different events and things because I have redeemed Capital One shopping cash back for StubHub gift cards because a lot of times that has felt kind of like gravy cash back. I'm not usually including that in the cost of something. So it's kind of like a bonus extra. And so one of the ways I'm using those bonus extras has been buying event tickets through StubHub. So we went and saw something I can't even remember what not that long ago that we bought through StubHub. And I've got Taylor Swift tickets that I bought my wife that we're going to go. She's going to go see her in Europe this summer. And I bought tickets to see a WNBA game to watch Caitlin Clark play. So those are all kinds of things that I wouldn't have done. I definitely wouldn't have considered, but I got all this cash back that I was able to get in large part with Capital One Shopping

because they ran that incredible referral promotion last year. It was super easy to rack up some money just referring family and friends. So yeah, those are some things that I've been pushed into doing. That's really cool. And that's a fun way to use those Capital One shopping rewards too. I really like that idea. So another thing that's changed about my life in a pretty big way is now I like to take a helicopter when I land at an airport and want to get into the city. My wife and I did this blade helicopter rides from JFK airport to Manhattan, thanks to a JetBlue promotion that matched her from her Delta Diamond to JetBlue Mosaic 4 and top tier mosaic status with JetBlue

gets these four blade helicopter certificates. So we have some more of those to use this year. So we are going to, you know, we're planning to do, plan a trip around these certificates because it was so much fun to do that the one time we did it last year. But now even more, built also now, if you have built platinum status, which you can get by just spending a lot on your built card, then you get, you get what one, I think helicopter ride per year with, with a blade. And so, wow. I mean, that, that's kind of a, you know, really unexpected type of thing that, that I've been doing. If you would ask me a year and a half ago, you know, I would have been like, no, that is not even remotely on my radar. But there you go.

There you go. You're helicoptering into Manhattan and back out. That's pretty cool. That's got to be a fun way to arrive, you know. And when we talked about that, I realized that they also have the helicopters between Nice and Monaco or Nice and Monaco. So if you've got the built status and you got it from that, if you have it from JetBlue, I don't think you can use that abroad. But if you have that free ride from Built Platinum, you could use that in France also. So that'd be totally talking about doing that. Absolutely.

Nice. I love it. I love it. By the way, something I should have mentioned on the baseball tickets that I haven't mentioned in any of the posts. But if you if you get interested in the baseball tickets, look up the promo calendar for your team. So you just Google, you know, New York Yankees promo calendar or whatever, because there are giveaways at lots of games like the Hawaiian shirts and hoodies and hats and scarves, the Harry Potter themed things. And some of the jerseys are like crossover with other sports teams in the same city. Like there's a New York Mets game. That's a basketball jersey. It looks like a New York Knicks jersey, but it's got the Mets logo on it. So there's some fun things like that. So that's what I've started doing when I look for games now. I'm looking for, well,

what are the cool giveaways? There must be something neat I can get. Parlay this into something cool. So anyway, that was the tip I meant to mention. All right, let's talk about being forced to travel or vacationing rather where the award space is. So I often pick where we're going to go based on where I can find award space because I need four seats nowadays. So I'd like to fly comfortably if I'm going to fly a long distance and I usually want to fly in a flatbed seat. It's much more comfortable for the family. So my choices as to where we're going to go are often influenced by, well, where can

I find award space to? And that's a lot different than what most people plan. Most people say, hey, I want to go here this summer. I want to go there next winter or whatever it may be. And I don't do that. I usually just say, OK, well, oh, wow, look, there's a ton of availability here. Let's find what's interesting here. And that's been a lot of fun. We've discovered a lot of places that we never would have seen otherwise. It just wouldn't have made it to the bucket list. We wouldn't have known they existed if not for the fact that we discovered a ward space or a cool hotel. And I said, oh, man, that looks like it'd be a fun place to stay for a few days. And

then we found lots of other things we liked. And I think it's easy to look at that as backwards, saying, you know, oh, choosing where to go based on the flights or the hotels, like, you know, poo poo on that is that you should be traveling to the places you really are passionate about going and seeing. And hey, that's awesome, too. I did a lot of that early on before we discovered miles and points. And I love that outlook also, but this has been fun because we've, again, we've ended up in places we probably never would have thought because we didn't realize they existed or didn't realize there was something interesting, but when there's four seats available, I say, Hey, well, let's look and see what's there. And we've ended up in some cool spots for that reason. Yeah. Yeah. What's like the coolest spot that you've found because of that? Or, you know,

your most fun trip that, you know, it's tough because there's been quite a few, but I think the most interesting for me was Saipan because that was a place that I like, I guess I should have known from World War II history, but I guess we just didn't study that part of it when I was a kid. And so I didn't even know Saipan existed, no less that it's a US territory out in the Pacific Ocean, about 100 miles from Guam, 120 miles from Guam. And again, I had no idea what it was. I was looking at an award chart for places within a specific region to piece together an award that would price well. And I saw Saipan and I was like, what's that? And so I Googled it and I said, oh, this kind of looks interesting. Oh, look, there's a Hyatt Regency there. Let's give this a shot. And it was fascinating. It's a really interesting place.

I learned a lot about the history of it and both good and bad. There's a lot of fascinating history there to check out. So that was, I think, the place that I'm happiest I found because I just don't know if I even would have seen it on a map. It's so small. I never would have thought to go there. And in the end, we were really amazed and impressed and I think enlightened a bit as to some of the history in the Pacific region that we just didn't know about. Yeah, yeah. It reminds me a lot of, you know, my wife and I recently went to Taiwan primarily because the Starlux flights were suddenly available wide open business class for a while. And, you know, now that's one that we had talked about going to, but it probably wouldn't have been something we would have actually done. Because, you know, it was something we were sort of idly talking about.

But as far as like going there and discovering how interesting it is and everything, what an amazing history and ongoing history. Yeah, right, right. Well, I think that's the thing. The Saipan thing was actually travel is free had written years ago about a way to kind of maximize the United most powerful region thing. And so it's gone way back a bit. But that's how I found Saipan was really through Drew's post, because he had posted about how there was a sweet spot you kind of put together between Japan and the South Pacific. And so that's what I had done. But that is long ago gone. Right. And probably a lot of our listeners don't realize that travel is free. The author of that, Drew, is the husband of Kerry, who is our creative director. And you all know Kerry,

I think, if you're regular listeners or readers of our blog. So that's the connection there. One thing I should mention about finding award space to anywhere, a lot of tools now offer that capability. One of my favorites that does that, I think, I'm not going to say the best, but does it really well is Pointia. They have a thing called Daydream Explorer, and it just seems to do a really good job of saying, I want to go from United States to anywhere for people, business class, and find what's available for me. So I'd recommend checking that out if you haven't already. All right.

So finally, another thing where the points wag the point collector is when you've got expiring stuff. And this usually happens to me with expiring free night certificates. You know, you have these certificates that are about to expire and you realize you haven't used them yet. And it's forced me to go on some adventures, you know, to various places that I probably wouldn't have gone to otherwise. And I really enjoyed that. I've actually, you know, even though it's kind of a burden where you're like, oh, no, this thing's expiring. It's great when it forces you sort of out of your comfort zone to somewhere that you wouldn't have thought to go to. And it turns out good. So just some examples in the past, I had expiring

uncapped IHG free night certificates. So we went to the Kimpton Seafire in Grand Cayman and loved that stay. I had an expiring seven night certificate with Marriott and we stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Tucson. And that place was fantastic. That looked amazing. The roadrunners too. My kids loved the roadrunners. All kinds of animals were running by us all the time. It was really, really cool. And really recently, I had, at the end of the year, canceled a Marriott night that I had booked just in case we were going to go out to the Rose Bowl. And we ended up not. And then I realized, oh no, I had a free night attached to that reservation. So it came back to my account, but was like expiring like days later. So we did a sort of

staycation in Detroit at the Element Hotel, which is really nice. And ate at this fantastic restaurant, which unfortunately doesn't exist anymore. But fortunately for me, the chef is now chefing in Ann Arbor. So it's more convenient for me. But we learned about him because of that, thanks to that expiring free night certificate. So that worked out really well. I also have some miles relating things that are likely to wag me soon. So for example, I have, thanks to expiring A&A miles, I booked a trip where I've flown half of it, but the other half is a business class flight from Dublin to Detroit. And so in order to actually get any value from that ticket, I need to plan a trip to Dublin. And I'm looking forward to that.

I haven't actually spent any time in Ireland at all, except in the airports. So that'd be great. And another one, I have a whole bunch of expiring Singapore miles that expire in like six months. So that gives me about an hour, a year and a half approximately for a trip because you can book not quite a year in advance. So I could wait until it's about to expire to book something far in advance. But if I want, I'd hate to wait that long to do it, but I'm kind of hoping that our, our last minute travel challenge flying by the seat of our points, I'll have a chance to use the 24 miles there, but I don't know if I will. So, yeah. Yeah. So, so that's some exciting stuff coming up for me where I've

got to. Yeah, those points wag me. Yeah, you know, I have a couple of points balances like that. Also with a clock on them. I've got some Emirates miles because the transfer didn't go through in time for the trip. And those only again, they have a three year clock just like Singapore miles, I think. And and I also have flying blue miles that are not under the clock because I've transferred more miles in, but it's a sizable enough balance that I'm getting nervous. I don't want a chance that it expires. So I've got a couple of those too that will probably wag us at some point. And hey, that's okay. Again, I find this stuff kind of fun because we end up finding places that we wouldn't have gone otherwise and taking trips. And that's, I don't know, that's kind of

neat. It gives you an opportunity, I think. Yeah. It's fun to hearing my wife sometimes telling her friends that she'll come downstairs where I'm working and I'll say to her something like, we need to go to New Zealand. She'll be like, really? And so in this case, I might be saying, hey, we need to get to Singapore so we could fly Singapore suites, you know, and she'll be pretty excited about that. Right, right, right. Not too shabby there. Well, you need to get to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe if you want to get on our

email list so you can read all about it when Greg redeems those miles. And don't forget to like this. Give us a thumbs up. Leave us some feedback wherever you're watching or listening and check out our full-length frequent miler on the air podcast episodes dropping every friday bye everybody you