Our Party of 5 trip has officially ended, with each of us touching down at home within the past ~48 hours after a rapid 20,000+ miles flown to get to Tokyo, the Philippines, Macau, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil before returning the the US. We snorkeled and saw sea turtles, created street art, felt the power of Iguazu Falls, and had a blast traveling and bonding as a group. Over the next few days, you’ll read more about the adventures we had during Week 2 of that trip and get summaries of all of the costs involved, but on this week’s Frequent Miler on the Air, we get a judge’s-eye view from Greg about what he thought worked best from each trip.
Elsewhere on the blog this week, we’ve been working to update and republish some of the many complete guides you can find on our Resources page. We always endeavor to keep our resources up to date and have been featuring them as we travel alongside early reports of our trip. Watch, listen, or read on for more from this week at Frequent Miler.
00:00 Intro
01:35 Challenge Format
04:38 Team Tokyo’s summary
14:56 Team San Francisco summary
28:18 Judge-eye view
28:51 Best location / worst location for each team
30:36 Best overall location
31:08 Best lodging / worst lodging for each team
33:45 Best lodging overall
33:58 Best flight / worst flight for each team
35:23 Best flight overall
35:45 Best local transportation / worst local transport for each team
39:41 Best local transport overall
29:52 Best overall food / worst overall food for each team
41:58 Best overall food
43:00 Best / worst activity for each team
44:38 Best overall activity
46:31 Best overall award redemption
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This week on the Frequent Miler blog…
Iguazu Falls 3 ways – Party of 5 Daily Update
View this post on Instagram
In her final Party of 5 Daily Update, Carrie summarizes the team’s trip to see Iguazu Falls from above, below, and “within”. This updated post now includes daily summaries for every day of the trip, but we are going to have a lot more content coming in terms of explaining how we booked things and accounting for full costs. I am embedding the final Igauzu Falls reel above, but if you haven’t yet checked all the Instagram content, I highly recommend going to the Frequent Miler Instagream page and checking out the highlights and reels because they serve as a terrific companion to give you the full feel of the scope of the trip.
45K business class to South America: LATAM sweet spot via Alaska Mileage Plan
The core sweet spot for Team San Francisco’s leg of the challenge was leveraging Alaska Mileage Plan to fly LATAM from the US to South America for 45,000 miles one-way in business class with a stopover. This made it possible for us to fly from Los Angeles to Santiago in business class (a ~10.5hr flight), stopover, and then continue to Buenos Aires. Had we found availability, we even could have had a domestic leg within the US on Alaska Airlines. Read more about this sweet spot and how you can leverage it in this post.
Mural Lessons in Buenos Aires with local street artist “Luxor”
On this week’s Frequent Miler on the Air, Greg and I share that we each independently chose the Buenos Aires Street Art Aerosol lesson with Luxor as our favorite activity of the trip. For both of us, that was because Carrie’s pure joy and excitement with this surprise was downright infectious (a description we both used at the same time, that’s how clear-cut this choice was). It would have been hard not to share that excitement with her. When you then consider the fact that the rest of us, with no previous artistic ability (and thanks in large part to the excellent tutelage of Luxor), walked away having helped create art that can stand with Carrie’s and that people are still passing in Buenos Aires today, that feels pretty awesome.
Hunting my stolen backpack in Santiago Chile
Unfortunately, travel isn’t all rainbows and sunshine — and in Santiago, Chile, we had a memorable misstep. Greg’s backpack somehow got snatched out of the back of our Uber before the hatch dropped shut (while four of us were getting in the back seat). As a result, we spent a day shuffling from police station to police station trying to track down Greg’s stuff by the location of his AirPods (which had been inside the bag). Sadly, we had no success. Let this be a reminder to always exercise due caution — we obviously didn’t think we were being reckless and were traveling in a group of five people — that’s 10 total eyes that missed this one. It was a major disappointment and not a small loss, but credit to Greg for moving on with us and enjoying the rest of the trip despite it.
Marriott Bonvoy Complete Guide
Our Complete Guide to Marriott Bonvoy includes just about everything you could want to know about earning points from stays and credit cards, elite benefits, eligibility requirements, and a lot more. This week, we updated the guide to contain the latest information about gifting free night certificates and more.
Citi ThankYou Rewards Complete Guide
Citi THankYou Rewards don’t get quite as much attention as the transferable points offerings from Chase, Amex, and Capital One, but this program offers a number of ways to amass a large and useful quantity of points without paying much in annual fees. Citi’s recent addition of Accor Live Limitless and new terms for banking products were added to this post this week.
World of Hyatt Complete Guide
World of Hyatt remains our favorite hotel rewards program thanks to robust elite benefits at the top tier and excellent value for points when redeeming for a wide range of hotel types. This Complete Guide is chock full of tips for how to get the most out of this widely-loved hotel loyalty program.
Bilt Rewards Complete Guide
It’s not just for renters: Bilt Rewards offers a number of ways for even those who don’t rent to earn points that can be transferred to programs like World of Hyatt, American Airlines, and many more. Domestically, I am trying to change my habits to choose Lyft over Uber (or at least price-compare!) thanks to the chance to earn easy Bilt points with my linked Lyft account. This Complete Guide is updated with info about that partnership and more.
That’s it for this week at Frequent Miler. As always, keep an eye out for this week’s last chance deals to be sure that you grab them before they’re gone.
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I’d like to hear how all of you got to SFO and then home/destination from South America, I.e. cash ticket or award redemption. .
To get there, I think we each paid for economy tickets. For the return, we used miles in different ways. Three of us used AA miles to fly business or first home through Miami, one used United miles to fly premium economy, and one (I think) used Alaska miles to repeat the LATAM adventure in reverse sort of.
Tens of readers really enjoyed Party of Five Adventure
My takeaway from this podcast was: my brain does not compute someone that both 1) dined at The French Laundry and also 2) doesn’t eat fish nor eggs like they are my 4 year old niece 😉
LOL. My favorite part of the trip was making fun of Nick’s eating habits.
Sheesh – at least Greg gave me credit for a 5yr old palate!
Luckily, there were no eggs on the menu the evening I dined at The French Laundry. Curiously, neither have I noticed them on the menu at other fine dining establishments. Tell your niece to take comfort in the fact that the Michelin-starred chefs clearly share our refined sense of taste!
I’m surprised people would spend 45 minutes watching a video. Except for some “help” videos on fixing a car, etc. I’d rather read an article.
Not sure why but this “party of 5” just didn’t interest me. Hopefully you all had a good time.
It certainly is always interesting to see that different people have different interests and preferences when it comes to reading / listening to / watching things for information. Different strokes for different folks — we don’t expect every person to be interested in every format. We certainly get far more blog readers than anything else, but nonetheless our podcast gets tens of thousands of downloads every month between the various podcast platforms and Youtube.
Sorry to hear thar this one didn’t interest you. Again, it’s to be expected that it wouldn’t appeal the same way to everyone. On the flip side, we’ve actually gotten tons of very positive feedback from many who have followed along. All that is par for the course. The good news is that every challenge so far has been pretty significantly different than the last – a trend that I imagine will continue.
Great adventure and amazing food for thought for rest of us. Question to team is what you do all for smartphone plan and internet? Any details would be helpful for planning
I have T-Mobile Magenta Max, which includes 5GB per month at full speed abroad (includes most countries). That’s probably enough for most people. In my case, I ran out, but I’m also doing a lot more data-intensive stuff than most people (unloading videos to Instagram and pictures for the blog, hotspotting to use my computer while on the move, etc.). With T-Mobile, you can pay for additional full speed data – 5GB, 10GB, or 15GB. I paid $50 for an additional 15GB that’s valid for 30 days because I’ll be abroad again in about a week and I know I’d blow through most of that 15GB between the Party of 5 trip and that trip – again, because I’m uploading / downloading a lot of pics and videos on cell data.
Obviously connectivity is the #1 thing with cell phone providers but we switched to T Mobile early this year and it works well for us. We haven’t tried it internationally yet.
We are only paying $90 (all in) for 2 lines and unlimited calls/texts/etc. and got $400 in gift cards (put them on Amazon), free MLBTV, money for Netflix and saving about $60+ per month (we are on the over 55 plan).
Thanks. I wish i had moved from AT&T to T-mobile but due to other reasons just recently moved to Verizon and their international plan sucks from what i know (I think they charge like $9.99/per day /per line ) Also its locked phone so getting local numbers/plan would be big hassle and challenge. I suppose should buy older unlocked phone and try to get local plan (is this easier in europe?)
I just use AT&T. They charge $10 per day up to a max of $100 per billing cycle for unlimited (I think) international data.