Using points and miles to travel for less is what we’re all about … but even two brilliant, handsome podcasters like us (yes, that’s sarcasm) need some help to earn more of them, get organized, and redeem those awards for better travel. So this week, we open up our toolboxes and run through the tools we use to travel better - including a few tools we created for our listeners to use for free! Come to get smarter about points and miles, stay to hear the rollercoaster that is Gunnar’s self-esteem during this episode.
Using points and miles to travel for less is what we’re all about … but even two brilliant, handsome podcasters like us (yes, that’s sarcasm) need some help to earn more of them, get organized, and redeem those awards for better travel. So this week, we open up our toolboxes and run through the tools we use to travel better - including a few tools we created for our listeners to use for free! Come to get smarter about points and miles, stay to hear the rollercoaster that is Gunnar’s self-esteem during this episode.
00:00 - The most annoying person at the party: The person who just got back from vacation
01:54 - Recapping Kyle’s trip to England and Scotland (that we previewed in Ep. 12)
09:25 - Something Hot: The Amex Platinum Lululemon credit & how to use it on gift cards
12:20 - Something Hotter: The Park Hyatt Tokyo was wide-open using Hyatt points!
15:00 - Something Cold: Who is the Amex Platinum for Business Card for?
17:45 - A word from our sponsor: Get max value from your points with Thrifty Traveler Premium
18:50 - The Extra Mile: Our tools of the trade for next-level award travel
19:15 - The tools we use to earn points and miles (Cardpilot, Rakuten, & more)
30:00 - The tools we use to organize our cards, points and miles (Card benefit spreadsheets, Travel Freely, & more)
38:00 - How we spend our points and miles wisely (Award alerts, award search tools, the guide to transfer bonuses, & more)
45:30 - Listener Observation: How to beat AA’s solo passenger tax
48:00 - On the Spot: What would Gunnar change about himself … travel-wise
Produced by Nick Serati and Gunnar Olson
Edited by David Strutt (Find him @davidstrutt on Fiverr!)
Show music: “All That” by Benjamin Tissot
Speaker 1 (00:00.364)
Yo, welcome to the show. I'm your host Gunnar Olson here with either the worst or the best person at the party. It's the person who just got back from vacation. It's Kyle Potter. How's it going, Kyle?
I'm definitely the worst person at the party. There's no question.
I was going to ask, cause I similarly can't wait to put my vacation into any conversation that comes up no matter what it is. Small talk be damned. There is no small talk when I come back from vacation, just big talk about what I've seen and how it's changed me.
For the person who coined the phrase travel is not a personality, trade it is definitely just a core part of your personality.
I put that phrase to the test every single day. I have more questions about your trip, but first I want to just quick preview the episode that we've been scheming up for a while now. We're calling it our favorite tools of the trade. It's all the tools we use to get ahead in this kind wild world of award travel. It's the way we earn points, the way we organize points, and then most importantly, the way we redeem those points for travel. And we're going to break them down in the life cycle of a point from the beginning to the end. And it's kind of a glimpse into our...
Speaker 1 (01:05.838)
points and miles toolboxes, if you will.
Yeah, the things that we use on a weekly, if not daily basis to keep track of things, make sure we're organized, make sure we're getting the best bang for our buck. And, I think there's going to be some things here where, you know, people are already using them. There are certainly going to be things that are going to be new and helpful to people.
Yeah, for sure. All right. We also have some updates on those Lululemon credits we talked about in the Amex Platinum episode. We have some updates on the Park High at Tokyo and the Business Amex Platinum card as well. And then next we're going to talk about Kyle's trip. Let's get it started. Welcome back to the Thrifty Traveler podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:50.382)
All right, welcome back. way back in episode 12 of the podcast, Kyle, you walked us through how you booked this trip to England and Scotland using points and miles and included a business class flight redemption and some really idyllic looking Scottish hotels that made me very, very jealous. So let's start with the logistics and then get to the fun stuff at the end. How are your flights?
It was great. You know, on the way there, we flew Virgin Atlantic upper class for my second time and probably the last because since we booked that flight, Virgin has added almost $600 in fees for a one-way business class ticket. So I will not be booking that again. And I knew that when we sat down. So I enjoyed it maybe a little bit more than I otherwise would. You can take from that whatever you would like. But it was a great flight. It was made even better by the fact that we're flying out of JFK.
And we got a Delta One lounge access at JFK. And we were there for probably a good four five hours. But it was great. We stopped into the Capital One lounge because my wife and I have a Capital One Venture X card. So that was another kind of great way to kick off the trip. And then it was a short five and a half-ish hours across the pond to London, but it was great.
I always forget how short that flight is. That's pretty amazing.
It is so short. And this is the thing, and I'm getting ahead of myself here, but we wound up flying back nonstop economy in Delta from London Heathrow straight back to Minneapolis. Because first of all, nothing beats a nonstop flight. And second, when you're flying during the day especially, seven hours, six and a half hours, however long it is, economy is fine. It's just fine. I'm not that special. I don't need to fly business class everywhere.
Speaker 2 (03:40.282)
and so it was, it was great. I really like flying Virgin Atlantic upper class. Their business class seats are great, at least on their Airbus A350s and their A3 3900 Dinos. But you know, nothing beats getting home, especially on the way home from Europe. So it was great all around.
That's awesome. All tell me a little bit about on the ground. Where did you stay? Where did you go? Remind everybody if they didn't listen to episode 12.
In hindsight, we moved around a little too much. My wife and I had a moment where we said, you know what, we need to scale things back a little bit next time. So as soon as we landed in London from that overnight flight from JFK, we connected up to Edinburgh, spent a night in Edinburgh, then picked up a rental car and drove out the next morning to the Scottish Highlands headed for the town of Oban, which was incredible.
The Scottish Highlands are just magical. I, that was for me, the absolute highlight of the trip to the point where I asked my wife like, should we just stay here for another night? Skip going back to Edinburgh for another day. Don't get me wrong. Edinburgh is great too. The pub scene, the restaurants, just the vibe of that town is really, really special, but nothing beats the Scottish Highlands of, you know, the rolling hillsides and the glens and.
the lox and especially the Highland cows. It's just really, really cool. I will remember that piece of the trip forever. After a couple of nights in the Scottish Highlands and some Scotch distillery tastings, we headed back to Edinburgh one more night and then down to London for the conclusion of the trip where we spent four nights.
Speaker 1 (05:24.96)
Awesome. Where did you stay in the Highlands?
I mentioned this in episode 12, which we have really been doing this for too long at this point. We booked a small luxury hotel of the world using Hilton points. At the time it cost, I think, 85,000 points per night. I think it's now up to 100,000. It's called Isle of Arisca, and it is a small private island that is about two and a half miles around. And they have their own highland cows.
They have their own kind of pen full of goats. They have a small farm. They, can do like clay pigeon shooting. I did not do that, but it is there. It's just, it was really, really cool. It was really special. It's a, an old manor castle. I don't know what to call it. That's been converted into basically an inn with I think 12 rooms, maybe less. It was just really quaint and exactly what I wanted out of a trip to Scotland.
Oh man, that is awesome. Anything private island got me sold there, especially if you can use points to book it. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. All right, so you talked about how you loved the highlands and some of the best things of your trip. Any re-dos, anything you do different, any skips? You mentioned maybe you moved a little quickly, but...
Yeah, it's tough to beat that, right?
Speaker 2 (06:44.782)
things and they both have to do with London. One is I would try to avoid planning a trip to London when the entire tube network is down because of a strike. the day that we landed in London, the strike began and it lasted until the day that we left. with a few exceptions, none of the subway networks were running during our trip there. So we put on 140,000 steps.
and 45 miles of walking in four days, which actually wasn't the worst thing. It was kind of a blessing in disguise because after eating all of that Scottish and English food, pies and sausages and fish and chips, I needed those steps. So it was good. And it was also very cool to see the city from the ground that way. know, walking past things that you would have just, you know, ridden past in the subway. So that was actually pretty cool.
Unfortunately, our timing was bad in another respect. One of the things that I really wanted to do was to see a Premier League or a championship game because I grew up playing soccer and I've just always wanted to see that. I've never, never seen a professional football match. And we happened to be visiting at the time when the Premier League and the championship were on Olympic qualifying break. So there were no matches whatsoever while we were there. So I will be back.
We'll be back for that. Maybe we'll go to Manchester and go to Manchester city or Old Trafford and see Manchester United. don't know. But on the whole, it was really just a marvelous trip. And I just want to shout out one last thing while we were out in the Scottish Highlands, staying around the town of Ulbin, which itself was really great. We also took our car on the ferry out to the Isle of Mull, which is a really large island and kind of the West coast of Scotland and just driving around that island.
driving out to Taver-Mori, seeing the Taver-Mori Distillery. It was really, really fun. It was a really special experience, a great day trip.
Speaker 1 (08:49.41)
Yeah, man, outstanding. Sounds like you planned the hell out of this thing and it all came to fruition. So great work. That sounds like an awesome trip. I'm sure a lot of people will try and replicate something close to it. And I think they should from what it sounds like in your experience.
I would go back to the Scottish islands right now and the podcast. I'm going back.
All right. Let's jump into something hot and something cold. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's a little bit of good news and a little bit of bad news from the week in travel. Cause life is all about balance. Kyle, you want to start with something hot? Okay. The new and improved Amex platinum card has a $75 quarterly credit that can be used at Lululemon, the sporty fashionable clothing retailer that has an absolute stranglehold on millennial closets, mine included.
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (09:36.686)
We learned of an important update for how you can use this credit this week, right Kyle?
So this is, you know, generally speaking, what always happens with American Express and credit cards more broadly is you read the terms and conditions of these new benefits that you get. And nine times out of 10, it will say gift cards are excluded. You cannot use these credits that might expire monthly or quarterly or twice a year or once a year in order to buy a gift card for that retailer. That's what it says on paper. But in practice, again,
Eight, if not nine times out of 10, it does actually work. It's just the terms try to discourage you from doing this. So, you know, we like to be the data point that we want to see in the world. And so a handful of us in the office here on day one or day two with the new Amex Platinum and these $75 once a quarter credits for Lululemon, we bought some gift card. I went to a Lululemon store and bought one. I also bought a physical gift card online from lululemon.com.
There are two options and this is really critical. You can buy an e-gift card or you can buy a physical gift card and have that shipped to your house. So I did the latter, which is an important distinction because I will almost guarantee you that buying an online e-gift card would not work. But in the case of the gift card that I bought in store and the one that I bought online, both of them triggered the credit. took about five days after purchase, but
$25 kicked in for those $25 gift cards, both the one I bought in store and online. Now want to say, this might not last forever, but at least for now, and as people are listening to this, they'll have their last $75 credit available on their Amex Platinum cards for the final quarter of the year. This is an option and it's a great one if you just don't have a Lululemon store nearby.
Speaker 2 (11:30.76)
Or you really want to buy a pair of pants, but it costs $150. And so you could buy a pair of pants now and get it for basically 50 % off, or you could buy a $75 gift card and then combine it with the second credit for a bigger purchase.
Yeah, I honestly I wish I would have just gone ahead and bought a gift card, especially with the holidays coming up that would probably come in handy either to use on a gift or to give as a gift in general, especially when you buy the physical gift card. But instead I went ahead and bought a shirt, which you can guarantee will be debuted on this episode next week. But no bad way to use your Lulu credit, but buying a physical gift card online as a really good way.
to stretch your dollar and make sure those credits don't expire because they are use it or lose it credits. Let's move on to something hotter. I'm bending the format once again because this deserved it. It is. The park at Tokyo reopened for bookings last week with an opening day in December. Last week on the show, we wondered whether this kind of historically awesome hotel would have any award space available at all. And I predicted that it wouldn't. How did I do on that prediction?
It's our show. We make the rules.
Speaker 2 (12:40.152)
Surprise! Poorly. No, you know what? I'm, I am honestly shocked. So, you know, the Park Hyatt said that it was going to be opening on December 8th. And they also said that on September 24th, at what worked out to be 10 PM central, they would open for reservations. And so this is what we do. We try to find deals for people, not just on flights, but hotels too for, you know, our premium plus service. So.
A couple of us on the team stayed up until 10, then we stayed up a little later until 1015 and then 1020 and then 1025 rolled around and I was ready to shut my laptop. I hit refresh one last time on the points calendar on highest website for the park, Hyatt Tokyo. And lo and behold, the flood gates were open. At the time it was bookable basically from the final days of February all the way through September of 2026, including peak cherry blossom season.
So we sent out a deal to our Hotel Alert subscribers that have the Premium Plus service. Every, basically every single day was bookable. And importantly, you know, I hoped that there would be award space bookable with points, but I assumed that Hyatt would do what Hyatt does with a lot of its really premier ultra-popular properties, require a two, if not three, or even four-night minimum stay in order to see that award availability.
And that is not what we saw at all. You could even book a one night stay at the park high at Tokyo and still to this day, the, peak cherry blossom season availability in late March, early April, April, that is gone. Now, a lot of the stuff in earlier 2026 is gone. It's spotty basically all the way through April. But from, as we're talking right now, from May all the way through September, it is wide open, bookable for as low as 35,000 points per night, especially as you get into August, which is.
a great deal for something that I know both of us are, you're excited to go back to. I'm really excited to see it for the first time.
Speaker 1 (14:41.644)
Yeah, my highest recommendation to book the park, high Tokyo. went before the renovation, but I don't think there's any way they made it worse with the updates. So I would recommend you go, go book it, go check out the award availability that we found. And it is still there, still lingering award availability, but sadly we need to pivot to something called Kyle. I want to keep this really simple. After all the new changes to the Amex platinum card, who is the Amex platinum for business card for?
That's it. That really is it. It's kind of crazy to be saying that because, you know, even if you don't have a big business, let alone a small one, a lot of people are eligible for business credit cards. If you have a side hustle, if you resell things, if you do some consulting on the side, whatever, you can open these small business credit cards. And the business platinum card has been for a long time.
a lot of travelers favorites. It is a fan favorite card among kind of the diehard award travel community, but they've done two things to really change that case. One is that they changed what was that card's really defining feature, which is, you can get a 35 % points rebate when you use your Amex points from the Amex business platinum card to book. Economy fair is on your US airline of choice.
But also any premium cabin fare, business or first class on any airline. And what they did with the, with this September 18th unveil of the new cards, they changed that second piece of it where now it doesn't matter what kind of fare you book, you can only get that 35 % rebate on one US airline, which really stinks. And at the same time, you know, I think there's been a lot of pretty well-deserved fanfare for the changes that American Express rolled out to the Platinum Card for.
everyday personal consumers. But on the business card, they really just didn't do a whole lot. The things that they did do require spending something like $200,000 a year in order to unlock a $1,200 flight credit and a $2,400 credit for your account's payable account. It just doesn't move the needle in the same way that it used to. So that's why I say this card is really only for big spenders for everybody else. think people are rightly focused on the personal platinum card, which is
Speaker 2 (17:07.606)
Again, a big piece of the reason why in our Amix Platinum episode a couple of weeks ago, we just breezed right past it because it just, doesn't move the needle in the same way.
Yeah, I'm sure there are some people out there who've had the card for a long time who put that much money or more on it a year and maybe for them it still makes sense. But you know, for someone like us for regulars out there, I just don't see why you'd pick that card up instead of the personal Amex Platinum anymore. So good points there. Let's start to dig into our toolboxes and talk about our tools of the trade. But first, we're going to take a quick break.
All right, all those points and miles that are sitting in your account aren't going to do you any good if you can't use them to fly to the places that you want to go. Whether it's a weekend in Arizona, bucket list trip to Japan, or a summer Euro trip, it helps to have someone searching for the best ways to use your points and miles for you.
That's what we do. Thrifty Traveler Premium does it all for you, sending ready-to-book deals straight to your inbox every single day. As a special treat, our podcast listeners can get $20 off their first year of deals. Go to thriftytraveler.com slash premium and use promo code TT pod. That's thriftytraveler.com slash premium promo code TT pod, five letters, all one word for 20 bucks off your first year.
Yeah, look, I'm not impressed if you have half a million sky miles in your account or 750,000 capital one points. You know what's cool? Having zero points in miles because you use them all to fly around the world and back. That's what's actually cool. We're spending all day every day finding the best deals so you can use all of your points and miles and so you don't have to do the searching all by yourself. Okay, back to the show.
Speaker 1 (18:47.534)
All right, welcome back. Let's get into the extra mile where we dive much, much deeper on something that you need to know about. And this week we're talking about the tools that we use to earn points, manage points and credits, and then most importantly, use those points to travel for less. And to do so, we're going to go through some of our favorite tools in the life cycle of a point from earning to managing to spending. Kyle, let's start with the earning portion. Open up your toolbox, show us what's inside. How do you...
Maximize your earning of points and miles.
Well, you know, I think it all really starts with picking the right card, which, you know, how many, how many hours have we now devoted in the last couple of months to talking about all of the changes to credit cards and new benefits and higher annual fees and which points program is best. And, you know, this stuff is difficult, especially as banks keep moving the goalposts about which cards you can get and approval standards and all of that stuff. And so, you know, the first tool is getting started with the right card. And for folks out there who
have trouble figuring out what that right card is for them because it isn't a one size fits all answer. It never is. It's deeply personal about your goals and your financial situation and probably most importantly, which credit cards you may already have in your wallet. And so our team built a tool called CardPilot, which automates all of this work. So you fill out a short questionnaire and there's no personal information whatsoever. We're certainly not selling your data.
You're just answering some basic questions about your goals, your financial situation, which credit cards you already have. And then we recommend within a couple of minutes, a handful of different credit cards that really might be the best fit for you. So you can dig in a little bit deeper and pick the right card and not make what can end up being a costly mistake of picking the wrong credit card that is not going to help you get where you want to go.
Speaker 1 (20:39.83)
Yeah, you know, this used to be the go-to question that people would ask me at dinner parties, like, card should I pick up next?
your least favorite form of small talk.
Yeah, this is the worst dinner party small talk there is and now I just send them to a link on our website. It's way better. I'm not as fun at parties anymore because I'm, you know, directing people back to our site.
Flashing a QR code on your phone here. Just shut up. Shut up.
I just printed a QR code of my hat. Don't ask me what card to pick up anymore. Please go to CardPilot. It's actually going to be better than whatever I'm going to recommend to you because like you said, this this stuff is so personal. What are you spending your money on? What cards do you already have? Unless you want to fill out a questionnaire for me at the dinner party, I'm not going to be able to help you as good as CardPilot is. So it's a really, really great tool. I'm not just saying that.
Speaker 1 (21:26.86)
I used it myself when we kind of piloted it and it was just the exact recommendations that it gave me the exact plan that I was looking into already and my highest recommendation for that as well. When it comes to credit cards.
We'll link probably everything in the show notes, right? But this one is just cardpilot.thriftytraveller.com if you want to get started and give it a whirl.
this next tool we did not create still very, very helpful. What is us credit card guide, Kyle?
Well, at first blush, it's a pretty outdated website with a ton of information about individual credit cards. But maybe the most important thing is opening a credit card is all about timing. Timing it around when you can spend anywhere between a thousand dollars to five thousand, six thousand, eight thousand dollars, maybe more in order to earn a big welcome bonus because that's the best way to earn points.
But it's also about timing and that you want to open that specific credit card when it's offering hopefully a record high welcome bonus, know, a bonus of a hundred thousand points instead of 75. And working out, especially with all of the changes that we see, what's a good bonus and what's not can be very difficult. And so what US credit card guide does better than anyone is on each credit card from the Chase Sapphire preferred to any one of the stupidly named Marriott Bonvoy credit cards.
Speaker 2 (22:54.188)
They have a historical offers chart, which tracks over time over the course of a decade or more exactly what the biggest bonuses are. So you can see, okay, this card currently has a 75,000 point welcome bonus. Is that actually very good or should I wait? know, the, maybe the question that we get most often about credit card offers is with the Delta Sky Miles cards, because they offer elevated welcome bonuses like.
three or four times a year. And this makes it very, very easy to determine whether the offer that you're seeing is actually a good one, or if you should wait for little bit and try again later.
Right. It's just, it's the perspective of, know, am I getting the best deal at the right time? It's really important stuff. Where can people find US credit card guide?
The easiest thing to do is if you're thinking about a card, Google the name of that card and US credit card guide. And that card page will show up on that website. Click it, scroll down to the historical offers chart, and it will give you everything you need to know.
Awesome. Use it. You don't have to pick up credit cards with big sign up bonuses to earn points. Most travelers should just try to be earning points all the time on everyday purchases. I think these next two tools are really good at helping you maximize the points that you're bringing in for the purchases that you're already making. Tell me about Cashback Monitor and Rakuten.
Speaker 2 (24:19.448)
Well, before I tell you about Cashback Monitor and Rakuten, we talked in our 10 Commandments episode months ago now, really good episode for kind of foundational knowledge. The most important thing to do to earn points and miles is to install a mental block before you make a purchase and ask yourself, how can I make the most out of this? And with purchases online, which we're all doing online shopping all the time, there is a crazy network of different online shopping portals where
You might get five points per dollar with, you know, this one shopping portal, you know, shopping at Lululemon. but this one offers six and trying to figure out which is the best portal to use, can be difficult. And the website cashback monitor is just like a massive network, that guides you to the best way to get the most bang for your buck on that online purchase. So you go to cashback monitor.com. You type in Dyson.
or Dell or Best Buy or Lululemon or Gap or wherever you're doing your shopping. And it will break down the current bonuses at every single shopping portal. Now you're not going to need to use all of these different shopping portals, but if it's a choice between using, you know, United Mileage Plus's shopping portal to add to your stash of United Miles versus using something like Rakuten instead, this can help steer you towards the best way to get more of the points or miles that you want.
Yeah, really good ideas there. just, you know, like I mentioned at the top, it's, just one of these smaller, more incremental ways to get the most bang for your buck. And these two sites are perfect as good mental blocks for waiting and picking the exact card that's going to give you the most rewards. Let's close with this one in the earning points and miles section. Where to credit? Tell me about where to credit.
And this is a theme here, very clunky, outdated website, not the most intuitive to use. But this is really helpful for those situations where, you know, let's just say you are a pretty loyal Delta flyer like the two of us, but you see a great deal flying economy or maybe even business class on British Airways. Do you want to earn British Airways miles? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe you want to earn other miles. And because of airline partnerships and alliances,
Speaker 2 (26:38.36)
you're able to credit the flight that you take with one airline to a dozen or more different carriers. What where2credit.com does is you just enter which airline you're flying with. You pick the fare class that you booked, which you just need to look at in your tickets at that single letter inside of parentheses. That is your fare class. You enter that and then it will tell you, show you kind of the breakdown of what kind of mileage you'll earn with each of British Airways or Cathay Pacific.
or Austrian airlines, whichever airline, where you might want to end up crediting your miles. So then you can go into that reservation, you can change your frequent flyer account on file to the airline you actually want to credit to. Where to credit is probably the best resource that I know of in order to help figure this out.
Yeah, that's another very simple way to pad your points and miles accounts. Good. Helping people stack up their miles. Anything else in this section?
You know, we didn't talk a ton about Rakuten. We talked more about Cashback Monitor. I just want to point out Rakuten is probably the single best, most useful shopping portal. can, it typically earns cash back, but if you have an American Express membership rewards card, like the Amex Platinum or the Amex Gold, you can switch that to earn Amex membership rewards points, which makes this a great way to just...
a one and done solution. There are times when you might make more miles using a different portal, but Rakuten is kind of your go-to repository for this. Just a quick caveat, don't make the mistake that I made early in the pandemic when suddenly I was like, I should be making cash back instead of points. Because once you switch that to Rakuten, you are done. You are locked in. You cannot switch back. So my primary Rakuten account, I'm still just making cash back on.
Speaker 1 (28:31.462)
I didn't even realize that was a thing. Yeah, no, Rakuten is an easy one for me. It's a browser extension too. So I just plug and play Rakuten every time I'm online shopping. Rakuten pops up and you can just activate it really quickly and make sure that you're getting some cash back without having to think too much about it. Okay. Can we move on to our next section?
Why do you ask me for permission?
You are technically my boss. If we want to org chart thrifty traveler, I do need to ask you permission to move on to the next section. All right, Kyle, you've done a lot of work recently creating some tools that have gone into my award toolbox. And I'm in real life, devastatingly unhandy. I don't know my way around the toolbox that's in my own house.
proof.
Speaker 2 (29:19.146)
No, we've all heard the story about how your very pregnant wife built your kitchen while you watched and helped clean up. So that tracks.
I'm such a good cleaner upper though, but yeah, to use a screwdriver, I got to go on YouTube first. It's really bad. This actually all comes from my dad who famously once asked my little sister and I for a toolbox for Christmas one year. And so we got him a toolbox and the next year for Christmas, we asked him what he wanted and he was like, I think I could use a toolbox. And we walked into the garage and showed him the toolbox. We got him last year unopened on the seal not broken. Unbelievable. Yeah.
gifs though.
So Kyle, you built these outstanding tools that I've already started using. And they're basically these like plug and play spreadsheets to help you organize your credit card credits and your points and things like that. Tell me about what you've done and why they're so useful.
First, I think we need to step back and appreciate that it is ridiculous that you in fact need a spreadsheet in order to use the benefits of a credit card that you are paying almost $900 a year for. But there comes a point where you just have to accept the reality of the world we live in and this is what is happening now and it's not going to slow down, it's going to get worse. So we stepped back and we said, all right, let's help people keep track of these things and let's do it in an intuitive way.
Speaker 2 (30:44.578)
So starting with the American Express Platinum card, but then branching out from that to the Business Platinum, the American Express Gold, the Chase Sapphire Reserve, even the Capital One Venture X. And we're going to keep adding to this list of cards, including Delta Sky Miles, Hilton Honors, et cetera. The list, unfortunately, goes on and on and on. We wanted to have a one and done spreadsheet where people can tick off the benefits as they use them. And then that spreadsheet's
automatically tallies up the current value that you've gotten based on what you've ticked off and use. so that you know, all right, I'm getting close to kind of making back the annual fee that I paid on this card. Great. It also is color coded and changes automatically when a benefit is set to expire within the next month, it'll turn orange. And then when it's about to expire within just two weeks, it'll turn red so that there's a visual reminder that, I haven't used my
monthly $15 Uber credit, I should really get on that. And then finally, the last thing that we've done as we've expanded this is, you know, we've kind of created a homepage where you can just click the cards that you have. So if you have the American Express Platinum card, as well as the Amex Gold and maybe even a Chase Sapphire Reserve, you click those three cards and then each of these spreadsheets shows up as a tab on the bottom. So it's all in one place for you to track all of these benefits, these hard to use benefits that you need to use or lose.
all in one place.
Yeah, I've been honestly waiting. I didn't know I was waiting for something like this, but I have been. It is really just quickly and easily doing the math for you. And I'm also devastatingly horrible at spreadsheets. You might be asking, do I have any skills? I don't know. Maybe I'll find one here or there.
Speaker 2 (32:28.696)
Tune into a future episode to find out. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Gunnar.
Maybe podcasting down the line. But these spreadsheets are just so useful. It just does quick math for you. So you're not worried about making back your annual fee. You can actually see and put it into practice all the time. It's way easier than, you know, trying to just do a little notes app, which is what I do. My wife and I have a little shared notes app with check marks and it doesn't really do any of the math for you. It just kind of shows me what I have and haven't used on.
various cards and you know, there are credits that always slip through the cracks. And so this just kind of helps close those cracks and seal things up for you so you can make your annual feedback. Anything more on your spreadsheets? We appreciate you being the superhero that we all needed here to put these together.
No, we'll throw a link in the show notes. Get started. Shoot us an email at podcast at thrifty traveler.com. If there's a card that you don't see on that list that you want to be able to track, if you have feedback about how to make this even better. mean, we're really just getting started with this, but it's clear that people not just want, but really need more of these tools to stay organized and make sure that they're using everything that they can.
Yeah, definitely. And we are not the only sites out there putting together really useful tools. I want to highlight especially one that I love, travel freely. This is how I organize all of the cards that I have open, the annual fees, when those annual fees are due, most importantly, so I can decide on if I want to keep the card or cancel the card. And it also helps you with kind of what people in the industry call two player mode.
Speaker 1 (34:02.38)
When my wife and I are working on this stuff together to earn points and miles together, I can keep track of her card, open dates, and how much you need to spend and when for the bonuses. Pretty intuitive, kind of well-designed site too. I really like to use it and I frequent it just to make sure that I'm up on everything that I need to. They also send very helpful email alerts. What do you like about Travel Freely?
The email alerts are the biggest one because again, you know, as you add to maybe four, maybe five, maybe even 10 credit cards to your wallet, none of this is to say you need that many credit cards, but a lot of people do. It's really hard to keep track of when you opened a card and it's way too easy to get past that card renewing and paying. Maybe it's 400, 500, 600, $700 a year in additional fees. And then it's like, oh.
I really didn't want to renew that credit card. Travel Freely with these automated emails sends you a handful of reminders as that renewal date is approaching so that it's on your radar so you can make the right decision for yourself. And I think really importantly, this doesn't require logging in with your Chase or American Express credentials. All you're doing is entering the cards that you have, the date that you opened it.
What the minimum spending requirement is to earn the bonus and what that bonus was to make sure that you keep track of all of this stuff. But it's just your information that you're entering manually. And then it kind of automates all the rest, which is really, really great. And a tool that I do use week in week out.
Yeah, a feature I forgot to, I don't know if you just mentioned it, the chase 524 tracker is also very helpful. It always reminds me how far over 524 I am at the moment and how devastating far away I am from getting back under 524. I've been on a bit of a run lately, but travel freely. My highest recommendation there too.
Speaker 2 (35:57.122)
Yeah, the 524 tracker is huge. know, so Chase has the 524 rule, pretty infamous, let's call it, where if you've opened five or more credit cards in the last 24 month period, not just from Chase, but from any bank, Chase, generally speaking, will not approve you for another travel credit or another credit card period. So keeping tabs on where you are at in that account can help steer you towards
okay. You know, I can open this new Chase Freedom Flex card because I'm under 524. I've only opened three credit cards within the last 24 months. if you're in Gunner's case, LOL 24, you know not to waste your time with that application.
Yeah, daycare bills are stacking up. So we're adding cards like crazy right now. The last tool I want to talk about here for the kind of managing your credits and points and miles section is Monarch Money, which is a kind of personal finance website and app. It kind of helps me and my family just kind of organize everything in our personal finances and credit cards and things like that. And it helps us with payment due dates.
it's a hundred bucks a year for my wife and I to use, it spring up, I guess it became more prominent after Mint went away. which is, you know, the Intuit platform that a lot of people use to track their personal finance. When that went away, I needed something else and Monarch was right there. They had a introductory offer right when Mint went enclosed and we jumped on that, but, it's just really easy, simple stuff. They make everything easy to understand.
you know, even for financially illiterate people like perhaps myself. So, but it's a great tool. I highly recommend it. Really good for people who aren't good at their own spreadsheets and personal finance as well.
Speaker 2 (37:47.564)
Your self-evaluation in this episode is just extremely poor.
the problem is I went golfing this weekend, so my self-talk is just all-time low.
Yeah, nothing makes you hate yourself like golf
I know it's really bad. All right, let's get to the really, really fun part of all this. And that is spending points and miles. Points and miles are useless unless you can put them to good use. Booking good flights, booking hotels around the world, doing whatever you need to do to travel for less. Kyle, what is the best way to travel for less? What's your favorite tool to spend your points and miles?
Let's just repeat, spend your points and miles. If your takeaway from this episode is I just want to have a million points and I just want to watch those balances grow, stop listening to the podcast. This is not the podcast for you because this is what we're all about. you know, we are slightly biased. You might've heard it in the, in the ad that we read, which we are, let's be honest, being paid to say, but we also believe it that Thrifty Traveler Premium is the single best flight deal alert service on the market because
Speaker 2 (38:49.838)
think we do more than anyone out there to help people find good deals to redeem their points. We send plenty of cash deals to whether you want to go to Denver for $96 round trip or fly to Europe for under 400. But increasingly we're doing more and more points and miles award availability alerts, not just for business class, which we love, but also economy too.
So I mean day in day out John and Peter and Katie and you and the others on our team are searching for the best deals that change from minute to minute and sending the best of the best out to thrifty traveler premium members in boxes.
Yeah. I'll plug premium just in one other way, before we stop navel gazing, but premium is perhaps best a tool for earning points and miles and creating a strategy just because when these emails come into your inbox, it's kind of like travel inspiration almost. So you can see what is possible for your points and miles, or most importantly, what points and miles I need to have to be able to book this deal the next time it comes around. It's huge. Yeah.
Some of these are so rare that it's hard to prepare for. Sometimes you just need to have the points in your account anyway. But a lot of these deals, if you didn't know that you needed to earn 45,000 Alaska miles to fly business class over to Dublin, then all of a sudden you get the deal alert and you say, huh, I can earn that chunk of miles. And next time this deal comes around, then I can book it.
Same thing with transferable points. It's giving you kind of an education on where your points are most valuable, when to use a transfer bonus to get the best deal. I kind of reverse engineer trips based on premium deals of old sometimes waiting for that next award availability to pop up that we're going to send to our subscribers. So honestly, that's the way that I use our own service the most. But I also get a first look. I get about a 45 second head start on every
Speaker 1 (40:45.294)
premium subscriber and I've put that to good use over the years.
The value of the education, shouldn't undersell it. mean, every, you won't book every single deal we send you. If you do, have unlimited PTO and good for you. But you still can learn a lot from every single email that we send, whether it's, that's how cheap flights to Europe can be, or, you know, with this 30 % bonus transferring my chase points, this flight over to Europe or to Asia is much cheaper than I thought. I should really get on.
get moving on having a strategy to earn those points so I'm ready for the next one.
Yeah. Okay. Our next tool is called seats.arrow and it's also a way to find award availability for flights that you want to take, but how is it different than thrifty traveler premium?
I mean, they're very different tools, but I think they're very complimentary. know, these two, Thrifty Traveler Premium and Seats.arrow are the two most important tools that I use in order to find award flights to be able to redeem my miles for maximum value. Because, you know, I wait for that premium deal to come in my inbox and if it works for a trip that my wife and I want to take or are happy taking because the deal is just too good, that's great.
Speaker 2 (41:58.264)
But for those situations where you already have a plan, you need to find the flight that you need, or a flight that will work for the trip that you're putting together. Something like seats.arrow is, is really invaluable. And so I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I don't think that there is a silver bullet for award travel for finding flights that you can book with miles. I do think you need a combination of different tools. so premium and seats.arrow or another award search tool. are.
a ton of them out there. feels like there's a new one every single month that comes out, you know, others like points. Yeah. Or point.me, especially if you're a beginner and you don't really even know the first thing to start with when it comes time to transfer your points and how to do that. but having another tool in your tool belt and we'll link in the show notes are great roundup of some of, I think our top 10 favorite award search tools.
Seats.arrow is the one that I use most frequently, but there are plenty of others that you can kind of use to supplement and make sure you're finding the flights that you can book.
Okay, this next one is pretty specific to the Amex Platinum card, so we'll keep it quick. But what is Max FHR and how to use it?
So we talked before about just how difficult it can be to find a hotel stay that is somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 a night to use that new, you know, twice a year, $300 credit for FHR and the hotel collection stays. And Max FHR, is free, a free website, it does have a paid version, which gets you some more functionality. But this allows you to say, all right, I'm going to Taiwan.
Speaker 2 (43:31.726)
So you just type in Taiwan and it pulls up a list of all of the hotels that are eligible for this credit, whether they're part of the hotel collection, which requires a two night stay, then for fine hotels and resorts, which only requires a one night stay. But being able to see those hotels, see how low the prices get, and then click on an individual property and click through the calendar and go to the dates you want, really helps find the best ways to redeem these credits.
You're not going to have a whole lot of luck in like LA or New York City finding anything close to $300 a night. But for other destinations, this is really helpful to make sure that you're using this credit wisely.
Awesome. Okay, one last tool to round out our award travel toolboxes here. How do you know where to find the best transfer bonus?
the grace of Jackson Newman on our team who does, you know, the most thankless work in many ways, but one of which is updating constantly our list of current transfer bonuses. We'll link it in the show notes, but this has a breakdown of all of the transfer bonuses from the big banks and even the not so big banks that are available right now so that you know, there is a 30 % transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic or to British Airways. And so that can kind of help.
get the wheels turning about the best way to use your points because always, always, always the best way is to transfer it somewhere where you get a 20 or 30 or maybe even 40 % bonus by transferring to that specific partner, which means you need fewer points to begin with in order to book the flight that you want.
Speaker 1 (45:09.698)
Yep, a frequented bookmark of mine for sure. All right, that's a pretty good toolbox. I think everyone's ready to earn, manage, and redeem awards based on what we've given them.
If you're not, it's Gunner's fault we've established on this show. And you can reach him at podcast at thriftytraveler.com to identify even more shortcomings.
That's good. Podcasts at thriftedriveler.com is exactly where our listener, Ali hit us up this week. And this is our listener question of the week. That's not a question at all. Ali actually just made us smarter with a super useful tip that she put into our inbox and that you should put straight into your toolbox. So Ali says, I've been enjoying the podcast and wanted to share an interesting, but potentially useful pricing quirk I came across while booking American Airlines one-way flights for my family of four. So basically.
Allie needed to make some bookings with AA for her family and AA was selling higher fares for single passengers, which is something that you dug up a few months ago, basically that the airlines were trying to punish business travelers by charging more for single passengers than they would for traveling pairs or for traveling groups. What Allie found, because she has an infant, when she searched for her flights with a lap infant attached, which are free in the U.S., the...
solo passenger tax would fall off the fare. So what Ali decided or what Ali found out was you can go ahead and book those flights and then go ahead and take the lap infant off your reservation. You don't even have to have anything but a fake name for a lap infant. don't need any, there's no like identifying number, no anything. So basically all you need is just a name and a birthdate. So you can just put in a random fake lap infant, put that in, book the AA fare and then take the lap infant off when you're done to get around the solo.
Speaker 1 (46:57.25)
passenger tax. What do you think about Ali's hack?
Great detective work, Allie. This is great. I will say this is definitely most useful for American Airlines because they are by far the most egregious user of charging solo passengers, hire fares. And I think we've started to see this creep even into some round trip bookings. It's still very hit or miss. You're not going to come across this solo passenger tax absolutely everywhere, but...
It's worth checking out if you're flying alone and it's worth even just within Google flights, you can add a lap infant to your search and see if that changes the price because you know, it might.
Yeah, I tested it out. worked on a few different searches that I ran on some one-way AA flights as well. So great work, Ali. Thank you so much for reaching out. If you want us to answer your question or you have amazing, incredible observations like Ali, email us at podcast at thriftytraveler.com. Your question might be featured in next week's show. To close the show, we always do on the spot and it's Kyle's turn to put me on the spot. What do you got this week?
We spent a lot of time talking about your, your failings as an employee and just as a human being.
Speaker 1 (48:12.844)
That's it, huh? That's the show.
No, just what do you think about that? No, if you could change one thing about yourself to be a better traveler now that that can mean whatever you want it to mean it could mean when you're somewhere and you're more aware or whatever or Be more organized learn something about travel and award travel, whatever. What would you change and why?
Wow. If I could change one thing about myself as a traveler. Honestly, I think it might just be just slowing things down a little bit. tend to, especially when booking, I'm not just talking about traveling on the ground where, like you said with your trip, your trip turned into the amazing race a little bit. am 100 % guilty of turning trips into the amazing race. I just want to pack in as much as I can. I travel too much, like I'm never going to go back somewhere.
And when Max came on Max Miles Points onto the podcast, he talked about how he was kind of changing the way he traveled a little bit and was, he decided that no trip was once in a lifetime and that that changed the way he traveled. I really wish I had that sort of patience on the ground, but also when I book, when I find something I like, I just want to book the whole trip and fill out the itinerary all at once. And I'm trying to pack my patience a little bit more and being a little,
a little bit slower about how I book. Book things when they're hot, obviously, but you don't need to fill in every single gap in the itinerary on day one, on morning one, and burn all your points. I know it's pretty exhaustive for my wife too when I have to message her 45 times on a Tuesday morning just to make sure that we have enough points to book what we need to. But just being a little more patient, slowing the process down a little bit, especially now that we're traveling two and a half, three people.
Speaker 2 (50:01.932)
Yeah, that's a really interesting one. I think ironically, points and miles are an answer to both of those things because as you earn more points and you learn how to redeem them, well, you do see that no trip has to be a one and done, that you can always go back and that gives you the freedom to travel a little bit more slowly. But also I've found, you know, I'm still learning this stuff every day and there are people out there that are way smarter about this stuff than either of us.
But as I have learned more and more, I have gotten more comfortable with leaving things a little bit open-ended as the trip draws closer. So for example, in that trip that we talked about a couple of months ago, where we both went on safari. When I booked that, the first thing I booked was a flight home from Cape Town. And then it took a couple of weeks before I booked a flight to Istanbul. And then it took a couple more months before I found a way to connect those things because my wife and I just really needed to talk about
Okay, what do we really want to do here and how do we make that happen? And I think the old me probably would have really rushed to get that in place and probably would have ended up doing something that ended up being less special than the amazing Safari that we went on as a result of just the rush to do that. But because I now know that I can do these things and that we will have the points in order to do them, that buys a lot of leeway and flexibility to plan things a little bit more methodically.
Yeah. Hey, I'm feeling a lot more positive at the end of the episode than I did at the beginning. My self-talk's turning around a little bit.
Well, tune in for next week's episode where I just tear you back down.
Speaker 1 (51:35.234)
This was a fun episode. Thank you everybody for listening to the Thrifty Traveler podcast. If you could please rate us five stars on your podcast platform of choice and like and subscribe to the show on YouTube. Send this episode along to someone you know who needs a vacation as well. If you have feedback for us, send me a note at podcast at thriftytraveler.com. We would love to hear from you there. Kyle, tell us about the TT podcast team.
This podcast was produced by our co-founder Nick Serati and your favorite host and perhaps the worst golfer in the world Gunnar Olson It was edited by David Strutt who we just want to pause and thank profusely He has edited all 30 plus including a couple of bonus episodes episodes of the podcast to this point and has been just a phenomenal editor and person to work with
You're going to hear a new name starting next week, editing and producing this show, which we're really excited for, but we just have to thank David Strutt for helping us get this show off the ground. the Thrifty Traveler podcast would not be what it has become, without David's help. So if you're trying to get your own podcast off the ground, seek out David Strutt on Fiverr. he is a very great person to work with and we wish him all the best.
Yep, David, you're a true pro and a great guy. Thank you so much for all of your work on the show and helping us figure out that we might have something here with the Thrifty Traveler podcast. So thank you for all of your hard work. We are eternally grateful. Our theme music, by the way, is by Benjamin Tissot. See you next week.
See ya.