Last weekend, my family took a somewhat spontaneous trip to Springfield, Massachusetts, to visit the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. As we were eating lunch after our visit, we made even more spontaneous plans to catch the home opener for Springfield’s minor league hockey team, the Thunderbirds (my kids loved their first hockey game). All that spontaneity required a last-minute hotel booking. Luckily, Marriott had a perfectly-located Sheraton (just a 7-minute walk from the hockey rink). Somewhat unluckily, it was a lukewarm points value at just over $300 or 39,000 Marriott points. We needed two rooms, so I ultimately decided to book one room with points and one room with cash.
It pained me a bit to part with $300 for a spontaneous single night’s accommodation (which I decided to do in part because I had a Marriott gift card from Capital One Shopping, but, frustratingly, the front desk agents couldn’t figure out how to accept a gift card as payment — fix this common problem, Marriott!). I soon wished the trip had happened a week later, as Rove Miles introduced the ability to stack earning their transferable miles with earning hotel points. Given the short-term opportunity to earn 10x on these bookings, I missed out on an additional 3,000 transferable miles by just a few days. But given this development, I’ll now have to make one more Internet stop when comparing prices before our next spontaneous getaway.
This week on the Frequent Miler blog…
Stephen won 100K Vacay! [Update: Congrats to Stephen for winning the audience choice vote too!]
It’s official: Stephen took both the judge’s choice award and the audience choice for an undisputed championship in this year’s 100K Vacay challenge. See the results in this update.
Rove launches Loyalty Eligible hotel stays; earn both Rove Miles & hotel points
The Rove Miles platform made waves this week by launching loyalty-eligible hotel stays, whereby you can double dip and earn both transferable Rove Miles and hotel points/elite credit. For a limited time, you can earn 10 Rove Miles per dollar spent on top of earning hotel points and elite credit, which makes this platform absolutely worth a look if you have paid stays to book.
JAL Mileage Bank multi-city for JetBlue: A cheaper path to 25 for 25
The Capital One transfer partnership with Japan Airlines creates some really unique opportunities. One of those opportunities is the chance to book complicated multi-city award routings that could be really useful for completing JetBlue’s 25 for 25 challenge for far fewer points than you might have expected. In this post, I showed an example nesting a couple of trips where you’d be able to hit 7 airports over the course of a week with 5 nights away from home (and time to easily sneak in 2-3 more airports in the middle) for less than 39,000 miles. This isn’t necessarily easy, as the search tool requires some patience and persistence, but given how far you could come out ahead, this could certainly be well worth it.
Find Preferred Hotels bookable with points (New interactive map!)
Preferred Hotels is essentially a partnership of distinct boutique-type hotel properties, some of which can be booked with points. Confusingly, award booking is not at all straightforward. Some of them can only be booked with Preferred’s IPrefer points, while others can only be booked with Choice Privileges points, and others can be booked through either program. I’ve found the process of finding these hotels to be off-putting, so I find Greg’s map of the properties hugely helpful. It is now very easy to see at a glance where I may find Preferred Hotels and which ones present a great deal using points through either program.
7 nights in London and Norway for 100,000 points: Mountains, fjords and ferries (Tim’s 100K Vacay Journal)
Unfortunately, Tim’s 100K Vacay plans had to be cut short due to a family emergency, but he published the details of the trip he had planned, and it looked incredible. I imagine that this trip would have appealed to many readers, so it is absolutely worth reading about what Tim had planned, as you may want to replicate some of these plans while you still can.
5 cool points & miles opportunities expiring soon | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep328 | 10-17-25 | Podcast
On this week’s Frequent Miler on the Air, we discussed several limited-time opportunities to get far outsized value, though a couple of them will still be applicable techniques even after the limited-time components have ended. There were also plenty of card and points news items to discuss, from the launch of loyalty-eligible RoveMiles bookings to a tool for easily finding Resy restaurants, and much more.
How to make Frequent Miler a Preferred Source in Google (find more of our content in your feed)
This is just a short post explaining how to prioritize Frequent Miler content in your search results, but I include it in this week in review for weekly subscribers who may otherwise miss it. It just takes a couple of clicks to let Google know which sources you prefer, and you can easily add several of your favorite sites.
Reader question: Do we really need to do the math?
A reader recently wrote in with a question that comes up often enough around this hobby: is all the math really necessary, or is “free travel” enough? In this post, I make the argument for doing the math by demonstrating the wide gap in the amount of “free travel” one can get by learning how to maximize on both the earning side and redemption side. The truth is that the flights and hotels aren’t “free” even when you aren’t paying cash for them, so you want to be making good decisions both when it comes to earning and when it comes to redeeming your points. If you’re going to choose to earn a point rather than a couple of pennies, you want to be sure that you’re getting substantially more value out of the points than you could have had with the pennies.
Virgin Atlantic Premium Economy Sweet-Spot & Review
Greg and Carrie recently flew Virgin Atlantic’s Premium Economy for their ride home from the 100K Vacay benchmark trip, and in this post, they review the experience. I’ve actually been pretty interested in trying out premium economy on a daytime flight from Europe, but my struggle has been that I just haven’t yet found the situation where award pricing was attractive enough to consider it. The trick that Greg used here to reduce fees is certainly the deal I’d be looking for, as they didn’t pay much more in taxes & fees than what it typically costs to depart several European countries in business class, but they paid far fewer miles.
Alaska tanks utility of its “Famous Companion Fare”
What is now known as the Alaska Atmos Ascent card and its business counterpart have long carried a companion fare benefit, whereby the cardholder can bring a companion one time per year for a fee of $99 plus taxes (this used to be an automatic benefit, but at some point they added a $6,000 annual spending requirement to unlock it). Unfortunately, Alaska has made numerous negative changes to the way the benefit works. For starters, it can no longer be used on complex multi-city routings with a stopover and multiple long layovers, but rather only on standard one-way or round-trip fares. While disappointing, that would be relatively understandable on its own. However, eliminating the ability to use Wallet funds to pay for the ticket is, in my opinion, unfair for many folks who may be trying to use the companion fare as intended. For instance, if you make a companion fare booking, but plans change and you have to cancel, you’ll receive the refund as a credit to your Alaska Wallet. Later, if you want to rebook that trip, you can’t use the Wallet funds you’ve received to rebook it. I think that’s a short-sighted policy change.
A quick chat with Pauline Frommer of Frommer’s Travel Guides and Frommer’s Travel Show | Coffee Break Ep73 | 10-14-25 | Podcast
We don’t typically have guests on our podcasts, but this week we had the opportunity to chat with Pauline Frommer of Frommer’s Travel Guides, who recently hosted Greg on an episode of her own show. I remember checking a Frommer’s Guide out of the library for my first international trip ~25 years ago, so it was really interesting getting a chance to chat with Pauline all these years later. I found it particularly interesting to hear the origin story of how Frommer’s Travel Guides began and to learn that hotels and restaurants do not pay to be included in their guides and that they are digging into stuff like dynamic AI-based attraction pricing and which city-wide passes are worth the money and which aren’t.
How to transfer Avios between British Airways, Qatar, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Finnair and Loganair
It is now far easier/simpler than ever to move your Avios between the various airline programs that use Avios, with all Avios airlines now on the same system for moving and combining your Avios. As a reminder, this is the rare situation where it is actually possible to move your rewards points from one airline to another to take advantage of different airline award charts, so it is worth being familiar with how this works (and it is worth setting up frequent flyer accounts with each of these airlines now so that you can take advantage of this functionality when it comes in handy someday in the future).
Eat out, earn more: Guide to card-linked dining programs for airlines, hotels & more
Stephen has updated his guide to card-linked dining programs to include limited-time opportunities for outsized earnings with the American Airlines and Marriott Bonvoy dining programs. If you aren’t already set up with card-linked dining programs for easy rewards on spend you may already be doing, this post is worth a look.
That’s it for this week at Frequent Miler. Check out this week’s last chance deals to catch them while you can.
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