Frequent Miler on the Air - Where to park your transferable points | Ep156 | 6-25-22

Episode Date: June 25, 2022

Got to cancel your card but don't know what to do with your points? Here are your best options. 00:58 3 Cards, 3 Continents, 3 updates 17:31 Giant Mailbag: Comments from live stream draft audience https://frequentmiler.com/drafting-the-dream-results-who-got-which-cards/ 21:32 What crazy thing . . . did the Curve credit card do this week? 26:05 Main Event: Where to park your transferable points https://frequentmiler.com/brex-it-what-to-do-with-100k-brex-points/ 28:37 Air France / KLM Flying Blue 33:16 Emirates? No. 33:50 Cathay Pacific Asia Miles 37:26 Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer? No, 37:50 Virgin Atlantic 40:07 Avios (British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Qatar) 43:05 Air Canada Aeroplan 48:03 Avianca LifeMiles 54:12 Qantas? (nope) 54:26 Our favorites 58:22 Question of the Week: What's your favorite brand of luggage? How about your favorite piece of travel-related gear? Join our email list: https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ Music credit: Annie Yoder

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, where to park your transferable points. You know, Nick, we love our transferable points,

but sometimes we've got to get rid of them every now and then even though we don't want to but sometimes you have to sometimes you have to like whether you're closing a card that's the only way to keep them alive or someone else closes your card for you there's various reasons why you might have to get rid of your transferable points and then so you want to transfer them somewhere we're going to talk about where are good places to transfer them to. If you've got to park them somewhere, where should you park them? So it's important to pick the right spot, right? You got to pick the right spot.

Okay. Well, we'll get back to that. Okay. But first, go ahead. First, we're going to introduce a new temporary segment called three cards, three continents, three updates. So, you know, we announced that we're doing this big three card, three continent challenge starting in September is when we're going to actually travel. But last night, as compared to when we're recording this,

we did the big draft where we each picked three cards each. And those bonuses that go along with those cards are going to be our budgets for traveling, making the most amazing trips we can with those three cards to at least three continents, maybe more, we will see. So what we're going to do between now and the contest is if the main event of our show is not about the contest itself, we'll have a little update saying, you know, what's going on with three cards, three continents. Today's update, we're going to talk about which cards did we each pick for our budget. So let's get into that now. Yeah. So should we talk about Steven since he's not here?

Yeah. Let's always talk about Steven when he's not here. Let's do it. So Steven got the second pick in each round of the draft. So one would think because he didn't get to pick first in any of the rounds that he would get stuck with the suboptimal set of cards, right? You might think that. yeah. You might think that. You'd be wrong, but you might have thought that. You'd be wrong. You'd be wrong. Steven ended up with a pretty darn good selection of cards.

Maybe we should have done Steven last because he did so well. But yeah, so Steven in the first round was able to scoop up the Amex Platinum 150,000 point offer. That's on the personal Platinum cardinum card only requires $6,000 spend for a huge welcome bonus. He was able to pick that up because I let it slip through my hands in the first round. So he grabbed that one in the second round. He added on much, much to my dismay, the American Airlines Advantage Aviator card, the Aviator Red that awards 60,000 miles after first purchase. So no spending requirement on that except for, you know, a pack of gum or, you know,

dollar gift card or something. So that's a great deal. And then in the third round, he took the Inc. Business Unlimited for its 75,000 ultimate rewards points, which is worth $750 for the purposes of the competition because he doesn't have a card to transfer to partners. But still, that's a great cash back haul, plus all of the points he earns on the minimum spending requirement on that card. So overall, Stephen's looking pretty good. He's got like $800 and change in cash back. He's got 156,000 total membership rewards points and 60,000 American Airlines miles. You can probably put together a decent little trip with that. He certainly can. He could put he could put together a fantastic trip of flights. One place where I think he's weak is with hotels. I think he feels pretty confident or he asserts he's pretty confident. But, you know, really the main budget he has for hotels is $200 credit from the platinum card for fine hotels and resorts.

And then he could, you know, do some other things he talked about last night that he might actually use some cash to buy Hyatt points to book cheap Hyatt. So that'll be interesting to see what he does there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I look forward to it because, I mean, there's a lot of ways to slice and dice. points to book um cheap hyatt so that'll be interesting to see what he does there yeah yeah absolutely i look forward to it because i mean there's a lot of ways to slice and dice and you know the thing about steven pepper is that he lives full-time in hotels so when it comes to slicing and dicing the price of a hotel he knows what he's doing so that's a good point whereas you and i would look to book an award first he will look to best rate guarantee and stack it with a third night free promotion and, you know,

find a way to buy a gift card on sale and earn some miles through a card linked offer and blah, blah, blah. Cause that's what he has to do for lodging day in and day out. So I think that we might learn a little something from Steven Pepper about how to get a nice hotel for a very nice price. That's good. That's something to look forward to. All right. So let me now describe Nick's picks. And then Nick will do mine, obviously. So Nick started off with the Venture Card. And the Venture Card had a 75,000 point signup offer, $4,000 minimum spend required, and it has the $95 annual fee. And the reason he picked that over the, why we all had that on our radar, as opposed to the VentureX, is VentureX has that $400 annual fee. And with the rules of the draft, that would have been hard to fit that in along with the other things we needed. So I think that was on everybody's list as like an early pick. Nick got to scoop that up first. That gives him, you know, well over $750 of travel spend, even if he doesn't never, you know, he could also transfer it to partners and use it for miles to book flights. Some hotels, not as good there. His next pick was the Schwab platinum card. So that same annual fee, same minimum spend as Stephen's platinum card, but with, uh,

50,000 fewer bonus points. So Nick gets a hundred thousand bonus points instead of 150,000 that Stephen got. So on the surface, it doesn't look as competitive, but the Schwab Platinum does have a killer feature, which is the ability to cash out points at 1.1 cent each. So if Nick gets stuck needing hotels or whatever, he could always cash out and use that as cash back. So that's, uh, that's definitely why that card was also on my radar. And you ended up with the American

airlines business card. Do you want to talk about that pick? Yeah, I picked the aviator business card because, and it was the aviator business, not the city business for a couple of reasons. Number one, uh, it comes with a good bonus, 80,000 miles after 2000 spend. So it doesn't require very much spend, but it yields a nice number of American Airlines miles. It'll get you basically just about anywhere in the world in business class one way, maybe not quite anywhere, but certainly if you're able to piece together some of American sweet spots in different parts of the world, then it could get you quite a bit of flying actually. So that was a big piece of the reason to take that card. But then also, that card not only comes with the 80,000 point signup bonus, but I noticed that it also is now

coming with a $95 statement credit after you meet the minimum spend, which is great because that offsets the $95 annual fee on the card. So it wasn't going to cost me anything against the budget. So very similar to Steven's bonus after first purchase, I ended up with a bonus that again, doesn't, it requires just a little bit of spend, but it doesn't count against my annual fee budget at all. Whereas Steven's aviator card does because he has to pay the $99 annual fee. Right. So one interesting thing,

it was a surprise to everyone that two people took Aviator cards or Advantage cards. American Airlines definitely has some great sweet spots on international partner awards. Like we've talked many times about the Cutter Q Suites, which is a great, great option to use your points for. One thing it doesn't have, unless I'm mistaken is ability to add in stopovers.

Right. So was that a consideration for you? Cause you know, actually doing things in three continents is not necessarily easy when you can't bake in a stopover. No, you're absolutely right. And it's, uh, there's, there there's there's some strategy going on in this game. But no, they so obviously that is a limitation of American Airlines, the inability to figure in a stopover. However, I'll I'll toss this out there as I'm not going to say a hint,

but as an idea anyway, that there are some regions where if you were to go between region A and region B via third region C, it doesn't cost much more if you book those as two separate itineraries. And so there are lots of cases where it wouldn't, but there are some where it wouldn't. So there are possibilities anyway to create your own stopover sort of for essentially just a small pittance of points. That's not necessarily what I'm doing. I'm looking forward to that post. I'm looking forward to you posting about that. That'll be interesting.

But that's not necessarily what you're doing. I will. Yeah, I will exceed the three continents. No fear there, Greg. I was worried for you. No, don't be scared. It's whether or not I make it home. One other thing to bring up about your picks is similar to Steven. You don't have a obvious hotel play here. Well, I mean, you've

talked many times before about the value of transferring membership rewards points to Hilton. You've said that that can be a reasonable play, particularly when there's a transfer bonus and there isn't today, but I'm patient. So I'll hope that there comes a transfer bonus either to Hilton or Marriott or both because I have found both Hilton and Marriott properties with good value in the places where I'm looking to go. So that's number one. And number two, because Hilton and Marriott sell their points so cheaply so much of the time, then I've potentially got some options in terms of buying points also, which again, like Steven said, within the United States, that probably wouldn't make sense. And I wouldn't generally want to redeem my membership rewards points to buy Marriott points. However, to throw an example out there, I'm looking at

one Marriott property that yields about actually a little bit more than two cents per point in value. So if I'm able to buy the points for 1.1 cent a piece, that's not bad. So anyway, I have some hotel options. Fear not, Greg. And hopefully there will be a couple of interesting possibilities to discuss. And that's not the only thing. There are no other obvious ones either, but I like some non-obvious things sometimes. So you'll see what I have in mind. I'm looking forward to it. Can't wait. All right. You want to go over my picks? I do. I do remember your picks. Yes. So in the first round, Greg, unsurprisingly took the Amex gold card. Now I say unsurprisingly, I'm still a little

surprised. I say unsurprisingly only because Greg had written out his entire strategy and he was very transparent about what he wanted and why. And while you might think I took the venture card in order to throw his strategy off, that wasn't the purpose. I just knew that I needed a good cash back card. And I say cash back. I know venture card isn't quite cash back. I like the fact that it's hybrid. I can transfer points and I can use them to offset purchases. But even if I just use them to offset travel purchases, that's $750, which is not a bonus you're going to get on any other card for a $4,000 spending requirement. So I wasn't taking that in order to try to trump Greg here and take away what he wanted

because we did know what Greg wanted. So again, I wasn't surprised when he took the gold card in the first round, though I was a little surprised in the sense that I feel like the smarter play for Greg might've been to go after the business gold targeted offer for 130,000 points, because if he's going to try and do this ANA around the world, a few more membership rewards points might've made that a little bit easier. He's certainly backed himself into a corner in terms of trying to price out the cheapest ANA around the world anybody's ever seen in business class.

So that will be a formidable challenge, but I'm glad that Greg is up for it. So he's got the Amex Gold card. Second round, he picked the Citi Premier card. And so that was a great pick, following along with what he said, because he told us all in his post that he wanted to find the great sweet spots in Choice Privileges,

because he's always saying that there's some great options with Choice Privile choice privileges points and 80,000 thank you points can become 160,000 choice privileges points. So surely he can find all of the best preferred hotels and resorts out there in the world, the book with points. And so then in the third round, logically, he chose the Marriott Bonvoy boundless card for five free Marriott nights. So apparently Greg is planning a really long trip because he's got five nights in Marriott. So you can use now, because of course the boundless card currently coming with five 50,000 point

free night certificates. So he's got five nights up to 50,000 points. Plus he could add some points on top, depending on whether or not he earns more Marriott points, he's going to earn some with the minimum spend. And so he's got five nights of Marriott and then potentially lots of choice privileges nights. And I'm going to wish him luck on finding a way to build an A&A around the world by A, finding availability, B, piecing it together on such a short route, and C, being able to afford the fuel surcharges. If he does,

it's going to be hard to beat. It's going to be hard to beat. Yeah, the fuel surcharge issue is actually why I chose the gold card instead of the business gold card, which is I needed a card. I needed another card that had the ability to turn into cash in case I need a lot more cash to pay for the fuel surcharges and the premier card has that ability. So I could just cash out the 80,000 points for $800. I don't want to do that, but you know, I have that option. So I think it, that helps reduce my fears of not being able to meet the, the fuel surcharge, fuel surcharge burden of the round the world trip. But it certainly is scary. The part about, can I really build this trip with only 90,000 ANA points, which is basically what my budget is now, which means a total of 14,000 flown miles. I think it is, obviously I believe it's possible

because I picked this, but I'm not going to lie. I was second guessing myself last night after the whole event. I was like, oh man, I should have gone for the business gold. You're not the only one who was like, man, I should have just gone for the business gold and retooled my plans. But yeah, that was, yeah, that one stuck on the table somehow. That was the dark horse that, yeah, should have gone in the event, but no one picked it up. It's only Achilles heel really was a very big spend requirement, $10,000 minimum spend requirement. It was hard to then pick up more than one other good card with that. So that was

a limiter. That was, yeah, that was the key limiter. But so, and I want to mention one thing and I just have to, oh yeah, the hotels, you mentioned the hotels and how I don't have very many hotel points. It's something else I meant to mention to you before when you made that comment last night too, is that, you know, there are sometimes when you might not need a hotel because you get to sleep on the plane because you're flying business class, right, Greg? So I'm less concerned too, because I've got some nights that will be spent. Yeah. You know, it's just highlighting what we have different orientations to how to do this. And for sure. And, you know, I think my style of travel is more about like,

get there as quick as you can and and as directly as you can and then enjoy your time there and so that's why i'm like more about the like trying to see how can i get luxury hotels for the whole time and if that's not your style which you know yeah you're more about as you said last night you're more about getting to the location the destination that excites you and less about where you're going to be staying when you're there. And so, right. So I think it's nice that we're highlighting different things like that. Cause I know we have readers on different ends of that spectrum too. So, uh, so I feel like this worked out really well. Cause I think originally we probably envisioned it being all luxury flights and hotels when we first started kicking around ideas for this. And then we decided

that we didn't want to do it that way. We wanted to just kind of make it a little bit more open in terms of a dream trip. And I think it's interesting because we're probably going to end up with three fairly significant different things that will appeal to three different types of readers. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right. Very good.

So that brings us to, I think, what crazy thing did? No, no, no. Back up. No up no back up i jumped over the mailbag oh my goodness order what am i doing here but it shows it shows your leaping ability because you jumped over the giant mailbag giant mailbag that's right leaps and bounds but you did stumble a little so when i got the haircut the hair the you know the barber told my son that now i can jump that or run faster and jump higher. So there you go. I just leaped over the mailbag. All right.

So it was true. It was true. All right. So giant mailbag. Drag it out, Greg. Tell us what's in the mail. So today's giant mail actually comes from everyone who watched the live stream draft. I went through the comments that were in the live stream, picked out some nuggets,

and just thought i would read some of my favorites and let's go lc said early on this is more fun than the nfl draft kathy novak said five stars for the tim play by play so as an aside tim was the color commentator for the whole show and he gave an gave his analysis as we went along. And he did a great job. He did a fantastic job. Meanwhile, by the way, Carrie had this great board set up where she had her almost like cartoon drawings of each credit card

and would post them physically on a board for everyone to see as we made our picks. So that's going to come up too. MB Herbert said, agreed. Good color announcers are hard to find. Jacob Blau said, Chase CEO crying watching this. So that was because until I picked the Marriott card, we had all passed up on Chase. So Chase did not get any first or second round picks and just got the one third round.

Right. No, they got, Steven Pepper took the Inc. Business Unlimited also. Oh, I forgot. So there were two, but still two out of nine is, you know, poor odds for a major credit card issuer, right?

Absolutely. It matches what Barclays got. You should be crying that's right uh and and and chase was probably you know considered a strong forerunner beforehand but anyway um liam said this is one of my favorite i stayed home and told my wife i was watching the draft i'm watching this on my 75 inch TV. She just walked in and said, this is the nerdiest thing I've ever done. The Stanley cup finals are on. Oh, yeah. And it shows what we know about hockey that we planned our draft during the Stanley cup finals, I guess. Right. No idea yet. Yeah. I didn't, I wasn't paying attention. Uh, so yeah.

Yeah. But, uh, but thank you. I loved it. I saw that and I was like, that's awesome. I read that while we were going. I thought that was fantastic. So I'm glad you're enjoying it. I wish I had a picture of it on the 75 inch TV though. Right, right. Jeffrey Pocone chimed in with Tim is a great commentator and separately Brits are so chill. Couldn't get Steven Pepper worked up over anything. I just relax, calm. He's got his nice little accent going there. David Ramirez said,

I was so terrified Greg would choose anything Delta related just because of fandom. And MB replied, yeah, if you're flying coach, you're losing my vote. So the assumption there is if I picked anything Delta related, I'd have to fly and coach because their point prices are through the roof for anything business class points with a crew stuck up for me said, I'm never betting against the OG frequent miler.

And as we, as we near the end, Tim asked people who had the best picks answers steven steven steven steven steven steven everybody believes in steven so i sure is on steven pepper the pressure is on he's got to live up to to his picks that's right we'll see jerry h says i can't believe no one drafted the Spirit Airlines MasterCard. What was with that? Well, what was with that is a couple of us took Platinum cards. They have airline incidental credits.

We could pick Spirit. And someone named Mark said, OMG, Tim, you're with Frequent Miler. It's great to see you. And you did a good job hosting. Apparently, it's someone who knows Tim outside of Frequent Miler. So that's pretty cool. All right. That's the giant mailbag for today. And that brings us to what crazy thing. What crazy thing did the Curve credit card do So a few weeks ago, I think I wrote a post about how asking is a curve credit card ready for prime time? Answer was easy. No, not even close. In that post, I mentioned how of the four of us on our team that have the curve card, I was the only one sailing along without any trouble. Guess what? After I posted that, all my transactions got blocked they're all denied i

posted so i sent them an email to support and um i've heard back from them a little bit but nothing's been resolved yet so curve is a complete bust in my mind at least so far they've got a ways to go before it's at all viable so of course they're going to extend their beta for quite a bit longer. Right. Right. Right. I mean, because clearly they need to, and Greg said he, he got his blocked by the way, ours is blocked now too. And I think Steven and, and Tim are all blocked. And, and to be clear, I wasn't doing any funny business on the car. I was using it for regular stuff. So I, yeah, I say I, my wife and I were using it for regular stuff. So I, yeah, I say I, my wife and I were using it for regular stuff, but yeah, anyway. So yeah, clearly they know they need to

fix some stuff. They've solicited feedback from the valuable first hundred people. They gave the card to like me and yeah, but no, not at all. Instead, instead they're like, no, you know what guys never, we don't need to continue to test. Let's let's have a party. That's what we need. We need a party. We don't need this. That's right. That's right. The problems. All the beta testers got an email inviting people to their launch party, like, you know, in a week. Right. So I'm going to launch this thing in a week. In a week. Yeah. Yeah. What are they thinking? Oh my gosh. Yeah. They're not. Well, I don't know. They're thinking it's time for a party, I guess.

I don't know. I don't understand. I don't get it at all. I'm totally confused. I saw the email and I was like, what? A launch party? How about we reply to an email now and then? Or, you know, spend a few dollars fixing the broken stuff? I mean, like, yeah.

You don't need a party right now. You need everyone to get together and fix things. You need an engineer or two. Yeah. You know, have a party once you're done. And after you've gotten feedback from beta testers. Right. I mean, they thanked us for helping.

How? They never asked anything. They never asked us how it's going. Right. Throw a pizza party for the engineers while they're working those all-nighters that they need to start putting in to fix the problems. I mean, I would be much more patient. I think that set me over the edge because I was pretty patient about the fact that, hey, it's a beta, it's a really cool idea. I mean, that concept I like and the execution, even though there've been problems when it works, it's good and it's pretty cool. So there's a lot of promise there.

I felt like a cheerleader of sorts being like, they can do this, let's just be patient and give them time. But wow, how foolish to be throwing a launch party when it's so broken. I know, I know, I just don't get it. And you know, like you, I, I still, I very much want it to succeed, but, but that kind of, you know, just pushed me over the edge of, you know, we can give, we could give them a break if they still continue calling it a beta and, and work on it and fix it, but not if they release it to the public, that's not, that's just not okay.

Right. Agreed. Agreed. So, so needless to say, we won't be at the curve party, party, but, but yeah. Actually, I would love to go if I could just to, you know, see them face to face and say, you know, what are you doing? Yeah. Wish I could show up and do that. But yeah, unfortunately I can invite them all and buy them drinks after the party and use my curve card and show them how it just doesn't work. It doesn't work at all. That would be fantastic. Oh my gosh. Just order the, like the most expensive drinks and then, Oh, sorry guys, you'll have to pay or,

or fix this. Oh, I hope somebody listening goes and does that. Oh, that would be great. Let us know how it went. All right. So, so yeah, that's, that's the craziness for the week. Can't believe it. Hope that curve gets everything fixed. I'd love to see it work, but man, not ready for the prime time at all. All right. So that's, that's crazy thing. Let's move on to the main event at brighter times here. The main event, where to park your transferable points.

That's right. That's right. So the idea for this post came from a couple of places. One is Brex. Brex is a business card that offers transferable points. And recently they sent out emails to pretty much everybody who has a single member business that had signed up for Brax and said, you know what, we don't like you anymore. So we're going to shut down your account in August. So make sure to, you know, remove any funds you have and cash in any rewards. So Nick wrote a post about, well,

where should you put those rewards if you have them? The other impetus for this is we regularly get emails or other requests from people saying, look, I'm going to close my, let's say, city premier card. And I don't know what to do with all the points I've earned. I don't want them to disappear. And so where should I put them? And so that's a common thing. And usually we say, well, here's an alternative. So for example, instead of closing the city premier, downgrade it to a fee-free thank you card. And that way you get to keep your points. They're not transferable at that point, but at least they keep them round. You could always re-upgrade to the Premier if you need to transfer them. But there's plenty of situations where people just want to be done. For one reason or another, they want to be done, right? Yeah. I

mean, sometimes it might be a customer service thing. Sometimes it might be a simplifier life thing. Sometimes it could be a divorce thing. It can be like all sorts of things that might lead to this. So you might need to figure this out. Right, right. So we're going to talk about the most likely transfer partners where it could make sense to transfer your points. And so partly we're working on a list of the transfer partners that are in common to most transferable points programs. So, you know, we're not going to

talk about, you know, American Airlines, for example, because you can transfer only from built to American Airlines right now. So even though that would be a good pick in general, if it was available to the others. Okay. So let's start with one that is available to pretty much all transferable points programs, one-to-one to Air France, Flying Blue. Could be a good place to park your points, right? So there's some advantages with flying blue. One of them is that, well, first of all, they have decent award rates, right? They're not through the roof. I mean, it's variable. So sometimes they are through the roof, I suppose. But when you find the regularly priced savory type stuff, they're reasonable. So they can be a reasonable option for flying to Europe. You'll find business class starting from 55,000 points each way to Europe. You're going to pay a little bit moderate fuel surcharge amount, but not terrible. And when there are these promo rewards each month, sometimes you can pay even less. And we've seen some really great deals on those every now and then. Economy class can be had sometimes even under 10,000 points. I think we've seen it. So one way that

is between Europe and the United States. So there are some really good options within Flying Blue. I'm particularly excited about Flying Blue these days because there's a 25% discount on child award tickets, kids that are under 12 years old. So you pay 25% less for those. So on the long haul flights. So there are some reasons to like flying blue. The issue potentially, which may be surmountable, is the expiration policy. So talk a little bit about the expiration policy. When do miles expire? I think it's, is it 18 months? I can't remember exactly how long it is, but the problem isn't so much how early they expire without activity. The problem is that if you do certain types of activity, it makes things worse.

So specifically, if you credit flights to your account, then they become flying miles. And the only way to keep those alive when they're about to expire is to fly more. Whereas if you keep them as transferred points that were earned by transferring in or by a shopping portal or things like that, non-flying activities, then you can reset your account just by getting more of those points that same way. So transferring a thousand more points from your transferable currency or shop through a portal or whatever. And then it's not too bad. So to be clear, what Greg's saying is if you never credit a flight to Flying Blue, if you just transfer, so you're going to close your card, now your city premier card, you're going to close it tomorrow. And so today you transfer all your

city thank you points to Air France Flying Blue. All right. So they're sitting there in Air France Flying Blue with an expiration date. Let's say it's 18 months from today. And so 17 months from today, you say, oh, wow, my points are about to expire. Well, now you just need to transfer in another thousand points and that'll extend it for another 18 months. And the reason that Air France is a good option is because they're transfer partners with everybody. So even though you closed your city premier, maybe you still have a Chase Ultimate rewards card or an American express membership rewards card or capital one card. And so transferring a thousand points from any of those to your flying blue account is going to extend those miles again for another 18 months. So it's easy enough to keep the points alive as

long as you track the expiration. Right. And so I really liked the Air France option. I think the other big Achilles heel, if you will, is the fact that between the U S and Europe, it's actually very strong because you've got KLM, you've got air France, you've got Delta and you've got, well, Virgin Atlantic isn't technically sky team, but they do let you book awards on Virgin Atlantic. So you have a pretty strong network that way going in other directions can be really dicey. Um, so that's, that's a bit of a problem maybe, but, um problem maybe, but I still think this is one of my favorites for where to transfer points. And I'm going to take us on a tangent just for a minute. Okay. All right. Let's go. Just to say, no, no, this has something to do with what you said earlier. You said something about when you could find those savory awards.

And I heard it as savory. And I thought, we're talking about savory sweet spots. So sweet and savory, all in one term. I can't let that kind of wordplay pass us by. Steven Pepper would have been very upset if I had. So back to the program. Savory awards. Svor like savory. It's all, you know, it was a nice little double. It's great. We need to use that more. All right.

Emirates is the other one that that you could transfer from everyone. Do we need to talk about them at all? No, they're not a good place to park your awards. They're a good place. Like if you know, you want to book an Emirates award pretty imminently, I wouldn't transfer and be like, Oh, maybe someday I'm going to want to fly Emirates. I wouldn't want to do that. So yeah, no, Emirates is not a particularly good place unless you're ready to book an

award. And if you're ready to book an award, then you're not worried about parking your points. You're just going to book an award. Right. So yeah, not, that's right. Not enough. All right. Moving on. Cathay Pacific transfers from everybody except for Chase. Are they a good place to park your points? You know, they certainly can be now that points don't expire as long as you have activity. They used to expire, but since like 2020 ish or

something, I can't remember the exact date. They, they changed that. So now you have activity, they used to expire, but since like 2020 ish or something, I can't remember the exact date. Uh, they, they changed that. So now you need activity once every 18 months, which again can be transferring in from any of their various partner programs. I don't know if Cathay Pacific has a shopping portal. I know Air France does. I'm not sure if Cathay Pacific does, but there are ways to earn points anyway, at the very least, like I said, transferring in from another transferable currency. So, and again, they're partners with Amex membership rewards. Let's see city, right? Who are they not? Or who are they partners with? Again, remind me, losing my train of thought. Everybody, but everybody would chase. Oh, everybody would chase. Right. Okay. So yeah.

So you got plenty of options to transfer in and they have a reasonable award chart. So it's not the best award chart ever. It's distance based, but if you're flying a long distance, then you reach the maximum end of the award chart pretty quickly, actually. And so you can go a really long time for a reasonable number of points. If you're looking at book a trip,

that's a really far distance away. The other thing that's nice about Cathay Pacific is they don't pass on as much in fuel surcharges on British Airways flights as British Airways does. So you can save some money on your British Airways flights by booking via Asia miles. So I actually feel like I like this better than, uh, than, than Air France and flying blue, because it gives you a few more options. I like the one world carriers and you're going to have to deal with some fuel surcharges either way. Uh, so I would rather be flying cutter and, and Cathay Pacific than flying most of the sky team carriers. So I think I'd probably lean a little bit towards Asia miles,

actually. And there's, so yeah, there's no issue with like the flight miles, you know, messing up your account, blah, blah, blah. Right. Right. So it occurs to me that if I thought I was going to be traveling really far often, then it wouldn't be a question. I definitely, I go with Asia miles, but if I thought it was going to be traveling a lot between the U S and Europe, I think, I think Asia miles has a problem there because of that British airways is the main route. And even though they don't charge as much, it's still a lot.

Well, the fuel surcharge. Okay. So I'll push back up with you on that. So if you're booking Air France award, you're going to pay around 200 bucks each way in fuel surcharges. If you book British airways via Cathay Pacific, it's what, like 275. So it's really that low. I thought it was more like four or 500. Well, the last, last route I checked anyway, it's what, like $275? It's really that low? I thought it was more like $400 or $500. The last route I checked anyway was $275. Maybe

I got lucky and picked one of those routes. It might vary on the length of the route as well. If it is $400 or $500, then yes, I would agree with you. If it's close, the thing that might make this appealing is that British Airways often has a lot of availability in premium cabins because they charge such high fuel surcharges. So, uh, you know,

not really competing most of the time for, for those seats. Uh, but again, you would check, check your own, check the math on that. Make sure, because I, I, I'm basing it on one single search. So, uh, so maybe they're the, the prices vary more. So at any rate, it's close. You'll also be usually routing through London and whether or not you like that. That depends on what you want. Very true. All right. I think we have good arguments for either one.

Neither one is my favorite yet, though. We haven't gotten to my favorite yet. So keep going. So let's go through them all and then we'll circle back to our favorites and debate them. Next is Singapore, which is supported by all the transferable points except for built. So that's, I think Singapore is an option if you want to fly Singapore, but otherwise, no, it's a pretty bad option because they expire after three years. There's no way to extend the points. Transferring from other people isn't going to do any good.

Singapore is not a place I would want to park miles. They're off the table. Virgin Atlantic. Virgin Atlantic. They're supported by everybody except for Brex. Yeah. Virgin Atlantic points don't expire at all anymore, right? Do you need activity?

I guess you do every two years. Otherwise, they expire. Not 100% sure. No, I am. But they're easy to keep alive. Yes. I looked this up recently. Yes. I looked this up recently after two years, they'll pause your account, uh, basically lock it up and you have

to call them in order to get it unlocked. Uh, but, but, but the points themselves don't ever expire. So you still have the points even if they lock it up. So, yeah, so that I think is a really good option except that Virgin Atlantic has changed the word chart overnight without any warning a couple of times now in different places. So I'm not as confident that they're going to continue to be those sweet spots two or three years from now. I have no idea what to expect. So. Right, right. So the problem with Virgin is they still have a number of sweet spots that are really good, but they're also very, very specific. Yeah. You know, so unlike Cathay and unlike Air

France, you can't say I'm going to use these miles for pretty much any type of travel I want to do. You basically use them for these like three different types of things you want to do. And if you're going outside of that, you're, you're stuck. So yeah, I even Virgin, it has some advantages, like, you know, there's a number of things that are good about it. But it's just not broad enough of a program. And there is that issue of when are they going to dump those sweet spots and, and become, you know, worth less than a penny a point. That's the biggest issue to me.

Cause I just don't, obviously they cut the Delta sweet spot way down. I mean, initially slaughtered it overnight and then there was enough pushback that they, you know, let the Europe thing slide back in at 50,000 miles each way in business class. But I get no idea when they're going to change that. And I have absolutely no reason to think that they'll give us any sort of advanced warning whenever they change it. So, uh, so I, we're not going to get a heads up on that. I could see doing Virgin Atlantic. If you've got a lot of flexibility, if you're retired and you're like, ah, I mean, if I sit around in the afternoons and I search award availability and if I see something, I'll book it and go, uh, okay. Maybe Virgin Atlantic works in

that fairly specific set of circumstances, but otherwise, yeah, I wouldn't do it. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Next up is Avios. So as you know, British Airways and Qatar and Iberia and Aer Lingus all share this Avios currency and you can move the points around from one to the other. So even once you transfer to, let's say, British Airways, you still have some transfer power still left in you to move points around. So that's pretty good. Avios are supported by everybody except for Brex and Bilt at the moment. I like Avios. I think Avios is a really good option, except that, man, the fuel surcharges just have continued to increase.

Now, I haven't checked to see. I know they've increased on the British Airways side. I haven't actually checked to see if Iberia has also increased fuel surcharges because that would stink if they have. Because historically, I've felt pretty good about this because I live within a drivable distance of the New York City airports. So Iberia can be a very good option. 34,000 miles one way in business class during off-pe peak times, which covers a lot of the year, actually. So thirty four

thousand points for business class is pretty terrific. So if I have British Airways obvious, I know I can transfer from Iberia to do that. I can use the British Airways. Obviously, you don't even have to transfer to Iberia anymore. Now, British Airways prices at the same. Oh, really? As Iberia itself. Oh, interesting. I misunderstood that. Okay. Well, that's good news. But the problems here are A, the fuel surcharges on British Airways flights that are increasing. B, American Airlines just is not releasing much partner award space. Now, it used to be great for booking short American Airlines flights. And if I could still book those short American Airlines flights with Avios for less than American is charging, then I'd be more excited

about it. But since American releases like next to no availability, even when they do, the British Airways site is so hit or miss on actually seeing that American Airlines availability that it's kind of bummed me out a little bit on Avios. Of course, you know, Qatar could be interesting, maybe, but only a maybe. I don't feel great about obvious anymore there there aren't a lot of um long there's a few but there's not a lot of long distance sweet spots with with obvious so if you have a lot of need in your future for the short distance you could always get you know great um award prices that way short non-stops um that's really nice. But as Nick said, if you're relying on, if you're hoping to fly around short distances in the US and you're not flying a Alaska route, then it's contingent on American Airlines

releasing the word space. So good luck with that. Not my favorite either for those reasons. If you live on the West Coast, I feel like the award rates to Asia are not totally unreasonable, but they're not great either. So you're not going to pay as much because obviously they don't have the same exorbitant fuel surcharges on Japan Airlines or Cathay Pacific that you see on British Airways and whatnot. But still, I wouldn't be terribly excited about this as an option. Right, right. All right. Next up is

Air Canada. Air Canada is supported by all except for Citibank and Brex. So if you're getting rid of your Citi card, Air Canada is not an option. Yeah. And that's too bad if you're getting rid of your Citi card. But if you're getting rid of a card that does transfer to Aeroplan and you're getting rid of a card that it does transfer to Aeroplan and you're looking for a place to park points, I like Aeroplan as an option. Now, award rates are going to be a little bit more than they used to be, especially if you're the type of person who books a very simple round trip in the sense that you live in Chicago and you're like, I want to go to Paris for a week. I just want to fly a round trip from Chicago to Paris nonstop. And that's all that I want out of the points. Then this is not probably going to be your cheapest option. So it wouldn't be a great place to park points if that's

you. If you're somebody who's like, well, I want to fly to Europe and visit a couple of cities, or you know what, I've got some time. I want to build this crazy trip to three continents with three cards. Aeroplan might be a great option for you. I'm just saying. They allow some really wild stuff. Yeah, they do. It's a really strong option. Um, as, as Nick said, like you're not for, for average types of flights, you'll, you'll, you'll get sort of average type of prices or prices, but they're not horrible. They're just not, you know, sweet spots every time. Um, uh, one thing I don't, there's a couple of things I don't love about Air Canada's program as it is right now. One is they add on, I think it's like 30 bucks or something to partner awards, which when you're doing a big international trip, it's,

you hardly notice it when you're doing a little flight from Detroit to Chicago on United. That's a significant, you know, that makes the Air Canada option significantly more than, you know, some other currencies for doing the exact same flight. I also don't like that they continue, as far as I know, to charge quite high change fees, unlike other North American major carriers. So that's kind of a bummer. I think they're still doing one free change though for flights booked before like

July something or other. I don't know exactly when it is. So I think if you book something soon, you get a free trip, but you're right after that, they're not doing the same kind of free change and cancellation that other North American carriers are. But nice things though, are that, like we said, they have an interesting award chart. If you want to piece together something complicated.

So, and by that, I mean, you can mix star Alliance carriers. You can mix star Alliance and non Alliance carriers. Air Canada has more airline partnerships than any airline in the world. So they've got a whole bunch of airlines that they're partners with that are not star Alliance airlines.

And you can mix those in along with the Star Alliance ones. They have really flexible routing rules. So you don't need to necessarily take the most direct option between point A and point B. In fact, the rule is that it can't exceed if you're going to add in stopovers

and segments and whatnot. Your distance flown can't be more than 100% more than the distance in a straight line. So by that, I mean, if you wanted to fly from New York to Tokyo, I don't know, let's say it's 10,000 miles, a straight line. And I don't know, I have no idea what it is, but just making that number up, you can't fly more than 20,000 miles to get to Tokyo, but that's not much of a limitation. So, you know, so you get, you got some cool options if you're interested in longer, more complex stuff. Yeah. Now they had promised when they first rolled out their new program that they were going to update the website really soon. And so you can do all those complicated

bookings online. We still haven't seen that. So at this point, you still have to call to do those kind of complicated bookings. Well, okay. So a couple, two different pieces there. If you want to do a stopover, you still have to call. You can't book a stopover online. It won't price right. It'll price as separate awards. So if you want to book a stopover, which they charge 5,000 miles on a one way for a stopover, you can do one on each one way. So you have to call if you want to be able to do a stopover, but you can do multi-city bookings online and the website produces a phenomenal number of different options. When you search Roots, they produce many more options than what you'll see on United. I've come to really enjoy

using aircanada.com to search for Star Alliance awards because they will piece together stuff that United just doesn't with their computers. Yeah. One thing I don't like is when looking for business class, they will put in a really short hop that's the only part of the whole thing that's in business class and list it as a business class price. And then you have to hover over to see, okay, 3% of your trip is in business class. I don't like that either. I hate that. But the one tip there is when it says mixed cabin in red, that means less than 50% is in business class. And when it says mixed cabin in black, it means more than 50% of the trip is in business class. That's a really good tip.

So I just ignore the red ones now. Good one. All right. Moving on. Next we have Avianca Life Miles. So you can transfer to them from anyone except for Chase and Built. So Avianca Life Miles is going to be my favorite pick. Now, reasons why it's not my favorite pick, I guess, or reasons why it might not be a good pick. The top reason why this might not be a good pick is because miles expire after 12 months. That's one year. Whereas everybody else we've talked about so far, I think they expire after like the smallest amount, 18 months of inactivity and some of them don't ever expire. So Avianca is definitely the worst in terms of quick expiration. If you don't have more activity

within 12 months, your miles will expire. But the reasons I like Avianca LifeMiles is because A, they have very reasonable prices for Star Alliance awards. B, they have a very hackable award chart in the sense that if you piece together flights that mix business class and either some long economy segments or business and first class, then you pay sort of like a hybrid price for your award and where they determine the amount of the award you're flying in a lower cabin and the amount in a higher cabin and price accordingly. Whereas Air Canada will charge you the business class price for that entire itinerary when only 3% is actually in business class. Avianca will charge you 3% of the business class price and 97% of the economy class price, more or less. So it's got a very

hackable award chart. You can pay less than what the award chart says by attacking on a long economy class flight. So I think that's pretty good. Star Alliance has so many airlines. There's about like 26, 27 airlines, and they don't charge any fuel surcharges. So you don't have to worry about getting hit with fuel surcharges. So those are all things that I like about LifeMiles. I mean, isn't this your favorite too, Greg? I mean, it's up there. One other thing I would add that I like is that if you were out of transferable currencies and you want to top off your point balance, they have sales so frequently that you can

often buy the miles for like 1.3 or less cents per point, which is fantastic. There's definitely things I don't like at all. So they also have the change fee issue. They're very expensive. They aren't known for their, you know their great customer support. So if you have issues, you want to make changes, it might take a while to get things resolved. I don't like that activity to keep your points alive has to be incoming, meaning using points doesn't count as activity to keep your points alive. You have to actually gain points somehow.

And so that's, again, buying or transferring in are the two main ways to do that. So there are things I don't like. So it does have some great sweet spots. So I do like it. I, I just, I would have a hard time picking it as where I would, where I'd put, um, all my points if I was, if I was, uh, parking them somewhere. Yeah. I mean, it's worth mentioning too, that the website doesn't always show all of the options that should be available to star Alliance carriers and nobody really knows why. So it's kind of weird as to what you'll see and

what you won't see sometimes. So that can be an annoyance with Avianca Life Miles. They also add a partner booking fee. So like Air Canada, they charge, I think it's like 25 bucks or something like that for an, or I don't even know if it's a partner fee or just a general award booking fee, the 25 bucks, but, but that gets added on. And a particular frustration of mine today is that initially they show you the taxes and fees, but it's not necessarily the total that they show you when you don't have all the miles in your account. It's not until you have the miles in your account that you're like, Oh, Oh, well, that's more than what you showed me. Yeah. I've had that happen too. That's, that's unpleasant. Yeah. You get a little sticker shock when you go to that final screen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's

a bummer because if you don't have the miles in your account, you can click all the way through, but it'll eventually tell you, you don't have enough miles. And so the only way to get that sticker shock and find out that it's more than what you expected is to transfer miles in. Yeah. And then you're committed. Right. Right. Right. Then you're stuck with life miles that you have to make sure that you keep active. Otherwise they expire. So, you know, set yourself a reminder. First of the year, new year's resolution every year is on January 1st. You're going to transfer a thousand miles into all of the programs where you currently hold miles in order to try to keep them all active. Or, I mean, just make sure your account is up to date on award

wallet and it's still email you when, when your points are getting near expiry and then you can transfer in another thousand or what have you. There you go. But before you do the last one, just a real quick, because we are talking about this, you know, when you have to move points and, and many of you may have Brex cards. And so you may be looking specifically to move Brex points. And so I did transfer from Brex to Avianca LifeMiles. And interestingly, oddly, I synced up my LifeMiles account. I actually didn't have it in an award wallet. So I synced it up right after I did the transfer from Brex. And so I transferred from Brex. I logged into my LifeMiles account and the miles weren't there. And I thought, oh, well, I thought these would be instant, even though Brex says up to one business day, I thought it'd be instant.

So, all right, I added LifeMiles to award wallet so that I could do a balance watch on it. And right away, as soon as I added the account, it said I had 35,000 miles in there that I had transferred over. And so I was like, OK, great. So the miles are there. Except then after that happened, I logged in on the website and of course the miles weren't there. And I logged in on the app and the miles weren't. But then. And I logged in on the app and the miles were, but then I saw they're in my activity and my life miles activity. It said, plus the miles from Brex. Yeah. And I was like, okay, so they're there, but they're not there. Like they're there in the activity. I've had that happen too. And I think it was like overnight.

So if you, if you transfer them and you're like, Oh my goodness, they're out of my Brex account and they haven't showed up in my LifeMiles account. Don't worry. Wait until overnight. And then they'll, they'll pop in. Yeah. Yeah. The last one I had on the list is Qantas. I don't know that we really need to talk about them, but what do you think? No, I mean, they're not a good place for a lot of reasons, but we don't even need to get into them. It's just not a good option. There's not, not very many sweet spots at all. You wouldn't want to park points there. So I think the contenders we're down to, the ones we both or at least one of us really like

are Air France, Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, and Air Canada, and Avianca. I think so too. Yeah, I think those are the four. Yeah, so out of the four, where would you park? You could just, if I could pick just one of the four, I would do Air Canada. Okay. Why? Because it's Star Alliance. So it has the broadest network. So if you want to get somewhere in the world, you can bet there's going to be a Star Alliance carrier that can get you there. And if there isn't, Air Canada is going to be partners with whoever it is

that flies there, right? Well, that's a good point because they have a bunch of other partners. They don't pass along fuel surcharges. So if you're flying like Lufthansa, which has, you know, huge fuel surcharges, it's okay because Air Canada is not going to pass that along. And the ability to add a stopover with 5,000 points, I think it's a great thing. So it just has the right mix to me of broad, broad applicability and good enough award prices to make it worth investing in. My second pick would be Air France, but that's my order. How about you? I just said a minute ago that LifeMiles, I think it was my favorite. And that was in part because they also can be very useful for

short United flights. So within my zone, 7,500 each way is a great deal on domestic flights and much easier to deal with in Turkish because you can just find the availability online and book it online. And so I like them also for that. However, that said, I think if I had to park them somewhere, I agree with Greg that I would park them in Aeroplan. And there's two reasons. One of them is all of the reasons that Greg gave. And the additional reason that I'd add on to that is that I have faith in the Aeroplan program to continue being awesome. And the reason I say that is because I think the people that run Aeroplan are in touch with what folks like us want, and they want to give it to us.

I think that it's very clear that Aeroplan is trying to pander to the crowd of people who are really interested in award maximization. This award chart that they put out during the pandemic, the new award chart is made for people who are wanting to fly six segments to different places and bounce around the world and build in long layovers and stopovers. They have super flexible routing rules. And when you see the people who run Aeroplan talk about it, they seem to be like frequent flyer nerds. They're into this stuff. So Avianca might change their award chart tomorrow. I have no idea. I feel like Aeroplan is likely to keep their program, even if they change award prices, to keep the program overall appealing to me.

Right, right. So a reminder, Air Canada Aeroplan is not available as a transfer partner from Citi or from Brex. So if you had Citi or Brex points that you needed to park somewhere, what would be your next, next favorite? I see my next favorite again, it's going to be life miles. I, I, and I see your argument for air France and I think it's a pretty good one, but I like the fact that there's no fuel surcharges, especially since I'm flying with a family of four now. So, you know, now when I'm looking at $250 in fuel surcharges, that's a grand out the window and fuel surcharges. So I I'm very

partial to no fuel surcharges and the size of the star Alliance network. So I think I would pick Avianca life miles, but you're going to say, and I would, I would go with air France, but I have to admit it's, it's a very tight race. You know, it's you're not making a wrong decision with either one. So do whichever one, you know, you're most comfortable with. I think if you're in that position, there you go. All right. So there you have it. That's what you do.

You got to park the points. So we've got that all squared away and set. So I think that means it's time for question of the week, right? All right. Yes. So the question of the week, right? All right. Yes. So the question of the week, I did not give Greg any heads up on this. So I, this one's kind of a lighthearted one that came in, in the frequent miler insiders and generated some, uh, some discussion and I answered it in there. So if you're curious about my answer, you can probably read about it in the, in the thread, but I was curious to ask you, I'm going to tag on a little

bit more. Somebody in frequent miler insiders asked, let's say I said somebody, and I should have scrolled all the way up to seeing who it was that, uh, let's see. Jared asks, what's your favorite luggage brands or models and why ready, set, go. And I'm going to tag onto this. So what is your favorite luggage? Because you travel a good bit. You've done a lot of travel this year. People are curious about this kind of stuff. Somebody who travels a lot. What do you like? And then B what's the like travel item or two that you're like, this really is awesome. And I would highly recommend it. All right. Well, let me say I'm, I'm completely unqualified to, to, uh, given a recommendation because I've basically had cheap luggage and I've had

two me's and the two and the two me's are completely next fall. When he, when he first, when he first joined up at frequent mile, he wrote a post about how to stack your way to like really cheap to me luggage. And so we bought something and my wife really liked it. And we ended up buying more two me's and yeah. So a bunch of to me's and so they've worked out well for you i mean that matters so to people so yeah so here's what i what i love about them and this is probably true of others too i don't know but the the wheels

just spin they glide so well so you know you could almost just like touch the bag with your finger and it rolls down the airport. And that's really nice. I don't like their hard sided cases scuff really easily. So you get a brand new to me. It looks beautiful. And then as soon as it comes off the baggage carousel, if you checked your bags, it's all scuffed up. And so, you know, doesn't look great for a premium bag. So anyway, so that's the extent of my knowledge of bags, good and bad.

Well, that's good to know because, I mean, expensive bags, I always wonder, you know, you wonder, is it worth the money? So obviously some people pay it and some people love it. And of course, a lot of this stuff is subjective, right? I mean, it's like, you know, what kind of jeans do you like or shirt or whatever else? But when I look at something, an investment piece like that, I want to know, is it going to fall apart on me, you know, in two or three trips or is it going to scuff up? So, so I think that was worthwhile feedback there. All right. All right. All right. Uh, the, the piece of, uh, travel equipment that I, um, that I like the most, you know, it's, it's probably, there's so many options, but I'm actually going to go with my, in the spirit of what we're talking about, my Tumi backpack.

I have this leather Tumi backpack, which is just super comfortable to wear. And it has like a hundred like zipper pockets all around it. And that's fantastic because I've come up with like set areas like, like this pocket is for this purpose. This pocket is my, is my kitchen pantry. I have all my like snacks and like napkins and, and, you know, anything related to eating is in that pocket. I know where to go. Here's my electronics pocket, you know?

So, so if you're looking for, I don't have to look hard for my phone charger. I know exactly where to go to get it. And there's even a pocket for my travel wallet, which is the wallet where I permanently keep my passport, my hotel-related gift cards, just in case I'm ever at a hotel that could use them, my vaccine card, my credit cards that I never take out except to use at hotels or during travel, my priority pass card, things like that, that I only need when I'm traveling, they're in my travel wallet. So yeah, there you go. You know, that's funny because no, you know, no affiliate links in this podcast, right? So it's, you know, there's no, no benefit to us. So you, uh, to me here,

but I, but I also have a to me backpack. Now I bought my to me backpack used on Craigslist for like a hundred bucks, like five or six years ago now, I feel like. And so, so I didn't buy it new and, and, uh, and it's still holding up really well a couple of the zipper pulls broke on me which is kind of annoying and I just ordered new ones for it but um but the zippers are really high quality and I like that like I feel like I can stuff it and I'm not going to break the zippers but the the pockets it's exactly the same story that Greg just gave that is what I love about the backpack yeah there's a pocket like you said. There's a pocket where I keep the passport and I keep the travel,

like the gift cards and everything else. And there's a pocket for the phone charger and they're well laid out. So I appreciate that. And it's not, I don't have any other to me bag. So I don't know anything about other to me luggage, but it's funny because I do the same thing with my to me backpack.

I have to say one other great feature of my backpack. I don't know if it's true of yours. Is it self-standing? So put it down on a seat like next to me and it just stands right up. And so it's sort of like a briefcase. I can then file through and get stuff. I don't have to worry about it flopping over. Yeah. It's just super, it's great. And unlike the hard sided cases we have, it looks great. And you know, as I said, it's, it's like a black leather. It's beautiful. It is. Yours is nice. I agree. I have the nylon one and I, I definitely, I like the look of your leather one a little bit more. Uh, but you know, either way you can't really go wrong. I feel like

with the number of pockets and the self-standing thing is something that you're right. I'm looking at it right now, standing up and I hadn't even thought about the fact that it does that. I don't see them advertise that, but it's actually a feature that's super convenient. It is. It's not falling. I think they should advertise it. There you go. So that was unexpected. I didn't expect we were going to talk about our too many backpacks today, but there you have it. Right. All right. So that brings us to the end of this week's episode. If you've enjoyed what you've been listening to and you'd like to find out more about what we're talking about, you want to go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequent miler.com

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