(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm so excited you're here today for an episode focused on travel hacking, points, and miles. This one is jam-packed with a ton of amazing hacks you've all shared, so thank you so much for sending those in, as well as some great questions we're gonna tackle covering everything from paying taxes with your credit card, to earning points, to companion pass, to booking travel, getting deals, a bunch of great sites, and things you can do to optimize your next trip, and so much more.

But I have a few cool things to share first. I'll start with some amazing listener wins you've all shared, and some of them are the biggest we've ever seen. First, Savannah wrote this in. "We have used multiple hacks from your show. "I've gotten into credit card points for travel "and believe it will save us around $10,000 this year.

"From your show about insurance, "we realized our house had grown in value significantly, "and we can now drop PMI insurance, "which will save us $1,000 a year. "I also found seven claims of unclaimed money for my dad, "so thank you so much for your content. "You really are changing the lives of your listeners." Savannah, thank you so much for writing that in.

It means so much to me that all the time and energy I spend can save people like you so much time, energy, money, and bring so much joy to your lives. I wanna run through a few more, because there were so many great wins since the last time I did this.

Alex wrote in and said that after only a year and three months, he's already racked up 450,000 membership rewards points on Amex, but he really wanted to make sure people understood that his spending is only about 20 to $30,000 a year. He said he knew it was small compared to most people that live in more expensive places, but he did all this by maximizing referral bonuses, signup bonuses, and using Rakuten to rack up over 60,000 membership reward points for things he already needed to purchase.

Zach, who we also talked about some wins about six months ago, wrote in with a follow-up. He was a medical student. He's now nearing the end of his third year, so he's making no income, but travel is really important to him and his girlfriend. So over the last two years, with some great signup bonuses and redemption values, he just wanted to share that from March 2022 to May 2023, they've taken three international trips using all the strategies he's learned in the show.

He's earned and used over 800,000 points, paid only $2,000 in fees to redeem flights and hotels worth $29,000. He calculated it out after subtracting fees at 3.1 cents per point, which is absolutely incredible. It's allowed him to have six weeks of international travel to places like Italy, England, France, Spain, and Portugal, and he said it wouldn't have been possible without all this advice.

So I'm so glad you were able to take those trips, Zach. A few more, we don't talk about hotels outside of Hyatt that much, but Noah had an awesome transfer from 45,000 city points to Wyndham to book three nights in a beachfront resort condo through their Vacasa Partnership and got a one-bedroom condo, which was way better than traveling in a hotel room with his three-year-old.

A different Zach wrote in to say that he's planning on using his points that he's earned to fly business class for his upcoming honeymoon with his wife on her first trip to Asia this year. First off, congrats, Zach and your wife, and I hope that you have an amazing trip.

I know we talk a lot about international travel, but let's focus on one domestic win from Angie. She wanted to take her children to all 50 states, and by August, she will have done it. She did that by opening up an Alaska card and her husband did the same, both of which come with a companion fare.

So between the companion fares and the points they got on the sign-up bonus, she was able to reduce the cost of more than $7,000 in flights to Alaska for her whole family down to less than half of that, and that was a family of five. Another honeymoon win from Lexi.

She booked 10 nights in Hawaii, in Kauai and Maui, at Hyatt's using her Chase Sapphire preferred sign-up bonuses that she and her fiance opened up to meet the minimum spend for all their wedding expenses, and they're now going on a $6,000 honeymoon just on points. So first off, congrats to Lexi and her husband.

I hope you guys have an amazing wedding and a great honeymoon. Finally, Tim loved the Japan episode so much that he's already booked a trip using points to stay at the Park Hyatt in Kyoto, which is an amazing hotel. He's going in July. I'm so sure you'll have a great time.

Everyone should check that out if they have the points and they have the opportunity. And then the biggest win I think we've ever had is Liz wrote in and said that the insurance episode came just at the right time. She was pricing out life insurance policies for her family and didn't realize the concept of laddering or layering was an option and it was exactly what she needed.

So she priced out things with seven different carriers and the layered policy they landed on, which is actually a 30-year term with 10 and 20-year riders, will end up saving them over $14,000 over the life of the policy compared to the lowest 30-year term quote. But she did point out that not all insurance companies offer these features, so it's worth searching for one that does, but it's also worth making sure that you push the agents on it because her agent actually asked her how she knew how to do it this way and thought it was a really smart option that he hadn't thought about.

So that is awesome. I'm so glad you did that. So that's a few of the wins I've heard from listeners, but I'll put a few more at the end of the episode 'cause there's just so many great ones that I want you all to hear about. Next, I wanna talk briefly about what the All The Hacks membership is and isn't because I've gotten a few questions from you.

First, it is not a guilt trip for you to feel pressured to join. If you think it'd add value to your life or if you've gotten so much value from the show that you wanna support me, great, but if not, totally fine. So what is it? My goal is to build a membership, something like AARP, but instead of focused on retired people, I wanna focus on people who like to optimize and upgrade and have the best experience and get the most out of life.

So I wanna set up exclusive deals, products, and partnerships, and I actually just shared our first exclusive deal to members with trust and will who is offering 50% off their estate planning services to All The Hacks members. It's the product Amy and I use for our family. In fact, we just updated it last week to include our second daughter.

I know, we should have done it sooner. So that's what I mean by exclusive deals. I hope we'll have more coming soon, but I also wanna build a community where members can connect with each other. So that's gonna be a part of the membership as well. In fact, our first members call is tomorrow.

So if you end up joining quickly, I can send you the invite to that. And then at some point, I wanna build a community online, and I will consider opening that up or part of it to all listeners, but I'm gonna get my feet wet with members first. So if you wanna join, you can do that at allthehacks.com/join.

And if not, I love you all the same, so no worries. Now, let's talk a little bit about credit cards. As you guys know, I have a page set up at allthehacks.com/cards, and one of the biggest ways you can support me and the show is to use those links when you apply for a new card.

However, like I always say, I want you to get the best signup bonuses possible and sometimes those are from referral links. Unfortunately, I don't have much control over how that page works. So even if I know about a great referral offer, I can't include it on the page. In the past, I've gotten links from some listeners and from friends and put them in the show notes.

And then on top of that, there's also some cards that I think are really great, like the Amex Green or the Built Rewards card, that because they don't have affiliate offers, they never end up showing up on that page either. Finally, there's just so much good information when you collect a list of all the cards, their signup bonuses, their annual fees, but there's no easy way to filter and sort on that information.

So I had an idea. I fired up ChatGPT and I asked it to help me code a new page that had all that functionality. Honestly, I didn't think it would work at the start, but to my surprise, I got way further than I expected. I still have some design and user experience things to fix, and I haven't added all the filtering and sorting I want, but I actually have a working prototype of a new cards page that I'm excited to transition to soon.

I actually hope it ends up being one of the best tools out there to find new cards, whether you wanna search on the biggest signup bonuses, the best earning in a category, or the best deals if you're over Chase's 5/24 restriction. So if you wanna check out an early version, you can go see the prototype at allthehacks.com/cardtool, and I would love your feedback, or if you're good with JavaScript or CSS, I would love your help getting it over the finish line, and then as soon as it's ready, allthehacks.com/cards will start directing to that new tool.

So you can also just wait for that to happen. Okay, that's it with announcements. So let's move on to all the hacks and questions about travel points and miles right after this. First off, I wanna start with earning points. So very timely, I'll kick this off talking about paying taxes with your credit card, because as of recording this, taxes are due in six days on April 17th, and I'm always getting questions from people asking if it makes sense to pay on your credit card.

So there are three payment processors that'll allow you to pay your taxes with a credit card. PayUSA Tax charges 1.85%, Pay1040 charges 1.87%, and ACI charges 1.98%. I'll look at this from two perspectives. One is, yes, there are cards like the Citi Double Cash that earn 2% cash back.

So if you owe $5,000, technically, you could get $100 of rewards and pay as low as 92.50 for processing them. Is it worth it to make $7.50? Probably not. If you had a massive tax bill, might it be more worth it? Sure, but at the end of the day, I don't think that kind of a spread is worth the time and energy unless you have a really large tax bill.

Where it might get a little bit interesting is if you're trying to meet a minimum spend on a sign-up bonus, or if you're trying to earn some points in a program really quickly, especially if you're trying to do that with a card like the VentureX, where you can earn two points per dollar and potentially make those points worth anywhere from 1.5 to three or four cents.

Couple caveats to consider. One, you can only make two payments per processor, though if you're filing jointly, you can make them in each person's name, so four total. All those payment providers have clarified that they will not show up as a cash advance with any extra fees. And then finally, if you are doing all this for business, card fees are tax deductible, but not if you're doing it personally.

So if you have a redemption in mind and you're gonna get outsized value here, great. If you're trying to meet a sign-up bonus, or if you wanna open up a card quickly to try to meet a sign-up bonus, I know there are some cards, I don't have a list off the top of my head, of ones that will give you a virtual card number you can use right away.

That's worth considering. But otherwise, I think the fee relative to the cost, it doesn't make sense unless you have something planned, which is my general advice when it comes to buying points and miles as well. Similarly, a question from Cameron about trying to put expenses for his wedding onto a card.

And in this case, the vendor only accepted a deposit and that the remaining they only accepted in cash or check. Are there any tricks here? The short answer is no. Yes, you can try to negotiate, and if you could negotiate the credit card fees into it, that would be an option.

If not, you're usually gonna end up having to pay the fees or use a service online where you can use your credit card to send a payment, but then you'll pay the fees. And those fees, I don't think are worth it. They end up being much higher than the cost to pay your taxes on a credit card.

I know they're typically more around 3%. So unfortunately, there's not a hack here that I'm aware of. But I will say, if you are able to pay your credit card, you can always ask. There are some cases where you might not expect to be able to do that, and that's possible.

So definitely worth doing that. But if not, unfortunately, that won't work. Cameron did mention that he got engaged a couple years ago and put the entire ring purchase on his credit card, which is a great option there. In fact, two questions wrote in about engagement rings that I'll share right now.

One, Tyler went out on a limb and asked his fiance how she felt about cubic zirconia or lab diamonds before they got engaged. It turns out she was thrilled with the idea. They ended up finding a ring that was only $650 and put all the extra savings into an epic engagement.

And then Jeremy wrote in that said, "Just make sure you're always looking shy "of the exact carat quartile." So if you're looking for one, look for 0.99. If you're looking for 1.25, look for 1.24. He also found out that jewelers have access to an online auction site for diamonds, where jewelers can request them be shipped for an inspection.

So Cameron ended up rejecting the diamonds the jeweler had in stock, gave him the specs of what to look for. And then even before that finding the diamond, he just negotiated a fixed markup. So he agreed on 7% above the price he paid the seller, which is way below what jewelers used to charge before the internet made all this info available and ended up finding something great.

So a couple of quick detour ring hacks. Coming back to trying to earn more points on dollars without spending more, I wanted to share a couple of things that I ran across recently. The first, and I don't know how I missed this when I signed up, but our utility provider in the Bay Area, PG&E, at least now, lets you put your utility bill on a credit card for a fixed fee of I think about $1.35.

So first off, when I did the math of how much our utility bill was and what percentage fee that would represent and how many points I'd earn, it ended up being a good deal. But then I was reading around online and found a suggestion from someone, which was that you can actually pay a couple months of your utility bill in advance and just carry over that balance.

So you're only paying that fee every quarter or really as much as you want. In fact, a lot of people I guess have used this tactic to meet minimum spend for signup bonuses. So they'll go and pay $1,000 towards their utility bill, which might cover them for three, six, maybe even nine months and be able to get all of that spend upfront.

Similarly, it had me thinking, oh, I logged into USAA now that they're our insurance carrier. They don't charge any extra fees to pay your insurance bill monthly, but at any point in time, you can go in and pay off the remaining months on the six or 12 month policy.

So if you're in a situation where you're trying to meet minimum spend for a signup bonus, or you're looking at a signup bonus and you're not sure if you will be able to meet this spend, two tactics there, pay your utility bill more than you need to if you can afford to pay off that bill, or go in and similarly, if you can afford to pay your insurance bill upfront, you might be able to pay that upfront if you're already paying monthly.

Okay, another question from Zach about whether to prioritize points bonuses or signup bonuses. So he's looking at new cards, thinking about his spending and seeing cards like the Amex Gold with four points on groceries. He doesn't have enough spending to be able to hit all the signup bonuses unless he puts all of his spend on those cards.

So he's wondering if he should prioritize cards that will earn him four points per dollar on the categories he spends most, or if he should focus on cards to earn signup bonuses. So let's take the example of that Amex Gold card. You're gonna spend $4,000 on purchases for 90,000 membership rewards points if you use a referral link, which I set up one at allthehacks.com/amexgold.

You also get $200 statement credit. So for $4,000, you're getting 90,000 points, which is the equivalent of getting 22.5 points per dollar spent. So much better deal to be focused on signup bonuses than to be focused on earning bonus points in the categories you spend on. However, I realized that many people, myself included a bit, don't wanna be opening up that many cards every year.

And so I like to have one or two cards that are just my base card that cover most of my spend and then open up opportunistic bonuses. So it kind of depends on your appetite for opening up new cards. And I've actually got so many great questions about opening up cards, the rules, how often to do it, the impact on your credit, that I'm gonna do a whole episode on that topic, but I just wanted to cover this as an example to try and answer Zach's question.

And when it comes to annual fees, I want to remind everyone that there are a ton of opportunities to earn retention offers when your card renews. I'll link to a good post from Miles to Memories about this, but we tried this with Amy's platinum card recently and said, "Hey, the annual fee's really high.

We're not getting as much value out of it," which was actually true because I have a platinum card as well. And then they offered, if she could spend, I think it was $3,000 in the next 90 days, they offered 30,000 bonus points, which I value Amex points around two cents.

So that's $600, pretty much covers the fee, especially if you factor in all of the different credits and perks that come with that card. So that was great. With the tax filing deadline around the corner, you're probably dreading sifting through all the paperwork to find those donation receipts or wondering if you missed out on maximizing one of the most generous tax deductions, charitable contributions.

Well, thanks to Daffy, I never have to go digging through emails or desk drawers to find my donation receipts, and I'm proud to be partnering with them for this episode because they've helped me be more intentional with my giving and maximize the tax benefits of charitable giving all in one place.

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Daffy does all of that by helping you set up a donor advised fund or DAF, which is a tax advantaged account that lets you contribute cash, stock, or crypto on a one-time or recurring basis. Take the tax deduction at the time of the contribution and then distribute that money to over one and a half million charities, schools, and faith-based organizations whenever you want to.

So head on over to allthehacks.com/daffy if you wanna start giving today. And for a limited time, if you visit that link, you can get a free $25 to give to the charity of your choice. Again, that's allthehacks.com/daffy, D-A-F-F-Y. Getting the crew together isn't as easy as it used to be.

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So whatever the occasion, download the Drizly app or go to drizly.com. That's D-R-I-Z-L-Y.com today. Must be 21 plus, not available in all locations. Next, I wanna share an email Matt sent me that included a bunch of incredible hacks for earning some points. First, he pointed out that if you're Canadian, you can actually get a US Amex card with your Canadian credit history as long as you set up a US bank account, have a mailing address in the US that you can receive your physical card at.

He did it while he was renting an Airbnb in California and TD, his Canadian bank, made it really easy to set up a US-based account. Then he pointed out that the Capital One shopping rewards portal often offers really big cash back on travel booked via TripAdvisor. He's seen it as high as 30%.

It's often capped at $500 per transaction, but he's gone in and booked three nights in his name, three nights in his partner's name, and gotten $1,000 back on an expensive hotel stay. He also wanted to share that he's been using Club One Hotels for stays over the past five years and is regularly getting 30 to 40% off the best rate he's finding on hotel websites.

He said he just stayed in Charleston at the Restoration during a festival and paid $400 a night when the own hotel's website and Trivago were quoting 700 a night. Same deal for a trip to London this summer, and they occasionally sell gift cards for 10% off, which multiplies the savings even more.

Then for chain hotels, he said check out Capital One Business Deals, which used to be called Capital One Spring, which is totally free to sign up, but sometimes has ridiculously good deals at chains like Intercontinental and others. Last for business class flights, he wanted to share that sometimes he's found that booking a vacation package and adding one night at the cheapest hotel can save thousands of dollars on paid business class airfare.

He doesn't even always stay at the hotel he books, just does it to get a better deal on flights. So Matt, thank you for bringing all the hacks. Love hearing these. I'm gonna add them to the arsenal. Last two earning points questions. So Kristen wrote in asking about whether the Bank of America cards were worth it if you have enough money in their partners and you can earn their highest rewards tier.

So I'll give a quick overview. The Bank of America Premium Rewards Visa earns two points per dollar on travel and dining, one and a half on everything else. But if you have $100,000 or more in an eligible account, they bump that up by 75%, which means you're earning three and a half points per dollar on travel and dining, or 3.5% cash back, and you're earning 2.625% on everything else.

So I have to ask, how does that compare to what I would consider a comparable option on the points side, if you're not willing to spend the time and energy to transfer points to airline and hotel partners? If you're willing to do that, I think you're gonna get way outsized value focusing on earning miles and points, but let's take the Chase Sapphire Reserve and pair it with the Freedom Unlimited and compare.

On the travel and dining spend, with the Bank of America card, you're getting 3.5% cash back. With the Chase Sapphire Reserve, you're earning three points per dollar, which you can redeem in the portal for 1.5 cents, so you're getting four and a half percent cash back. So you're getting an extra percent cash back on travel and dining, but for the everything spend, you're getting 1.5 points on the Freedom Unlimited that are also worth 1.5 cents in the portal, so that's 2.25% cash back compared to 2.625.

So at the end of the day, if you're using the Bank of America card, you're losing out on 1% back on travel and dining, but you're earning half a percent on everything else, but you're doing it all with one card and you're doing it all without having to worry about booking in a travel portal and getting a deal.

I always prefer the Chase option because if you just want the cash back, that's fine. You can use it as credit in the portal, but if you end up wanting to transfer to partners and get outsized rewards on aspirational travel, you have that option, whereas with Bank of America, you don't get that option.

So I've always preferred the Chase option, but if you only want one card, you only care about cash back, and you're willing to put 100,000 or more dollars into a Bank of America Merrill Lynch account, and you factor the cost of doing that at nothing, which is not how I think about it, but if you're already there, then I do think the Bank of America option is a great single card option, but I think very few people are gonna be in that boat.

Last on earning points, I wanna talk about Companion Pass. I got two questions from Scott and Jomar asking about applying for cards to earn Companion Pass, how long it's good for, how to use the strategy, and how to do it with your partner. So for people not familiar, Southwest has a status tier.

When you earn 135,000 points in a year, you get Companion Pass for that year and the following year. And Companion Pass means that anytime you buy a ticket, whether it's with points or dollars, you can add a person to your flight for only the taxes, which domestically are $5.60.

Now, you have to name that person in advance, and you can only change the name, I think, three times a year, but if you're a couple, and you're planning on doing a lot of travel on Southwest, it can save you a ton, especially if you're flying to a lot of the Caribbean, Mexico, Hawaii destinations Southwest flies to, but the strategy is when to do it.

So the trick here is that when you earn it, you get it for the rest of the year and the following year. So you really wanna make sure you earn it as early in the year as possible. So if you're gonna do this with card bonuses, you need to make sure all the points you're earning post as early in the year as possible.

Now, it's not about when you spend the money though, it's about when the statement is posted. So if you spend money in December, the statement closes on January 1st, sometime in early January, those points are gonna post to your Rapid Rewards account. So if you wanna do this, you need to hit 135,000 points.

You could sign up for either the personal cards for 50,000 point signup bonuses, or there's 60 and 80,000 point bonuses on the business cards. You probably need two, which you can do at once. I have done this in the past to get companion pass, and then it'll be good for two years.

Just make sure that you don't spend the bonus early, because if you sign up for those cards in November or December, and you hit the bonus before the end of the year, there is no way to push that out to the next year. But the follow-up from Scott was, could he have his wife do the exact same strategy in two years, and then he reverts in four years?

And the short answer is yes, that is a tactic that I know lots of people do. They sign up for the Southwest cards in year one, earn companion pass for two years, hold on to them for one and a half, two years, maybe even three years, just so you're not potentially having a bad reputation with Chase.

And then his partner will do the same thing in two years. Obviously, you need to be able to meet the minimum spends on the cards, and spend a little bit more to get to 135,000. So if you do two cards to hit 50,000, you still need to spend another 35,000 to get to 135.

So it is a big effort. So this could be a great option, but keep in mind you do need to spend a lot on the cards to make this work. There have been plenty of times where the signup bonuses on the Southwest cards have been much higher, and you've been able to clear the 135,000 point requirement in two cards with no extra spend.

So obviously, if you can hold out, and this isn't urgent, it's a great chance to take advantage of it when that happens. So those are all the hacks and the questions I got on earning points. There's a bunch of other travel stuff I wanna get to. So let's start with booking.

I got a bunch of tips from listeners and things that I've found myself recently on trying to track fare drops. So one from my neighbor, Joe, he said he uses TripIt, which monitors his Southwest fare prices and alerts him if Southwest fares drop. And then Jessica actually pointed out to me that if your fare does drop, you can actually change the reservation, and then it'll show you a negative amount to change it to the same flight, and then you can just get a refund for that difference.

Unfortunately, not all airlines are that easy. We just booked a flight for Amy to go to New York on United, and I wanted to make sure that I could monitor the flight prices. So what I did was I set up price tracking on Google Flights, and I got an email that the flight had dropped by $50.

So we went to try to do the same thing that you can do with Southwest, but United wasn't making it possible to book that same flight. So we ended up canceling the flight and then rebooking the exact same flight with the credit, but because the flight had dropped $50, Amy now has a $50 United credit.

So that was great, but a side benefit was I hadn't really used Google's price tracking for flights, and now I'm using it for all kinds of trips and getting updates on how those prices are changing. And they even launched price protection recently, which I noticed for a flight I was booking to LA, where Google says if you book this flight through Google and the fare drops by more than $5, we'll refund you the difference up to $500.

So unfortunately that didn't work for the flight I needed to take, but it was really interesting. But caveat, if you're using an Amex card that gives you a point bonus for airfare booked directly for the airline, I don't think you're gonna get that airfare bonus with this because you have to book the flight through Google.

If you're using a Chase card that gives you points on travel, I think you'll be fine. Capital One has a similar feature if you use their travel portal, and I have used that before, especially when I'm trying to use my travel credit for the Venture X card, but I haven't had the fare drop yet, so I haven't been able to actually take advantage of it.

Tom wrote in another great hack. If you're traveling with a lot of luggage, he owns a video production agency and always has really big, heavy cases of equipment. He realized that domestically, checking bags can get so expensive, and sometimes upgrading to first class can be so cheap that he's looked, and it's been cheaper for him to add first class for $70, get two free items, including an overweight bag, instead of paying $40 per bag, or even $100 for heavy items.

So this is something interesting that I always do just for fun anyways, is I always just look at the business class fare. Very rarely will I ever pay for it with dollars, but I've occasionally seen it so cheap where in one case, actually, I was flying to Southern California, and it was only $20 to upgrade to business class on Alaska.

So in that case, I just said, "Why not?" Next, Jared sent in a hack that was a little bit longer, but it saved him hundreds of dollars on a rental car, so I thought it'd be worth going into. And he actually stumbled on it by accident, so I thought it was a really cool story.

He'd been looking for a 2 1/2 week rental car out of Dallas-Fort Worth, and was seeing all these different prices depending on what device and shopping portal he went on, but he actually noticed on the Hertz app on his phone that a Tesla Model 3 was actually the cheapest option for only $600.

But then when he looked on his computer and every browser, it was almost twice as expensive, or he couldn't even see a Tesla, and it was gonna come out to almost $1,000. He tried using the Amex Platinum discount, no luck, and he almost booked it on his phone, but the Capital One shopping portal had 30% back on Hertz if he booked on the Hertz website, so he really wanted to book it there.

And after some digging, he found that when you use the Hertz app, they'll apply a corporate code, and they'll apply a rate code prepay. And that shows you prepaid rates that you won't see on the website unless you apply that code. So sure enough, he typed into the rate code box labeled RQ, prepay, all one word, and boom, he found the Tesla Model 3 for the same price he found in the app on the website, booked it with the Capital One shopping portal, and now is saving over $500 between the rate and being able to use that 30% back from the shopping portal.

And just to make it even sweeter, this purchase puts him right over the edge for his Delta Reserve card, so he's getting 120,000 points and 10,000 MQMs. So he's really stoked, and I'm excited to learn another hack for rental cars. One more little hack that I thought was great was from Julie, who wanted to share that she's been getting incredible value from using IHG points on hotels all over Europe, but she was trying to use one of her free night certificates and wasn't able to do it for a trip she wanted to take because it turns out it was a football weekend in the city she was going to, and all the rooms had a two-night minimum.

Well, she tried calling the manager and asking if he would lift the two-night minimum for 15 minutes while she booked online because she actually wanted to book two nights, but she could only book them one at a time using her certificates. If you had asked me if this would have worked, I would have told you it's not worth your time, but I'm clearly wrong.

Great job, Julie. I didn't even know that a manager at a hotel would be able to lift that restriction so easily or would be willing to do it for a short window of time, but it turns out that was the case, and she got that hotel, which was running over $600 a night, so it was a great deal.

Then I got a question recently about the 25% transfer bonus from Chase to Flying Blue. So right now, until May 15th, you can get a 25% bonus when you transfer from Chase to Air France KLM's Flying Blue, and Myles wanted to know if it was worth doing this in anticipation of a trip.

He says he's a Delta guy, so this seemed like a good deal, and he wanted to know if the goal is to book Delta One flights, if this is worth doing. I have the same feeling here, as I mentioned earlier, about paying for points or buying points. I really try to avoid doing this until there's a specific redemption in mind.

It sounds like he's kind of on the fence where he knows a idea of a redemption, but not a specific redemption, and so I can see the allure. However, I just think that there are circumstances that you might not be able to predict, that you might need to take a flight, and it's not available to partner inventory, and so you aren't able to book it on Air France, and now you just have Myles and Air France that are harder to use, or maybe there's something else comes up, and you wish that you had those Chase points to transfer somewhere else.

If you look historically, Air France has had a 25% transfer bonus every year since 2018, including twice in 2022, and in 2020, the bonus was 30%. So I think unless you're really coming up on a trip soon, and you've already done some searching, and you know the availability is pretty good for when you wanna go, you're just not sure on exact dates, I would hold off and wait until you are more certain about the trip, especially knowing that this is the kind of bonus that we see pretty regularly.

And on the note of booking with partners, Caroline wrote in a question. She said she has 250,000 Capital One points, nice job, and she started thinking differently about how to use her points. She was looking to transfer to Air France or Virgin, but she comes into a problem. Every time she searches on these sites, she can't find the flight she's looking for, and wanted to know if she's searching wrong.

And this comes back to one of the challenges of trying to get outsized value from your points. It's that you can't expect to be able to fly on every flight on every day for really popular routes. You might need to book super last minute or super far in advance.

So the way it typically works is that airlines have two types of availability for flights with points. There's their saver availability, and then all the general availability. And so if you're looking on a site like United or Delta or American, you can usually book any of their flights with points, but only some of them will be a reasonable number of points.

I've looked at United and found flights to London for 60,000 in points in business class. And then I've also seen it be close to 200,000 for a flight as similar as the same day. So that saver availability when it's lower like 60,000 is what they make available to partners.

So if you're not seeing that saver availability with an airline, you're definitely not gonna see that availability booking Delta through Air France or Lufthansa through United or anything like that. So the challenge is it just takes a little bit more time, a little bit more searching, and it can sometimes be easier to search on the airline you wanna fly on websites first, and then searching on the program you have points for once you've found the dates.

The added bonus there is that the airline websites for their own flights often have a calendar view where you can see more dates at once. Or you can use a tool like point.me, which will let you search all of the options, but you can only search one day at a time.

Or there's a cool site called Seatspy. They only support a handful of routes, but they do support searching a year at a time. So you can see the entire year of dates, but again, it's only for a limited number of routes on a limited number of airlines, but there are some decent options.

But it's enough that if your trip is supported, it might be a good option. Mike actually wrote in a question that seems as if he's taking the trip Caroline wants to take and wanted to know if he was booking a flight with Virgin Miles on Air France, and Air France changes that flight, whether it's to a different day or even cancels it, what happens?

It feels like Air France might claim that they're unable to do anything because he booked it through Virgin, and Virgin will say we're unable to do anything 'cause it's on Air France. And then he's stuck in the middle of two airlines that are saying call each other. So I emailed Tiffany Funk, who I've had on the show, who runs point.me and asked her specifically how this works.

And she said that as the operating carrier, it's Air France's responsibility to accommodate them. And there doesn't need to be award inventory for Air France to rebook them on another flight. I have had this happen in the past and ended up being quite an amazing experience. Air France actually canceled a flight from Paris to the Seychelles on our honeymoon.

And so they ended up rebooking us in Emirates business class, which while we had a stopover was a much nicer flight. However, because Virgin is the ticketing carrier, it turns out that they usually need to all do this together. So fortunately, airlines have liaison desks for these exact issues, but it isn't uncommon to end up on a three-way call because not all airline agents know that liaison desks even exist.

So I'll link to a couple of blog posts Tiffany shared with me, but I will say if you're in this situation and you're willing to put in the time and energy, I don't think it's one you need to worry about. It'll just take a little bit of time. All that said, if it is the day of travel, once the ticket goes under airport control, whoever's operating the flight has free reign to do everything and you won't have this problem.

Next, Erin wrote in hoping to go to Paris this spring and said that she found tickets for her family of four from Seattle to Munich flying through Paris, but oddly couldn't find the Seattle to Paris flight for the same price and it was double the points. So she wanted to know, could she just buy the Seattle to Munich flight and get off in Paris and not take the next route?

She said, which is a very important thing that she'd only have carry-ons and she wanted to know my thoughts on trying to do this. In her case, her return flight is already booked home on a separate ticket. So she's already covered most of the bases and there's actually a website called SkipLagged that helps you do this kind of searching for deals like this on paid tickets, but when it comes to award tickets, there are a few things that are similar and a few things are different.

First off, the flight that you skip always has to be the last flight in the entire itinerary. So if you were to book a round trip, once you miss one leg, the entire rest of the ticket will most likely get canceled. So I would make sure that you're only trying to do this where you're skipping the last leg of your trip.

Second, you need to make sure you're not checking bags because if your bags get checked, they'll likely get checked through the final destination and they won't be where you are if you get off your flight. There's obviously a risk that when you check in, they'll ask you to gate check your bag because maybe the overhead bins are full.

That doesn't happen as much internationally, but I would just make sure that if that happens, you ask them to not check your bags through to your final destination. You could tell them that maybe there's something you'll need access to just in case there's a cancellation or medication. They shouldn't have a problem doing that.

But airlines don't like this. There have been airlines that tried to sue people for doing this and have been unsuccessful in doing so. So it's not something that's necessarily illegal, but I would say it's a little extra risky when you're doing it with your frequent flyer miles because there is something that the airline could hold over you, which is the balance in your account.

I know if I were doing this and I've done this probably a couple times with paid flights, I don't usually attach my frequent flyer number to the account, or if I do, I'll attach a frequent flyer number for a partner airline where I don't have a big balance of points.

So I fly United enough that I have a lot of United miles. So if I were using United, maybe I would credit those points to Avianca just in case there's a problem. United's not gonna be upset about it and do anything. I think the risk is low, but if I were doing this for a ward ticket using my points, maybe I would either open up a new frequent flyer mile account, transfer the points there, transfer them to a partner where I don't have a big balance, or if I don't have a huge balance of points in the airline, it doesn't matter.

So those are some considerations, but I think the biggest risk is that something goes wrong. And let's say the day of they cancel your flight and they say we're just gonna rebook you from Seattle to Frankfurt and then transfer you to Munich. And it's gonna be really hard for you to explain why that doesn't work for you without telling them you're trying to do something that they're explicitly trying to prohibit you from doing.

So I think as long as you are flexible with something like that happening, then it can kind of be okay and you're willing to take that risk on yourself. That's not always a huge risk. If you end up landing in Frankfurt and having to buy a ticket to Paris, it's gonna cost you some money, but it's not gonna be thousands of dollars and it's a pretty low risk that it happens.

That's something to be aware of. That would be the biggest risk in my mind of this happening. One other way to mitigate that would be to try and make sure you're doing it with a carrier where the stopover is their hub. So for example, if I'm trying to go from San Francisco to Paris and I buy a ticket to Munich on Air France, it's unlikely if something happens that Air France is gonna try to route me anywhere other than through Paris 'cause that's their hub.

But if I were buying that ticket on United and they were flying United to Paris and then connecting to Munich on Lufthansa, then it's a possibility that if that flight got canceled, they would just book me on a Lufthansa flight directly to Munich through Frankfurt or something like that.

So I'd feel better about it if the hub of the airline you're on is the city you wanna get off at. But in general, I would say if you're okay with a little bit of risk, it can be worth doing, but it's not a perfect solution. My fitness routine this year had a few rocky starts, but I am back into it now.

And honestly, one of the things that helped me get back is that I just added some new workout gear. And if I'm gonna buy more, why not have the best performance apparel out there, which I think is Viori? And I am excited to be partnering with them for this episode.

Viori makes performance apparel that's incredibly versatile. Everything's designed to work out in, but it doesn't look or feel like it at all. And it is so freaking comfortable, you will wanna wear it all the time. But it's not just for men. My wife is obsessed with Viori as much as I am.

While my personal favorite will probably always be the Sunday Performance Joggers, I have at least three pairs. I just got a few pairs of the Core Shorts and three or four Strato Tech Tees, and I'm loving them. Honestly, I can't think of the last time I went on a run, bike ride, or walk in anything else.

Their products are so versatile, you can use them for just about any activity, whether it's running, training, or yoga, but they're also great for lounging, running around town, or they even have a few things you can wear for a night out. Honestly, I think Viori is an investment in your happiness.

And for All The Hacks listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase, as well as free shipping and returns on US orders over $75. So you should definitely check them out at allthehacks.com/viori. Again, go to allthehacks.com/v-u-o-r-i and get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet.

Did you know that someone new gets impacted by identity theft every two seconds? It makes sense when there's so much of our personal information getting shared online without our consent. I found a listing for my dad on a site called Family Tree Now that had his name, age, address, phone number, email, past addresses, and the names of his relatives.

And that was just one of the 69 listings that had his info. Fortunately, instead of spending hours finding all the sites with his info and submitting the request to take it down, I got it all done in minutes with Delete.me from Abine, and I am so excited to be partnering with them for this episode.

Delete.me is an amazing service that will not just find and remove your personal information from over 500 data broker websites, but they'll continuously scan for new data that shows up and get that removed as well. On average, Delete.me finds and removes over 2,000 pieces of data for a customer in their first two years.

And to date, they've removed over 35 million pieces of data for their customers. So if you wanna get your personal information removed from all these listings on the internet, go to allthehacks.com/deleteme and get 20% off a plan for you or your entire family. Again, that's allthehacks.com/deleteme. I just wanna thank you, Quick, for listening to and supporting the show.

Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. Finally, Tony wrote in because he's going deep on Antarctica research and wanted to follow up from the Antarctica episode.

He hasn't booked anything yet, but there were two sites he wanted to share for anyone interested, Antarctica Travels and Freestyle Adventure Travel, who put out emails on cruise deals for Antarctica during the travel season. And the lowest he saw this year for a double occupancy twin balcony room on a traditional cruise was $3,400 per person, which is a crazy deal because the normal prices are over $6,000.

So if you're looking to go on an affordable trip, sign up for those and see if you can find some last minute deals and you might be able to get to Antarctica for a lot cheaper. Next, I just wanna do a rapid fire of some sites I've found recently and you guys have shared with me that might be helpful for you, that might be interesting.

First, Justin tried to share this cool tool called AI Hotel Review that summarized all the TripAdvisor reviews using AI to try to give you general sentiment. Between the time he shared it and now, that company has pivoted to a new company called Where2AI, which is an AI trip planner.

You can also just use ChatGPT to do itinerary planning and I've been really impressed at how good it is. So if you wanna try to go in the weeds, you can do it yourself with ChatGPT or you can go to Where2AI and go through a kind of interesting AI trip itinerary planner tool.

And right now, it's all free. Next, there is a site called bagsaway.com, which is just a directory of retail locations and stores in a city where you can store your bags like you would at the front desk of a hotel when you were checking out. So if you're on a day trip in a city and you want a place to leave your bags, that could be interesting.

Kyle shared a site highche.com, H-I-C-H-E-E.com, which looks like they're doing a productized version of that reverse image search hack I've talked about on Airbnb, where you can use Google Images to try to find other sites that might be listing the property you're trying to book. So you go there and you paste the URL for an Airbnb and they'll go scour the internet to try to find another website that might be cheaper.

So awesome there. Mike shared a link that I can't believe that I missed before our London trip, which is deltaairbnb.com, where you enter your SkyMiles number and you start earning a mile for every dollar you spend on Airbnb on stays all around the world. So don't forget to do that.

Thanks, Mike. I can't believe I forgot. Jason wrote in to recommend checking out Max Rewards, which is an app that lets you link all of your rewards cards and activate the deals and offers they have. He loved it 'cause he got an Amazon offer that saved him $25, which was cool.

It's a pay-what-you-want app that costs as low as $5 to $9 a month or $60 to $108 a year. I've seen the app around for a while, but I always have used card pointers and I hadn't really taken it for a spin. But for the purpose of this question, I thought I would.

I won't say I had the experience Jason had. The first time I loaded the app, it didn't load and I had to kill it and reopen it. Then when I went to link cards, it looks like it wants you to link your cards with a bank connection, which means you have to share your data to Max Rewards.

Normally, I'm not opposed to doing this. However, when it doesn't seem necessary, I get a little hesitant. But what actually had me much more hesitant was that I'm very familiar from my time at Wealthfront at all the ways that you need to present how you're collecting data and what you're doing with it.

And so whether you're doing that through products like Yodlee or Plaid, you'll almost always see a pop-up when they ask you to link your account that says, "Hey, this is what we're doing with the data. "This is who's the party that's doing this." And in the Max Rewards app, it just switched straight to a box that was enter your username and password.

So I know at Wealthfront, when you put in your username and password, we don't store those credentials. We work with a third party like Yodlee to be able to process that. Company that's in the business of doing that exclusively. It made me very hesitant to use their syncing feature because I just don't know what they're doing with the data and how they're doing it.

But just for fun, I tried to do it with one Amex account that I was willing to change the password with after. And it turns out, as soon as I clicked connect, it didn't work at all. And they forced me to manually add my card. I went in to try to manually add the card and there was a spinning wheel.

It never actually loaded. I quit the app, came back in, it wasn't there manually. I tried to add it again. It was a spinning wheel, I couldn't do it. So I'm not sure exactly how to get the value that Jason has in the app. I was doing it all on iOS.

Maybe their Android app is stronger. They do have a ton of great reviews in the app store. So there might be something there, but I couldn't figure out how to get value of the app because it just wasn't working for me. And I don't love that you have to connect your bank connection.

So I'm gonna keep using card pointers. If anyone has a different experience or if someone on the Max Rewards team wants to reach out, I'm happy to give it another look and share the issues I'm facing. But for now, I'm sticking with card pointers. I think it's a great experience.

They have a Mac, web, mobile, Android, watch, everything app, and they're all super fast. I have partnered with them to get you guys 30% off at allthehacks.com/cardpointers. But funny enough, while I was recording this, I was reflecting on my earlier conversation about getting good deals for members. I actually emailed Emmanuel, who is a listener, and said, "Hey, would you be willing to do "an even better offer for members?" And so through the end of the month, Emmanuel's gonna offer all the Hacks members who wanna sign up for Card Pointers Pro 50% off.

So that's awesome. It's a great product. I've talked about it multiple times before, but they will go in and add all the offers on all of your cards with Chase, with Amex, so that you're getting all the deals that you can. Card Pointers actually hits Amex and Chase at the same time for all your cards, which lets you add the offers to multiple cards, but you can't actually do manually on your own.

There is a free version of the app, so you can play with it before you sign up. Check it out. Let me know what you think. And if you're an All The Hacks member, keep an eye out for that 50% discount. Two more, Jason said to check out the app Fetch, which gives you points for scanning all of your receipts.

Said it takes almost no extra time, and he just earns a nice little bonus there. Last, I have mixed feelings on this next one. As a content creator, I don't love it. But as a deal seeker, I see the appeal. It's a site called 12 Foot Ladder, one to ft.io, and they have an iOS app, and they basically let you get through the paywall for articles and content that you'd normally have to pay for.

Matthew noticed that it even works for some of the ones where going into incognito mode doesn't work. So here's the caveat I'll put there. If you're just trying to get to know a site and you wouldn't otherwise pay or subscribe and you just wanna read an article, great, go for it.

But if you find a content source that you really like, I would encourage you to consider supporting them. Being a content creator full-time myself, I really appreciate that support. Whether it's by checking out the sponsors we have on the show, joining my membership, or using the links for cards on our site, I really appreciate all that support.

I'd hate to make recommendations that you should be finding ways to not support other creators, but this show is called All The Hacks, and I couldn't call it All The Hacks if I said all the hacks except for a few. So I wanted to make sure I put it out there.

Last group of travel hacks before we wrap is when you're on a trip, and I'll just run through a few. Garrett wrote in after hearing me talk about jet lag, and he noticed that I didn't talk about fasting in addition to normal tricks, but he's found it's been one of the best when he's come across growing up traveling from Sweden to Japan for three years, and now annually from the States.

He gave me a link to a Harvard post that I'll put in the show notes, but basically what he recalls was fast for 12 to 16 hours and then break the fast with breakfast at your arrival destination. Works better for some flights than others, and it means foregoing lounges, which he's a little bummed that he might be doing, but it really helped with jet lag for him.

He's not a doctor, I'm not a doctor. This is not medical advice, but definitely something that you might wanna look into if you're trying to really optimize around jet lag. Next, Kush wrote in, wanted to share how his learnings from a bad experience could be really helpful for you.

Back in 2019, someone stole his bag at a metro station. It had his passport, his money, and all his important documents. He couldn't find it and wasn't sure what to do, but he went to the embassy and it was so helpful, and he said, "I know anyone that gets in this situation "is probably gonna panic and be stressed," but for him, the U.S.

embassy was so helpful. They knew everything about how to submit the right paperwork, expedite the process, get him a new passport, and they even had an off-duty officer that could help with guidance when they were closed during the holidays or the weekends if something was urgent. So definitely a tactic I hope no one has to use, but if so, Kush, thanks for reminding everyone that your embassy when you're traveling abroad can be a great resource if you end up in a situation like that.

Similar to citizenship and passports, Rob reached out with an episode idea, which I don't know if it'll make a whole episode or not, but it's at least worth sharing here as I think about that. So Rob is Italian, but he's not an Italian citizen, but he learned about getting citizenship through Bloodlined.

He found out that his great-grandmother never officially became a U.S. citizen, which left the door open for him and all of his Bloodlined to claim Italian citizenship. He's been working with an attorney for the past few years to get all the death, marriage, and birth certificates going back four generations, and is just about ready to bring the case to Italy.

The nice thing is that the whole process where the lawyers do all the work costs him only $10,000, which will get him EU citizenship and a passport, but not only him, it will get his father, two sisters, one uncle, two cousins, and three nephews citizenship too. If you compare that to the cost of getting citizenship through Golden Visas and other processes where you might have to spend $400,000, live somewhere for weeks at a time, and it only works for one person or one family, he thought this was an amazing hack.

The process is called Gisanguinis. I'm probably pronouncing that wrong. There are 12 countries that do this, and so since the U.S. is a country of immigrants, there might be other people that don't know about this, and there are a bunch of benefits. If you ever need to get out of the United States, you have an option.

Rob said it makes him feel a little bit like Jason Bourne. He can work anywhere in the EU. His wife can actually take a test to become a citizen. He gets free healthcare, and he could even play for the Italian National Soccer Club. It also makes owning property in Italy or other places much easier, and he can hide the fact that he's a U.S.

citizen if he's ever traveling somewhere where he might want to do that. Unfortunately, I don't think I have any Italian heritage, but if I did, this is actually something that I would probably look into. It's super interesting. If anyone else digs into this and has experience, I'd love to hear about it.

I'd love to share it with everyone else. Finally, I'll share a great hack from my good friend Mike that is just the perfect hack to end on. It's for getting free bottled water at a hotel. So every time Mike checks into a new hotel, he goes straight to the gym where almost always there's a cold fridge with free water.

He stocks up on water in the gym, takes it up to his room so he doesn't have to pay the two, four, five, $10 for a bottle of water from the mini bar and is stocked up for the week. Though it's funny because I get texts from Mike now.

Every time he checks into a hotel, he just sends me a text of the photo of the fridge in the gym. So every time I check into a hotel now and I want some waters, I think of him. Hopefully you guys can use this hack and think of me and Mike as well.

That was a ton of stuff and I didn't even get through all the questions I wanted to. There were a ton about opening cards, how often, how many credit score implications that I'm gonna make a whole episode on. There were a few about cruises that I actually wanna do a whole episode on as well.

There were a bunch on booking hotels with points that I wanna do an episode on. And then I wanna come back and do a deep dive master classy kind of episode on booking flights with points. So stay tuned for all of that. Lots of content to come the rest of the year.

If you made it this far, thank you so much to everyone who's listening, sending questions, sharing their hacks and wins. I'm so excited I found such an amazing community of other optimizers and hackers to share this journey through. And I hope you all enjoyed this episode. Before we go, I wanna share a couple more wins that you all had because I didn't get to all of them in the intro.

Adam found $4,000 of unclaimed money from some old escrow issue in a mortgage after a refinance. So congrats, Adam. Big reminder to everyone to keep searching for unclaimed money. Then Medisa had an amazing experience. Thanks to Trustworthy, one of the partners of all the hacks, where she was flying with her kids to Singapore through Manila, which she's done all over the world.

But she had an interesting experience where Philippine Air actually required her to show a copy of her son's birth certificate to prove she was his mother because of some of the human trafficking that's been happening. She obviously didn't have a paper copy of it with her because she's never had to travel with that, nor do we travel with our kids' birth certificates.

But because she'd loaded up all of her important docs in Trustworthy, she was able to find a copy immediately and email it to them, which they accepted. And she actually wrote this saying, "We're currently sitting at our gate "and waiting to board our flight, "which we wouldn't have been able to do without this." She was so thankful for the recommendation.

I think Trustworthy is such a great product for organizing all of your family's most important information. If you also wanna check out Trustworthy, you can go to allthehacks.com/trustworthy and get 20% off. Finally, the last win I wanna share is my own. I was taking a last minute trip down to Southern California and I looked online and it was $200 to fly from San Francisco to Burbank.

Now, I quickly did a search on United, saw that it was only 15,000 miles, which is about 1.3 cents per point. But I ended up saying, "I wonder if there's a partner that makes this cheaper." So I went to point.me, I did a search and found the flight for only 6,500 Avianca miles, which I could transfer from Cap One, Amex or Citi, which ended up being a three cent per point redemption and made me feel a lot better about the last minute trip.

So big reminder, if you ever find a deal, make sure there's not a better deal by using a different transfer partner. Point.me makes this really easy. And if you haven't checked it out, you can get your first month for a dollar using the code ALLTHEHAX. Just make sure you select a monthly standard plan and put the code in all the way at the checkout, not in the "I have a code" field, which is a different promo.

I also have been talking to a company called AwardLogic, which is a competitor to point.me. I'm trying to play around to see if I can do a good review on the two products. That was a lot of wins, I know, but it's just really exciting for me and hopefully for you to hear all the amazing experiences people are having using all the tactics we share on this show.

(upbeat music) It's so awesome hearing all of those. Finally, I just looked at Apple Podcasts. I'm at 941 ratings. I still have a goal to get to a thousand, which means 59 of you could help me get there. So if you've gotten any value from this episode or this podcast, I would really appreciate a quick rating and review on Apple and see if I can get to a thousand soon.

Thanks so much, see you next week. (upbeat music) (whooshing)