Frequent Miler on the Air - Which is the best Amex transfer partner - Air Canada or ANA? | Ep163 | 8-13-22

Episode Date: August 13, 2022

Our two favorite Amex transfer partners offer access to a wide array of awards that make for fascinating possibilities, whether great award chart values or flexible routing rules or a lot more. This week, we debate which is best from a wide range of angles. 00:51 Giant Mailbag: Watch out for "free" award cancellations 6:36 Mattress running the Numbers: 14K Wyndham points with a 3-night stay 12:07 Awards we booked this week 19:38 3 Cards, 3 Continents, 3 Updates 32:42 Main Event: Which is the best Amex transfer partner -- Air Canada Aeroplan or ANA? 34:48 Transfer time 39:28 Award Charts 44:58 One-way awards 49:24 Fuel surcharges 55:32 Partner airlines 1:01:32 Stopovers 1:04:30 Award space for their own members 1:06:32 Change fees 1:08:10 Mileage Expiry 1:12:19 Lap infant fees 1:20:23 Question of the Week: Is Plastiq ever worth it for the 2.85% fee?  Join our email list: 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, we're going to be debating who is the best Amex transfer partner,

Air Canada or ANA. Fitting, isn't it? If you know what's been going on, if you've been following with our three cards, three continents challenge, it's fitting that Greg and I would debate this. It is. It is. Nick has been betting heavily on his Air Canada exploits and I'm all in on ANA. So we will get into the nitty gritty and be arguing in favor of our favorite programs,

I guess, when it comes time for the main event. But first, giant mailbag time. Today's giant mail comes from Tony. So we've talked before about how United allows free award cancellations as long as you cancel 30 or more days in advance of your flight. And Tony emailed us and says, in case you were unaware of it, I thought I'd call attention to a new sleight of hand maneuver United is doing. Instead of redepositing miles upon canceling an award trip, which is more than a month in advance, it is creating a travel credit consisting of the miles which should have been redeposited and is putting an expiration deadline by which the miles must be used. They don't explain that this will happen anywhere I can find on the United website. All right. So I looked into this. I had some awards to cancel. And it turns out that Tony's mostly right

in that when you go to cancel a United award these days, they give you two options. But the option they default to, there's like a radio button, and the default option is called cancel and rebook later. And that's exactly what Tony described, that if you cancel in that way, you have this sort of mileage-based travel credit that expires in a year, which I can't think of any examples where you'd want that.

The other option is cancel trip now and redeposit miles. So if that's your intent, make sure to slow down when you're canceling and look at the options. Hit the cancel trip now and redeposit miles button and you'll be fine. You'll get your miles back and they won't expire in a year. So what if you accidentally chose the travel credit? Is there any way to fix that? Yeah, he was able to contact United and get them to reverse it. They said it would take

some time though. So if, you know, yes, you can fix it if, if, if it's a problem, but it would just be easier from the get go to cancel it correctly. The other thing Tony probably could have done was rebook the award with the travel credit and then cancel it and select the correct option. That's a good point. This is interesting to me also because I run into a situation with American Airlines where my wife had a lot of American Airlines miles because of the Simply Miles deal last year. And so we had booked a lot of award travel this year using her miles, knowing that most American Airlines awards are cancelable without a fee and you can get the miles redeposited. So good, flexible way to book things.

However, each of the trips that she has canceled, it's given a message that usually the miles are automatically redeposited if eligible. And none of the trips that she's canceled have been redeposited. So I've been meaning to get her to get on the phone and call and talk to somebody and figure out getting the miles back for the trips. And it's not just the specific trip she's booked because I have booked a couple of things that were almost identical trips. And when I've canceled them, the miles have come back automatically. And I've wondered if maybe that's because I have a level of elite status with American Airlines that it's automatically going back because I can't figure out why.

Otherwise, we had very similar awards booked from our accounts. And like I said, mine deposited automatically. So I've been meaning to have her call, but that's something to look out for, especially if you have a large balance of American Airlines miles. And maybe you didn't even notice that the one award you canceled didn't go back. Make sure you got those miles back. You can look at your activity and you should be able to see if the miles have come back in.

So I don't know if Americans doing the same thing as United there, because it said, I saw a message that I can't remember the details now, but something about this one year expiration on the miles, which I knew had to be not true, but it's a matter of calling and getting that resolved. Yeah, yeah. As an aside, like with both programs, to be not true, but it's a matter of calling and getting that resolved. Yeah.

Yeah. As an aside, like with both programs, it, it used to be possible and I don't know if it still is, but, but maybe, um, when you knew that there was an award devaluation coming, it used to be possible to book, um, the award under the current price cancel in the way we're talking about, uh, where, where you get the credit instead of the miles back and then reuse that award later. I just don't know if that's still a thing that happens or not, but maybe. That's a good question. Because you might wonder why do the airlines even have that option right when everybody want to get their miles back

and usually i think you would yeah so the frustrating thing for me with american has been that it's most awards i've tried to change online anything involving a partner airline let's uh qualify with that you can't change online and it just gives you a message telling you that you should just cancel and rebook because the miles will be redeposited. And rather, it basically gives you a message that says, rather than waiting on hold to talk to somebody, because you can't do this yourself, you should just cancel and rebook, which of course, it sounds great, except my wife hasn't gotten the miles back and she had a whole bunch of trips booked. So it didn't work out well. She's still going to have to call. So that's a little annoyance.

At least they're acknowledging that you're going to have to wait on hold for a long time. Well, that is kind of, that's kind of refreshing because it seems like most, most programs, you know, you try to do something online and the website says, you need to call to do this. And then when you call the phone line says, while you're waiting on hold, did you know you can go to Marriott.com and get all your, all your problems solved? Right. You know, right.

Yeah. Sorry, Mariette. That's the way it goes. All right. So that's a good piece of mail, good piece of info, something to watch out for if you're booking and canceling award tickets.

Well, let's move into Mattress Running the Numbers. So this week's Mattress Running the Numbers, we've got a Wyndham promotion coming up here. Our Wyndham promotion going on. Tell me about the Wyndham promotion. Do you know what's up with this, Craig? Yeah. So they have a promo where it's advertised as if you stay three nights, you get some piddly little gift card, like 50 bucks or something. But as Steven points out in the post about it, you can alternatively get 14 000 bonus Wyndham points why anyone would choose like a

small denomination gift card over 14 000 Wyndham points beyond me but that's how they've been advertising it so um 14 000 points that's that's a good chunk of change it sure is if you have a Wyndham earner card of any type. There's three different versions of them. You get an automatic 10% discount on awards. So an award that would normally be 15,000 points costs 13,500. So like Vacasa vacation rental stays one night, costs that much if it's a one bedroom. And so that means you could get enough bonus points for one night out of a Casa vacation rental or at a number of Wyndham properties, depending on

the normal pricing, because those range up to 30,000 points, but there's a lot that are 15,000 per night. Yeah. So it's basically in a nutshell, it's not hard to get at least one cent per point in value out of Wyndham points. And you can often do quite a bit better, especially towards the Casa rentals. You can often do quite a bit better. So, so, all right. So is this mattress run worthy? You've got to do three nights in order to get the 14,000 points. Do they have to all be consecutive? Do you have to stay in a Wyndham property? It has to be a three straight nights. That's my understanding. It's a three nights stay. So it's not three nights, but a stay consisting of three or more nights yeah um and uh you have to both register in advance

and you have to book it on your phone so it says book via either the app windham app or through a mobile browser so just that little caution and um so is that just run worthy no you don't think so so well okay okay. All right. So how much would you be willing to pay for Wyndham points? If they go on sale, what's a price where you'd be like, okay, I'd buy them for that price. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, when they go on sale for a penny each, which is not, I guess it's not that frequently, but, you know, I think that if you were, if I knew I was going to be staying at a Wyndham and that was good value, obviously I'd buy it at that price. But I wouldn't even prospectively buy at that price, I don't think, just because I don't. So personally, and maybe you're different, I don't find that many opportunities to use my Wyndham points.

So I don't want to stock up on them, especially keep in mind, Wyndham points are like ANA miles. They expire in a certain amount of time and it's very hard to keep them alive. So yeah, not for me. What about you? What price would you be willing to buy? I bought them at a penny each before. I wouldn't buy them now at that price because with the Wyndham

business owner card at 8X at gas stations, I don't need to pay a penny a piece for miles. But if you're not amassing at gas stations, then I think a penny a piece is not bad. And so that means if you find a place for a little less than 50 bucks a night all all in, this could be mattress one worthy and you can find places for less than $50 a night, all in. Now I don't remember off the top of my head. The Wyndham chain has some pretty low level chains and brands in there. And so, yeah, you could find a really nice- It's not a large roadway in for 35 bucks a night or whatever. Now I don't remember. I spent three glamorous nights there. Absolutely. No, no. You check in and leave. Like, I mean, the nights in Detroit I hear is real nice, but I'm not sure if you

remember what the, uh, what the bedrooms looked like. Did you make it that far? I didn't go into the bedroom. Now I went to the desk. I told them what I was doing. So they wouldn't check me out early. And, uh, and I left actually, maybe that was a one night stay. Maybe I didn't go into the bedroom. Now I went to the desk. I told them what I was doing. So they wouldn't check me out early. And, uh, and I left actually, maybe that was a one night stay. Maybe I didn't do that, but I know I talked to them at the desk to tell them what I was doing anyway. Yeah. Well, so then that was a previous window promotion that Greg did find mattress run worthy a couple

of years back. Uh, but anyway, so the point is, yes, you can get very cheap ones. Now I can't remember off the top of my head, whether Wyndham has a minimum cost per night in order for nights to be qualifying. So you'll want to check the fine print on that because I know, for instance, Choice, I believe, has a $40 minimum per night for hotels to qualify for most of their promos. So you may need to check that in the details with Wyndham to make sure that those really cheap $30 or $40 nights will count. But if they will, you could pay significantly less than a penny a point with this promotion.

As long as the hotel is willing to not check you out because you probably won't want to stay three nights at a $35 London property in the United States. Just going out on a limb. All right. So I think that's, I say maybe mattress run worthy. I've got a Vicasa rental coming up next week.

And yeah, you convinced me. You convinced me. You convinced me. Yeah. Yeah. If you feel fairly likely, if you would be willing to buy points at a penny each and there's no sale going on at the time you need them, why not? Go for it.

Why not? All right. So that's mattress running. The number's out of the way. Let's see. So we have a couple of different things here. Awards we booked this week. I got it all out of order, didn't I? Awards we booked this week is what we're going to do next though. So Greg, what have you booked this week? I mean, nothing other than the three

cards, three continents stuff. So. Okay. So if you're updating a second, we'll do that in a minute. So for me, actually, I booked a couple of different things this week. I just mentioned a second ago that I've got a Picasso rental coming up next week. And I just booked that within this actually Sunday. I booked it on Sunday in the car. I think something, I can't even remember where we were on Sunday, but we booked it from the car and called the Casa. I didn't realize the Casa was open on the weekends, by the way, I say the Casa, there's a special line and 800 number. You have to call now to use your Wyndham Rewards points to book Vicasa. And so I thought that line was probably only a Monday through Friday thing.

But actually, a reader emailed me with a question about Vicasa booking over the weekend and said he was going to call on Sunday. And I said, are they open on weekends? And he said, oh, yeah, they definitely are. So I was appreciative of the tip because I didn't realize that. I knew they were like a daytime business hour-y type line, but I didn't realize that I knew they were like a daytime business hour-y type line, but I didn't realize they were open on the weekends. So anyway, we booked that and I learned a couple of interesting things there. So my wife is the one that has the business earner visa cards. So she called Wyndham, but we were in the car and she was driving. So she asked

if I could talk to them after she verified who she was. And they said, yes, they would add my name to her profile as a secondary user. So now my name is on her account also. So I don't know whether I could call and earn or make a redemption, but at least it'll hopefully be a little bit easier if I need to in the future. So that was kind of nice. And then the second piece of it that I asked about after we made the booking was whether or not you can gift these. Can you make a reservation for somebody else? Because that's a frequent question we get about using hotel points and awards. Can you book for someone else? And a lot of times with a lot of programs, you can make a booking in your own name and

add somebody else's name, and maybe they'll be able to check in ahead of you. But I was happy to find out with Vacasa that, yes, you can just totally make the reservation in somebody else's name. You could gift those for Casa rental nights. So that was actually, I thought a good thing to learn the Casa rental itself that we booked is not particularly high value. It's more than a penny a point, but probably a penny and a half a point. So not going to be amazing, but we'll see how that goes. We'll talk more about it afterwards after I have more info on how it went. So, uh, so book that. And then the other thing that I booked this week was you might've seen Steven Pepper posted about a whole bunch

of Fiji airways award availability between the United States and Fiji and onward to Australia and New Zealand. Normally it's very difficult to find that availability. Maybe you'll find one seat here or there. If you find two seats, you got to be really happy. But actually I was able to find some dates with availability between Los Angeles and Fiji with five seats available in business class, which I mean, that's great. Blew my mind. Yeah. I was like, wow, I can't believe there's five seats. So I booked a, for the, my family of four, uh, and I did it using Alaska Airlines miles because Alaska will allow you a stopover on the way to Oceania. And so I only booked Los Angeles to Fiji, but I think, I don't know this for sure, but I think if I call Alaska, I probably can tack on another leg to that, make it a stopover in Fiji and tack on a leg to Australia or New Zealand. I didn't book it that way online because there wasn't availability in business class for all four of us for the second half of that.

So I think I'd probably be able to call and add that. I don't know. And if I can't, oh, well, I could use some other miles if we decided to even go and then also decide to go onward from Fiji. So I figured I can figure that out later. I booked it for 2023 because when are you ever going to find four seats in business class to Fiji? You got to hop on those things when you see them, if you're traveling with a family. So I booked, I figured book first, ask questions later. We'll see. that it's good to have like sort of a healthy stash of miles in various programs. Usually we talk about transferable points because, you know, you see a great deal that's bookable with Air Canada or something you could transfer at the time you need them. In this case,

Alaska miles are probably the best way to book or American Airlines miles might've been a good way to book. And both of those, you know, are not transfer partners for most programs. So those are a couple of programs where it could make sense to sort of try to have a good stash of, of miles in reserve at all times. And, and both of those programs also let you keep your miles alive very easily. So, you know, it's, it's not that hard to, uh, to do that. Once you build up the stash, just keep it around for these kinds of opportunities. So you can jump on them when, when they're available. That's great. I think that was a good point. I want to say that you

said, or maybe American airlines miles, cause it was a lot more with American airlines miles. Alaska charges 55,000 American charges 80, but the advantage of course, is that American doesn't charge a fee to cancel in Alaska does. So I knew I was going to be on the hook if I had to cancel our tickets, but I didn't tell them. Alaska doesn't charge a fee anymore. Are you sure about that? I'm positive. All right. OK. All right. So there you go. No fee. So perfect. So it worked out well for me then. Yeah. The main advantage of American that I can think of is that American is more connecting flights to L.A LA. So from wherever you're coming from, you can add in American Airlines flights to LA to go onward. So it can all be booked as one.

With Alaska, they only allow, even though they're partners with American, when you book one partner, the only other airline you can mix in on that same award is Alaska itself. So you'd have to have Alaska Airlines itself feeding you into LA or else you'd have to book two separate awards for that kind of trip. Very well. And that is an excellent point. The other thing I was going to add to that is that I actually booked, so I booked for my family of four on one flight out of LA. And on the same day, I made speculative bookings for family members out of San Francisco. And now we haven't even talked to them about it yet. So who knows whether or not we'll actually do this, but I, but I, I booked them on the same day from San Francisco because there was availability there too. And I used American airlines miles for that. Cause I simply didn't have enough Alaska miles to book everybody

using Alaska miles. But it was nice to be able to see that and find that. I mean, on the same day from those two West coast airports. So we'd arrive within 45 minutes of each other. Just seemed like an opportunity we're not going to see very often. Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. And we've seen a number of these kind of things in recent months, like the United Airlines Awards to New Zealand, the Qantas Awards to Australia. Now this one to Fiji, where lots of award spaces suddenly opened up at desirable times a year that you'd want to go when usually you can't find awards during those times. So it's, it's yeah, it just reinforced what I said earlier, having a stash of miles.

You could jump on these things when they're there is, is a huge deal. And I have to say, you know, you said there were five seats available when you looked and you booked for the four of you and you didn't book me as the fifth. I don't know if I can forgive you for that. I ran out of the miles. All right. All right. So it's time for three cards, three continents, three updates. As you all know, we are doing our annual challenge this September where we each um we pick three credit card cards as our as our budget the welcome bonuses from those cards are

each of our individual budgets and we have to use those budgets to travel uh to three continents and to build as amazing of a trip as we can what is uh we're going to go into the updates for each of us steven uh nick and me uh steven though doesn't have an update he he kind of finished everything he got all the stuff done too early you know He seemed to book it all without a sweat. He had one little error that he posted about with a hotel booking. Other than that, he just wrapped it all up with a bow. And his trip to Disney World should be great. He's going to satisfy the three continents by going in Epcot.

You know how they have the different worlds in there? That's right. He's going to get all three continents by going in Epcot. You know how they have the different worlds in there. That's right. He's going to get all three, all in Epcot there. I mean, hey, listen, it's a small world, Stephen. It's a small world. So, yeah, I mean, isn't part of the fun agonizing over rebooking this stuff? I mean, is he not enjoying that? Yeah.

Yeah. He did it too easily. All right. Well, so for me, my update is that I made a couple of hotel bookings since last week and, uh, and sliced and diced the prices a little bit. So ended up spending far less than I anticipated on a couple of hotels. So I had kind of hemmed and hawed for a while about how many IHG points to buy. And I posted over the weekend last weekend that I bought IHG points. I was initially intending to buy more IHG points, but I was able to save so much with some cash rates that I decided not to buy the

points and instead to book a couple of cash rates. So my hotels are almost entirely booked now. And I only ended up buying 22,000 IHG points. And so that cost me a little bit more than half a cent each because you needed to buy like 52,000 in order to get the cheapest price on the IHG points. And unfortunately I just didn't need that many. So I had to overpay a little bit on my IHG points. Now in the real world, of course,

I bought enough that I only really paid half a cent each, but I'll account for it as though we only bought the tour. I only bought the 22,000 that I needed for the trip. So I did that. I'm really excited about the cheapest hotel on my trip. So the least expensive hotel so far that I've booked is $28 and 40 cents. So I look very much look forward to seeing what I get for $28 and 40 cents. So I look forward to showing you what I got for $28 and 40 cents. We'll see. And I have one more splurge hotel that I'm dying to book,

but I need to like get the price down just a little bit more. It's a little too high right now. So we'll see. Yeah. Hopefully. All right. Well, that's going to be exciting to see that unfold. All right. Well, I have,

I have sort of, I guess a few updates as well. So some of you may have read on the blog about my experience. You know, I think last week's show, my update was that if i remember right i i thought i had everything um all the flights yeah it was all set um yeah i thought it was all set and then um i had i guess i had some changes to make oh i know it was yeah i had some changes to make with my mystery travel companions booking. And so I made those, I called up ANA, paid the 3,000 miles to change the award, actually to rebook the award and got her on almost all the same flights so that we're really doing this round the world trip together. And it seemed to be all set. And about four days later, ANA gives me a call and said, oh, we are so sorry. We've been working. The woman who called said, I've been working all afternoon trying to find an alternative route. But by the time we went to ticket this,

the awards were not available yet or anymore, I mean. And as I dug into more about what happened, I was asking her, because she's the same person I talked to four days before. I said, what happened? We had it all set and I went away feeling good that it was all done. And she said that she had forgotten or she didn't think she needed my credit card security code when we went to book.

And I remember her saying that, actually. She muttered something like, I guess I don't need your security code. And it turned out they did need it. And the ticketing department, of course, called her to tell her that she needed to collect that information from me. They called the wrong number, apparently, and left a voicemail in the wrong place. I don't know how she eventually found out that this was still outstanding, but eventually she did and it was too late by then. So when I got this call, I was just about to go out to dinner with my wife. We had pre-booked dinner.

So I said to her, oh my gosh, can you call me tomorrow morning? So this was a Thursday evening. Can you call me Friday morning? So after dinner, I came back and I searched awards left and right everywhere I could think of to try to rebuild our trip. And I found what I was actually really, really excited about. I found this amazing situation where there were not just the two awards, but I could have booked five people on a particular route that you wouldn't expect there to be any business class availability. So I'm very excited about that. And she did call me back. We were able to book everything as I had designed the night before. And now we're literally every single flight

is we're together. And the only there's one tiny exception, which is there's a very short, very, very short flight at the end of the trip where we're at two different times on the same airline. And so I'm watching the award space to open up so I can move hopefully my ticket to match hers. And that's free to change with ANA. So that's not a problem. And so this was a big relief. She waited on the phone with me while it was actually ticketed so that there wouldn't be another issue like was before. And that was great because the next day I was flying off to Miraval, Berkshires to have a nice, relaxing, stress-free weekend. And if I had this award not booked going into that weekend, it would not have been a stress-free, relaxing weekend. So that was terrific. And then on Saturday, I flew to the Miraval and I was waiting in line

to check in and ANA called me again. Your heart has to just sink at this point, right? You're like, no, don't call me again. It's so scary when they call. And it was scarier when they told me why they were calling. They said that United had canceled my segment. One of the segments was on United. And they didn't cancel the flight. They had canceled me, like my part of it. And they were like, no, Greg is canceled.

The frequent miler is canceled. The note in the computer to ANA was duplicate booking. So, you know, here's me on the phone outside Miraval. What are they talking about? At first, I started to blame ANA. I was saying, well, if there's a duplicate booking, you must have put it through twice because obviously I didn't book the around the world thing twice for me. But then I remembered that early on in my research, I had found some award flights that I thought, oh, I might want to use these for my Round the World Award. Let me use my United miles to just kind of hold these awards for now and hope that if I decide to use them later and cancel the United Award, hope that it'll go back in inventory so I could book it with ANA. And so there was only one of these left and it happened to be on the same date as the segment. So it wasn't actually flying United. It was just that I booked through United, but United knew about this, knew I was supposed to be flying on that date and didn't want me to book a new

flight on that date. I, while we were on the phone, I used the mobile app to cancel that dummy award. And the ANA rep said she would call United and try to push it back through, get it reticketed. And she said, if I get an email with the confirmation, then it's all good. Otherwise, she would call me later to try to figure it out. I did get the confirmation a couple hours later. So shoot. Thank goodness for that. Yeah. Yeah. But you know what? I'm still kind of on edge because so I can log into ANA. I see that it says it's ticketed. I could see my, you know, all the tickets are there, but that was true before, before it said it was

ticketed before she called and said United had canceled one segment. So, yeah, it's scary. But I think. And Mirabal's not the place where you want to be waiting and wondering if somebody is going to call you, right? Because, I mean, I saw that picture of your phone. It was like, you know, tucked away and asleep, right? So, I mean, you can't have your phone everywhere at Mirabal, right? They really encourage you to put away your mobile devices for the whole time you're there and not look at them.

I didn't quite do that. I was able to relax once it was re-ticketed. That's nice. And the other nice thing is once it was all set, I was able to book all my hotels finally. So I now have all five of my certificates in use and my Marriott points, which I had earned from doing the minimum spend for the signup bonus. I have that in use. And I have choice points in use for additional nights. And on top of that one night booked with cash. So I have quite a lot of hotel stays going on on my trip. Very good. That's exciting. Well, that really did make the difference for me too. It's like,

once I got the flights set, then I could start locking in on some hotels because I was a little hesitant. I had booked some hotels speculatively thinking, oh, maybe I'll be able to use this or that or blah, blah, blah. But then I kind of stopped doing that because I kept changing my plans and I just didn't want to have too many things to go back and cancel. So it definitely was a big relief once I got the flight squared away. I was like, okay, now I can really focus and hone in on the hotels. So totally understand that. And I think it's a really interesting situation you described with your United cancellation or ANA cancellation canceled by United there, because people I think have often asked that type of question. Like, can you book two flights on the same day and decide later which one you want to keep? And you may be able to get away with it for

some amount of time, but I think most airlines will eventually cancel one of those. And so my advice on that is usually not to do it because you don't know which one they're going to cancel and it might end up being the one you really wanted. So I know Southwest will do that. Eventually they'll cancel and it'll usually be in the middle of the night and you don't know if it's going to be the one that you wanted them to cancel or not. So you can't really mess around with that. I did kind of live on the edge a little bit with American Airlines with that with a couple of awards I booked. And I was nervous about that because I had two totally different flights on the same partner airline on the same day. And I thought at some point,

either American or the partner is going to look at this and say, you can't be on both these flights. So I did make an effort to cancel that relatively soon after being double booked, so to speak, because I didn't want to chance any problems with it. Yeah, that's smart. It just never occurred to me that that might happen. And so I'm going to be much more careful going forward for anything like this. All right. So that's our three cards, three continents, three updates. I think that means it's time for the main event.

And that was a great segue because we were just talking all about ANA and the main event today is about ANA. Which is the best Amex transfer partner, Air Canada Aeroplan or ANA? And And, you know, it is I think it's worth mentioning. I think those are the two top candidates of Amex transfer partners. If you're going to if you're going to pick one as as like the single best, I can't think of any other airline programs that would be good candidates as the best. But but you might argue with me. I mean, I think, I think Avianca Life Miles is a reasonable, you know, honorable mention, but I can understand why it's not considered in the best because you won't always see the flights you want to find and there's high fees and blah, blah, blah, high fees and cancellations and so on and so forth. So,

yeah. So I can understand why we've excluded that, but otherwise, yeah. I mean, I think that these are definitely the two best and I say definitely, and of course, I'm sure there's somebody out there saying, oh, not for me, blah, blah, blah. And that might be true. These are really, I would say, the best airline transfer partners if what you value is premium cabin international travel, because that's really where these shine. If you mostly just want to fly domestically in economy class, these are not probably the best two options for you. Yeah. Yeah. So what we should mention is that both of these are Star Alliance carriers. So that is actually part of the reason why they're so useful is that Star Alliance is the biggest airline alliance. There are so many airlines in it that finding award space within Star Alliance is so much easier than One World or SkyTeam.

So that's a really useful thing. But they have a lot of differences, these two programs. They sure do. For being the two most valuable, they do have a lot not in common. The opposite of in common. They really do. They really do. Let's talk about the first part. We were talking about them as transfer partners. When you transfer from Amex to one of these programs,

the first thing you'll notice is how long it takes. And this is a place where I can't really argue ANA is the best. No, you can't really. No, you definitely can't. No, because Aeroplan, Air Canada Aeroplan transfers are instant. So if you transfer your miles from Amex to Air Canada, they're in there right away in your account. Now, I will say that somebody recently said that they did that and they could see the balance, but then they weren't able to ticket something online. But when I booked my award over the phone, I didn't have enough miles in my aeroplane account. I transferred from American Express while I was on the phone and immediately the agent saw that transfer and was able to ticket the flight. So I think that at the very least, you could take it immediately over the phone and probably within a few minutes online anyway. So that's nice because

ANA isn't that way. No, right. It is not that way. And compared to ANA, it's not just nice. It can be essential. ANA can take anywhere from a day to three days for the transfer to complete. And if you've been waiting to book an award that is rare and you have to wait three days and hope that it's still there, that is not a fun situation. You might think, oh gee, I should have just transferred to Aeroplan

or to LifeMiles, as you said, and booked it from one of those programs. Yeah, so that's definitely a pain point. However, I'm going to do your job for you, Greg. And I'm going to say, but if you're booking a round the world award, we have learned from this guy, Greg, the frequent miler, that you can put some awards on hold. Do you need to have the miles in your account already in order to put them on hold? Or could you put them on hold and then transfer over? Wow. I think you could put them on hold without the miles, but I didn't test that because I already had the miles in my account. So I'm not 100% sure. But the other thing I learned from all of that is that a hold doesn't hold as tightly as you would hope. So I had an award on hold at one point. And when I went to try to ticket it,

I was already near the end of the 72-hour hold. And what I didn't sort of factor into all this is that there's a gap in time between when you call and they actually go to ticket what you called about. So in that gap in time, the award disappeared. So yeah. And there's also a bit of mystery about how long holds are for. It seems to vary based on which airlines are in your itinerary. And so it can be as little as 24 hours or up to 72 hours, apparently. Well, and I should make a point on that too, when you mentioned that it didn't hold as tightly as

you expected it to. I had that problem happen with American Airlines once with a, I can't remember if it was Japan Airlines or a Cathay Pacific flight that I put on hold and I got a five-day hold and I called back like two days later or three days later. And they said that the hold was released by the partner airline and it was gone, availability was gone. So I called back like two days later or three days later. And they said that the hold was released by the partner airline and it was gone. Availability was gone. So I think that those holds in general aren't necessarily airtight. It's why I'm always a little hesitant with a hold. Although that said, I've had lots of holds that have held the way you would expect. So maybe my hesitation is not necessary. So it necessary, but, but so it may be possible as well.

I say there may be possible to put an award on hold anyway, and hope for the best and transfer over the miles. So that may be better to do it before, before doing the transfer, not doing it. If it's an option, it's not going to hurt you if you can do it. So, so that may be less of a problem than it sounds like. Now, ANA hasn't been known for holds in the past. So I don't know for sure whether that's possible if you're not booking around the world. Because what Greg found was that some partners you could hold for longer than others, right? And some partners, maybe you couldn't hold at all, you found, like around

the world. So I wonder if it's always been possible to put some partner awards on hold and just people have assumed not because the partners that people tried in the beginning couldn't have a hold or whatever. So I don't know. It might be worth calling and checking. But anyway, so that could be less of a limitation. But overall, I mean, you got to hand it to Air Canada there. So transfer time, Air Canada is a winner. Right, right. Now we get to award charts. So ANA has a spectacular award chart for their own flights. If you want to fly business class to Asia on ANA, especially in the low season.

What is it again from the US? 75,000 miles round trip. Round trip. You know, hello, you out there just round trip 75000 miles in business class from from the U.S. to Japan and low season in like regular season, 85000 and high season. It's 90000 round trip. So and to add on to that, like I've booked it during cherry blossom season and that's been low, like low time, 75,000 during cherry blossoms. So it's like the low time and the regular time are more prevalent than you would expect. You would think, oh, okay, well peak time must be like all the

times you want to visit Japan. And it's just not the case. So you can do really well there. And even if you were paying 90,000, 45 K each way, what, I mean, most programs charge 80 or 90,000, 45K each way. What? I mean, most programs charge 80 or 90,000 each way, right? I mean, there's at least five. So it's a great deal. It's a great deal. And their Star Alliance award charts are not that much worse. So you can fly round trip all the way to South Africa, for example, for what is 104,000 miles round trip, round trip in business class. I mean, yeah. And again, that's another route where most airlines charge 80,000 one way or so. So that's a fantastic deal.

It really is. Fantastic deal. To Europe from the US round trip, 88,000 miles. I don't remember what Australia is off the top of my head. I think it's 120. I believe 120, if I remember correctly. So yeah, that sounds right. It could be a little bit off, but it's close anyway. And I was surprised actually, when we decided we were going to talk about this today, I Googled an ANA award chart and I didn't actually expect to find an award chart because in the past, I've always found these really complicated. I don't know. You've probably seen them before,

right, Craig? There's like the really complicated page that lists the zone names and everything. And yeah, well, wouldn't you know it? I don't know if this is new, but today I found a regular partner award chart, like the lines, you know, you can find the spots. And I was like, oh, wow. How come I've never seen that before from ANA? So it's actually much easier to see now. Although, of course, it's not North America centric. So it is still a little bit of a chore going through it and figuring out what the prices are to different areas.

But yeah, so great deals to be had there. Yeah, yeah. And 120, by the way, to Australia was correct. the distances, it'll charge you differently, but you can easily build an around the world award for 125,000 miles and a miles. Um, you know, and if you go much further, like you connect to the, uh, Australia or South Africa or whatever, then it's going to be more of the, I don't know the exact buckets, but more closer to one 50 or one 70, regardless, anywhere in that range for around the world business class award is kind of just completely bonkers. So good. No, it is. You couldn't do that with most other programs. You couldn't come close to that pricing. And when we talk about that around the world

award, I mean, you're talking about stops and up to like eight cities and up to 12 segments, I think. Right. So, yeah, I mean, that's amazing for the price. If you were to price that out individually, even with the best of sweet spots between each partner pair, you'd be paying probably double, triple, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's it's just such a amazing deal. And, you know, And for this challenge, I used only 90,000 miles and then used some other currency to sort of fill the gap. Because getting from Asia to Europe, for example, I filled that in with a different currency to fly different airlines. But the idea to get most of the way around the world for only 90,000 miles in business class, unbelievable. You just can't beat that.

So from an award chart point of view, ANA over Air Canada, I think easily. It looks really good. Yeah, I think, and maybe there's an exception I missed, but I think that every single award chart spot on the ANA chart, I think they price better than Air Canada on everything. You know, it doesn't really whether we want to go to Europe or you want to go to Asia or you want to go to even South America, it's eighty eight thousand round trip in business with ANA, whereas with Air Canada, you're going to pay a minimum of fifty

thousand each way for a business class flight to South America. And it might be $60,000 depending on how far you're flying. So I mean, that's a huge difference, right? If you end up paying $60,000 each way via Aeroplan to fly business class round trip to South America, and you're looking at $120,000 round trip versus $88,000 round trip with ANA. Same is true with Europe. You're going to probably pay almost as much each way with Air Canada as you would pay with ANA. So the award chart, it's hard to argue. That's a true story.

Great award chart. Right. Okay. Now let's get into which airline do you think has the better, which program has better one-way award pricing? Well, you know, Aeroplan overall, probably. Although I say that and you could end up probably saving miles booking a round trip with ANA and just throwing away the return, right? You know? Yeah. You know what?

Yeah. You know what? Yeah. So Nick is saying that because ANA won't let you book a one-way award. You have to book a round trip or around the world. You can be clever about things. So, for example, I once booked. I had to cancel it, but I wanted a one-way award to Japan and ANA had better award space than was available through partners. So I couldn't have booked this ANA flight with Air Canada miles at the time because they weren't releasing the space I needed to partners. And so what I was able to do was book one way in business class,

return an economy, and that brings the price down even below the 75K round trip. And then you can make it even cheaper by going back to Hawaii rather than to the mainline US. So the throwaway leg is shorter. They have a different word chart for that segment. And so you definitely can, when it kind of works out like that, you can engineer it to be as cheap or maybe cheaper than other airlines, including Air Canada. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you look up like a JFK to Tokyo, that's 6,745 miles flown. So with Air Canada, booking that would cost you 75,000 miles one way. So that's if you just want to fly in New York to Japan, then it costs you $75,000 one way.

And you could potentially book that as a round trip with ANA, have access to more availability. And even if you don't fly the return flight to the United States, if you pay the full $75,000 round trip and you just don't fly the return flight to the United States, you might have come out a winner because you were able to access more award availability. Now, if you're going to connect onward and go somewhere else in Asia from there, then you can almost certainly do better with ANA because Aeroplan is going to charge you upwards of $105,000 each way, depending on how far you're traveling. And so you might be much better off booking that 90,000 mile round trip with ANA and saving yourself 15,000 miles, even if you don't fly the return ticket. So, so I think that the best for true one-way awards, obviously is Air Canada because ANA doesn't allow one-way bookings. They require round trip bookings, but if you're willing to be a little creative, then at least there's some competition there. It's like, and it can still be a good option.

Yeah. Right. Right. Let's just out of curiosity, cause I mentioned earlier, what a great deal, um, flying to South Africa is a really anywhere in Africa for 104,000 round trip. What would air Canada costs to go, uh, to South Africa one way? That's a good question. So one way, so let's, let's make up a route. I mean, let's let's let's say you get really lucky and you're able to find availability on the JFK to Cape Town route and you want to go to Cape Town. Right. So that's about as short as it's going to get from the United States. So that would be almost seventy eight hundred miles one way. So with the short seventy eight. So that would be 85,000 miles each way with Aeroplan. So booking a round trip isn't necessarily going to be cheaper with ANA yet. But the most you'll, so the most you'll pay with Aeroplan is a hundred thousand if it was more than 8,000 miles flown.

So you still wouldn't come ahead with ANA there unless you actually fly around. So one way you still won't come out ahead with ANA there. All right. All right. Well, it can get close. I mean, that's very close. It sounds like.

It's 104. It's very close. Yeah. So ANA, I think, got some strength, but Air Canada is going to be much simpler if you just only found availability one way and you just want to book one way. Absolutely.

Absolutely. All right. Now, here I don't think ANA is going to be able to book a one way. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Now, here, I don't think ANA is going to be able to narrow the gap on this one maybe, but pass along fuel surcharges imposed by the carriers. ANA does and Air Canada does not. So if you're going to book, for example, Lufthansa or Swiss Airlines international business class, where the fuel surcharges might be $800 one way, ANA is going to charge you. Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely true. So that's a problem. That's a problem for ANA because you're going to get hit with those fuel surcharges. So you're not going

to want to fly Lufthansa and Swiss and Austrian. And the problem with that, of course, is that those are the airlines that most frequently have award availability between the United States and Europe. So if you want to fly to Europe, it's a little difficult to avoid those. It's not impossible. You can fly a lot Polish, and I found a decent amount of availability with them lately. And their surcharges are like 100 bucks each way. You fly United with no fuel surcharges. Fly tap air Portugal with no fuel surcharges. Uh, you can fly SAS. I believe there's no fuel surcharges on SAS, not positive. I'm

pretty sure that's true. Uh, so you do have some options, but of course, like, I don't know, when was the last time you saw SAS business class award availability? I actually saw some recently, but it's not common. It's not common to find. So, and United again, you know, it's like, you may find it, you may get lucky if you're using seat spy, maybe you'll find an award seat here or there, but you got to get really lucky. Tap Air Portugal is a little bit easier, but then, you know, you have to deal with tap errors, inefficiencies sometimes. So I actually liked the seat quite a bit and I thought the service was fine, but the ground game in Lisbon left a lot to be desired. So, uh, so, uh, you definitely limit

yourself. Whereas with Air Canada, of course, the nice thing is you're not going to pay fuel surcharges with anybody, but whoever you want with Air Canada and not have to worry about that at all, all you got to pay is the taxes. So that makes a huge difference because if you book Lufthansa or Swiss, you're going to pay just whatever the airport taxes are that you need to pay. So maybe if you're booking a round trip to Europe, it may still cost you $150 or something because those departure or $100 as departure taxes from Europe do add up a little bit no matter what. But not going to cost you anywhere near the $700 or $800 that you may pay if you book via ANA. Right, right. that you may pay if you book via ANA. Right. And with ANA, it's really hard to figure out exactly what the fuel surcharges being passed along for a single segment is because of the

requirement to book round trip. You can't tell if you're booking online, well, is it being, you know, okay, I can see that there's like $400 in fees. Is half of that for the outbound segment and half for the return? We don't know. You know, there's just no easy way to find out. And there's also some variance because when Greg brought this up, just before the show, I said, but is that a big deal? I mean, how many airlines does that really eliminate for you? Just a couple, Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian, right? And he said, oh no, there's others because Turkish has got fuel surcharges. And I always thought of them as being kind of moderate, but I don't know if they increased or I just was mistaken with my labeling them moderate because they have been higher, I've noticed too, when

I've looked in recent times. So that becomes an issue. And then the other interesting thing is there are some airlines that have surcharges sometimes and not others. I mean, you discovered that with United, right? That there are some routes where United still charges surcharges. If you're flying to Japan and Japan's your endpoint, then you're going to get hit with high fuel surcharges. If you fly through Japan, though, and onward to somewhere else, it may be considerably less. And Greg mentioned Ethiopia, and they had high surcharges. And I said, oh, I looked at an Ethiopian award for the three cards, three continents, VA and A, and there were no fuel surcharges on the award that I looked at.

And I know that because I looked at other programs that don't charge fuel surcharges and the total was exactly the same in terms of how much it was going to cost. So it may even vary by route with other carriers too in different parts of the world, blah, blah, blah. And the problem is you don't know when that's going to happen unless you're an expert in this stuff. And obviously Greg and I have booked a lot of awards and I didn't know that Ethiopian had fuel surcharges and he didn't know there were routes where they didn't. So the average person I feel like is unlikely to master that end of things. It's going to be a lot of hunting around and being frustrated by surcharges with an agent that apparently can't

tell you which airlines have the surcharges, right? Were you able to extract that information? Oh, yeah. The agent, it was like a mystery. They can sort of go away for a moment and estimate them somehow and then come back and tell you, but they can't tell you, at least for the Around the World Award, they would just tell me overall, here's how much the taxes and fees come to. And they didn't give me any info about the individual segments so you have to kind of piece it together you know like if you had if you had an award and then add in another segment and then it changes very drastically the fees and yeah then you could but you know i don't want

to scare people away from a and a all together because there are quite a few star alliance airlines they don't have any surcharges i mean obviously greg had to put together this three cards three continents around the world award with 90 000 miles without using very much money so obviously he's found enough to get most of the way around the world without paying an exorbitant amount of surcharges so it's certainly possible that's right let's take some effort yes it is it is it is possible it's just it would be really nice to have those additional options available when booking around the world. And unless you want to pay an exorbitant amount, as Nick said, you've got to leave out Lufthansa, Swiss. What was the other one in that alliance?

Austria. Yeah. So, you know, I'm going to skip us out of order here because when you, when you said it, it'd be nice to have those additional options. I feel like that has to segue into the number of partners that they have. And so that's an area where Air Canada Aeroplan just is leaps and bounds ahead of everybody, like everybody. So I think I just counted 48 airline partners on their website. You can double check the math because I had the number 41 in my mind, but I just counted up the number of logos.

So maybe there's a couple of things in there that don't have many flights, but I counted 48 partners anyway on their website. Certainly more than 40. It's not just the 26 in the Star Alliance. You can fly tons of different airline partners, some of which you might be able to book via some programs, but you can't book all of those partners via anyone. And while ANA also allows you to mix and match their Star Alliance partners, ANA will not allow you, I believe anyway, to mix and match their non-alliance partners with Star Alliance partners on a single award. Whereas Air Canada Aeroplan will let you mix and match just about anybody. And I say just about because I ran into some roadblocks and trying to book complex awards

where certain flights couldn't be combined and nobody could figure out why. But yet the award that I eventually ticketed is flying on a number of different partners, both some Star Alliance and some non-Star Alliance. So it's not that you can't mix and match the two. a number of different partners, both some Star Alliance and some non-Star Alliance. So it's not that you can't mix and match the two. So it's nice because that gives you tons of reach. I mean, already we said the two best anti-transfer partners are ones that are members of the Star Alliance. And the reason we said that is because there are so many airlines in the Star Alliance,

it has much more reach than other alliances. So you already just automatically from Star Alliance have a lot more options for finding awards. And then you take that and put it on steroids with Air Canada Aeroplan by adding in all of these additional partners. And you can get to just about any corner of the world, it seems, using your Air Canada miles, just about. You sure can. And if you look at the Middle East and look at how many Star Alliance carriers are based in the Middle East, I think the number is very close to zero. Very close, infinitely close, in fact, to zero. Whereas Air Canada has some very nice partners there. Most notably, I think, is Ethiopian. But there's, I mean, sorry.

Did geography just go haywire on me here? It sure did. Etihad is, you know, one of the other E carriers. But there's Oman Air, they've got Gulf Air. So Oman Air out of Oman, Gulf Air is out of Bahrain, and Etihad. So they've got all three of those. I mean, that gives you all of the reach of anywhere in the Middle East. And that was interesting to me when I was looking at awards, because there were some connections on some of the a number of other places in the Middle East that I haven't considered visiting before because I've never seen them come up in an award search because I've never found there was a connecting itinerary there. But with Aeroplan, there are because there's just so many options. So and that's not necessarily going to be for everybody in every instance, but it means that you can get to a lot more places.

So, you know, if you have a wide range of places on your bucket list, you can hit them with Eric. Right. And I have to say for my round the world award, um, not having a middle Eastern carrier in the mix really made it, um, really limited what I could do, um, in, in some significant ways. It made some things a lot harder. And I think I could have... Well, just for example, I found a Marriott property in... I think it was in Jordan that looked really awesome. I would have loved to try it. And it was just too hard to get there. And so, you know, because of me committing to this round the world award and, you know, with Air Canada, of course, and it's not just the Middle Eastern carriers, you know, they've got all sorts of other interesting partners.

Like I wrote a little bit about Mauritius and Air Mauritius, which is a partner of theirs. So, I mean, that's another option that it doesn't give you tons and tons of flights to get there and out, but you got options from London and Paris to get to Mauritius. You can get to Mauritius, of course, from South Africa also, and from India. And so when you mix those together and you, you know, you were able to mix different partners on a single ticket, you can get just a wide range of places. So that I find particularly exciting. And it's particularly exciting because Aeroplan not only allows that, but they also will get into stopovers in a minute and long layovers and really wacky routings. Whereas most programs will kind of limit how crazy you can get with your routing. Aeroplan really doesn't. And we'll probably get more into that in a second.

But that's an advantage of having the multiple partners that when they're also flexible on those routings to not just a lot of because like American Airlines has a few interesting partners, but their routing rules are such a pain that there's a lot of things you can't do, even though they've got great partners. Right. Air Canada doesn't have that limitation. They have great partnerships and great rules. that's actually a really good point um all right let's move into stopovers so uh ana i believe allows one free stopover on a round trip award um and of course allows lots of them on

around the world award but that's the whole point of around the World Award. I mean, Air Canada has a different approach to that. They do. They allow a stopover on a one-way. You have to pay 5,000 miles. So you pay an additional 5,000 miles, and you can have a stopover on a one-way. Of course, you're still going to pay taxes, and that may change a little bit with a stopover because you'll owe some additional taxes probably. But that's a great deal because you could get two then on a round trip. So you get easy stopovers. And again, they allow really flexible routing. So for instance, for my three segments on a one-way award, but Aeroplan allows up to six. And they're really good about letting you

piece together what you want. So I have long stops in five different places on a single one-way. So it's going to take me five days to get to my end point for my first one way. So and that's not because I couldn't have gotten there sooner. It's because I wanted to visit a bunch of places. And some people say, oh, but I don't want to visit a place for less than 24 hours. And I'll look at it and say, but I'd rather visit it for almost 24 hours than not visit it at all and get to see a little something interesting along the way. So that excites me. It won't fit everybody's style, but I think that between being able to have one stopover on a one-way for 5,000 miles and the ability to piece together the award you like with long stops to be able to visit a couple of places, I think that's just a fantastic combination. When you add in then the fact that they've got

all of these additional partners that other people don't, it just gets pretty exciting in my opinion. It sure does. So, and just to clarify in case people aren't familiar with this, that in general, a stopover is like when you stop for more than 24 hours and a layover is when it's less than 24 hours and no programs charge you for a layover. Because of course, if you're connecting somewhere, there's going to be some amount of time in between the two flights. But where it does get confusing is some programs, like if you have a layover in the US,

they might not allow one longer than let's say four hours or else they're going to act like it's two separate awards. Yep. Yep. And so that I find interesting. Also, it's worth noting here when we talk about partnerships, too, and it's kind of backing up a step. But Aeroplan has some partners that you might be familiar with because you've seen them on United.com. And maybe because, you know, if you've been used to booking Star or your award tickets through United, you may assume that some carriers are in the Star Alliance that aren't, like Eurowings, for instance. Not a Star Alliance carrier, at least I don't believe so, but they are bookable via Aeroplan or via United. Vistar is another good one that you'll see their flights. It's an Indian airline. You'll see their flights

at United, but you can't necessarily book them, for instance, with ANA miles, however you can with Aeroplan. So there's a number of partnerships in there too, that I think add to that piece a little bit. Quite a few South American airlines too. They've like Gol and Azul out of Brazil. So there's a lot of these different pieces of the puzzle that play nicely together with that. It sure does. Wow. All right. Let's talk about award space for members. So if you want to fly that airline, if you want to fly ANA, ANA releases more award space for their own members. And if you want to fly Air Canada, that's that's true there, too. But it does one or the other have an advantage? I think ANA has a clear advantage there because yes, Aeroplan offers more space to their own

members, but not at good prices. They offer more space to their own members. Well, I take that back. I shouldn't say that. They do sometimes have discounted rates on their own flights. So there are times where you'll pay fewer miles for Air Canada flights. But what I've noticed more so in my award searches, and maybe it's the routes that I've been searching, is that there's access to seats on Air Canada flights, but they charge a lot more miles for it. Whereas with ANA, you either got availability or you don't. Is there an anytime award price with ANA? Maybe you're more familiar. Maybe you've done more searches. No, no. Yeah, so it's just the price. They release more space to their members, but the price is what the price is.

Yeah, it's not like Air Canada where you can book. I think you could book any seat anytime on their own flights, but the pricing is going to vary all over the place. Sometimes it can be very good pricing as you said um i think what it comes down to you can't really i don't think you could really sort of compare here because it depends what you want to do if if you if you really want to fly a particular air canada route then yeah you're gonna have much better luck finding that and booking that with air Canada, uh, as own miles. Uh, but if you really want to fly a and a, um, let's say you really want to try out their, their best business class in the sky called the room, I think it's called, or, um, then, you know, your best chance of finding availability is with a and a miles. Yeah, that's a good point.

Good point. All right, so that hits that part. And what's our next piece here? We have another piece here? Yeah, we do. Change fees. Well, that's a place where ANA has a clear advantage. Yeah.

ANA, to make a change or to cancel and redeposit your miles, you pay 3,000 ANA miles.'s, that's super, super nice because 3000 miles, you're talking 3000 membership rewards points. So the equivalent of, you know, I, if you were to cash the points out for your Schwab, that's $33, right? So not a particularly expensive change fee. Whereas Air Canada, I think it's $125. I try not to look at that. Yeah, I don't remember exactly what it is, but I know it's up there. I'm pretty sure it's... I would have guessed higher. I'm pretty sure it was $125. Because the thing about this was that they were offering free changes during the pandemic, and then they decided they were going to stop that. And so if you had booked

something before the 5th of July of this year, so before July 5th, 2022, you get one free change still. So even now you could still do one free change if you booked it before July 5th. But things after July 5th, now you're going to be paying the Air Canada change fee. And that's painful because whether you want to change or cancel, then you're going to end up with a high fee. And that stinks. That's reminiscent of the way things used to be with the United States-based carriers. And they've all moved away from that.

And I would love to see Aeroplan move away from that in the future as well, because that's the one area where I think they're really lacking. Yeah, yeah. All right. Now, mileage expiry. So with ANA, you transfer from Amex to ANA, and you've got three full years to use those miles before they expire. That's right. I used to say there's no way to extend those miles, you know, unlike most programs. But if you introduce a global pandemic. Time your transfer right before a global pandemic and you're all set. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So what about Air Canada?

You know, to be honest, I don't know. Do you know the expiration policy? I forgot to check that. I don't know off the top of my head, but I believe that any activity in the account of using miles or earning more miles will reset the clock as most programs work that way. At least most North American programs, I guess. 18 months of inactivity. So you have to make a transfer once every 18 months. So what I am going to start doing now, because now I've got more miles and different programs than I used to, is just, I think twice a year, I'm going to go in, take a look at all the expiration dates, just set a day twice a year and say, okay, I'm going to

check everything out, transfer over the miles for whatever accounts I need to keep alive, the thousand miles or whatever, because I want to make sure that I keep stuff active once or twice a year. So why don't you use the word? Well, yes, I do. But if I miss that notification, I, you know, I, I find it better to set a day and first of the year, first of June, take a look, make sure nothing's set to expire in the next six months. And if it is just transfer over. Gotcha. Not, not a bad, not a bad way to do it. So, I mean, transferring isn't always the best way. Single best way. Right. I mean, in some cases you might,

you might've already been able to use the miles and reset the clock that way or, or some programs you might be able to book an award and cancel it and that might reset the expiration i don't know whether that could reset it in some cases uh sometimes you might want to shop through like a mileage portal and earn a single mile or something but um but transferring is the easiest so if you have a lot of transferable points you just say i'm just gonna move a thousand more points over. One program where I do regularly do that is with Avianca Life Miles, which expire in only one year. Preston Pyshko, Found that out the hard way. Jeff Ross, MD, Yeah. And using the miles does not reset the clock. It's gaining more miles that resets it. So what I try to do is anytime there's a transfer bonus and it's been

at least six months or longer since I've reset my life miles, then I'll transfer a thousand points over and I get a little bit more than a thousand points. They're transfer partners with most of the transfer roll points program. So it's pretty common for you to see that. Truth be told, Avianca is the airline that inspired that strategy because not only did I get burned by them earlier this year, I guess it was, or it was the last year where I had miles expire. But then also now since Brax offered a transfer bonus, Brax, of course, accounts are closing down here in a couple of days and they offered a transfer bonus from Brax to Avianca Life

Miles. And so I took them up on that. I didn't realize how many Brex points we still had. So I was kind of pleasantly surprised by the fact that we had more Brex points than I thought we did. But that means that I now have enough Avianca Life Miles that I really want to protect those from expiring. So yeah, so I do what I can to transfer in a little bit. That's a good strategy when When there's a transfer bonus, all right, go ahead and move 1,000 miles over

and keep them alive. That one particular Avianca Life miles, I think that really applies. Air Canada is pretty easy though. They got a shopping portal. So like Greg said, you could just buy something really small through the shopping portal once or twice a year

and make sure you keep your miles alive. So mileage expiration policy, hands down goes to Aeroplan because in normal times, your ANA miles expire after three years. No way to extend them unless you've got like the super diamond platinum status of ANA. If you're like top, top tier, I think there's some way to extend, but otherwise there's not. Yeah. All right. Finally, we didn't have this on our notes to go over, but do you happen to know ANA's lap infant policy, what they charge for that? Whereas we know Air Canada. Yes. So I, yes and no, no, I'm not remembering, but I remember now, I believe I'm going to double

check this while Greg talks about Air Canada's cause I think he knows that one is that I believe they now give you the option to pay 10% of the revenue fair or 10% of the mileage. The last time I booked a lap infant with ANA, it was 10% of the revenue fair, but then I believe that changed in not that distant past here. So I believe now you can pay 10% of the award fee. So that's very good, but not as good as Air Canada. But not as good as Air Canada, right? Air Canada, if I remember right, it's like 3,000 miles or $30 Canadian. 2,500 miles.

Yeah, or $25 Canadian. That's fantastic. And especially if you're booking a round-trip award and you pay just 2,500 miles for the lap infant, that's insane. Yeah, that's great. And it is 10% of the mileage fare with ANA, which is, again, much better

than paying 10% of the revenue fare. A couple of years ago, I messed up and I thought I had added the lap infant. I realized a couple of days before my flight, I hadn't. So I had to pay 10% of a business class fare, like two or three days before departure with ANA. That was painful in order to have the honor of a baby on your lap the whole way. So 2,500 miles with Aeroplan is just incredible. That's as good as it gets. So if you're going to travel with a baby, Aeroplan is the ticket. Right. Yeah. So it's kind of interesting as I think about the different categories that we compared and contrasted these two programs on, in most cases, ANA wins on pricing, meaning like the award price is less, the change fee is

less, but it loses on convenience or Air Canada wins on convenience of being able to book all these different partners, being able to book one ways with stopovers, being able to get your points very quickly from Amex when you transfer. There's a lot of things like that. Air Canada, though, does win on pricing on both the lap infant thing and on fuel surcharges, and potentially in a very big way on that later one. So I don't know. Have we come up with a single winner here?

You know, it's hard to say because I think ANA is my favorite Amex transfer partner, but that said, I've become much more of a fan of aeroplan. And so I think that if you like, especially if you like trying different airlines and premium cabins, if that's kind of your thing, you enjoy that aspect of your trip, because for a lot of people that are into award travel, well, I should say for certainly a segment of people, which might be very large, award travel is just a way to get to where it is they want to go. And they don't really care so much about the details of the award travel. They care about getting someplace and seeing something and doing something. But then there's also a very large

segment of people who are like, this is fun. I want to fly all the various premium cabins that I can. And they enjoy that part of it, the different planes and the different premium cabins and the different airlines and different champagne and whatever else. And so if you're into that part of it, then I feel like Air Canada is a lot of fun. So yeah, I don't know if I could only pick one. I guess I'd have to go with Air Canada because those fuel surcharges could really add up over time. But I'm willing to hunt around for those exceptions with ANA. And I hope that one day I can book this round the world award. So I'm glad I don't have to pick. What about you, Greg? Do you have an answer? Yeah. Yeah. That's a true story. I'm glad I don't have to pick. I would pick Air Canada if I had to pick just one. Now, part of that, so I highly value nonstop flights or fewer connections. And out of Detroit, which is my home base airport, there's one long distance international flight. That's Lufthansa. I'm never going to book that with ANA miles. But, you know, I could see booking that with Air Canada miles, especially if I'm going,

you know, take advantage of a one way stopover. No, I mean, cause like that's only convenient for you if you're going to Germany. Right. So if you're gonna go anywhere other than Germany, you're going to have to then connect in Germany. So why not connect in New York and fly whatever airline you want? Like it's one. Well, cause I mean, most, most trips are still going to be another connection from New York, depending on where I'm going long distance. So, yeah. So, you know,

Lufthansa from Frankfurt has, you know, goes everywhere in the world pretty much. And so you could get there in one stop just about anywhere in the world that way. Not so much if I have to first stop somewhere else in the US, but you're right to some extent. Anywhere from New York, nonstop just about, right? I mean, like any major city. Obviously, that's not going to be true if you want to go to like a small city in Germany or a small city anywhere, I guess, in Europe. You're not going to have to, like your point stands for that because Lufthansa probably flies there from Frankfurt and you're not going to fly there nonstop from New York. If you want to go to Madrid or you want to go to Rome or you want to go to any of the

major European capitals, for instance, you can be one stop going through New York or one stop going through... That was a horrible example because there isn't a Star Alliance carrier that flies nonstop from New York to Madrid. That was a bad example in hindsight. That's funny. But another reason that's not a perfect example is that there's only one direction you can fly to New York from Detroit on Star Alliance, and that's to Newark on United. And so if your onward flight is out of JFK, that's a big pain in the butt. I am not going to book a international flight where I have to transition airports like that, unless it's an overnight connection. Even that it's kind of, I couldn't do it, but even that that's true. That's true. All right. Good point. You went, I'll give you that. So, so Air Canada for Greg and ANA, you know, sometimes for me,

I'm glad I don't have to pick, but I'd probably pick Air Canada too. If I had to pick one, I guess it'd be Air Canada also. Even though the word pricing won't necessarily be as good as some partners. And I think that's a point worth making that, like, for instance, you would probably pay less for a business class flight to Europe with Avianca LifeMiles than you will with Aeroplanes. So, and you won't pay any fuel surcharges with Avianca LifeMiles either. So if that's your main goal, Aeroplanes probably not going to be the best one for you.

But if you want to get somewhere in the Middle East or in Africa or in some place where Air Canada's partners have more reach, then obviously you're going to be better off with Air Canada. So I think they're my pick. They're my pick. That's it. Yeah. And I'm still hoping that Etud is going to bring back their apartments and if if when they do uh which is their first class product on on their um on their uh boeing on their the a380 a380 aircraft um and it's spectacular um If they bring that back, Air Canada is probably the best way,

easiest way to book it. And so you could potentially fly from the US to Abu Dhabi and then onward, let's say, to Sydney, Australia in this amazing first class product. And if you don't mind doing some connecting around,

then maybe you could fly Oman Air first class and Etihad first class on the same award ticket. I mean, come on. I like that. It'd be terrific. Fantastic value there. And fun. Again, if that's your idea of fun, then I think the fun factor becomes pretty high there. All right. So there we go. There we have it. So I think that brings us to the question of the week. And so this week's question of the week came in and the frequent miler insiders, Facebook group, I saw somebody asked about plastic or plastic, and I don't have the exact question in front of me,

but the essence of the question was this, is it ever worth using for instance, if you can earn two points per dollar with the MX blue business plus, or, um or two points per dollar with a venture card? Is it worth it at the 2.85% fee? And the person who was asking the question said, well, I figure in that case, I'm paying around a penny and a half per point. Should I be using Plastic? Now, if you're not familiar with it, of course, Plastic, or like I said, some people I've heard it pronounced Plastique. Plastic is a service where you pay with a credit card and they send a check for you to whoever it is you're paying. And there are limitations in some cases as to which types of bills you can pay this way. So don't get too excited straight out of the gate. But that said, there are certainly bills you can pay. And so I brought up two cards that are in two points per

dollar everywhere. I should throw the double cash in there too. So you've got three different cards that you can use to pay bills through Pl plastic and earn two points per dollar and essentially be paying one and a half cents or a little less than one and a half cents per point. Is that worth it? Yeah. Yeah. And let me just throw in with the double cash, because that's a master card, they allow more types of payments through plastic and including, for example, mortgage payments that you can make that way. So a lot of people have this potentially very easy way of buying lots of transferable points at, as you said, a little bit less than one and a half cents each. I think if you're, it can make a lot of sense if you're in a situation where you're not otherwise

able or you haven't figured out how to earn lots of transferable points and you'd like to get them then I think that's a very reasonable price to pay if however you are signing up for these Amex credit card offers that keep popping up that are jaw-droppingly big, $150,000, $250,000, you name it, then you might be earning so many that it would be kind of silly to be buying more. And so you have to look at your own situation. One kind of niche thing I want to point out is if you have the Citi Premier card as well as the double cash and you combine those accounts, then you can be buying choice points for less than, you know, 0.75 cents each. And if, so if you have a lot of like, kind of like high value choice hotel bookings in mind,

that could be another way of doing that. Yeah. So, yeah. So yeah. Well, yeah. I'm going to say there's such,

like you said, it depends on your situation. Like, is it worth it to pay like a really small bill and pay that fee where you're not going to earn very many miles? And I wouldn't be too excited about it. But let's say you got a kid in a private school and you're paying 20 or $30,000 a year in tuition or more these days. Right. And so if you're earning two points per dollar, I mean, let's say it's to make the math easy here. Let's say you're paying $44,000 a year in tuition for whatever

it might be. You've got a couple of kids in college or something, right? And so that, if you're earning two points per dollar in the Blue Business Plus, you're talking about 88,000 points there. That's a round trip ticket to Europe. And if you're paying about a penny and a half per point, you're talking about a little over $1,200 that you've spent in fees in order to earn a round trip business class award to Europe. Now, you know, you got fuel surcharges and everything else to worry about. It may not work out to be a great deal, but it certainly could work out to be a pretty good deal. And if instead you use that to fly round trip to Japan at 75,000 miles round trip, I mean, then that type of thing might make sense if it's helping you buy a ticket for a pretty significantly discounted

price in a premium cabin. Same is true if you've got very high tax bills and some people who have businesses may have really high tax bills, or maybe you've sold something in investments or whatever else, and you know, suddenly a chunk of taxes, real estate, whatever it might be, then it could be worth it for those things. But the final thing, really the thing I think that it makes most sense for is for welcome bonuses, not necessarily paying one and a half cents each, but rather when you can't otherwise meet the spend for your welcome bonus, but you realize you can pay this kind of bill or that kind of bill through plastic, then it starts to make sense to pay the two and a half or 2.85% fee. As a, for instance,

my mother-in-law recently bought a car. And so to get the best price to the dealership she went through, she had to finance. But of course, she had the money to pay for the car and didn't want to finance necessarily, just did that in order to get a better price and could pay it off right away. So we paid it off through plastic. And I have the curve card. So what I did was I put that in multiple separate payments using the curve card because of the curve cards go back in time feature, where now, theoretically, at least, I haven't done this yet, but theoretically, we could sign up for a couple new credit cards and go back in time and move some of those charges over to a credit card to instantly meet the welcome bonus requirements and earn a few welcome bonuses by splitting up $20,000 worth of car payments into multiple separate ones. In that kind of a case, it might make sense because I wouldn't have necessarily had that.

That was a big chunk of spend that I wouldn't have had otherwise. And all of a sudden, I could meet a bunch of welcome bonuses that more than pay for the 2.85% fee. Yeah. So at a gross level, I think of the, the points and miles game as like, there's two sides of it. One is like, you, you enjoy like working out all the ways of earning lots of points and miles. And if that's you, then yeah, what Nick just said is really the only reasonable way to use plastic, I think to earn lots of miles. And the other side is you enjoy figuring out great ways of using the points and miles and you enjoy getting great award pricing and all that. And if that's you and you're not interested in the first side, then I could definitely see you

just saying, you know what, it's easier just to put my 2X card on a repeating payment to pay my mortgage or my whatever and pay my tuition bill, whatever it is, and just keep earning miles so that I can concentrate on the redemption side because I know I get great value from my miles. And then if you're not into either side of this, I kind of question why you're listening to our show. Great point there. Great point there. But you're so welcome. And what I didn't mention, but should, is that you can only pay certain types

of bills with certain types of cards. So if you heard this conversation and you got like some light bulbs firing off and you're like, oh, well, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can do that. You should definitely like Google frequent miler plastic complete guide or something like that. And plastic is spelled with a Q. That's why, like I said, some people pronounce it Plastique, P-L-A-S-T-I-Q, because then you'll find that, for instance, you could pay a mortgage payment or a car payment with a MasterCard, but you can't do that with an Amex. You can pay tuition with an Amex. So there are some things that you can do with one card or not. The other taxes you could pay, I think, with just about any card. There are certain issuers, though, that have certain limits and rules.

So you'll want to look up that post so you find all that information. All right. That brings us to the end. If you've enjoyed today's episode and you'd like to get our posts in your inbox each day, you want to go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join one of our email lists. You can follow us on all the various social media. We're on Instagram and YouTube.

And we have a Frequent Miler Insiders group, where you can join and ask questions like that plastic question that just came up. Lots of people in our group had answered that for the person who originally asked. So great place to ask and answer questions there. And if you have further questions for us, you can send those too. Yeah. Well, if you have questions or you have observations that you want to share with us for the giant mailbag segment, send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Thank you, and we'll see you again. Bye, everybody.