Frequent Miler on the Air - Why pay $400 or more for a credit card? | Ep171 | 10-15-22

Episode Date: October 15, 2022

Why would anyone want to pay $400 or more for a credit card? This week, Greg and Nick discuss some of the cards on the market that *may* be worth it and which perks would need to matter to you to make them worth the price of admission. 00:46 Giant Mailbag: ANA's friendly change 4:55 What crazy thing....did Air Canada Aeroplan do this week? 9:51 Awards we booked this week: Greg's United award change to New Zealand and Nick's Marriott booking near Disneyland Paris 24:23 Why pay $400 or more for a credit card? 27:09 Capital One Venture X 33:45 Amex Platinum card 35:33 Amex Business Platinum 37:40 Chase Sapphire Reserve 39:41 US Bank Altitude Reserve 41:35 Amex Delta Reserve 43:28 United Club Infinite 46:10 American Airlines Executive Card 47:28 Chase Ritz-Carlton 50:00 Amex Bonvoy Brilliant 55:51 Amex Hilton Aspire card https://frequentmiler.com/maximize-hilton-resort-credit/ 1:00:38 Question of the Week: What can you do for phone access abroad? (Testing Holafly) 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. Why pay $400 or more for a credit card? That seems like a lot, Greg. There are reasons. It does seem like a lot. There are reasons, believe it or not, that you might want to pay $400 or more. But not all reasons are good reasons. We're going to go over some of the best $400 and up cards and talk about why you might want to pay that much.

And by default, if those aren't reasons for you, that means you probably shouldn't be paying $400 or more for those cards. First, of course, we have the giant mailbag giant mail this week comes from aiden aiden says i have an a a round the world award set for next year that i owe 100 to the information the frequent miler team puts out so i wanted to thank, first of all, for all that you do. Now for the interesting part. One of my segments in the round the world trip was Cairo to Bangkok via Egypt Air. And I got a notice this morning that it was canceled. I called ANA and asked them, could they move me to Cairo through Istanbul to Bangkok through Turkish Airlines. The agent came back and was able to make this happen. I thought this was noteworthy as you're not allowed to change carriers within

an ANA round the world ticket once it's booked. Also, there was no change in terms of taxes and fees, which I thought was interesting, but hey, not going to complain. Anyways, keep up the great work. That's really interesting. So he must have read your post about flying on Turkish Airlines because he knew that the catering would be terrific on that short flight from Cairo to Istanbul. And then he'd get like the real deal from Istanbul to Bangkok, right?

Right. Yeah. So somehow he canceled that Egypt air flight altogether to make this happen. Well done. No, I thought this was great information because I actually wondered about this type of thing. As Aiden says, he's totally right.

Once you book an ANA Around the World Award with ANA, you use ANA miles, but you book Star Alliance carriers. And it's a fantastic deal as far as like number of points required. You just can't beat it. But once you do that, you can't change the carrier, the route, but you can change like the time and day of any flight for free. And I did. I wondered like, well, what would happen if a route got canceled or there was some kind of, you know, operational thing where, where you just couldn't fly that route, what would they do? And it sounds like they'll make sure that things stay good for you. So that's really good to know. It is good to know. It's not surprising that ANA has good service because they do have good customer service. It seems in general, right? I

mean, despite a couple of hiccups that you had, but they weren't really entirely on ANA's end, I guess. Right. So, so yeah, I mean, that's all good news there. So thank you for sharing that little tidbit. The one thing I wondered when I saw this was, did that go beyond the maximum number of segments? Like, I wonder how many segments he had and if adding the additional stop in Istanbul would have exceeded the segments and if they broke that rule too or not, I wonder, because I think you can fly, you know, up to eight stopovers and up exceeded the segments. And if they broke that rule too, or not, I wonder, because I think you can fly, you know, up to eight stopovers and up to 12 segments. Right.

So presumably he didn't have 12. That sounds right to me. So, so anyway. All right. Right. Well, we just don't know. Yeah. We just don't know. Yep. All right. So let's talk about, this just goes to show, you know, that, sorry, I just want to finish this thought that ANA around the world awards are not just a great deal, not just truly bookable since I did it recently, but also there's potentially a little more flexibility than is advertised, at least when things go wrong. So that's great to know.

I think it's a very legitimate, real-world thing that people can do with their miles and get unbelievable value from them. Agreed, agreed. And thank you for submitting that tip, Aiden, because that really is a good tip to know. So very good. Awesome. Well, I think that brings us to what crazy thing. Now, before we get into the real crazy thing, I'm going to say what crazy thing is Nick doing? Nick is coming to you live from a cruise ship. So if you happen to notice any background noise this week, my apologies for that. I'm coming to you live from the port here in Athens, Greece. I'm on Carnival Pride, which we had written about that deal a while back. You can search status cruising for more information about how and why I got here.

Anyway, so if you do hear any background noise, my apologies because I'm on the ship and I can't control any of the background noise. So all that said, let's talk about what crazy thing did Air Canada Aeroplan do this week. Now, I've been on vacation, so I have no idea what they did. Greg, what did Aeroplan do this week? Yeah. Well, to great fanfare, Aeroplan came out with Hotel Saver Awards. And it sounds quite exciting. They've negotiated rates with a whole bunch of hotels, and this includes everything from low-end to extremely high-end hotels. And they allow you to use your aeroplan miles to book these hotels, which that part's not new. I mean, they've allowed that for a while. A lot of airlines let you use their miles to book hotels, but usually at very

poor value. And I should jump in here really quick, because if you were following the Three Cards, Three Continents competition, you may have noticed that I ended up with an extra 5,000 airplane miles that I didn't end up using. They were supposed to be for a stopover that I canceled and changed. And I intended to use those miles to book a hotel because you can use airplane miles. You could. It's long been possible to use airplane miles to book a hotel because you can use Aeroplan miles. You could. It's long been possible to use Aeroplan miles to book a hotel. But the problem was that the value was so poor that I was going to pay more for a hotel than I would if I just booked a different place altogether because the miles were worth so little, at least before.

But they've done something. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So when you search for hotels on Aeroplan's website now, you see a number of them come up with a banner that says hotel savers bucket vary from category one to eight. And the award chart shows that that means they range from 10,000 points to 105,000 points per night. And what, you know, was really notable to me about that is this matched very closely to Marriott's award chart before they canceled their award charts. And yet they included some high-end hotels that go even beyond most of what Marriott includes.

That sounds interesting. And so, yeah, so it was suddenly sounding interesting. Like, wow, so this means, you know, instead of transferring your Amex points, let's say, one-to-one to Marriott to book something, you could instead transfer to Air Canada or transfer from a number of programs to Air Canada and book some hotels within these, you know, word chart bounds. And especially during peak season, when these hotels are way overpriced, you know, you should be able to get in at these low prices. So that all sounded really good until I started exploring. And the first thing I found was, was these rates are not actually so good. So I looked at, I just looked at some real world examples and, you know, tried to calculate what is the value of my aeroplane points if I use them for this hotel.

I compared to like the best price I could find on hotels.com, for example, and found, I think I found one example where the value you got was slightly over one penny per mile, but most of them were considerably less than one cent per mile, which is not good. No, that's not a really good point. But then I thought, well, at least they have this award chart so that when the hotels are way, way overpriced, then you'll get great value. Well, then I looked more closely at the award chart and there's the asterisk. They always get you at the asterisk, don't they?

Yeah, I'll tell you. The asterisk says prices may vary. These are just examples of what the prices might be. So it's not really an award chart at all. Thank you, Arrow Plan, for getting my hopes up and dashing them right away. Well, I mean, none of that is shocking and surprising, but it's nonetheless still disappointing, right? It's too bad. It's because it sounded like it had some promise and you were excited about it. And it's always a disappointment when you get to the end and you're like, oh, yeah,

man, that just stinks. There's no value to be had there. Less than a penny a point. Not that I can say. Unless you're swimming in aeroplan miles, I guess. You're not transferring them in, but you're swimming in aeroplan miles because you've been flying a ton and crediting the aeroplan and you have nothing better to do with your aeroplan miles. Then I guess, I mean, there may be situations where you'll be like, okay, well, I'm not flying anyway,

and I can book this hotel. Perhaps you'll do that, but it doesn't sound like this will be a go-to. I'll tell you who would want to do it. The person who spent a million dollars on an aeroplane card in order to get that free companion for a year, they're not going to be able to spend all those aeroplane miles on flights because they're getting basically flights for two for half price. Right, right, right. So spend it on hotels. They created something for you. Congratulations. That one guy. Million dollar spender on your airplane card. Okay. All right. So that out of the way,

let's talk about awards we booked this week. And I'm pretty sure you're not going to talk about how you booked a hotel through Aeroplan since you're not that million dollar spender. So what have you booked? So I'm actually going to talk about how I changed an award this week. So what happened was a few months ago, United Awards to New Zealand were amazing, like wide open available whenever you wanted to go almost for only 70,000 miles one way in business class. And so I booked for my wife and I to go to New Zealand this winter, which is peak season in New Zealand.

It's summer there and it should be fantastic. And our route had us ending up in Wellington, New Zealand. We had decided though, after planning our trip, that we actually wanted to start in Auckland. So I was going to buy a cheap flight from Wellington to Auckland. But then along the way, so one of our stopovers on this award was in Sydney. So Sydney to Wellington was the last segment. And we got a email saying there's been a change to your flight. And that flight from Sydney to Wellington now was about 10 hours later than originally scheduled. So we'd either be stuck in the Sydney airport for like all day long

and not be able to get to Auckland until a day later. Or I guess we could have gone out to Sydney for a few hours to enjoy that. But I didn't like either of those options. So I called United to see what can be done because I know from, I haven't actually done much of this myself, but I know from plenty of friends that when there are schedule changes of a certain

size, the airline you booked with has a lot of latitude to make things right for you on their own flights. And this was, everything was on United Metal except for that last flight to Wellington. So I called and of course they couldn't do anything about that flight to Wellington or anywhere to New Zealand because they don't have any flights on their own metal and there were no awards available on Air New Zealand. So I asked about, well, could you do something different? Could you fly us instead of going Dallas? No, I'm sorry. Instead of going Houston to Sydney to Wellington, could you fly us San Francisco to Auckland and just stop there? And at first she said, well, we can't do that without repricing the whole thing, which I

didn't want because the 70,000 points was a special pricing. So I said, okay, well, how about if we go San Francisco to Auckland to Wellington? And she looked that up. She said, oh, I could do that, but there's no availability from Auckland to Wellington. And so she talked to a supervisor who was willing to waive that part. So they were able to make the entire change. So I'm going all the way from my home city, Detroit, to San Francisco, to Auckland.

And so it's a way, way better route than we originally booked. The same price. And it's all thanks to the mighty schedule change. And basically this long story is just a way of saying when you get a schedule change and if it's significant in some way, either because you have a much longer layover or even better, if they made it a shorter layover to where it's sort of an illegal routing because you don't have enough time at the airport to change gates, then definitely call them up and suggest a better route. Do some homework ahead of time to see where does this airline that I booked with fly that meets my needs and call them up and say,

well, could you do this instead? And I can't guarantee it'll work in all cases, but it worked for me with United. I've heard positive cases with Delta as well. So definitely worth it. I think the really big point here to highlight that Greg said a few times, but I'm going to highlight again is the airline you booked with is the airline that is where they get the latitude. So United, for instance, was not going to be able to open up award seats on Air New Zealand or, you know, Qantas, which they don't even partner with, or Thai or something like that. They can only do that on their own flights.

So, I mean, if you booked somewhere that they don't even fly, like I don't think they fly to Doha. So if you had an award flight to Doha booked on some other carrier, United is not going to be able to do anything for you beyond whatever you see in terms of award availability with other carriers. But in this case, Greg knew that United does fly to Auckland. They fly there from San Francisco and that they would have the

capability, whether or not the willingness they had, they would have the capability to put them on that flight. So that's, that's what happened. So again, you know, again, that's just, just for your, to keep in mind that they're not going to be able to move mountains and make magic happen with other carriers, probably. Yeah, no, very good point to stress that. The other thing I want to mention in case it wasn't obvious is if I had looked for award availability from San Francisco to Auckland, there would not have been any. I know that with 100% confidence, even though I didn't necessarily actually look for that. There just never is. So they're able to book you into what is only available for revenue purchases in these exceptional circumstances without changing how much you paid.

On their own flights. Exactly. On their own metal. Good. On their own flights yep all right excellent well i realized i skipped over what oh actually you know what i didn't do my my award i booked this week hang on let me back up right real quick what award did nick book this week well so uh quickly actually i had two so i'm going to quickly just very very quickly talk about two so number one uh actually last week i booked a vacation rental marriott vacation Vacation Club property that's near Paris Disneyland because I wanted to go to Disneyland. I was in Paris for a few days last week.

And so I booked that like day before or day of or something like that. And the base price, whatever that whatever showed up in search results was like 30,200 points. And that wasn't available. However, I was able to book a room for 40,200 points, which wasn't the most amazing value ever compared to cash rates, but it was acceptable. It was decent. It was better than the eight cents of a cent or whatever it is. And the nice thing is that that Marriott vacation club property out near Paris Disneyland is very close. They have a shuttle

that runs to Disneyland. They sell tickets, but the driver doesn't check the tickets. So I don't really know what's up with selling the tickets because lots of people just got on and didn't actually show anything. But anyway, that aside, the the room I booked for forty thousand two hundred points, they're all villas there. They're two bedroom villas. So it's like a two bedroom condo, basically, with a kitchen and a living room downstairs, two bedrooms upstairs, two full bathrooms, plus a half bathroom. So, I mean, that was terrific in terms of space for a family looking to go to Disney in Paris. I thought it was terrific. It wasn't the most luxurious property I've ever seen, but it was nice. And if you go during the summertime, they have pools and there were playgrounds galore. Like there was a little playground right off of our back patio where the

kids could play. If we had expected to spend more time, I think it would have been even better. There was an arcade, blah, blah, blah. So plenty of things to keep you entertained there. So that was actually, I thought, a pretty good find. And we're not the first people to find that by any stretch, but I know I do want to ask you a question about that, though. So that was not a base room. Right. So I did not use a free night certificate of any sort. I had to use points. And that's what I wanted to point out, that you might see a room available for 41,000 points and think that you could use a 50K free night certificate or a 35K with points added in. But Marriott only lets you redeem those for base rooms. And so even if an, if an upgraded room is available with points and falls within the range of your certificate, you can't use it.

And that's, that's a bummer with a Marriott free night certificate. It is a bummer. And, and that really stinks, I think, but, uh, but I don't think that this property has base rooms. Maybe they do, but I haven't seen any available. I looked during a few different times and I haven't seen it. I think it's all two bedrooms. So I don't think that they have any one bedrooms and that's probably why they don't have any quote unquote base rooms. Two bedroom probably should be a base room. But anyway, rates also cash rates as an elite member were actually pretty good. And there's another reminder to log into your account because if I wasn't logged into my account, I would have seen rates in the like 350 range. But as an elite member, I actually booked one night on points in the second night on cash because the cash rate was

like 250 euros or something like that the second night. So it was cheaper than the first night for some reason with the elite discount. But without the elite discount, it would have been well over 300, about 350, I think. So it was quite a nice discount for an elite member. So that was a decent property, good place to stay. If you want to go to Paris Disneyland, there are other places for sure. But that's where I ended up. The other award I booked this week, and I'm going to mention just because it was for four people, is that I changed my mind in terms of how I'm getting back from Europe.

I'm going to cruise in Europe right now. And originally I was flying Air Europa and going to Miami. Instead, I changed it around to fly to New York. A long story there, but I won't get into the details. Key point is that just like less than two weeks before departure, I had no problem finding four seats on United from a number of their gateways in Europe in business class at Polaris. I was really surprised you recently reviewed United Polaris. And while I don't expect the food to be all that great, it seemed like the bed would work

out nicely. It's a daytime flight, but still we can recline and relax and enjoy that. So yeah, I had found them from a number of European airports. I booked it out of Brussels, but there were a number of different airports where that was available. So worth keeping an eye on that if you're traveling with a family. Yeah, that's fantastic. All right.

Okay. So I jumped over, I mistakenly jumped over a segment. So let's talk about mattress running the numbers. So this week we're talking about Chase spending offers. There's a new round of spending offers out for October, right? Yeah. So not everybody gets these, but a lot of people are offered these offers for your Chase consumer cards. And these are for co-branded cards, your hotel cards and airline cards primarily, not 100%. And basically what most people are getting as an offer is you can earn 10 points per dollar at gas stations and five points per dollar at grocery stores and Amazon on up

to $1,500 spend. So for example, if you spend the entire $1,500 at a gas station, you would get 10 points per dollar with that. So you'd get what, 15,000 points and that's inclusive. So when they say 10 points per dollar, if your card automatically gets two points per dollar at gas stations, then what they're doing is they're adding additional eight points per dollar on top of that. So my question, this is sort of like a little pop quiz for Nick, which is which card would you use? Let's say you had all of the following cards. World of Hyatt. Hyatt card. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, right answer.

I mean, if you have it on the Hyatt card, it's like a no-brainer, right? I mean, because you go to the gas station at 10X. I mean, that's a no-brainer. There are multiple cards that earn Avios. There are multiple chase cards that earn Bonvoy, Marriott Bonvoy points. There's the Hyatt consumer card, IHG card, Southwest cards, United cards, and Aeroplane card. And Nick already answered that he would spend it on the Hyatt. Me too. Hyatt points are so valuable. You know, last I did a detailed analysis at average 1.6 without like cherry picking good awards.

But I am very confident that if I were to do it today, the same analysis would be two cents or more per point value. And you can easily get much more than that if you sort of cherry pick the best awards where you're booking hotels that otherwise would be very expensive but but have a good award price. Yeah. I mean, that's a no brainer. You're talking 15,000 points on 1500 spend. I mean, that's three nights at a category one, right. Or, or, or in a regular standard night anyway, at a category four. So, I mean, people spend $15,000 a year to get a category one to four free night certificate on that card. So, I mean, people spend $15,000 a year to get a category one to four free night certificate on that card. So, I mean, you're getting essentially something that I think is better than a category one to four free night certificate in 15,000 points. Only $1,500 spend. Totally worth it, especially if you have a gas station that sells, I don't know, Visa gift cards.

10X seems really, really good. Yeah, absolutely. So, that's great if you've got it. And if you have something you could buy at gas stations for $1,500, that's the way to do it. And actually getting 5X is pretty good too. So if you don't have that much spend at a gas station, I would still love to use the Hyatt card to get five. Okay. I throw a question back at you. So once you've done the Hyatt card, let's say you max that out. Right. So what's the second card you would max out on this? Yeah. So I don't know if the airplane cards are eligible, but I think that might be the next one. It's hard to say. I mean, cause there's not an obvious, you know, second most valuable, but I'd say airplane andin may be obvious after that. See, and in my household, it'd be Southwest because I know I'll use the Southwest points

for about a penny and a half per point in value. So that's pretty good for me. So that's probably a better answer. If you know you'll use Southwest points, you know they're worth close to one and a half cents each. A little bit less, but yeah, close to one and a half cents. So, so yeah, anyway, so, all right. So we've got a few different options for you there. Okay. So that brings us, I think to this week's main event. Main event. Why pay $400 or more for a credit card? We're going to, we're going to go through a number of credit cards and talk about the, the biggest perks that make them worth paying for if you value those perks. And before we do that, I just have a word to say about rebates.

A lot of these cards come with various forms of rebates. You spend for airline fees or you spend for travel in general. There's a lot of different variations of these and some are very specific, like you spend a Dell and you get rebates. But in all these cases, I don't want you to think of the face value of that rebate as how much it's worth to you when you're considering the annual fee of the card. Let me put it this way. When you pay an annual fee, you are basically saying upfront, I'm willing to pay $400, $500, $600, whatever the annual fee is. I'm willing to prepay that for all these perks, including this rebate. So let's say I came to you and said, I'm going to give you $25 back on dining spend per month, maximum $25 back on this credit card, but you need to prepay $300 a year for this perk. Would you do that?

Yeah. I mean, of course, most- What do you think, Mac? Would you do that? You shouldn't. Whether or not I would or somebody listening to this would, you shouldn't. I mean, of course, most, what do you think you should do that? You shouldn't, whether, whether or not I would, or, or somebody listening to this would, you shouldn't. I mean, there are a lot of things that people do that you shouldn't do. So, uh, but you shouldn't, because why would you, why would you lock $300 into this? Like hoping that you were a member every month to use this and get $300 back. Exactly. Exactly. Your total hoped, the best you could do if you do it perfectly is to get $300 back. And yet there's a good chance you won't get $300 back. There's also a good chance you're going to have some level of stress. It might not be much, but just having to

remember to use this card for dining once a month. And this is a real world example of the Bonvoy Brilliant card, by the way. And so that's a long way of explaining why you should not value that $25 monthly credit at the full $300 when comparing to the annual fee. You shouldn't say, oh, yes, the annual fee is $650, but subtract $300. So it's really only $350. It's not. It's $650, and you get this $300 rebate, which you're not going to be willing to pay $300 for. Anyway, just keep that in mind. We're not going to go into that with each card because that would just take forever. But there you go. So let's start with bank cards. So these are cards that offer their own

like bank points, which are in many cases transferable to a number of airline and hotel partners. And let's start with Capital One Venture X. It's a $395 card and it comes with $400 in rebates annually. $300 if you purchase travel through the Capital One Travel Portal and 10,000 Capital One miles each year upon renewal. So that's a total of about $400 in rebates, but it also gives you airport lounge access. So the $400 in rebates and the airport lounge access are the two items I'm going to pick as like why you should keep this card. Now, let me back up a little bit. We are not going to go into every perk of every card. So before doing all right so before doing this we decided let's only pick two or three headline perks say you should keep this because of because of this if

you value these two perks and um so those are the two i picked for the capital one venture that makes sense i mean because there are lots of other and lots of these cards have perks that overlap like you know like tsa pre-check credit or whatever else. Whichever of these cards you get probably has something like that. And so that usually isn't a headline perk since there's a good chance you may have another card in your wallet that gives you that perk. So anyway, all right. So what Greg said here, I mean, I think this card is a no-brainer for most people, isn't it? I mean, you look at it and you say, okay, $300 in travel credits. Now, the big downside, the big gotcha on the VentureX card is that you have to book your

travel through the Capital One travel portal. And that means you might not get a full $300 in value out of it. So that's something you've really got to consider and think about. Now, real world example here, I mentioned just a few minutes ago that I booked my flight back home just, I don't know, during this trip to Europe. And so I booked it out of Brussels, but my cruise ends in Rome. So I have to get from Rome to Brussels. There were no good award options.

The best option for me, believe it or not, heretical as this is going to sound to many people, was Ryanair. So Ryanair had a flight that was timed well to get me to Brussels. And so I booked that. Now, an interesting tidbit here is I booked it through the Capital One portal and I took screenshots because it says that it includes one free check bag for each passenger and seat selection. Now, whether or not it actually does, I'm very skeptical. But if it does, then it will turn out to be a great value there because it was the same price or within like two or three dollars anyway of booking directly through Ryan

Air. So so if it if without any of that, the extras. So if it does end up including the check, we have a great we have a great post coming up from Nick in the future about how he tried to claim that extra money from Capital One after it didn't work out. Goodness knows that's what's going to happen at any rate. But that's a good example, though, because I did just mention kind of offhandedly, but it is important for purposes of this discussion that it was three or four dollars more for those flights than had I booked them directly through Ryanair. And that's the problem. And that's part of the reason why you shouldn't value the three hundred dollar credit at full face value, because you're going to often run into situations where the Capital One travel portal is going to be a little bit overpriced

compared to your next best option, whether that's for a hotel or rental car, or perhaps even a flight. So it's a little wishy-washy. So I don't know how much would you be willing to pay for it? Hard for me to say. Yeah, it is really hard to say. One other problem with it is sometimes I find that it only offers non-refundable hotel bookings when other online agencies allow you to pick for fully refundable hotel bookings. So that's another issue I've had with it. But still, if you can eke out anywhere close to the $300 value and the 10K, I think it's worth it. Yeah. I mean, I think it's worth saying that the 10,000 miles you get with it are worth $100 for travel purchases. But if you transfer those to partners, you can get way more than $100 in value. I mean, you could transfer 7,500 of those to Turkish Airlines and potentially fly United one-way economy all the way to Hawaii from anywhere in the continental U.S.

So, I mean, a one-way ticket to Hawaii is worth significantly more than $100. And you have 2500 miles left over. So I think that you know, that card is, I do think it's a no brainer in terms of the costs and the features. And in fact, my wife's old venture card, I think I'm going to upgrade one of those to another venture X because and perhaps mine too, because I mean, it's just such a good value compared to having a regular venture card that I think it might be worthwhile for us. Why wouldn't you want to just cancel your others and get free authorized user cards on the VentureX? Well, because I haven't had a lot of trouble using the Capital One credits, the $300 in credits, and the 10,000 miles to me then becomes a pretty decent purchase. 10,000 miles for around 100 bucks, a penny a point. It's not great, but it's also not bad. Though Greg makes a great point that I am an

authorized user on my wife's VentureX. So we already are doing that for the free perks, the additional perks. I just think it's a decent value between those two things. But you're right. It probably makes more sense to just cancel the other cards altogether. Of course, the chance of ever getting approved for another Capital One card is so slim that I kind of want to keep those accounts around and alive just in case there becomes a product change option that's worthwhile. But that's an advanced play that's on a whole nother level for a different show altogether. So VentureX, we both agree is probably pretty easily worth its $400 annual fee,

right? What do we have up next? Yeah. Yeah. And it costs $395. So it technically doesn't even qualify for this show since we're talking about cards that cost $400 and up, but it's close enough. We have too many ultra premium cards to cover to give an analysis like we just did for the VentureX, but the VentureX is special in that I think for most people, you can find a good reason to keep that card because it has easy to get rebates that cover the annual fee basically yeah so what i want to do with the rest of these cards is i'm gonna we'll we'll take turns i'm gonna name the card and we'll take turns saying what are the one two or three perks that if you value them make this card worth keeping all right yeah i'm ready so'm ready. So I'm going to ask you first,

the Amex Platinum $695 consumer card. Oh man, I wouldn't say I had to give me the hard one, right? The $200 fine hotels and resorts credit. If you like fine hotels and resorts, which I do, I think that becomes pretty easy to get close to full value. But I only say close to full value because you can sometimes book those same hotels for less elsewhere. So whether or not the free breakfast and the $100 credit and the 4 p.m. checkout are worth paying a little bit more for that hotel, that's an analysis you have to kind of do on your own. I was already booking fine hotels and resorts at least once a year or so anyway. So the $200 prepaid credit, I mean, I think it works out to

be pretty good. So that's one perk that I think is worth it. And the other perk, of course, the obvious one is the airline fee credits, the $200 each year and airline fee credits, which a lot of people bemoan the fact that you can't easily buy gift cards. But these days, it's so easy. There's so many different ways to trigger those credits. If you go to our page about ways to trigger the credits, but the easy one that I think gets talked about often enough is buying flights that cost less than a hundred dollars. Oftentimes that will trigger the credit, even though it's not supposed to, it will often trigger the Amex airline fee credit. And so if you pick an airline where you're able to buy a flight, and then if your plans change, you're able to somehow

cancel that flight and retain it as a credit with the airline that never expires. Southwest. Then I think that it's easy to get a decent amount of value out of the airline fee credits. So those two perks, if you value those, I think that eats a big piece out of the annual fee. Of course, there's still a lot of money that you got to spend there. I think it's hard for a lot of people to justify this one. All right. I'm going to cover the Platinum business card and I'll also partly cover why I think NikMix missed a major reason for keeping the Platinum card, the consumer Platinum card.

So the business Platinum card also is $695 a year. And yeah, one major perk, I'm going to just lump them all together, about $600 in rebates, but you may not actually get anywhere near $600 in value, depending on your purchase habits. But the other big, big perk that is very valuable to a lot of people and in common with a consumer card is airline lounge access, airport lounge access, including Delta. So if you fly Delta often and you want to get into those sky clubs, then on days you're flying Delta, you can get yourself in for free with the Business Platinum as well as some other lounges as well. And the third thing that the business platinum card has that the personal doesn't have is that 35% point rebate. When you use points to book flights with your preferred

airline or business class or hire with any airline, you get a rebate that makes your points worth a little over 1.5 cents each on when purchasing flights. So there are some good reasons to get those platinum cards and to pay those fees if you value those things. Preston Pysh, Jr.: I'm glad you brought up the airport lounge access because that does make a difference for a lot of people. I think that's a... And really, when you look at the fact that the consumer card comes with over $1,000 in

total rebates and I didn't lump them together. So there are a lot of rebates. Uh, so if you value those other ones also in the airport lounge access, I'll agree with Greg, it can be a good value. Although I'd rather have the venture acts that you can add free authorized users to it and they get their own priority pass and their own Hertz president circle status and blah, blah, blah. So if I were picking, they do, but they don't get into Delta clubs or a century. So if you want that, you'll need one of the Platinums. All right. Next card up is the Chase Sapphire Reserve, $550 annual fee on that card. And so it comes with a $300 easy to use travel rebate. And again,

the $300 rebate against travel purchases and that's purchases you make anywhere. You can book directly with an airline or a hotel or use them on Uber or lots of other different things that qualify as travel expenses, train tickets, et cetera. So easy $300 rebate plus three X on all your travel spend, which can be huge for anybody who spends a lot on travel, that extra point per dollar over a lot of other cards out there, the three points per dollar, three valuable points per dollar, I think can be well worth it. It's about a 4.5% rebate if you're using the points towards travel with a chase. So that's a good benefit. And then of course, best in class travel protection, something goes wrong. If your flight gets canceled or changed or whatever, at the last minute, you miss your connection, they lose your

luggage, et cetera. You've got all sorts of very good trip delay and cancellation benefits that, again, are just best in class. I don't use a card other than a Chase card for booking travel in general because of those best in class travel protections. Absolutely. And those reasons are why I've kept the Sapphire Reserve card. It's been close because it's an expensive card with not that many distinct perks, but those are enough to keep me a customer. Quick tip that came in. So I met a number of readers on the cruise that I'm on this week. Quick tip that came in from a reader, by the way, he had a flight that was delayed by X

amount of time. So the scheduled arrival time was just over the cutoff. I think it's six hours for the trip delay cancellation on the Sapphire Reserve. And so it was scheduled to get in just over six hours. But of course, you know, they had tailwinds or whatever, and they got in like five hours and 50 minutes or something like that. So you thought, oh, man, did we just lose the credits here? But as it turned out, Chase went with the scheduled arrival time

rather than the actual arrival time. So if you ever end up in that situation, scheduled arrival time is what matters for the trip delay protection benefit. Wow. Great to know. All right. So then next card in our list is the U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve card. This card doesn't get a lot of press. It's kind of an outlier there and its points are not transferable to airlines or hotels. So a little bit less interesting, but this card costs only, it costs exactly $400 a year and has $325 in easy to get rebates.

So use the card to spend on travel or dining and you get $325 back. So very, very easy to get that back. The main other perk that makes this thing worth keeping is you get three points per dollar for mobile wallet payments. So Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, that sort of thing. So if you buy things in person, you go to Costco or wherever, and you tap to pay with your phone, you're getting three points per dollar and points thanks to the third feature that I love, real-time mobile rewards. When you're purchasing travel, you get the ability to pay with points at 1.5 cents each, even though you purchase travel directly, like you pay for an Uber, for example, you can

redeem your points at 1.5 cents each. So that 3X mobile wallet makes it a 4.5% rebate card if you use your points that way. And so altogether, it's a very nice combination that nets out to only about $75 if you were to fully value the $325 rebate. Which, of course, we wouldn't value a full $325. So it nets out to a little bit more than $75. But it's up to you as to how much that is. But if you spend a decent amount of money in person, I feel like that card is a great card to have. You're like a Costco shopper.

You're not going to do better than basically four and a half percent back at Costco. So that card is almost a no brainer, in my opinion, for a lot of people. Exactly, exactly. All right. So airline cards. Let's talk about airline cards. I'm going to let you talk about the first airline card up on the list because you know way more about the Delta Reserve card than I do.

So I want you to talk about that one. Sure. Delta Reserve card costs I do. So I want you to talk about that one. Sure. Delta Reserve card costs 550, excuse me, $550. And its main reason to be is Delta Sky Club Lounge Access. And, you know, so it's a little bit cheaper than the Platinum card, but gets you Delta Club access. It also gives you an annual companion ticket, which can be used for pretty much regional round trip flights where you add a companion. And you can even book a first class ticket on that.

So those two things are worth a lot. And then the third, there are actually a slew of benefits. So you'd want to go through them to see. But the third, I think most valuable to some people is the ability to earn medallion qualifying miles, MQMs with high spend. And what that means is it lets you earn or maintain Delta elite status through spend. And so for those who travel with Delta a lot and are interested in getting or maintaining their elite status, that perk alone can be extremely valuable because you could just be like, I'm just going to pay my taxes rather than do a special mileage run on Delta in order

to keep my status. You don't have to fly to keep your status. You are on mute. And so right away. Yes. So, all right. So I agree that the Delta Reserve can be valuable for Delta flyers. But what if you're a United flyer? Then we should talk about the Chase United Club Infinite card, because that card comes with United Club lounge access, which remember, you won't get club lounge access to United lounges just by being an elite member. That's true with all of the U.S. based airlines that being an elite member with the airline will not get you lounge access within the United States. Now, you may have elite status with some other

airline, some foreign airline, if that will get you potentially club lounge access in the U S but if that's not the case for you, then this could be well worth it because United club membership would cost you hundreds already. It would cost you more than the annual fee, I believe on the United club infinite card. So you get the club membership and you get a 10% discount on saver awards within the U S and Canada. And that can add up if you book a lot of saver awards than the U S and Canada through United. And, uh, and that's kind of an interesting thing though, to me, because how do you know what a saver award is anymore? Cause I don't think they say anymore. Right. And I just recently read that they don't even say what a saver award is anymore so how do you know which ones you're to get 10% back on

Greg yeah that's tricky I feel like some sometimes it says and sometimes it doesn't I don't know the united award search is very weird it has like three different interfaces and it seems almost random which one you get when you're doing award searches if anyone knows the secret as to which one shows up when I'd love to hear it. But yeah, this card costs 525 a year. And, you know, I really do agree with Nick. If you're interested in club membership, that's really the main reason to be for this card. Yeah. I mean, if you're interested in club membership and period number one, and then if you book a lot of domestic awards, I mean, that could add up to 10% back could add up to be worth quite a bit. I mean, cause it's pretty easy to get more than a penny per point value with United

with most of the U S based airlines, really, it's easy to get at least a cent anyway, relatively easy. So, so I mean, getting 10% back, if you spend a few hundred thousand miles a year on flights, which some people probably do, could make it a good supporting reason to keep the card. You're probably not going to earn enough to justify the card on its own, but a good supporting reason. There's also some sort of benefit of having both that and a business card, I think, right? And you get like a little discount, I think, if you have a business card also, but I don't remember what that deal is. So I probably should have skipped right over it and moved on to the next card on the list. I think that's a benefit of the business

card that if you also have a personal card, you get a hundred dollars back or something. Nevermind. Okay. So the third airline card we're going to talk about is the American Airlines executive card, $450 a year. And the two perks that I think make this card worth having. And, and by a long shot, if you're interested in American Airlines admirals club access, the card gives you membership to the club, but it also allows up to 10 authorized users for free. They each also get club access. So this is a way for $450 to provide your family and friends, close friends who you know won't actually be spending on this card with lounge access.

So incredible deal for people who value American Airlines lounge access. For sure. Totally agree. Awesome. Okay, so that's our airline cards. Those are the ones that are the ultra-premium expensive ones anyway for now. I mean, I hope that we're eventually going to see a couple of other good ultra-premium airline cards. Aeroplan, if you're listening, where's your ultra premium card airplane? Like let's get that out in the United States. But anyway,

let's move on to hotel cards because there are a number of these $400 a year plus hotel cards out there. And the first one on the list is my favorite of the bunch, the chase Ritz Carlton card, which has recently become an incredible deal. This is a card that's not available new. So you can't apply for this card. What you have to do is have a Chase Marriott card of some sort, the bold or the boundless that's been open for at least a year. It's got to be a consumer card. You can't change between business and consumers. So you need a consumer Chase Marriott card that's

been open for at least a year. And then you should be able to call up Chase and say, you'd like to product change to the Ritz card. Now they may enforce that minimum credit limit of some sort, but it's worth calling and just asking to see if you can product change to it if you're interested because the annual fee on this card is $450 and the benefits it comes with are fantastic. I'm going to start with a rebate. So there's a $300 airline incidental credit rebate. With Chase, it's different than with Amex. So this is not triggered automatically. And so it's different than the Sapphire Reserve in that regard. These are supposed to be for things like checked baggage, club lounge access, et cetera, which you have to call and tell an agent, hey, I used my card for this charge.

And so I'd like to get the credit. And what we've all found in practice is that it really varies from agent to agent as to what qualifies for this incidental credit. They're relatively easy to use. I'll say that much that you don't really have to work too hard at convincing an agent to credit you for whatever the incidentals you've spent on are. And if you do run into an agent that is particularly difficult, it's worth hanging up and trying again.

So pretty easy to use $300 airline incidental credits, comes with priority pass. But the star of the show is that now the card comes with an annual Marriott free night certificate worth up to 85,000 points. So you can use it for a single night of up to 85,000 points. And then of course with Marriott, remember you can add points. So you should be able to add up to

fifteen thousand points on top, which means you could book a night that's up to one hundred thousand Marriott points with this card that's only going to cost you four hundred and fifty dollars. And those Marriott properties that cost eighty five to one hundred thousand points are generally properties that cost, you know, 800, 1,000, $1,500 a night, sometimes even more. So it's a great, great value on top of everything else I just talked about for $450 a year. I feel like this card is probably among the best deals and credit cards right now. Absolutely. It's fantastic. And it comes with all those great travel protections. I should mention that the Sapphire Reserve does, and that's the other reason I keep it. It comes with all of those

same best in class travel protections. Yep. Absolutely. All right. The next card on the list is the Amex Bonvoy Brilliant. So that's the Marriott card that recently went up from $450 a year to $650, but it has some new perks that are quite valuable. It has the same annual 85,000 points free night certificate that the Ritz card does, which you get each year upon renewal. And it has a different $300 rebate. It's the one we talked about earlier in the show, which is $25 per month in dining credits. So use your card for any restaurant or food delivery purchases and you'll get $25 a month back if you spend $25 or more. And the other new perk is you get automatic Marriott Platinum status. So Platinum status at some Marriott properties, not all, will give you free hot breakfast, free lounge access, you get guaranteed 4 p.m.

late checkout at hotels, not resorts. And a number of other perks come with Marriott Platinum. Depending on your stay habits, where you tend to stay, how much you value breakfast, things like that, that perk alone can be worth a ton. So it could also be worth nothing. It just depends where you stay. So, yeah. So, again, $650, I think for a lot of people who stay at Marriott properties often, especially high-end ones that do give benefits to platinum elites. So that would be St. Regis properties, that would be autograph collection properties. I don't know off the top of my head what else. Luxury collection. Maybe you include JW in there too. Some JW Marriott's are pretty nice. So yeah, I mean, if you stay at places like that, it can add up really quickly

because breakfast for two people at a lot of those places can easily run 70, 80, $100, which I mean, maybe you wouldn't eat breakfast there if you had to pay a hundred dollars for two people, but it's nice being able to have breakfast there. So it's, it's not worth a hundred bucks a night, but it's probably worth something to you. And so if you have a few of those days every year, I mean, the card could almost pay for itself with breakfast. Uh, so, uh, yeah. And, and if you have like St. Regis resort stay where you're going to be paying for breakfast anyway, cause you're kind of resort captive, you know, then it is worth the $100 a day or whatever it is they would have charged you because you would have probably paid that. Right.

Or gone hungry. I think especially for people who like St. Regis, really, honestly, that's what makes the, that platinum status, I think the most valuable because St. Regis has the nicest places that are going to give you free breakfast and, uh, and you know, all the rest of your benefits without any sort of a fight. So, so I think that that's those, that crowd, if you like St. Regis, this card becomes, I think a pretty good value is still at six 50. So I think for a lot of people, it may not be as good. And by the way, we should mention, I'm going to mention this because this just came up on a bus in Greece the other day here with somebody who has the brilliant card. And, and she said, oh, the annual fee just went up and I don't think I'm going to keep it. And so she said she was going to cancel it. And I, I reminded her, she probably didn't know this, because if you didn't have a card a

long time ago, you probably wouldn't know that there is a $95 a year Amex card, an Amex Bonvoy card. And with a lot of the cards we've talked about so far, almost all of them, not quite all of them, but almost all of them, if you decide it's not worth keeping, you don't necessarily have to cancel. You can call the bank and downgrade to something cheaper, maybe even something without an annual fee. So if you decide that one of these isn't for you, cancellation is not the only thing on the table for you. You could downgrade that Bonvoy Brilliant to the $95 MX Bonvoy card that comes with a free night certificate each year, blah, blah, blah. I'm

not going to get into all the benefits on that card right now, but you have an option. If you have this Chase Sapphire Reserve, you could downgrade all the way to the no fee Sapphire card or a Freedom card, potentially, if you don't want to keep it. So there are a number of different options, and you can look on Frequent Miler for more information about your downgrade paths with various ultra premium cards. So all right. Yeah. And let me say a little bit more about that, especially with this Bonvoy card. So I would say that the way you should approach this is wait until this new annual fee kicks in, because depending on when your annual fee is, you'll probably be charged $450 one more time before it goes up to $650.

And again, it just depends when that is. And so go ahead. And if it's $450, I think this card is definitely worth its price. Go ahead and pay that. The next year when they charge you 650, wait till the charge hits, call them up, say, hey, I want to cancel this card. It's too expensive. I bet you they're going to offer you some kind of big bonus to keep the card that'll

make it worth keeping another year. If in the off chance they don't, then say, oh, wait a minute, could I instead downgrade to the $95 card and then do that? Good point. Because Amex is particularly generous with their retention offers or has been at least these last couple of years. And probably they're going to run into a lot of people clawing on this card. So really good point from Greg, particularly with that card to try for a retention offer. Chase is not so well known for retention offers. City usually is pretty good about retention offers, but Amex has been the best these last couple of years. So well worth calling for that. Okay. Speaking of Amex, we have one more Amex card

on the list here, and that's the Amex Hilton Aspire, which is probably my second favorite hotel card after the Ritz card. And again, one of my favorite ultra premium cards because the card costs $450 a year, but it comes with an annual free night certificate valid at just about any Hilton property in the world. There's a few vacation rental type properties that are excluded, but the vast majority of Hilton properties worldwide, you can use your annual free night certificate. You could use it at the Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives or the Conrad Tokyo or Conrad New York or wherever it is that you would like to go at a high-end Hilton property. So that alone can be worth more than $450 depending on where you use it. And then it also, the card also comes with $500

in credits, $250 hotel resort credit rather at Hilton resorts and a $250 airline incidental fee credit, which we already talked about ways to trigger AMAX airline incidental benefits. We have a post about that and I'll have that. We should have that link in the show notes for this show. So if you hear these things and you want to find out more, you can always find links in the show notes. So $500 in credits each year, free night valid at almost any Hilton property. And then you get Hilton diamond status, which is a nice status to have because A, you get free breakfast and B, you get lounge access at properties with lounges. Now I should know that diamond isn't a huge upgrade over Hilton gold status because Hilton Gold gives you breakfast

already. Now, I also need to add another asterisk here because I talk about free breakfast and it's not really free breakfast anymore within the United States. If you're staying in a Hilton property within the United States, you're going to get a daily credit for up to two people. And that credit amount varies from one property to another, depending on how high end the property is. It varies from $10 a person up to $25 per person, which in many expensive cities and places like New York and Chicago and whatnot, it probably doesn't even cover breakfast in its entirety. So the value of free breakfast at Hilton has decreased, I think, substantially. Though on the other hand, you can usually use that food and beverage credit at any time during your stay. So maybe you'd rather have a drink at the bar or an appetizer

at dinner. So having Hilton Gold or Diamond status either way gets you access to that credit. And so this card comes with Diamond, which gives you that plus lounge access if the property you stay at happens to have a lounge. And if you do stay at a lot of Hilton properties with lounges, then the benefit, I think, becomes a little bit better because you get your lounge breakfast already, and then you can use your daily food and beverage credit for something else and end up with maybe free dinner also or something along those lines. Now, of course, when you're staying at Hilton properties outside of the United States, you get a full free breakfast in their restaurant, and you also, again, get the lounge access. So this card, I think,

is pretty easily worth $450 a year. I think that free night certificate alone could be worth more than that. But you should probably value that at least at $200 or $300. If you're willing to spend a little bit of effort in using that annual free night certificate, it should be pretty easy to use it for $200 or $300 in value or more, the $500 in credits and the Hilton diamond status altogether. I think that adds up to easily more than $450 a year for anybody who likes Hilton properties. Totally agree. Totally agree. This card is probably the one that has the most sort of cash upside of all the cards for people who have sort of regular spending habits. And I say that because you could argue that the consumer platinum card has more cash upside,

but some of the credits are for such specific weird things that you wouldn't expect most people to get the full credits that are available through the consumer platinum card. But with this one, I mean, the credits are airline incidental fees and Hilton Resort. And we should mention too, check the list for the Hilton Resorts because a lot of them, A, if it's got the word resort in the name, that does not mean that it's a qualifying

resort, which doesn't make any sense at all to me. But you have to look at the map and see which ones are eligible for the credit because there are some places that you would think are resorts that aren't on the map. But there are also some places that qualify for the resort credit that are not what you would probably think of as resorts. So there are a range of places where you're able to use your annual $250 in credit and ways to trigger that credit too, which we've written about as well. So hopefully that's helpful.

And I think, again, that one is pretty easily worthwhile. Like you said, I think Greg hit the nail on the head. If you have pretty regular spending patterns and you like Hilton again, that one is pretty easily worthwhile. Like you said, I think Greg hit the nail on the head. If you have pretty regular spending patterns and you like Hilton properties, that one's a pretty easy one to get full or good value out of rather. Very good. All right. I think that brings us to the end of the main event. I don't know if we have a question of the week.

We don't have a question of the week. That wasn't even on my mind this week. So no, we're not going to have a question of the week. We don't have a question of the week that wasn't even on my mind this week. So no, we're not going to have a question of the week this week. I'm just happy that the wifi lasted in order to be able to do a full shower or my T-Mobile signal. Absolutely. Anyway, abroad. Oh, you know what? I'll add a question of the week question from Nick. So if you're traveling abroad and you don't have T-Mobile access, what can you do for phone access? And I'm going to answer it myself because I got an email recently from a company that was looking to promote their product, I think, but it piqued my interest because I

looked at the product. It's called Olifly and they're eSIMs and you buy an eSIM card, which if you have an iPhone or a newer Android phone, your phone probably is capable of loading an eSIM instead of a physical SIM card. It's an electronic SIM card. And a number of phones are able to have both your regular physical SIM card and an eSIM card running at the same time. I have a Pixel phone, which is able to do that. So I was able to keep my T-Mobile SIM card in and also add Olifly on my phone. Now, the reason I bring this up, and I want to mention that they offered to provide one to me for free, and I did not take them up on that. I paid for it myself to use it and check it out. And I've been pretty impressed so far for a couple of reasons.

So you're able to buy SIM cards for different countries and regions around the world. I bought one for Europe, and you can buy them by the number of days that you need. Five days, 10 days, 15 days, 20 days, et cetera, et cetera. I bought a 15-day card, completely unlimited. And I'll put an asterisk there and I'll come back to it in a second. And I think if I remember correctly, it was like $47 maybe for the completely unlimited 15 days. 10 days was I think 34 and five days was 19 if I remember correctly. I'll have to check. I'll write a post about this eventually.

So keep your eye out for it. But anyway, relatively reasonable prices. Now you might say, okay, well, unlimited, is it really unlimited? And of course I asked them that question. What does it really mean? Because I can't imagine it's truly unlimited. They're gonna throttle you at some point.

And they told me that as long as your average daily use comes out to be on a 30-day span would be less than 90 gigabytes per 30 days that you don't get throttled in general. So if you go way over one day and use like five gigabytes or six gigabytes in a single day, then your speed may slow down. But they said it would only last for about 24 hours. And I put that to the test and I used mine quite heavily on this trip. And sure enough, I did hit whatever this imaginary cap is one day. I don't know how much I used exactly, but sure enough, just as they said, the next day it went back to full speed. So, and that was again, pretty heavy data usage. I had asked about if I use two,

three gigabytes a day, is that going to be okay? And they said, yeah, that's, that should be fine. Uh, and most people don't use two or three gigabytes per day of data. I have my photos and videos set to back up in real time as I take them. So, and I take more probably than most people. So that's why I use so much data and I've been pretty impressed. The speed has been good everywhere. I've used it in Europe for the most part. It was not able to zoom. I wasn't able to zoom with Greg a couple of days ago when we tried this. So I did have a little bit of problem, but overall, I was really impressed because I didn't have to take out my SIM card from home. It worked pretty well. It's been pretty fast. And it also has worked on the cruise ship, which has been interesting. When we've been out at sea, it still worked. Now T-Mobile sent me a text message and said,

hey, we can see you're on a cruise ship. If you use data, this is not included in your, you know, unlimited and your worldwide coverage. You'll pay more. You pay like, I can't, it was a ridiculous amount per 15 megabytes of data and then 50 cents a text message or whatever. I got nothing of the sort from all the fly and it continued to work at sea and it's a prepaid service. So it's not like they have my credit card stored to charge me later on. So that's kind of interesting. It's worked well. That's very interesting. And just to circle back on the pricing. So about $50 for 15 days, compare that to with AT&T. If you pay for their international service, it's $10 a day. So you'd only get five days of international service with AT&T. I think Verizon's similar.

Whereas this way you get 15 days for about the same price. That's a great value. Now, is there any issues with... So you'd have a different phone number, I presume with that eSIM. So, so if you turned off roaming, like if I turned off roaming on my AT&T device and use this eSIM, I wouldn't, is this right? I wouldn't get text messages from people at my usual phone number. Is that right? Well, so good question. I'm glad you brought that up. You don't get a phone number. So these are data only SIMs. So you don't get a phone number. So you could still use something like Google Voice to make calls that are like VOIP, but you don't get a phone number. So now what I do on my phone is I just left calls and SMS messages to run through the T-Mobile SIM card and data to run through the Olifly SIM. So that way I could still make calls and still use text messages

with my normal phone number and pay whatever it is that T-Mobile charges me for that. I think text messages are free, but calls are a charge on my T-Mobile plan. So I've been able to text just fine and that's done its thing. Of course, like I said,

I got a message from T-Mobile that they charge me more per text or charge me 50 cents per text on the cruise ship. But I just didn't text very much while I was on board. And data ran through Olifly. Now, it didn't work absolutely everywhere at sea. There were definitely points at sea where it stopped working for a little bit. But for the most part, it has worked at sea.

I turned it off the first couple of days because I was like, I don't want them to shut me down before I even have a chance to test this on land in a few different places. So I turned it off for the first few days. But then after a few days, I was like, well, let's live on the edge and see what happens. Are they going to shut me down or not? And they have. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's important to caveat this, that you're cruising in the Mediterranean where you're never like too far from land and cell towers. If you're, if you're cruising like across the Atlantic Pacific ocean, you are not going to get some. No, I doubt it would work. And it's also worth mentioning that they have different plans for different regions. So the Europe region is pretty good because it includes most Western European

countries and some of the Eastern European countries, but you have to look through what's included because you might be traveling somewhere where you're going to need a country specific plan. And then, you know, depending on how many different places you're going, it may not be a good value for everybody in all situations. But I think for a lot of people, especially those going to Europe, it can be a pretty good value. All right. Good to know. Good to know. All right. So that brings us to the end for this week if you've enjoyed what you've been listening to and you want to get our emails in your inbox each day or each week you can go to frequent miler.com slash subscribe again that's frequent miler.com

slash subscribe join our email list you can follow us on all the various social media we're on twitter and instagram you can join our frequent miler insiders facebook group where if you have questions like these you can ask them and get them answered by lots of other readers interested in this stuff too. Thank you guys for listening this week, and we will see you guys again next week. Bye everybody.