Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is almost done! The last two weeks Greg, Nick, and Stephen competed to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines. But who completed the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
Once I had booked most of my flights for the 3 Cards, 3 Continents Challenge, it was time for me to start weeding through the vast piles of reader comments and emails that I had otherwise neglected for the past few weeks. Of course, doing so meant that I didn’t have time to write a proper post for today. Instead, as I worked through my never ending list of neglected messages, I compiled reader comments and questions (along with my answers) that I thought you may be interested in. Enjoy!
Good news…
Book Preferred Hotels with Choice points
Regarding the nightmare of booking Preferred Hotels with Choice points, Brandon writes: “Happy to report that I had a smooth booking process today. The agent knows everything and it took around 15min to get things booked.” Yay! Let’s hope that’s true for everyone going forward!
Recommendations…
Hyatt Regency in Belgrade Serbia
Julie recommends the Hyatt Regency in Belgrade Serbia: “Hey Greg! I am currently staying at the Hyatt Regency in Belgrade Serbia, a Cat 1 property. I have no real status with Hyatt. I was coming here and checked out the possibilities. I have some off peak nights booked at 3,500 points. Club access is an additional 2k per night. This place is awesome and is one of the best values I have ever booked on points. Hotel has great food plus nice pool and spa.” Sounds great!
Tips & Tricks…
Keep Air France / KLM Flying Blue Miles Alive
Regarding keeping Air France Flying Blue miles alive, vbscript2 writes: “If you have a stay at a Fairmont or other such Accor property, if you link your Accor account to your Flying Blue account, they have an arrangement similar to what Delta and SPG used to have where, in addition to the normal hotel points, hotel stays will earn Flying Blue miles. These will also extend the validity of transferred miles in my experience (though I assume it would not extend miles earned by flying.)” Good to know!
Questions Answered…
Time limit for Round the World awards?
Regarding tips for booking ANA Round the World awards, Bryan asks: “Sorry if I missed this somewhere, but is there a maximum time limit for the trip? For example, do all the segments have to be flown within a 1 year timeframe?”
Answer: You have one year from the date of your first flight to complete your RTW trip.
Where to credit Virgin Atlantic award?
Regarding Virgin Atlantic’s expanded award space, Steve asks: “I still found value in booking MCO-LHR award for the direct flight. Any points/miles/tier benefits from the fees? Should I credit the flight to Delta, Virgin, Air France?”
Answer: You won’t earn anything from paying the fees except for credit card rewards. However, if you credit the flight to Virgin Atlantic, the flight will earn tier points towards Virgin Atlantic elite status.
How to search for Air France awards?
Regarding Virgin Atlantic’s expanded award space, A B asks: “Off topic but related: I can’t figure out how to efficiently search the AF/Flying Blue website for award fares. After I do one search (one route only, one day only) the next search glitches out and I can only close the window, open a new one and log back in. Does anyone else have this problem, and/or know the solution?”
Answer: See “Fixing Flying Blue’s forever hourglass” (yes, I wrote a post to answer the question).
Cancel Delta Platinum card?
Via our “Contact Us” page, a reader asked about cancelling the Delta Platinum card. He wrote that he had paid his Delta Platinum card’s annual fee several months ago and was wondering if he cancelled now whether he would keep the Delta companion ticket and get a prorated refund of the $250 annual fee?
Companion Ticket Answer: Yes, when you cancel your Delta Platinum or Delta Reserve card, you get to keep any companion tickets that have already been issued to you.
Annual Fee Answer: If it has been more than 30 days since the annual fee was charged, you will not get a prorated refund if you cancel. A better solution is to downgrade to the fee-free Delta consumer card (or the cheap Delta business card). When downgrading, Amex will give you a prorated refund.
Questions about our blog…
Why so many pictures of Greg?
In response to my reminiscing about my 40K to Far Away Challenge, Emily asks: “Why soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many pictures with Greg in them?
No offense but this is a big turnoff for me. It was why Million Mile Secrets became the laughing stock of this space in blogs community.”
Answer: There are a few reasons that we include photos of people on the team…
-
- We think it helps readers connect with us more when they not only read our words, but see us too.
- Posts featuring images with people’s faces tend to get shared more and so that leads to a bigger readership. That’s good for our business.
- Sometimes when we use photos of things like particular brand airlines or whatever, copyright holders come after us saying that we used their work (yes, even if we pull it down from a site that claims everything there is free to use for commercial purposes). It’s much better for us to use our own photos as much as possible to avoid that sort of thing. Yes, we could (and do) use paid services that offer stock photos, but they rarely have the specific brands we want to show.
Can you help book awards?
Many readers have asked if they can pay us to help book international awards?
Answer: No. We do not offer an award booking service, but there are plenty of people who do. Take a look at this post for a list of services: Award Booking Services. If you just need to ask questions but plan to book it yourself, I suggest asking within our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook Group.
How do I change my newsletter email address?
Frequently people who have subscribed to our email newsletters ask us how to change the email address that the newsletters are sent to. Your best option is to unsubscribe from our mailing list (there’s a link at the bottom of each newsletter) and then re-subscribe with your new email address: https://
Where did the Frequent Miler newsletter emails go?
Subscribers to our email newsletter sometimes reach out to us because they’ve stopped receiving our emails. There are two likely reasons (that I can think of): 1) you signed up for a second Frequent Miler newsletter; or 2) the newsletter has gone to your spam folder.
Second newsletter
Our newsletters are setup so that if you sign up for one subscription you’ll automatically be unsubscribed from the other. If you had the instant subscription, for example, and added the weekly one, the system would think that you no longer wanted the instant one and would unsubscribe you from that one. The only way to sign up for both is to use different email addresses. I can’t think of any reason that it would be useful to sign up for more than one, though: The daily newsletter contains everything in the weekly newsletter, plus more; and the instant newsletter contains everything in the daily newsletter plus more.
Spam
In most cases the problem is probably due to your spam filter erroneously identifying our emails as spam. To avoid this, we recommend adding our newsletter email address to your “safe sender” list. Here’s how to do that in Gmail:
1) Search for our email address:
Enter our email (as shown in the image above) in the search box and press the search settings icon to the right of the search box.
2) Click the Create filter link:
After clicking the search settings icon, you should see a link to “Create filter” near the bottom of the box and to the left of the “Search” button. Click “Create filter.”
3) Never send it to Spam:
Check the box to “Never send it to Spam” and then press “Create filter.”
Want to learn more about miles and points? Subscribe to email updates or check out our podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
Have you guys noticed a devaluation of Flying Blue biz awards to US? To Midwest it seems to have increased from 55K to 70K and from West Coast from 70K to 80K.
Wait wait wait… someone named Emily commented on how Million Mile Secrets became a laughingstock because of all the personal photos? First thought: you are being punked, for sure. Second thought: that is, like, just one of several reasons why that site garnered stocks of laughter.
TBH, though, MMS was actually once a site I enjoyed a great deal, and the least you can say is that, at one time, it had character.
Greg, just a shout out to let you know that I love all of the pictures of you and Nick. Media feels so negative and divisive to me every day. I always get a kick out of seeing you and Nick superimposed onto some airplane or whatnot with your huge smiles. It feels silly, simple, and easy. Thanks guys, you rock. 🙂
Thanks!
Ditto, I’m a huge fan of all the fun you and your team manage to create! The photos are great. Thanks! PS: Maybe just for “Emily” you can post one with a bow-tie.