What are the best miles and points deals we’ve seen in 2024, and which deals came out above the rest? In today’s episode of Frequent Miler on the Air, we’ll decide what we think the best miles and points deal of 2024 was.
Main Event: Deal of the Year 2024
Mailbag
(01:05) – Feedback about Greg’s “Frequent Miler’s 2024 State of the Business Report”
Read Greg’s “Frequent Miler’s 2024 State of the Business Report” here.
(08:12) – Additional datapoints regarding possible Atlantis stays for after February 1st
Mattress Running the Numbers
(12:14) – Greg’s Marriott Mattress Run
Awards, Points, and More
(20:48) – Capital One Offers
(26:18) – Easily extend National Free Day
Main Event: Deal of the Year 2024
(28:41) – Catch our “Bonvoyed of the Year” episode from last week to see which loyalty snafus we thought were the worst in 2024.
(29:11) – Buy Aeroplan miles for 1.14cpp: Read more about buying Aeroplan miles here.
(30:41) – Big payouts via Capital One Shopping
(36:35) – Virgin goes dynamic & lowers surcharges
Read more about Virgin’s dynamic pricing here.
(40:00) – Bilt transfer bonus up to 150% to Flying Blue, Virgin Points, and IHG One Rewards (Jan 1)
(42:19) – Bilt transfer bonus up to 100% to Alaska (July 1)
(44:05) – Amex +10x restaurants referral offer
Read more about this Amex referral offer here.
(47:11) – 120K Ink Business Preferred offer + 40K referral
(48:27) – Hilton SLH
(53:20) – Alaska’s awesome shorthaul AA pricing
Read more about the Alaksa award chart winners and losers here.
(57:41) – SAS Eurobonus Millionaire
Read more about the SAS Eurobonus Millionaire challenge here: https://frequentmiler.com/sas-eurobonus-millionaire-promo-frequently-asked-questions-million-mile-madness-2024/
(1:00:02) – Which did we actually take advantage of? (Or which didn’t we?)
(1:01:59) – So…which was the best?
(1:11:10) – Read more about this story here: https://loyaltytraveler.boardingarea.com/2015/05/25/frequent-flyer-history-latinpass-million-miles-mileage-runs-that-bankrupted-a-company/
Question of the Week
(1:13:17) – Can you swap a cash seat you’ve already purchased with Southwest with a companion seat with your companion pass instead?
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Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder
Confirming I was able to move a preexisting Atlantis Czr reservation to after Feb 1, 2025 with current Diamond status
Re: Question of the Week. I tried the same thing in 2019 when I was new to the companion pass, also with Cancun. Canceled a paid ticket to rebook with CP. Los the seat and it never came back. And this was on the phone with an agent. She said the plane must have been oversold. We gave up and booked a new route to Cancun. Out of curiosity I watched the original flight. A couple days before our trip a seat did reappear on the sold out flight. Back then (five years ago) I had no idea that a flight could be oversold!
Re question of the week: A WN agent can indeed take an existing points reservation and convert the ticket to a companion pass ticket and refund the points. I personally prefer the safety of that option to canceling the ticket and rebooking immediately, but boys ways work.
Pepper was easily the deal of the year, though only really for gc resellers.
Pepper was very lucrative for the level of effort with the referral bonuses and double rewards offers at launch. Coupled with the recent $15 off $50 AMEX offers it was an easy way to get an extra $100 – $200 off at retailers that require more effort to find discounts at (Amazon and Target for us, whose GCs have been disappearing off many retailers shelves). Not a GC reseller but for an hour of effort it was quite rewarding.
$1.01 Pepper GC reloads for Target and Amazon are also probably the easiest avenue left to leverage offers that credit for rounding up to the nearest dollar. Bought a decent chunk of AA miles at just under 1cpp from a FlightCents offer this way.
My vote would be the perfect storm of the 20% bonus of AMEX MR points to Hawaiian Airlines miles, then the ability to move HA miles between HA accounts with the HA CC, and then the ability to convert HA miles into AS miles. I have converted about 800K MR points to AS miles.
I have always logged in to Capital One Shopping using my C1 login and see basically all of the top tier offers written about here plus more. What does matter for me is having the browser extension active. The only time things have gone badly for me is when the browser extension was not working and needed to be repaired.
I think I would’ve voted for the Alaska-AA pricing, just because it’s so useful and easy to use.
I’ve signed into Capital One Shopping with my Capital One account and gotten some good email offers. For examples, just in the last couple of days 35% at Columbia, 30% at Ulta, 20% at Walmart, and 20% at Hoka. It seems to help if I search for a site on the shopping portal, click through, and don’t buy anything. Sometimes within the next few days I’ll get a good offer on the same site.
This time you remembered bilt transfers to Alaska. Around the 56:05 mark. Good job! Greg’s memory is improving!