Every month, the Frequent Miler team takes your questions live on YouTube.
We normally hold Ask Us Anything at 9pm on the first Wednesday of the month. That means that our next Ask Us Anything session will therefore be live at 9pm Eastern Time on Wednesday, May 6.
And of course, the best way to make sure you don’t miss these live episodes is to subscribe to our YouTube channel here and click the bell icon next to the “subscribe” button to enable notifications from our channel.
You can watch the most recent Ask Us Anything video below!
Want to catch up on past Ask Us Anything recordings? Click here.
More info
Join us once a month on our Frequent Miler YouTube channel. We’ll be there to chat, answer questions, and joke around. See you there!
- When: the first Wednesday of every month at 9pm Eastern Time, but as a one off it’s the second Wednesday in April, so May 6.
- Where: Our Frequent Miler YouTube channel. Subscribe now, here.
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question for Ask Us Anything – would it be a good strategy to get a JetBlue credit card now? With lots of talk or speculation as to a merger might it be a way to increase the points balance at the acquiring airline? I’m on West coast so JetBlue is not much of a player for me but I might be willing to make a bet on the credit card.
Which airline looks the most possible – United or AA?
It seems like business class can sometimes vary widely within the same airline. Airlines with large fleets may offer a new product, but it’s only available on a few routes, while most of their planes are flying an older, dated product. How do you make sure you’re booking the best business-class product, not something that’s outdated? I know Aerolopa is great for seating maps, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you whether it’s an old or new design. Are there tools or resources to check the actual product before booking?
How are you using your Bilt Cash (and/or how do you plan to use it before the end of the year)?
I have 14999 Delta Sky Miles and need one more lousy point to be able to book an award ticket. I can transfer 1000 points from Amex but that seems like a waste. I tried to convince Delta support to comp me a point but they were seemingly unable to help. Any suggestions (other than getting the Delta Amex card).
Is this an imminent booking you need to make. If not, a cheap purchase through the Delta shopping portal would earn you some miles, but those could take several weeks to be credited.
Buying miles is another option, albeit at appalling value as it costs $70 for only 2,000 SkyMiles.
Another option is if you have a small number of hotel points, you can sometimes convert them to airline miles. The transfer ratio is usually very poor, but if they’re orphaned points that you’re unlikely to use any other way, it might be worth it.
Along the same lines, you could transfer 3,000 Marriott Bonvoy points which would become 1,000 Delta SkyMiles. I’d probably be more inclined to just transfer 1,000 Membership Rewards though, even though there is that pesky excise tax that has to be paid.
Buy something inexpensive at a restaurant that participates in skymilesdining.com. Miles post to your Delta acct in about a week.
If you have complete flexibility to position to any airport in Europe to fly home to the USA, are flexible on arrival airport in the USA/Canada/Mexico, and time wasn’t a constraint but you would like a good points redemption in J (not first), where would you position to and which airline would you book on?
what a strange premise lol. of course departure/arrival airport matter so its a futile exercise. You’re not going to backtrack from the west coast back home to east coast just for a better experience. You’re basically just asking to rank the european airlines, which is widely available already
I live in a small city in the Midwest. I’m positioning regardless. Doesn’t matter to me whether I am positioning to Chicago or NYC or Denver or Houston or Toronto or Montreal or Cancun (all direct flights from home). I’d prefer not to position to Seattle or LA or SFO unless I’m going to Asia, but if it was a truly worthwhile difference in flight experience, I would do it.
For me, within the USA, I really don’t care where my initial arrival city is. I have complete flexibility in the length of my trip.
I’m looking at a European trip next year, and I will be doing Scotland, but don’t want to fly home from the UK. I’d like to position somewhere fun for a few days to experience another location AND book a cheaper return (without having to pay the expensive UK fees). I’m up for any city that is a direct flight from Edinburgh.
how to find out fees and tax on award booking on Qatar airways.?
I was planing to book qatar flight on qatar using avios. The points range is varied wildly based on off peak and regular, but i couldnt find the $ for fee + tax part of redemption before i transfer points Qatar. is there a way to find it?
Unfortunately it is not a direct flight and made it more complicated to figure out $ value
you all have an older ask us anything above, not the latest….the youtube link works to the most current
Question for the 4/8 Ask Us Anything: Any update on when in May that the Hyatt award chart is changing?
May 7th
I feel like it’s been a little bit since we’ve seen a “What’s in your wallet” question/article so “What’s in your wallet”?
What’s everyone’s favorite airline or hotel program for availability and value? Final value of an award booking, in my opinion, should take into account time spent researching and booking.
With all the recent and pending devaluations, what hotel reward program, if any, would you recommend for someone who generally only stays in hotels for a week or two each year?
Question to all. Any prediction that BOA can transfer points to Alaska?
Question for Nick – in the recent podcast episode where your friend needed to spend 115k what cards/spend/welcome bonuses etc did he/she end up going with and why?
Umm, did you guys see that some guy named Eddy created a competitor site to your MaxFHR.com… called betterFHR.com? DoC had linked to it recently. It’s a little wonky, and no paywall. Interesting…
https://www.doctorofcredit.com/recap-betterfhr-tool-aer-lingus-offer-citigroup-dismisses-us-regional-bank-acquisition-rumor-more/
Yep, they commented a couple of times on here about it. I took a quick look and saw that it was listing ~$150 rates for the Park Hyatt New York, so I immediately jumped on to Amex Travel to check that out, only to discover rates were ~$1,800 per night or something like that.
It might be that that’s a one-off glitch, but I haven’t had time to do a deeper dive. Seeing that glaring error straight off the bat though meant I haven’t prioritized it.
If it does display results correctly and without a paywall for date searches, it would be a great tool to use.
I respect what you (FM) and Eddy are trying to do, regardless. It seems he’s still basically beta-testing, making course corrections. Either way, feels like a little healthy competition. Wish Amex simply made tracking FHR properties easier. Bah!
Hi Stephen, I have a question for you. Now that you and Shae have moved back to the UK, is there anything you miss about the United States or wish you had done/seen before you moved? Thank you.
Oh man, how much time do you have?! There’s so much of the US we didn’t get to see during our 50 state road trip, plus loads of places we’d love to return to. In CA, we never made it to Yosemite. We missed out on Death Valley, never got to Taos, NM despite spending two months or so in New Mexico across a few different visits.
As for stuff I miss, TBH there’s not a ton, but that’s not to say I didn’t like living there. Thanks to VPNs, we can still watch US shows and use streaming services too. We’ve stocked up on various products whenever we’ve been back in the US.
It’s also hard to assess things based on how different our life is now compared to how it was on the road trip. Life here feels very easy now, but I’m not convinced that’s due to living in the UK as such, but more simply because we’re not moving home every single week anymore. I think if we’d settled down in the US after our road trip that I’d probably feel similarly.
We do miss having so much daylight though during the winter, as well as nice weather. During the summer we get really long days as we’re in the north of England, but it’s therefore not as great in the winter.
Actually, something else I miss is how much easier it is to manufacture spend in the US versus trying to do that kind of thing from over here.
Thanks for the quick response, I thought I would also make a good conversation for your ask us anything live. I know exactly how you feel. I have lived in California and the United States for my entire 36 years, and there’s still a ton of stuff I have not yet seen. I don’t think it’s possible to see everything but it’s fun to try 🙂
Could you do a 50 State road trip but European country version or maybe just UK version?
Shae and I had talked about doing a European road trip, or a UK road trip to visit all 48 counties, perhaps doing one per week over the course of a year.
That’s not likely going to happen anytime soon though. We’re both enjoying not moving around constantly now, plus our pup is getting older (she’s 13 this year) and she’s lost nearly all her sight, so full-time travel would be much harder on her now. She’s small (only 10 lbs), so we’re hoping she’ll live to 18-20, so I can’t imagine we’ll do any full-time travel again before she’s no longer with us. To be honest, I’m not convinced I’d be ready for full-time travel myself before then!
Gotcha, sorry to hear that Truffle’s eyesight is not as good as it used to be, hopefully she is enjoying the slower pace of life nowadays 🙂