put in a little bit of effort and you could be flying first class for next to nothing. And that is a pretty fantastic feeling. Why do you like points? They make travel possible in ways that cash doesn't always make practical. Then you feel like you're not paying for it.

Getting the champagne and the caviar and the onboard chef or the shower. It certainly feels pretty incredible. I spend less money, but I get far more vacations and far more comfortable experiences. Of course, you have to know about transferring the points and booking it, but all of those things are very learnable.

We're going to walk you through that entire process. Yeah, absolutely. You'll have plenty of opportunities to travel around the world using monopoly money to pay for the ticket because you're like, "Oh, I don't want to bother with this." Then you may be giving up $1,000 in value. And with a little bit of effort, look at that, you saved yourself 80% of the points.

So I often tell people that if you want to travel more, you need one of three things in abundance. So the first thing, obvious money. If you've got millions and millions of dollars, easy to travel. Number two is millions and millions of miles and points. Those two things are difficult for most people to get more of.

The third thing that influences your ability to travel more is... Nick, thanks for being here. Happy to be here. I'm excited. Yeah, I am really excited for this conversation. I've had a bunch of times in the past in the show where we've talked about different ways to redeem points, get the most value.

But I wanted to do an end-to-end. And I was talking with Greg, who is your partner on the Frequent Miler on the Air podcast. And he was like, "Get Nick on. Nick is the pro." So this is going to be fun. I'm glad. I'm glad he said that. I'll make sure to send that check in the mail.

Greg, it's out there, right? If you're listening. Of course you're listening. Yeah. So I guess the thing I want to start us with is the premise of a conversation about redeeming your points and getting the most value out of them when you're traveling is that points even make sense.

So why do you like points? Why aren't you sitting there collecting cash back? Yeah, that's a good question. I really think there's kind of like two different pieces to this. So the first piece is that they make travel possible in ways that cash doesn't always make practical. So I can almost guarantee that anybody who's not focusing right now on earning miles and points could be traveling more or more comfortably or both if they're learning to maximize miles and points.

So that's definitely a big piece of it. The other big piece of it for me is that it's kind of a psychological thing. I think we all like getting a deal, right? Like stores have clearance sales and Black Friday sales and flash sales because they know that we get excited about saving something, right?

And so if you've ever had that experience that high, getting 10 or 20 or 30 or 50% off on a pair of shoes or a TV or whatever, then you know what that feels like. And the thing with miles and points is that that discount is often significantly higher.

So we're looking at saving 60 or 70 or sometimes like, believe it or not, 90% or more. Often the cash price is something. And so that takes things that are just impossible and brings them within reach. Last year, I took my family of four to Europe three times and we flew in business class both ways.

And that's something that I wouldn't have the cash to be able to do. And even if I focused on cash back, I couldn't possibly earn enough cash back to be able to make that happen. But miles and points create these opportunities for far outsized value. And that's exciting and fun.

When you get on a plane and you know that you paid 90% less than somebody else on that plane, there's an exciting element of that. But it also gives me the opportunity to show my family the world and to go places and do things that I thought I would only see in books.

Yeah. So I agree with everything you said. This is why I love this. I thought before we jump into actually how to make sure you're getting the most value, we'd kind of rewind and talk about how do you not get the most value? So I'll share what my quick research led me to.

I'm curious if there's anything I'm missing. But when I think about people saying, "How do you make sure you get the most out of your points?" I'm like, "Well, let's make sure you're not getting the least." Letting your points expire, obviously, maybe the worst. You know, but... True. Using them for gift cards, maybe the second worst.

Are there any other, like, just terrible ways to use your points to redeem them for the least value? Shopping on Amazon is one that comes to mind because it frequently offers low value for your points. And that's where, you know, when you mentioned gift cards and things like that, they typically offer very low value for the points.

And when you asked before, you know, "Why care about points and miles rather than cash back?" Well, that comes into play here. Because if you're going to redeem your points at less than one cent per point in value, then maybe it would have been smarter to just focus on cash back and use your cash back to buy whatever stuff you want.

So if you're redeeming your points at very low value like that, it obviously just nerfs your potential outsize or your potential for outsize redemptions. So yeah, I mean, gift cards tend to be among the worst. Or shopping online, redeeming points that way. Redeeming for a statement credit varies in quality from one type of mile or point to another in terms of how much you can get.

But typically, you're capped at about a penny a point at most, which is not a value that I would normally accept from my points and miles. Now, I say that and I recognize there are some people that are the financial independence retire early crowd. And for some of that crowd, I think that redeeming for statement credits might make some sense.

Or at least if you're focused on saving 10 or 15 cents per gallon on your gas or how much you're paying per square of toilet paper, then you may want to also focus on, OK, well, how can I earn outsize value for my miles and points? Or how can I at least earn cash back that could well eclipse whatever it is I'm saving on other things?

Because one or two new credit card bonuses a year, even if you're only redeeming at one cent per point, will probably defeat or outperform, I should say, your efforts in a lot of other areas because the points can be worth so much. Then you also have redeeming points and miles for travel through your credit card portal, and that typically looks a little bit better than a statement credit, but it doesn't necessarily perform better.

And what I mean by that is a lot of times card issuers or some card issuers at least will offer opportunities to get, like, let's say, 25 percent more for your points when you redeem points for travel through their travel portal. And that looks and sounds good, but there's some opportunity cost involved there where you're not necessarily getting the 25 percent more that you think you are.

So, you know, for instance, if it's that 25 percent, you might think, OK, well, I'm getting 1.25 cents per point in value out of my points. But you're giving some things up because if you're booking through your credit card portal, you're losing the opportunity, for instance, to earn hotel points from the chain.

Normally, you know, if you book a Marriott, then you can earn Marriott points when you stay. However, if you've booked through your credit card portal, you're not going to earn those Marriott points. If you book directly through Marriott, you will get those points. And most hotel chains offer a rebate somewhere in the range of like 8 to 20 percent, depending on your status and the card you use and things like that.

But but at any rate, you're giving up that, let's call it 10 percent to keep the math simple right there. And oftentimes you could be clicking through a shopping portal to book that hotel and potentially earning another five or 10 percent back. And then if you have something like a AAA membership or some other type of coupon code that you might be able to use directly with the hotel chain, you might be able to reduce that price even further to the point where if you're redeeming points, you might actually be getting worse than one cent per point in value.

You might have been better off cashing out at one cent a point and booking that hotel directly using some of those various stacking methods. So I don't necessarily love booking travel through the credit card portal, although there are times when it makes sense. And I think it makes more sense for flights in general than for hotels.

And sometimes if you're booking a boutique hotel where you wouldn't have access to a better price otherwise, there are times when that can make sense. But generally speaking, I find the opportunities to get outsized value to be in transferring your points to the various credit card transfer programs. I agree.

I want to come back to the flight side of the travel portal, because two things are interesting. One, I believe American just announced that you are not going to earn points or loyalty points or anything from flights that you don't book on their website, or I believe through some kind of corporate travel portals.

So it could be the case by the end of the year, even who knows that similar to booking hotels in a travel portal, you might not earn frequent flyer miles on airlines or status if you book on these portals. I'm not sure if that's going to be the case.

I'm curious what you think. But that's one aspect of flights that I think could potentially throw another wrinkle here. Yeah, it definitely might. I think this is one of those things that's still developing, and we're going to have to see how it all shakes out, because I think American's intention is to force any portals or any types of travel agencies to follow their rules and presumably to give them opportunities to earn more or price the flights higher when you're booking through someone else rather than directly through American.

I don't know exactly what their goal is, but I think I get the sense that they're going to have a system to approve various travel agencies. And so maybe the credit card companies will jump through whatever hoops they need to for people to earn miles. It's hard to say.

I think it's kind of a short sighted system, to be honest with you, because commissions on airline tickets are so low that I can't imagine they can squeeze all that much more out of this. It seemed kind of silly to me, but you're right. I mean, if other airlines follow suit on that and it becomes the case that you can't earn frequent flyer miles and elite status when you're booking through your credit card portal, that will more or less to me destroy the value of booking through a credit card portal in the vast majority of situations.

Yep. The only two things I'll flag also just considerations for the portal, because if you have a Chase Sapphire Reserve card and you're like 1.5 cents, that can seem pretty compelling. One is when things go wrong, you're often having to deal with the travel portal. And so I've told a couple of stories about this in the past, but I had a flight and a friend was on the same flight.

We wanted to cancel and take a different one. I booked with the airline. So I went to the desk and said, "Hey, the flight's delayed six hours. Can you cancel it?" He had to call Amex Travel. He was still on the phone with Amex Travel while we were taking off on the other flight.

And so that's one. Same thing is sometimes true with hotel chains. And then also the pricing. I would say, like you mentioned, you might have access to other deals, but there might just be different pricing. So I would say always, if you're looking to book on the portal, thinking you're getting that 1.25 or 1.5 cents of extra added value, make sure you go somewhere else and look at the price.

And I can't remember which blog post, but I'll link to it in the show notes. Someone went out and said, "Looked at all these flights on all these different portals." It might have been your guises. And in some cases, the flights in the portal are actually a little cheaper, especially for some international flights, often in business.

And in some cases, they were much more expensive. So if you're going to pay a premium to book in the portal, it's also obviously not as good of a deal as you think. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, on the flip side, there are times when booking through the portal will be beneficial.

I mean, there are times, Amex has programs, for instance, with some airlines where you may actually get a better deal booking through their credit card portal. But those times are more few and far between. And like you said, you got to shop around. You got to make sure that you know that you're getting a good deal because you aren't always.

And that affects the value you're getting. So all of a sudden, that 1.5 cents might not be 1.5 cents, it might be 1.35 cents, or maybe it's 1.15 cents, or you have to kind of shop around and figure that out. And again, like I said, I typically find the opportunities to get far more value than that with the various airline and hotel programs to be so abundant that it's rare for me to find a situation where I would like to book travel through the credit card portal.

And like you said, I mean, those risks of irregular operations are an issue. I try not to make too many of my decisions about travel booking based on irregular operations because they happen irregularly. And generally speaking, I don't have those problems happen. But when they do, you're right, it's a headache and nobody wants a headache.

Or at least you'd like to have less of a headache if you can. And booking directly through the travel provider makes a lot of sense for that. Okay, so I think we established a bunch of the ways that you can use your points for some value. I guess the only one we forgot is if you have the Schwab platinum card, you can transfer your points at 1.1 cents to your Schwab brokerage account.

So I guess there's something slightly better than one. But I think the goal here is to talk about how you can do slightly more, if not a lot more than one. And so the premise is transferring your points. And we've talked about this a lot in the show. But I think maybe just to kind of wet people's palate, maybe we can give some examples.

I have a couple, I don't know if you do, of a booking where the value of your points just far exceeded the one, one and a half cents of value. Well, sure, I'd love to hear about what you've done. Go ahead, tell us. Yeah, so the two examples that I have were kind of a practical one, and then just kind of an extreme one.

So the practical one is, we live in San Francisco. And I think one of the most amazing beach vacation destinations you can get to in one flight is Tahiti. And it's notoriously expensive. And so I was looking for my wife and I, we've now been to Bora Bora a couple times.

And the most recent time round-trip tickets in business class were $5,500 from San Francisco to Papiete, which sounds about right. It doesn't seem like a good amount of money to pay for an eight-hour flight. But that's what it was. And so no surprise if you want to book it in the portal.

It was about 550,000 points at Amex. At Chase, I could have gotten one and a half cents per point. So it was about 365,000 points. But I went to United's website and I was like, "Wow, I could book it for 145,000 points." And so if you thought I could transfer those Chase points to United, I was getting twice as much value out of the point.

So it ended up being about 3.8 cents per point. And that's where I think a lot of people would stop. And that's where I'd encourage people to think, "Well, maybe you could take this one step further." And a few weeks ago, I had Greg on the show and we talked about award tools.

And one of the things we talked about was all these airlines have different partners. And so I didn't just stop at United. I said, "Well, if United has a good price, maybe I can book that through a partner of United for even less." And the flight on Aeroplan through Air Canada's program was only 110,000 miles.

And so that's 5 cents per point. So if you figure booking in the Amex portal would have been about 5 times as expensive. And so I ended up getting 5 cents per point on that trip. And I just felt great sitting in that seat knowing that I was getting a deal and everyone else was probably paying full fare.

That's a fantastic example because people who are newer to the partner redemptions, the people that typically just look at the credit card portal, I've often heard from people who've said, "Well, I've looked and Amex tells me it's going to be a million points for us to go here or go there." And the thing of it is that, like you said, if you just look through the credit card portal, you're just going to see prices based on the cash price of the tickets.

Whereas most airline loyalty programs, most frequent flyer programs, have prices based on regions or distances that remain the same. And they're totally divorced from the cash price in most cases where it doesn't matter if the flight is more or less, the award price is the award price if you find award availability.

And so it can make a huge, huge difference like that. And so I think that's a fantastic example showing that, yeah, I mean, you can get a much, much, much better deal than what you see if you only scratch the surface. You do have to dig a little bit deeper to find that because, of course, you had to know which partners to search and know where to search for those awards.

And then, of course, you have to know about transferring the points and booking it. But all of those things are very learnable. And with a little bit of effort, look at that. I mean, you saved yourself. Gosh, I mean, what is that? 80% of the points, essentially, per passenger.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the goal of this episode is we're going to walk you through that entire process. I'll give the other examples a bit more extreme because I didn't take this flight. But if you wanted to book a flight from Houston to Abu Dhabi... And this might have changed now with some of these recent devaluations.

But if you wanted to fly first class on Etihad, that fare was about $18,000, which meant on Amex, you're going to pay about 1.8 million points. And on Chase, if you have a Sapphire Reserve, by the way, if you just have to pay on your card, it might be the same 1.8 million points.

But it was a shy 1.2 million points, which is still a massive number of points. Right. But on Air Canada, at the time, when I looked, it was 130,000 miles for that exact same flight on Etihad. So that was $0.14 per point. So 14 times more value than you get in the portal.

And I was doing the math in my head. I was like, "Wow, if I had an Amex Platinum card, and I'm buying a flight, and I'm getting $0.05 or $0.05 per dollar, and I can make those points worth $0.14, right? I'm getting 70% cash back." And this is where you have to slow down a little in this process and say, "Yes, that's true." If you were otherwise going to spend $18,000 on a first class ticket to Abu Dhabi, which is certainly not true.

But like you said earlier, it feels good to get a deal. It does. It does. And while I think it gets murky in figuring out, "Okay, was that $0.14 per point?" Because you and I probably wouldn't have paid the $18,000 for that flight. And so maybe it's not worth $18,000 to us, but it's certainly worth more to me than flying Economy.

And so if I can fly in that first class seat and have the good champagne and the caviar and the experience that goes along with all of that, then suddenly the flight becomes part of the trip. And like you said, you get the excitement of knowing that you've made a great redemption.

And again, the savings are incredible. There are some people that save up millions of miles and points over years and years and years of using their credit card. And I just hate to see somebody waste those 1.8 million points on something that you could have gotten for literally 10% of that cost by just knowing which partnerships to look for and which things.

So yeah, I think those are great examples. And I think there are also smaller examples, if you think smaller, where you can still get well outsized value for your miles and points by learning how to maximize programs. Those flights are the flashy, fun ones that I enjoy redeeming for.

But even in a more practical sense, if you look at last minute flights, you have some sort of a family emergency that comes up. Often, flights at the last minute are exorbitantly expensive. And those are great opportunities to use miles and points. I've done that for family members a number of times before, where a family emergency came up and I was able to use a nominal number of miles to me to book a flight for a family member that was prohibitively expensive.

So I think there's a lot of opportunities there. And those are definitely fantastic examples. So you need to learn how to do that, how to take advantage of those foreign airline partnerships, I think. I think that's the key. And it does take some time and some effort to learn.

But I think that the return on investment is well worth it. And before we jump in, my one question is to someone listening who's like, OK, you know, last minute, you cherry picked two trips. Like, is this really going to be that hard? Like, can I really get value out of this?

Or is this all going to be me looking and looking and finding nothing? What do you say to that person? You know, I think that like anything else, you get the value out for the effort that you put into it. And so does it require some effort in terms of learning how to do this stuff?

Yeah, you know, of course it does. But is the juice worth the squeeze? Well, yeah, it absolutely is. I mean, we travel like this all the time. My family travels very frequently. I do find awards. It does require a slightly different perspective in terms of how you look at booking travel.

And we'll talk about flexibilities and things a little bit later on and how to find those things. But I mean, you put in a little bit of effort and you could be flying first class for next to nothing. And that is a pretty fantastic feeling. You know, with a modicum of effort, you can save yourself tons and tons of money.

Or what I often tell people is I spend less money than most people I know on vacation, but I get far more vacations and far more comfortable experiences because you do have plenty of those opportunities to travel around the world and feel like you're not paying for it, to be honest.

I mean, you'll pay your award taxes and fees. But when you're using Monopoly money to pay for the ticket and you're still getting the champagne and the caviar and the onboard chef or the shower or whatever it might be, it certainly feels pretty incredible. Are there any people listening who you'd say, you know what?

If you're X, Y or Z, maybe this isn't for you. And maybe you're not going to be able to get this value. Yeah, I mean, if you're the type of person that doesn't enjoy gamifying things, you know, if you're somebody who wants to just get online and you have a trip in mind, you want to go to Paris for the 4th of July.

And you just want to get that out of the way because you hate the planning part and the booking part. And you just want to book it and, you know, use your car to be done with it. And like that person exists. I know it does plenty of people in my family and my friend circle live in that world.

And that's what they would prefer to do. And so, you know, if you don't want to have to put some time into it, and if you have very limited flexibility, then it may be a difficult world to get into. Although I'll caveat that with saying that you might think that your flexibility is limited, but not realize how you can be more flexible.

And so I think that if you're willing to be open-minded in terms of how you look at trip planning, if you're willing to change some of your habits, then I think you're going to find that this world is actually pretty good for the vast majority of people. I mean, we have lots of people.

I'm always surprised at the number of medical professionals, for instance, that are involved in this world. Anytime I go to a conference, I meet lots of doctors who do this because they have that type of brain, that wired brain to maximize things and, you know, to exceed expectations. And so they want to maximize miles and points.

But of course, you know, if you work in that type of field, your schedule is a lot more rigid. So you have a lot less flexibility in terms of when you can travel and how long and which days. And yet many of them are still able to find ways to maximize this world.

So I think that, you know, there are certain roadblocks where you could say, oh, you know what, this isn't going to work for me because X, Y, Z. But I think actually it's pretty good for most people, unless you just really don't want to be bothered with the booking and planning process for your trips.

And, you know, in which case maybe travel just isn't for you. And there are certainly some people that don't enjoy traveling. And so if you don't enjoy traveling, then miles and points aren't going to excite you. Then you may want to focus on those cashback redemptions that we talked about before.

Yeah. So maybe very briefly, let's mechanically talk about when we say transferring points, what we mean, how it works, and then we'll jump into how to start planning that trip. Sure. So each of the major credit card companies, issuers have their own native currencies. So for example, American Express has membership rewards points, or Capital One has their Capital One points, or Capital One miles, rather.

Citi has thank you points. Chase has their ultimate rewards points. And so those in-house sort of monopoly money currencies all have a variety of different uses. So let's start with with Amex. Amex has, I think off the top of my head, I didn't actually look it up. I think about 14 different airline transfer partners, if I remember correctly, a couple of hotel transfer partners.

And so they have a bunch of different foreign airline programs and you can transfer your Amex membership rewards points to any of those various airline programs and then use those airline programs to book tickets. So Amex, for instance, partners with Delta, and surely most people are familiar with Delta.

You could transfer your Amex membership rewards points to Delta and then book a Delta award flight through your Delta account using your Delta miles. Now, you probably won't want to do that because Delta will probably charge you a billion miles for the flight. You're not necessarily going to make out better.

It's not going to be one of those examples that you gave before in terms of getting great value out of your miles and points. But luckily, Amex has a lot of other good transfer partners where you can get fantastic value. In fact, you could transfer to Virgin Atlantic, for instance, which is one of Amex's many transfer partners.

And in some cases, book Delta flights for far fewer miles than what Delta would charge for the same exact flight. You know, you gave some great examples before. And Business Class to Europe is one where sometimes I'll see Business Class tickets to Europe where Delta is charging two or almost 300,000 miles one way, where those flights at times are available through Virgin Atlantic, the same Delta flight for 50,000 Virgin Atlantic miles.

And so you can transfer your membership rewards points to your Virgin Atlantic account. You'll have to link up your Virgin Atlantic account. So this requires step one, I suppose, signing up for a frequent flyer account with Virgin Atlantic, free, easy to do on their website, then connecting that to your Amex account within your Amex membership rewards account.

You can connect various loyalty programs. So you can connect your Virgin Atlantic account with your account number. And then it's just a matter of clicking a button and telling them how many points you want to transfer to your Virgin Atlantic account. And most programs transfer instantly from the various credit card programs with just a couple of exceptions.

So as soon as you click through, the miles are there, and then you could use them to book your ticket through that airline program. Yeah, I think one thing that I often hear from people who are a little bit new to the transferring world is, you know, they look at the transfer partners and they say, "Well, you know, I have an Amex.

I got a million Amex points, but I always fly United. And so this isn't going to work." And I say, "Well, hold on. I think you got to remember both the list of transfer partners and the way these airline alliances and partnerships work." And so you use that Delta example, which was great.

You know, you say, "I'm a Delta flyer. I only want to fly Delta." Well, a couple of caveats. One, most of the times when you're flying on points and miles, you're not going to earn points anyways. So whether you book a Delta flight with your points or you book a United flight, you're not going to earn your Delta miles and your Delta status anyways.

So maybe you shouldn't worry about it. But also, you know, you mentioned Delta and Virgin Atlantic, but also Air France, KLM, they're a partner of Delta. And so even if you look at the transfer partners that your credit card company has, and I'll take Capital One as an example, I don't think Capital One has any of the major US airlines, you know, Delta, United, American, but they do have a partner in every single alliance that includes Delta, American, and United.

And so it's possible from Capital One to transfer your points to, I believe, British Airways and probably Aeroplan, but I'm going off memory and I could be wrong here, and Air France. So you can get to alliances that might let you book the United, the Delta, or the American flight without actually being able to transfer them.

Yeah, and so we should probably back up a step and talk a little bit about airline alliances. So, you know, you may or may not be aware that most major world airlines have partnerships with other airlines, and many of them belong to a major worldwide alliance of airlines. And so I'll take United as an example.

They belong to the Star Alliance. So there's, I think, 27 or 29 different Star Alliance airlines. And the reason that airlines created these partnerships in the first place is, let's say you lived in Palm Springs and you really want to go to a Greek island. Well, United doesn't fly from Palm Springs to an island in Greece.

They don't fly to Greece at all from Palm Springs. In fact, I'm not even sure, they probably fly to Greece from somewhere, but I don't even think they do probably from California at all. So they can't get you there, but they still want to sell you a ticket if you're in Palm Springs.

And so they'll sell you a ticket to fly United from Palm Springs to Los Angeles and Lufthansa from Los Angeles to Frankfurt and AGN from Frankfurt to Athens and on to whatever island. And so airlines created these partnerships to be able to do that, to connect their programs to do that.

And the nice side effect of that for us is that you can use miles from one airline to fly any of the airlines in their alliance. So if you want to fly in United, you could use your United mileage plus miles, but you could also use miles from any airline in the Star Alliance.

You could use Air Canada Aeroplan, as you mentioned before. You could use Avianca Life Miles. You could use Turkish Miles and Smiles. And so there's tons of different ones. And of course, all the major airline transferable currencies transfer to a variety of these transfer partners. And it's worth learning about that because of the examples like the one you gave before Chris, where the price can vary dramatically.

I just flew to Hawaii recently and from Newark to Honolulu, United would have charged 25,000 miles for that flight if I booked through United, but I didn't want to book through United because I didn't want to pay that many miles. If I had booked through Singapore Airlines, I think it would have been about 20,000 miles these days they charge, but I didn't want to pay that many either.

Aeroplan would have been 22,500 from New York, but I booked it through Turkish Miles and Smiles, one of their partners, which now charges 10,000 miles for that. Less than half what United charges for the same exact United flight. And the thing is, you have all of those options available to you.

And when you have a transferable currency, like Amex membership rewards points or chase ultimate rewards points or Capital One miles, you've got just this plethora of different options. And so then it becomes a matter of figuring out, okay, well, you know, which airlines partner with which other airlines. And so that's where I say there is some time investment involved in determining which are going to match up with your needs and what's available.

But oftentimes you'll find that the best deals are available with those foreign airline programs. And it makes sense. They want to collect revenue from American customers. The major airlines earn a lot of money by selling miles to the banks. And so all these foreign airline programs want to get in on that too.

And it makes sense then that they would frequently offer better pricing than the U.S. based airlines because they have less access to U.S. customers. So it really pays to learn about those partnerships and figure out that, okay, yeah, I can use my Air France miles to fly on Virgin Atlantic, or I can use my Virgin Atlantic miles to fly on Delta or my Avianca Life miles to fly on United.

And initially that seems overwhelming, I think, for somebody who's new to this. They're like, whoa, you just named like six different airlines and maybe you don't even know all of those airlines, haven't heard of some of them perhaps. And so it seems a little overwhelming in the beginning, but that's where, you know, there's a variety of different award search tools that can help you find those things.

So, you know, these days, I think it's a little bit easier actually for a beginner to get into it because there's so many different tools on the market to help you figure out how those things work. - Yeah. And Greg, your co-host came on the show a few weeks ago and we did an entire episode on that and intentionally recorded that episode first so that if anyone's listening to this and says, oh, how do I use these tools?

We didn't want to say, well, now that we've gotten you excited to book an award, wait three weeks to find out how to use the tools. So you can go back and listen to that. Maybe you already listened to it. Maybe you want to watch it on YouTube where I did some screen sharing so you can see how the tools work.

And so that episode exists. So we're not going to cover today how to actually search for the flights using the tools. And we're not going to cover, you know, how to make sure that if you find it, like you did from New York to Honolulu, how do you figure out who's the best price?

Because that's what the tools are going to do. Greg and I talked a lot about that. But what we are going to talk about is kind of the way you think about this. And I think the only other thing to kind of make sure you understand before we go forward is just because an airline has a seat doesn't necessarily mean you can book it with miles at a reasonable price.

And so there used to be a distinction of like Saver and Standard and Saver was kind of released to partners. But how do you think about that world today? Well, things have changed quite a bit, at least on the United States front in terms of how the U.S.-based airlines operate, because the major U.S.

airlines, and I'm talking about American, Delta, United here, have kind of changed their model from that, where nowadays they price their flights dynamically. And so you don't know in advance how much to expect to have to pay exactly. And obviously, this is a game for the airlines to figure out, OK, well, how many seats do we think we're going to sell on this flight?

And so obviously, if they think they're not going to sell out the entire flight, then they're going to make some more seats available at lower redemption rates. And if it's a peak time, a peak destination, then they're going to make fewer seats or maybe no seats available at the cheapest redemption levels.

So there is some challenge, I think, in determining what's going to work in terms of your schedule and where that pricing is going to be, because it does vary and not all seats are available. Now, a number of programs like American and Delta and United will make most seats available with miles, but they'll charge you a lot for those last seats.

And so it pays to have a little bit of flexibility. And, you know, flexibility is one of those things that so I often tell people that if you want to travel more, you need one of three things in abundance. And the more you have of that one thing, the easier it is to travel more.

And if you have more of more than one of these three things, then it becomes easier yet. And so the first thing, obvious money, right? If you've got millions and millions of dollars, easy to travel. You just pay for the flights you want whenever you want to travel, right?

So that's number one. Number two is millions and millions of miles and points. If you've got an infinite number of miles and points, well, you can pay whatever number of miles and points it is for that last seat on the plane or through your credit card portal and not have to worry about it.

Those two things are difficult for most people to get more of. The third thing that influences your ability to travel more is flexibility. And so, for instance, if you're retired or you travel, we work remotely rather, and you can travel and work while you travel, then you've got infinite possibilities, right?

You can travel whenever you want. And so that is nice if you've got it, but most people don't have that much flexibility. And so you might think, well, I don't have any flexibility. I got to travel when the kids are out of school, or I have to travel when I bid my vacation a year in advance, so I'm not flexible.

But I think it just requires looking at your travel booking process a little bit differently than you have in the past. Most people decide, okay, well, this year, I'm going to go to Disney World or I'm going to go skiing in Colorado, or I'm going to go to Paris.

And they say, okay, well, 4th of July, I'm off that week. I'm going to go to Paris that week. And they look at prices and book a ticket and hotels and everything else. And that's the normal way to book travel. But I often tell people that if you can have destination flexibility, that can actually have a huge impact on your ability to use miles and points to your advantage.

And destination flexibility requires a seismic shift in the way that you plan travel, but it also has an incredibly outsized effect. So for instance, I look at travel a lot differently. I say, well, you know, there's a lot of places in Europe I'd like to visit. I love Paris.

I'd be happy to go back to Paris. But there's also a couple of Greek islands that I haven't seen before that I would like to get to. And I always like to get to Italy. And so I'd be open to going to Europe just about any time. I also love the beach.

So a tropical destination is always nice for me. And I don't really like to ski, but let's pretend that I like to ski. And so like, I want to ski and people like to ski, like to ski in new areas, new mountains, new places, right? So rather than saying, I'm going to go to Paris, I'm going to go to Aruba, I'm going to go skiing in Colorado.

I say, those are all things that I would like to do. And so if I see a great opportunity for any of those things, I'm going to jump on that opportunity. And so I'll just keep searching and looking at various options and I'll say, oh, well, here, look, I found a great price to Dublin and I can get to Paris from Dublin for 20 or $30 on a cheap, you know, European airline carrier.

But I got a great flatbed seat from San Francisco to Dublin. And that isn't something that's easy to find. So if I'm open and flexible with my destination, then I'll pick that and I'll let the destination kind of pick me. And so I'll be open to a variety of different places and see, OK, well, what deal pops up?

Because the deal always pops up eventually. And, you know, maybe this year I'll go to Europe or maybe I'll see a great deal on a beach vacation to Aruba or maybe I'll see, oh, wow, there's four seats available on a flight to Santiago, Chile, and they have mountains there.

And our summertime is their winter. So I can go skiing in July. And so I'll be open to destinations like that. And then that opens up a lot more because then you have a lot more opportunities to find safer seats instead of saying, OK, I'm just going to go here during this week.

If you're like, I'm going to travel during this time period, but I'm kind of open to where I go, then it opens your possibilities to get massively outsized value out of your points. And, you know, Paris is always going to be there. So maybe I'll get there this year.

Maybe it'll be next year. Maybe it'll be the year after. I'm sure eventually I'll run into a situation where that'll work out. But there's a whole world full of other destinations also. And I'm going to let the destination that becomes available, that fits my schedule, that provides an awesome deal, dictate where it is that I go this year.

Or I guess one thing that I'm realizing now is. We have a little bit more flexibility in our time, right? We're both self-employed this year. Who knows how long that'll last? And so we can really crank up the flexibility on the time. And I think if you can do that, maybe you don't even have to be as flexible on the destination.

Like there are a couple vectors of flexibility. And so I think the third one is flexible about how far before you leave, you know where you're going. And I've found sometimes if you have your heart set to go on Paris and to Paris in the summer with three people, you know, if you're flexible enough that you won't know when you're going until a couple days before, you could probably really increase your likelihood you could do that.

I'm not going to recommend that path. You know, we'll get to like booking something and changing it later. But flexibility not just comes in destination. It could come in time of year. It could come in how far out you plan. And so all those things kind of play play to the whole situation.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great point because the way you plan travel also absolutely has a lot of effect on what's going to be available to you. You know, when are you going to how far in advance do you need to plan this out? Because I think that your example there was a great one in the sense that you're right so that, you know, you talk about the best times to book award travel, right?

And for I think for most people, probably one of the best times, if not the best time, is really far in advance. So airlines tend to release their schedule about a year in advance. And when they first release their schedule, there's generally speaking, and this is a broad statement, so it's not always going to be the case.

But generally speaking, more of a chance that you're going to find those best price, saver awards availability close to when they release the schedule. And that varies, like I said, from airline to airline. There are some airlines that guarantee that they're going to release X number of seats when they open the schedule.

And then other airlines that are less predictable like that. So it does vary some, but that tends to be one of the easier times to find seats to go somewhere. So you do have to then consider, OK, well, I have to plan pretty far in advance for that. A second best, not necessarily the second best, but another best time to book is like you said, sort of at the last minute.

If I want to go to Europe, booking a flight tomorrow is probably going to be easier than booking a flight three or four months from now, believe it or not, because tomorrow the airlines know, well, we're only going to sell so many seats on that flight that's taking off tomorrow between now and then.

And so they're more likely in the weeks and days before departure to open up some seats. So being flexible in that way certainly can make a huge influence and may give you the best options to book a trip. But it's not the most practical for most people. Most people can't just wait until a couple of days before to find out where and when they're going.

So most of us are going to have to either plan far in advance or search pretty often. And, you know, that's another thing that I do. I'm frequently looking for award flights. If I'm in line at the grocery store, I'm usually scrolling through award flights and availability and looking for trips that we can take or ways we can improve trips that we have booked.

Yeah, yeah. When Greg and I were talking, we broke it into flight search tools and flight discovery tools. And I think the advent of these flight discovery tools is going to be really great for people who could say, you know, every few days, I'm just going to check where four people can go to that's warm in July.

And, you know, this stuff changes so much that, you know, saying you check today and you didn't find anything does not mean that vacation in three months is off the table. That's a really important point. And one that really is worth repeating, I think, because award availability changes all the time.

And that can be one of the most frustrating things. When you asked earlier about who is this not good for? And I said, well, it's I think I mentioned that it's perhaps not good for somebody who doesn't have patience, because you need some amount of patience for this, because exactly what you said is so true.

I could search for an award flight today and tomorrow and the day after and see absolutely nothing. And then all of a sudden, a few hours later, search again and see that the floodgates have opened and there's tons of available seats. It can change at any moment. We don't know in advance when that's going to change all the time.

And so you do have to be somewhat persistent and willing to wait it out and say, OK, well, I'm going to keep searching and look for something. And then also the other piece of it. And, you know, you mentioned talking about flexibility is that many award flights are changeable or cancelable.

And depending on who you book through, the cost of that or lack of cost is going to vary from one to another. But being open to booking something that's not perfect, but is good, is also going to be another another major piece of your trip planning that's going to require, again, a shift from the way that most people look at planning travel, because most people just book a flight and that's it.

They've paid for it. They can't get their money back. And so they're locked into it. Whereas when you're booking award travel, if I see something that looks pretty good, I'll jump on it and book it, knowing that later on I can continue to search. And if I find something better, I can cancel the first option and switch to the better option.

And so, yeah, I think that that is something that you it helps to have that kind of flexibility and to look at booking travel in that flexible way. We've talked before on our show about finding impossible awards. And that's one of the tips and one of the key things that you really do need to be willing to continue searching and to book something that's maybe not perfect and work on improving it.

Yeah, I mean, you said you talked about it. It's actually an episode. So I will link to the Finding Impossible Awards episode in the show notes. And the only thing I'll remind people that we didn't actually say is that when you transfer your points from any of these bank programs to an airline, you cannot transfer them back.

Maybe in some rare case that there was a glitch, but I would say 99.999% of the time you're not going to. So look, if you transfer them to a program that is kind of pretty generally available for lots of things like Air France, KLM, where I feel like you'll probably be able to use them if something better comes up, great.

But the risk being, I talked a few weeks ago about some devaluations and, you know, if you had transferred your points to Turkish Miles and Smiles, found a better deal and left all your Turkish Miles there for the future, that Turkish program, yes, those Hawaii routes are still there.

So maybe you'll just have a lot of Hawaii trips in your future. But a lot of their international business class flights got much more expensive. So yes, you can cancel flights last minute and rebook, especially if you do it within the program. You know, you'll be you'll be fine because you're using those points again.

But don't forget that if you transfer a bunch of points to an airline, cancel, get your points back, book on another program, you might not be able to use those points. Right, right, right. And I think that one of the biggest misconceptions among people that aren't wildly familiar with this world is that I think oftentimes people say, well, how do I transfer my United Miles to Air Canada or my Air Canada Miles to United?

And you don't do that with the partnerships. You'll use your United Miles to book perhaps an Air Canada flight or use your Air Canada Miles to book a United flight. But you can't actually move the miles from one airline program to another. Once they're in that one airline program, like I said, they're stuck.

That's it. They're there. And, you know, whether that's good or bad news for you is going to vary. But you can't. It's a one way street. You can't move them back. So generally speaking, I prefer to work with programs where, A, I know that I use them frequently. B, they don't have a high risk of devaluing soon.

Although I say that and we never really know when a devaluation is coming. So you don't know when that value proposition is going to change. So there is some level of gamble in that. But again, if you find an award, that's good, that you're happy with, even if it's not the perfect one, then, you know, well, you've got a good award booked.

And so that hopefully will hold up or, you know, in many cases, it'll work out OK for you. So but very good point that it is a one way street. And so you can't get that flexibility back. And the value of transferable points is really in the flexibility to transfer to various different programs.

We've talked about the various transferable programs in our show lots of times before, too. And which which is the best transferable points program was episode 243. And that's not a topic that's easy to come up with a universal answer. But we've talked about the the power of transferable currency as many times and the power is the flexibility.

Once you transfer to an individual airline program, you do give that up and you give it up in exchange for hopefully a great award. But you do give up the flexibility. Yeah, and the only other thing I just thought of is we talked about the best times to book, right?

You could book right when the award calendar comes out. You can book last minute. If you're flexible, you can book any time because things are always changing. The one time I will remind people to consider is from time to time, various card programs offer these transfer bonuses. And so, you know, for for example, I think right now there's one to Avianca.

There's one to Air France, depending on which credit card program you have. By the time we record and publish this, it might not be there. But in general, if you're keeping an eye on those things, and I know you guys post about them on your website, I send them out of my newsletter.

That's a great time to start looking, right? You know, it doesn't mean you're going to find the trip and I wouldn't transfer unless you have something planned. But if all of a sudden you see, wow, I have a lot of chase points and I can get 30% more of them going to Air France.

Might as well see if there's a vacation. We want to book for the family on Air France. And if you find it, what better time than when your miles go 30% further? Yeah, absolutely. Transfer bonuses are huge and they offer opportunities to get even more outsized value. I mean, you know, you gave great examples before where it's not uncommon in this world to get three or four or five or maybe 10 cents per point in value, depending on on how you determine that versus the cash prices.

And yeah, if you can get 25 or 30 or 40% more or whatever the case may be with the transfer bonus, then you absolutely want to take advantage of that. If like you said, if you found the trip that you want to book, but it's a great time to look.

It does always make me look. I mean, that's certainly part of the the impetus behind offering those is to get us to look. And sure enough, I do, because I want to see if I can make my points and miles go a little bit further. It's all part of that.

Getting a great deal. And oftentimes some of those programs, like you mentioned, Air France, Avianca Life Miles, they frequently offer some of the best deals in award travel at their full prices. So if you're able to get a transfer bonus and you found a trip that you want to book, then you can get a really incredible deal.

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the practical ways that you're doing some of these searching things like positioning flights or just finding one particular leg first. How do you actually structure a trip? You know, you mentioned I'm always looking. What exactly are you looking for? Yeah, that's a great question, because this is also a big change from the way people that don't use points and miles look at booking travel.

And so for me, I tend to like to use my miles and points to fly in business class because it's comfortable on international business class routes, long haul international business class routes. We're talking about usually a flatbed seat so I can get a full night's sleep, a good meal and arrive rested and comfortable and ready to hit the ground running.

And then that's become super valuable to me. That's something that I never would have paid for before I started using miles and points. But once I started using them, it's something that I've gotten so used to that I have a hard time letting that go, because it's great to be able to not waste that first day recovering from jet lag.

And so because that's what matters to me, getting that good night's sleep and a good meal and having that comfortable travel experience. I start with finding that long haul flight. So I'm located in upstate New York in a small town because I'm drivable to New York City. I'll start with looking at flights from New York City and I'll say, OK, well, let me look at flights from New York City to London or to Paris or wherever it is that I'm looking to find.

And let me see if I can find that long haul flight first. And if I found that, well, great. Then if I need a connector from my home airport to get to New York City, then I can look at booking that either separately or in conjunction. But I definitely start with the long haul flights first.

And another sort of similar, but different example is if I'm looking to go to Asia, I will look at flights from Chicago and flights from San Francisco because there are far more airlines that serve Asia from those places than well, or at least there are airlines that serve Asia from those places.

And there are not airlines that serve Asia from my home airport. So I'll look for the long haul flights first. And so if I find a good long haul flight, then I'll say, OK, well, which airline alliance is that? And so if it's a Star Alliance airline, let's say I want to go to Tokyo and I find a great flight from Chicago to Tokyo.

I don't live in Chicago. I live in upstate New York, but I'm one flight away from Chicago. I can fly United from Albany to Chicago. And because United is also on the Star Alliance, then I might be able to get that entire trip booked together. But what I don't want to do is start by searching from Albany, because then if that short, you know, two hour flight from Albany to Chicago is not available as an award, I'm not going to see that long haul flight that I really care about from Chicago to Tokyo, simply because that one small leg is not available.

And flights from Albany to Chicago are not terribly expensive. So I'll sometimes look at piecing things together. And so I'll find that long haul flight from Chicago to Tokyo, and maybe I'll book that and then book a separate positioning flight to get from Albany to Chicago. And that opens up my options, because now I can use miles and fly whichever carrier it is that offers the best deal to get from Albany to Chicago.

I could fly United or American Airlines or Southwest or all the various options I have available to me to book a positioning flight. And so we talk about positioning flights a lot because I will look at award flights from a variety of airports. Like I said, I live in upstate New York.

I can drive to the New York City airports. I can get to Boston by taking a train. I can take a one hour flight to get to Washington, D.C. So I'll look at award availability from all of those cities very often. And like I said, if I'm looking to get to Asia, I'll also look at award availability from the West Coast, because the most important piece to me is getting that long haul flight.

So I will usually look for those individually first. Then I'll look and see, OK, well, is there one single award from my home airport on that date? Because I need to find the dates that have the best price awards for the long haul flights first. And then we'll see if we can add in that positioning flight or if I have to book the positioning flight separately.

And so if I have to book the positioning flight separately, then I'll look at, OK, what are my options for booking that? And many of the U.S. based programs offer free cancellations these days. So sometimes I'll book two positioning flights. So if I have that Chicago to Tokyo flight, I want to make sure I get there for that.

So I might book a flight from Albany to Chicago on both United and American Airlines. So that way, if my United flight gets canceled, I'll have an American Airlines flight as a backup and I could always cancel one of them later if I've got miles in all the various programs.

But I definitely start with the long hauls first, because those tend to be the hardest flights to find. And especially when you're looking at partner awards, those flights are the ones that you'll need to have availability on to start with. If you want to be able to piece together anything better.

Now, there are some exceptions. There are some programs that will only price awards when you have a connection at the cheapest levels. And that's a little weird. American Airlines frequently does that, where if you start from New York to Paris, you may see an exorbitant number of American Airlines miles for that flight.

But if you start in Florence, South Carolina, you may find a great deal on that flight that includes the New York to Paris lag. It's really weird like that. It's in fact, that's a real life example. I booked that a few days ago for a family member, and it was way cheaper to book it starting in Florence than it was to book it starting in New York.

And originally I started looking from New York and thought, well, I can get them from Florence to New York separately if I have to. But I mean, kind of need to be able to be flexible and search both of those things. But again, I focus on the longest flights because those are the most important to me.

And then I kind of go backwards from there and finding, OK, how will I get to that gateway from where I am? Can it be the same award or does it need to be a separate one? And, you know, I know if you were to book a American flight to get to Chicago and you had a United flight to Tokyo and that American flight's four hours late and you miss your flight to Tokyo, United doesn't care that your American flight was was late.

Now, will they maybe try to accommodate you if they can? Yes, but not nearly as much as they would if you had booked it all through on United. Any advice to people when they're booking those flights to make sure that they don't end up in a situation like that?

Yeah, that is a good point. And if you're able to book as a single award, that's great. So if you were able to find a United flight from Albany to Chicago that then lines up with a Star Alliance flight on ANA from Chicago to Japan, then that's ideal, because then if it's all booked as one ticket, then if your United flight is four hours late, United is going to accommodate you in one way or another.

They'll get you on another flight to Tokyo. So you will be OK in that situation. But the scenario that you mentioned, where if you book a totally separate ticket on an airline, it's not a partner. Yeah, you're going to have a problem in that case. And so when I'm looking at positioning, I tend to be pretty conservative and I look at positioning the day before.

And so if I have a really valuable award to me flying from Chicago to Tokyo on ANA, I will probably look at positioning the night before and staying in an airport hotel in Chicago. That way, if everything goes wrong, I can find another way to get to Chicago. And I find that that can be a good use of free night certificates that come with various hotel credit cards because those free night certificates that you get every year are usually limited in terms of how many points per night they can be used for.

And so I'll frequently look at those as a great way to book an airport hotel, you know, for to get to that airport the night before on a positioning flight. Like we said, though, if you have the ability to book on an alliance airline and an airline in the same alliance as your long haul flight, that would be your first option, your best option.

And leaving yourself plenty of time is obviously also a good tip. If you don't want to leave the day before, you can't do that. At least leave yourself plenty of wiggle room so that there's something else you can book if you need to drop back 10 yards and punt.

And again, that's very different than people that don't book a word travel. You have to have the confidence and flexibility that you know you'll be able to book something else and the flexibility to change if you need to. But but we often talk about positioning flights and how to book those and how to consider the flexibility of them.

I the way I gave the example is probably a poor one where I said, you know, book a United flight and an American Airlines flight as a backup. Maybe I'd book that American Airlines flight first thing in the morning and a United flight as a backup later on. So if my American flight ended up delayed by four hours, I could cancel that hop on the United flight because they partner with the example I gave out of Chicago.

But that's certainly a good consideration when you're considering how you want to book your positioning flights. And how does this entire process change for someone who maybe doesn't care about business class, wants to take more trips and flies economy or or where does premium economy fit in here? How do you think about the various classes and how it might affect redeeming your points?

Yeah, that's a really good question because economy class awards. So when I when I got into this world of miles and points and I was new to it before I actually redeem miles and points at all, I never even knew that flatbed seats existed on an airplane. My wife and I traveled by the shoestring kind of budget and did a lot of backpacking style things and just went wherever the cheapest airfares would take us.

And so I long, long, long traveled in economy class and appreciate the desire to travel more. And when I got into this, initially, I thought it was crazy that people redeemed miles and points for business in first class because the front end of the plane gets there the same time as the back end of the plane.

So it doesn't make that much of a difference. I thought anyway, over time, I realized that the difference in pricing between economy class awards and business class awards is far less than the difference in pricing with cash. And so over time, it became apparent to me that it just made more sense to book business class flights because the cost difference was not that big.

And there are a lot of ways to earn more miles and points. So I didn't necessarily have to sacrifice traveling as much as it was that I wanted to. And my initial thought was exactly what you said, that I'd like to just travel as much as I can rather than focusing on comfort.

So I'll say that that certainly is something that I've changed on over time. And when it comes to redeeming flights in economy class, there are situations where it can be a phenomenal value, particularly if you're located in a small airport, not a major airport hub, and/or you're traveling at a peak time.

There are times where you can get incredible value out of your miles and points. There are other times, though, where it doesn't present fantastic value, especially as compared to booking through credit card portals. I frequently run into situations where I say, well, using my chase points at one and a half cents per point, I could actually probably pay a little bit less than the cost of an award ticket.

I was just looking at an award last night where that was the case. And I said, well, maybe I'm better off using my points at one and a half cents per point than booking an economy class flight. So you'll have to look at that and shop around in the same way that we talked about before.

That said, there are plenty of good economy class sweet spots. And premium economy is something that I think hasn't been written about very much and explored very much comparatively, because until recently, a lot of airline programs didn't have an award chart for premium economy tickets. It was something that not all airlines offered.

And they still probably don't all offer a premium economy experience. And there's huge variance in what that means from one airline to another. But it's becoming more and more prevalent. And I think that premium economy is actually a sweet spot that doesn't get talked about enough, because in many cases, the experience of flying premium economy is very similar to what a first class flight within the United States is.

So it's significantly more comfortable than a regular economy class flight. And with many programs, premium economy doesn't cost much more than an economy class flight. And I think the level of comfort it probably provides exceeds the difference in price. And so I think that's something worth considering. And, you know, again, when I go back to the fact that I started this out, anticipating that I would only fly an economy class, actually.

And over time, I came to realize, well, you know, the additional outside value I get out of flying more comfortably is worth it to me to redeem more points. And so you may find that same thing to be true with premium economy. And in economy class, I think the thing to consider is it really, really pays to know your various partner programs, because the U.S.

based programs in general do not have the best economy class pricing for international awards. Now, domestically, sometimes those U.S. based programs are your only option for booking economy class awards, depending on whether they release availability to partners or not. But internationally, it's almost always going to be the case that you're going to pay far fewer miles with the right transfer partner programs in economy class, especially.

So you'll want to learn about those things and look at sales. Air France, KLM, Flying Blue, for instance, frequently offers promo awards every month. They offer promo rewards. And very often there are awards on sale from U.S. cities in economy class at great prices. I mean, we're talking 10, 12, 15000 miles one way to Europe, plus the taxes and fees, which can be an amazing value, depending on where you're starting and when you're looking to travel.

But it does vary. And so you do have to frequently compare against cash prices, whereas the cash price of a business class ticket is almost always going to be many multiples. The in terms of the number of cents per point you're going to get out of your points compared to the cost of the award ticket, at least when we're talking about saver awards with economy class, that's just not always true.

So you have to compare and see what your best option is. Yeah, make sure it's a good deal. But I will say I've seen a lot of availability in economy that is sometimes easier to find than business. Now, I have a great point. It's a little bit of a catch question, because I know they answer to some extent, but to someone listening that says, Nick, this all sounds great, but I have kids.

Like, how does that change the whole thing? What do you? Yeah, you know, and that is something that I have direct experience with, because my wife and I started this travel game without kids. And so our very first award flight together was a first class award. We had never flown in business class, even forget about first class.

And and that hooked us into this game. And and so we played the game pretty hard for a few years, traveling around just the two of us. And then, yeah, the game changed a lot when we had first one kid. And now we have to have a six year old and a three year old.

And it is a lot different. In fact, on our frequent mile around the air show, we've talked about points for family travel episode 174. We did an entire episode on the best programs for lap infant tickets and your best options when you're traveling with family. It definitely changes the game a lot in the sense that you need more seats.

And the point you made about economy class being easier to find multiple seats is a very relevant one for family travelers. I think if you're looking to travel with three or four or five people, then finding award availability in economy or premium economy is generally far easier than finding availability in business class.

And so that's one of those times where, yeah, if you want to travel with a group, then traveling economy class might make more sense because it will give you many more options, a lot more availability in order to book multiple people. But then there are also programs that are particularly good for releasing multiple seats.

And this is where the flexibility comes in. And this makes a big difference in how I book travel. These days, the flexibility that I mentioned before is more important now because I'm looking for three or four seats or I'm looking for four seats these days. And so obviously being flexible is important.

And also finding more ways to maximize your miles and points is important, too, because now those tickets cost me, you know, the cost of four tickets. You know, when I was a little kid, my uncle told me that marriage meant that a 50 cent hot dog would cost me a dollar because I'd have to buy one for her, too.

And and that means it means it's two dollars. It's two dollars now. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the prices have gone up a bit since he taught me that. So so, yeah, it definitely requires earning more miles and points, and it requires a bit more flexibility in terms of deciding where and when you're going to travel.

It also influences, you know, which flights are going to be acceptable for you. When it was just my wife and I, if I had to make a couple of connections and take a couple of, you know, weird time to flights, that was no big deal. With kids, it's a little bit harder and direct flights are more valuable to me now than they were in the past.

And so you do have to consider which are going to be your best options for those things. But it is doable. You know, here I am with a family of four and we travel very frequently. We travel quite a bit each year. And this year, in fact, we've got lots of trips planned and we do find availability for four.

But it requires that constant searching and more of that flexibility that we talked about in terms of when you're willing to travel, how far in advance you plan, how much planning you do. I mean, it does require me to search more often. And sometimes I'll get lucky and hit the jackpot on the first search.

But oftentimes I'll have to search quite a bit. And that's also another piece of this is where flexibility becomes super important to me because not all programs are created equally on a flexibility standpoint. Most of the major U.S. airline programs, American, United, Delta, Southwest, allow free cancellations, whereas some international programs like Avianca Life Miles, for instance, will charge you $200 a person to cancel a ticket.

And I didn't really think much about that at all for many years. But then last year we had a trip booked to Fiji and we're literally in the rental car on the way to the airport when my six year old, who had seemed low energy for the last couple of days, but insisted he felt OK, let us know that he definitely didn't feel OK.

And and, you know, he got sick in the car and we said, OK, well, now we have to cancel this entire trip to Fiji that we had planned. And thankfully, we had booked it all with flexible miles and points where we were able to cancel it without paying any fees.

And so I consider that type of stuff more now than I did when it was just me or just my wife and I. Those things are important to me. So you've got to consider that, I think, when you're booking and look into, OK, well, which program is going to offer me a low cancellation fee or no cancellation fee because kids get sick all the time.

I don't know when that's going to happen, when I'm going to have to change plans. So that's a consideration. And there's a lot of other considerations. I mentioned lap infant tickets and the cost of adding a lap infant to an award ticket can just vary tremendously from next to nothing to a thousand dollars or more, depending on which program you book through.

So knowing the best program for that, if you're going to travel with a lap infant, it can make a huge difference in cost. Yeah, I definitely recommend if you have a lap infant to go listen to that episode. We had one experience doing this and the award tools. I actually think there's one one award tool that maybe does this now, but in general, they're not going to tell you these things.

And so I remember, you know, because some of the airlines say, oh, it's just 10% more miles for a lap infant. And some say, no, you've got to buy the lap infant at, you know, a fraction of the, you know, the retail cash price of that business class seat.

And so we were looking to book a flight that we could have booked through three or four different programs. And it turns out that the one that was the cheapest number of miles would have cost us a thousand dollars. But the one that was 10% more miles cost us a hundred dollars.

And so for us, had we had we used the cheapest miles program, the total cost would have been higher. Now, this is a small thing. It only matters to people traveling with small kids. And I will point out as we learned that relying on the bassinet on a flight, which many flights have, if you're flying, doesn't necessarily mean your child will fit in the bassinet.

So you may think you're getting a great deal, but the size of bassinets varied very widely. And our daughter was actually age wise, fine for the bassinet, not size wise. She did not fit. Yeah, but backing up to people wanting these kind of aspirational business class awards. I want to make sure they don't feel too much doom and gloom if they're flexible.

Do you think a family of four can, you know, with enough points and miles find great redemptions to travel internationally in business class? Yeah, they absolutely can. I mean, like I said, we do it pretty frequently. I went to Europe three times last year. This year, we're going to Europe and Africa for about a month.

And all of our long haul flights are in business class and flatbed seats. And we do that quite a bit every year. We take a few trips like that. It's definitely doable. It's just a matter of finding which awards are available. And also, you know, you mentioned we mentioned lap infant tickets, but also some programs offer more advantageous pricing for children's tickets.

Air France KLM Flying Blue is a good example where children between age two and 11 pay 25% less than adult fares. So and we're talking about the number of miles they charge 25% fewer miles for a child ticket than an adult ticket. And so Air France KLM Flying Blue, for instance, to from the United States to Europe at this point, charges from 50,000 miles one way for an adult ticket.

But you'll pay 12,500 miles less than that. So you'll pay less than 40,000 miles for a ticket for a child. And so knowing that and knowing that, OK, well, there is an opportunity where I might be able to get a particularly solid deal. That's helpful because, like you said before, you may look and say, OK, well, this award looks cheaper than that award.

If you don't know that you could save on the children's tickets by using the right program. So that's where it pays to kind of know your programs a bit and also know which programs are more likely to release more seats. Air France KLM is a good example where they frequently have a lot of seats available when they have seats available.

JetBlue is one that tends to internationally have several seats available. If they're going to have business class seats available anyway, they tend to have a number of seats available. Now, booking them through JetBlue is not the best deal. You'd want to book those through Qatar Avios. And that'll be your best option for that particular program.

But again, those types of knowledge of those types of partnerships and which ones are going to have that is going to be helpful. And again, the flexibility is going to be a huge piece of that, too. But it definitely is doable. Like I said, we do it very frequently.

We've done a lot of times. And in fact, I find and this is kind of going back to the business class thing, but I find that it's far easier to travel with children in business class than it was when we primarily traveled in economy class because it gives you some more space to move around.

It gives the flatbed seat where the kid can fall asleep and not be laying all over you. So that makes the trip far easier also on us. So that's something that we consider when we're booking our trips. We did just recently take that long flight to Honolulu from Newark.

There was 10 hours in economy class. And we said, well, it's a good reminder why we collect lots of miles and points so that we can frequently travel more comfortably than that when we're on long flights like those, because it definitely makes a huge difference in the experience. But there are a number of other programs, too, that very frequently offer multiple seats.

British Airways often does, though they're known for high surcharges. If you depart countries in Europe other than the United Kingdom, then the surcharges are typically pretty reasonable. Booking through American Airlines or booking through Alaska Airlines, and they often have enough seats for a family of four, at least. Finnair frequently has availability for a number of passengers.

Now, this stuff is going to ebb and flow. So those examples I gave today, tomorrow, maybe you won't find anything at all. But there are numerous airline programs that do release multiple seats. The US based programs in general are not as good about that as many of the various foreign airlines, though that's not always bad news because the flight experience on a lot of foreign airlines is frequently a little bit better than the US based airlines.

And I said that, but there are tools you could use to find multiple seats on, for instance, United. United releases a lot of availability relatively close in and some of their flights to Europe. I we've more than once flown United between the United States and Europe and found four seats and, you know, in a premium cabin with them.

So it's doable. It varies, though. If you want to fly Emirates first class and have a shower on the plane, you're not going to find seats for a family of four. You're going to have to probably book business class and hope that maybe you can upgrade a person or two.

But there are limitations like that where you won't necessarily be able to book some of the splashiest flights, but there's plenty of good, comfortable experiences out there. Yep, and to that United example, I think it's a great reminder. You could book the economy flight and then keep checking. And if the business class flight opens up in the last two weeks, transfer a few more chase points to United or whatever airline you booked it through and then, you know, rebook that award in business class.

And so a couple of notes. One, I always like to book unless the airline requires it a one way award or two one way awards. And the only caveats for me, and I'm curious if you have any, are I don't like to do it if the carrier requires it.

So like ANA has a lot of round trip awards. And then I don't like to do it if the cancellation fees are kind of per ticket and they're high. Then if you had a round trip, it might be on Avianca $200 to cancel. But if you had two one ways, it might be $400.

But I find that cancelling something online and rebooking it is so much easier if you booked a one way than if you're trying to cancel one leg of a round trip for a lot of airlines, especially some of the international ones. Yeah, that's a great point. Actually, this goes back to some of the flexibility that we talked about.

It's not actually flexibility, but it's kind of a flexibility in the way you think about booking trips. Because yeah, almost all of our trips are booked as separate one ways. And not only are they booked as separate one ways, but a departure from the way most people plan trips is that I'll just book one direction because I see four seats.

And that's something that if you have a family, if you're traveling with a family, you have to jump on it when you see availability and not wait until you find all of the seats you need in both directions necessarily. If you see a great deal for your family in one direction, you got to book that and then continue to look for the other direction later on.

And so I definitely do that very frequently because it's hard to find multiple seats. If you're traveling as a family, as we typically are, it's hard to find four seats on the exact dates you need in both directions at one time. You're going to probably need to book the one that you see today and then just start looking for the other direction day after day.

And if you book things that are flexible and cancelable, then at least you have the opportunity to get those miles and points back if it doesn't work out. But I find that more often than not, if you're persistent with it, you can find those things. So that's, I think, something you really want to consider when you're booking.

I always book separate one ways. You made a good point that programs that charge high cancellation fees per ticket, you may want to think differently, but also think about perhaps in some cases, like Air Canada Aeroplane, for instance, will offer flexible tickets for more miles. And so you may pay more miles up front for the ability to cancel or change for free later on.

And so that can be a technique that's worth using. If you find something that you say, oh, this isn't necessarily perfect or there's economy class availability, but not business class availability. Let me book the flexible economy class award. And then if I find business class availability opens up, oh, great.

Then I can change to that. Like you said, transfer a few more miles. If I need to, I do that very frequently with Air Canada Aeroplane specifically because they have so many different airline partners. They have more airline partners than any airline program in the world. So even if I don't find that perfect award up front, I know there's a decent chance that I'll find it later on.

And even if I can't find the best pricing immediately, I'll know I'll probably be able to find it eventually if I look. So I'll lock in something that kind of works and then look as we get closer to change it. And we mentioned that award availability close in is often better.

And so you'll see opportunities often within a few days or weeks of travel to be able to get that premium cabin award if that's what you're after. Yeah. And this is especially true if you're trying to book an award, right? As the calendar releases and you're going for two weeks, the calendar is not going to release for both dates.

So book one, wait two weeks till they release it. One hack that I recently learned that I haven't thought about how it would apply to awards, but it definitely applies to traveling with children is a friend of mine said, look, we were always looking for business class, but it's sometimes hard and it's super expensive.

And they probably play more in the cash world than the points world. But they said the cost of four business class tickets, whether it's points or miles, is way more than the cost of six economy tickets. And so they often book six tickets. And depending on the airline, you may or may not be able to book a ticket without a person.

But, and I don't think this is crossing any lines or ethical issues, but you can book a second extra seat for passengers of size and for a musical instrument. There are reasons. So I don't think you could just book one for a fake person who's not going to board.

But what they do is they book, oftentimes on a flight where there's three and three, they book all six. And so they couldn't find the business class availability or it was way too expensive, but they book six seats in economy. And then the kids can lie down. It's a little bit more space to move around.

And so oftentimes I can tell you that finding six economy seats on some flights might be difficult, but it might be easier than finding four business class seats on that same flight. Oh yeah, no, that is a very good hack. And like you said, I think you're fine. You can book an extra seat.

That's a legitimate thing that people do. And yeah, that would be a far more economical way to do it. And, you know, that's a great example of thinking outside the box a little bit to give a similar, but different hack that I've used with my family is with Southwest, because Southwest offers the ability to, if you book a one to get away plus fare, which I know Southwest, we're talking about domestic flights.

We're not talking about business class here. We're just talking about economy class. But if you book a one and get away plus fare, you can do a same day change to a different flight. And so what I'll frequently do is book the cheapest flight that day, looking to change at midnight on the day of travel, when I can make a free change to the more desirable time or flight.

And so I once in a while have booked four seats for somebody else that may or may not make the trip on the flight that I actually want, because if they cancel after midnight, then I can take those four seats when I do a same day switch. So I've been known, Justin Bieber has been on a couple of Southwest reservations before that he hasn't flown.

But, you know, that's like you said, thinking outside the box a little bit as to how you might be able to accomplish those things is great. I love the six seats in economy class, because that really would make a big difference. And you're right. In some cases, that will be far cheaper than booking business class awards.

So that's a that's a smart hack. Yeah. And by the way, if you do it on Southwest, or I believe Alaska, if you book on Alaska or Southwest, I believe, and you book an extra seat and the flight isn't full, you can reach out and they'll refund you on those extra seats on Southwest and Alaska.

So you're traveling with kids and you're like, "Wow, this flight isn't that full." Book an extra seat and then you can get a refund. So you actually get two extra seats for free. So great option. Fantastic option. If you're trying to find a kid hack. Obviously, there's no business class in Southwest anyway.

So that's not your option. Right. So I guess I have two wrap ups. One, when you're doing all this, what advice do you have for people on when is it a good use of points? Is there a target value you're trying to convert cash to points or how do you think about that?

Well, there's two different pieces to that. First of all, yes. I mean, I want to generally get a good value for my points if I'm going to invest my time and effort into earning miles and points, then I want to make sure that I'm getting a good return on that.

And you have to consider that it could be earning cash back. And so I want to make sure that my award redemptions are exceeding the value I could have gotten if I just used a credit card to earn cash back. So I generally want to redeem my points at a value of at least two cents per point.

Now, figuring that out is a little bit murky, because as we said before, you know, if you're booking that first class flight on Etihad from Houston to Abu Dhabi, it's difficult to determine how much that's exactly worth, because it's worth more than the cost of an economy class ticket.

But it's probably not worth the $18,000 to me. So there's a little bit of murky math involved in that. But I generally want to make sure that I am getting at least two cents per point in value, because I could have easily used a two percent cash back card instead of using whatever credit card program I had used initially.

So that's part of it for me. But the other part of it for me is that I also consider the ease or difficulty of replenishing the points. And so, you know, if it's a type of point that is very easy to earn more of, and that's most types of miles and points, to be honest, then I'm at least slightly less stringent in terms of how I redeem them.

I'm a maximizer, so I like to get the best possible value that I can. But I also know that there's lots of ways to earn lots and lots of miles and points. I mean, every year, my wife and I earn millions of miles and points through new credit card welcome offers and referral bonuses and category bonuses and strategic spending in order to increase our rewards and buying and reselling things, you know, buy things and resell them in order to earn a small profit and earn lots of miles and points.

So I don't only consider the target cents per point. I also try to target lots and lots of low hanging fruit in terms of new welcome bonuses. But I like to get as much value as possible. And the one thing I don't like to do is to redeem my points for very low value when I know I'm going to often be able to redeem them for more.

And here's what I mean by that. People that are very much into award travel often love Hyatt. Hyatt is a hotel chain and they offer a great award chart. Most other hotel programs don't have an award chart at all anymore. Hyatt has a very reasonably priced award chart, many incredible properties.

If you're looking to stay at very high end places, you can stay at some incredible properties for very reasonable award rates. And by the same token, if you're looking to stay in very inexpensive properties from an award perspective at the low end of their award chart, they have amazing deals there as well.

And so I know that I'll almost always come into lots of situations where I'll get better than two cents per point out of my chase points by transferring to Hyatt. So I don't really want to redeem my chase points at any less value than that. And that's, in fact, why I don't often consider using their travel portal at one and a half cents per point, because every year I come into so many situations where Hyatt can give me more value than that, that I don't really want to accept less value for my chase points.

So I tend to focus those mostly on Hyatt, which also, by the way, is great for family travelers, because Hyatt not only does do they have good award pricing for their hotels, but they also offer the ability in many cases to book a suite with your points and sometimes a premium suite.

And as a family traveler, that's huge to me, because if I can lock in a suite at the time of booking, then I know I'm going to have the space we need. It's so nice to have a separate room and a door to be able to close in order to separate space from parents and kids.

So I tend to to spend time thinking about those types of things when I'm considering how many cents per point. And I also, again, have to compare against cash prices for reasonable options. So when I say two cents per point, I'll say, OK, well, what is my next best option?

Would I book this? Sorry, I'm not necessarily comparing against only the cheapest possible flight, because if it's a flight that I wouldn't have booked because it's awful timing or a bunch of stops, and that's maybe not the best comparison point for me. And similarly, you have to consider the flexibility.

You know, when it comes to hotels, for instance, I rarely ever consider booking a nonrefundable cash rate. And when I use hotel points, I get the flexibility of being able to cancel up until a couple of days before the stay. And I value that. So I'm more likely to compare against those other flexible rates.

So I'll consider that both with flight awards and hotel awards. But yeah, I mean, I don't want to redeem for less than two cents per point. And I tend to like to redeem for three or four cents or more. And that's usually pretty easy, particularly if you're redeeming for premium cabins, because those premium cabin flights do often yield a fantastic value versus the cash price.

What about you? I mean, do you have a target? You have like a minimum at two and a half cents or what do you have? No, I've typically said to that that's been my threshold. Also, I may did a little presentation for a wealth management firm that was like, can you teach us about points and miles?

And I said over to over or equal to two cents, like you feel good. The only caveat I'll put on there is that there are people that have played this game and some of them are listening now and have emailed me and said, gosh, I've accumulated millions and millions of points.

Just got laid off from my job. I found this great redemption, but I can't get the two cents. But cash is tight. Go on the trip. At the end of the day, I think the points are here to allow you to have incredible experiences. And so can you find ways to get more value?

Yes. But I would rather you use the points than end up in a situation like maybe I have, that I've probably hoarded my points, focused a little bit too much on the optimizing and not as much on going. And so I did this great episode with Bill Perkins, who wrote this book called Die With Zero.

And most people listening have probably heard it. I think it's the most popular episode we've ever done. And I was explaining this trip I wanted to take. And I was like, yeah, but I don't know if I can get a good deal. He goes, you're optimizing for the deal.

You're not optimizing for the trip. And you should be optimizing if it's important for your family to go on a trip together this year. Maybe it's more points. Use the more points. Maybe it's not a good deal, but optimize for taking the trip. And so I think if you have enough resources that it's we're going to take the trip.

It's just do I do points or cash this time? Maybe you can hold a higher bar. But if you don't have that luxury for the trip at hand, optimize for taking the trip, optimize for enjoying the moment. Go back and listen to that episode if you need some encouragement with a little stronger language.

Forewarned. It has an explicit reminder at the beginning. But Bill really knocked it into me. And funny enough, about 3 days after that episode, my wife and I booked a trip that wasn't as optimal as normal. But we took a trip with 4 to Europe. We found roundtrip tickets in business class for 4 people both ways.

So it all worked out. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And it goes back to what we talked about a little bit about flexibility, because there's also this analysis paralysis that you can get into and say, "Oh, well, am I getting the best deal? And which deal could I get that's a little bit better?" And then I think newcomers often have a fear that, "Oh, are people going to judge me because I didn't get a great deal?

I didn't get the best deal." Or they may feel nervous about talking about it. And I'll say, "No, no, no. I mean, if you're using your miles and points, enjoy that joy of free. Enjoy that ability to take a trip that you wouldn't have otherwise. There's no shame in that.

And not every redemption is going to be the absolute optimized, most perfect redemption. But you're probably more likely to remember that trip than you are the fact that you got 1.8 cents in value versus 2.3 cents in value out of the points. So I totally agree with that. And I think if you've got millions and millions of points, and there are certainly lots of people that'll use a credit card for years and years, maybe for their business and accumulate these huge piles of points.

And the points aren't going to grow in value. They aren't going to appreciate it all. The programs, in fact, will more likely devalue than increase in value. So you want to put those points to use sooner rather than later. And yeah, when I've built up a huge chunk of points in a particular program, I've been much more likely to accept less value because I do want to use those and keep my cash that I can invest and can appreciate and grow over time rather than spending the cash and holding the points, hoping that I'll get the perfect redemption someday.

So that's a really good point. I don't want to use them towards really low value and kind of waste the time and effort I had put into earning them. But you're right. I also don't want to sit on a massive pile of points that I'm not using and either not travel or use my money rather than use my points.

Yeah. Okay. I keep saying we got to wrap because we've been here for so long, but there's two last things. One is we talked about flights this whole time. We said, here are some ways not to redeem points. Transfer partners are the ways to do it. Flights, flights, flights.

Spent about two minutes on Hyatt. I know that almost every transferable currency has a partner, at least one in the hotel groups. Do you ever consider those as good ways to use points other than Hyatt, where I think we've kind of clearly established good value? I don't often look at transferring transferable currencies to hotel points.

And that's because hotel points, well, two reasons. Number one, hotel points in general are worth far less than airline points from a cash perspective. The programs just have it set up that way where most hotel points are worth less than a penny per point. Now, in some cases, you can get multiple points when you transfer.

It varies from one transferable points program to another. Like for instance, if you're transferring your Amex points to Hilton, it's not one-to-one. You get more points when you transfer to Hilton and there's frequently transfer bonuses. There are times when it can be reasonable enough. And particularly if Amex is offering a transfer bonus to Hilton, that's one time where you can get a reasonable enough value out of your points.

But you have to consider that many of the hotel programs sell their points pretty cheaply. Hilton is an example that they almost always have their points on sale for half a cent each. So if you're transferring your Amex membership rewards points to Hilton and you're getting two Hilton points for every one Amex membership reward point, that's not a great deal because you could have used your pennies and bought those two points also.

So it's not as good of a redemption when they offer the right transfer bonus, then it can become a reasonable redemption, but it's not one that I typically look at. And the same can be said for Marriott and IHG. They frequently sell their points for less than a penny a point.

So if I really wanted those points and I hadn't earned those points from the hotel programs, then I might consider cashing out my points at one cent per point and buying points and end up with more points than I would by transferring. And Chase to IHG is a great example of this.

If you transferred your Chase points to IHG for every one Chase point, you're going to get one IHG point. Whereas instead, if you cashed out your Chase points, every one Chase point will give you a penny and you can pretty frequently buy two IHG points for that one penny and end up with far more points.

- And when you say cash out, you mean just the statement credit or something like that? - Yeah, exactly, exactly. Which isn't a redemption that I typically consider doing. But again, if I were really in need of IHG points because they're frequently on sale for half a cent each, then I would consider cashing out Chase points for a statement credit and buying the IHG points I needed.

Now, all that said, each of the various hotel programs have their own credit cards and often those credit cards offer good welcome bonuses. And often with these hotel programs, they have more than one credit card and you might be able to get more than one of those credit cards.

So we certainly do use hotel points, but our hotel points in general are earned via welcome bonuses from the various chain credit cards. Hyatt is the one example or the one exception rather, where I will transfer my transferable points to a hotel program. Now, all that said, again, there are situations where you may have a great redemption and maybe you have almost enough points, but not quite enough points to redeem for the hotel award you want.

And then it really might make sense to transfer over. If you need a few thousand more, 10,000, 20, whatever it might be for a really valuable hotel stay, then yeah, by all means transfer over, top off and get that booked because that can yield enough value to make it worthwhile.

I just generally wouldn't consider transferring a large chunk of my transferable points to a hotel program. Yep. Now my last thing is if someone listed this whole thing and said, "I really wish I could get this two, three, four, five cents of value, but it just sounds like so much work.

I don't have that much work." I wanna make sure people understand the alternative isn't just, "Okay, great, redeem it in the portal or a statement credit." There are people out there. I don't know if you guys have any at Frequent Miler, but there are people you can pay to just do all of this for you, award booking services.

And so if someone's listening and thinking, "Gosh, I got a million points." The difference between getting two cents and one cent is like $100,000, right? Like, or maybe $10,000. Sorry, sorry, $10,000. But still, I mean, a $10,000 difference is worth paying somebody a few bucks. $10,000. Yeah, yeah. And so for a few hundred dollars, usually per person, so 150, $200 a person, you can say, "Hey, we wanna take a trip as a family.

We've got four people. We want a five business class. We're willing to go anywhere in Europe in July." Someone else will go and do all this searching for you and come back and say, "Here's an optimal way to do it." Usually you put about $25 deposit per person. So you're not even spending the full amount to do the searching, just the deposit.

And so I'll just flag to anyone listening, we'll link to a few in the show notes that are options. I don't know if you have any favorites that you've used before or referred people to, but that is an option where if spending $200 a person for four people, so $800, is the difference between getting $20,000 or $10,000 of value from your points.

By all means, I think anyone listening can do the math to say that was a good ROI. Yeah, no, for sure. I don't have a lot of firsthand experience with award booking services because when I got into this, I taught myself how to do it and learned how to do it and enjoyed doing it, which I think is a big key because not everybody enjoys the hunting and the searching.

I enjoy the thrill of the hunt, but not everybody does. And if you don't have a lot of extra time to do it, then I think an award booking service fills a really important need. And I think your point that the amount of savings you can have in the sense that if you redeem your points just through the credit card portal, because you're like, "Oh, I don't want to bother with this." Then you may be giving up, that example is a great one, $10,000 in value that you could have for just paying somebody a couple hundred bucks a person to book it for you.

We don't offer award booking services at Frequent Miler, but there are lots of different ones out there, like you said, and you may be familiar and have a good list of them. Yeah, I'll find a couple. I'll link to them in the show notes. Definitely. But I will also send you back to the episode I did with Greg because the award tools have come so far.

A lot of these discovery tools have made it so easy to kind of get inspired that I think maybe 3 years ago, it would have been a lot more work. It's like search every route, every date. That's gotten a lot better. So it might seem like a lot of work.

And if you go back and listen to that episode with Greg, you might realize, "Actually, I could do some of this searching on my own pretty quickly." So this has been amazing. If someone listening today has not been inspired to get good value out of their points, maybe made some changes to how they're thinking about planning, I would be surprised.

You mentioned a lot of episodes, but Nick, where can people find the stuff you're writing, the shows you're hosting? Frequentmiler.com is our blog. But if you're looking for our podcast, that's Frequent Miler On The Air. You can find that on all your various podcast platforms, wherever your favorite podcast platform is.

Of course, we're on YouTube as well. And you can find our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group where people frequently ask questions about this stuff. You asked about award booking and people frequently will say, "Hey, I'm looking at this. Is this a good option? Is there a better option?" And people help each other in our Frequent Miler group as well.

But all those episodes that we've talked about, you can find us on Frequent Miler On The Air on all your favorite podcast platforms. Yep. Whatever you're listening to now, highly recommend. Thank you so much for being here, Nick. Thank you very much. It was a lot of fun. Really enjoyed being here.

I appreciate the chance to sit down and talk miles and points with you. Anytime. And when you started talking about how easy it was for you to earn a lot more points, I'm like, "Hmm, I got an idea for another conversation." So we'll see how we can make that happen.