One card to rule them all

Can one card rule them all? If the headline sounds familiar, you are clearly a loyal Frequent Miler reader and remember back to a 2012 headline that we referenced on this week’s Frequent Miler on the Air. This week we take a look back at some of the card solutions that tried to pull off what we hope Curve is going to finally going to accomplish and why we’re so excited about it. I also make Greg crunch the numbers on that Emirates subscription, we answer a couple of reader questions, and more. Watch or listen below or read on for more from this week at Frequent Miler.

This week’s video production has been delayed. If the video below does not yet play, check back a little later or subscribe to our Youtube channel and enable notifications to be updated when it goes live.

• 1:17 Giant Mailbag: Why not log in to United?
• 4:44 What crazy thing…did Aeroplan do this week?
• 10:41 Mileage running the numbers: When is an Emirates Skywards+ subscription worth it?
• 18:10 Main Event: One card to rule them all
• 45:03 Question of the Week: Is it worth it for me to pay rent with a credit card?

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This week at Frequent Miler

Curve Is Coming: Get On The Waitlist

This is just a short post about the Curve card waitlist, but as it was the main topic of this week’s Frequent Miler on the Air I wanted to include the link for those who want to read a little bit more. It’s totally worth joining the waitlist — while there may not be much of a shot at moving your way up to the top 100 for the 10% back promo, even getting an extra 1% back on top of your credit card rewards for six months could be a great deal.

The best program for booking domestic flights

What’s the best program for booking domestic flights? Would you say Turkish for its incredibly cheap pricing on United? Perhaps you like Avios for short-haul American Airlines flights? More and more, I’m finding the answer is not transfer partners but rather the transferable currencies themselves. You can often pay fewer points for the same award ticket and earn miles and elite credit while you’re at it.

Striking out on my own with US Mint coins

We’ve seen a lot of opportunities lately to buy and immediately resell coins from US Mint releases. When buyers are lining up to offer commissions before the coins have even hit the market, you know they are expected to increase in value. If you’ve been tempted to forgo the buyers club and strike out on your own, I’ve got good news and bad news: sometimes you can make a lot more money, but it isn’t always a slam dunk.

Aeroplan might be a more exciting transfer partner than we thought

When Chase added Aeroplan as a transfer partner, we didn’t find it to be huge news since they don’t regularly beat United’s award pricing. However, this week we discovered that they may beat United in award availability on United flights. Forget about the awards exclusively available to you as a cardholder or elite member, check out the flights exclusively available to you as an Aeroplan member. Hopefully this is foreshadowing for the new search tool they’ve promised.

It pays to be a dummy…sometimes

We always strive to make sure that our Best Offers page has the best publicly-available credit card offers, but sometimes you can do even better with a dummy booking offer. This post lists some of the recent dummy booking offers I found when going to an airline or hotel website and starting the process of making a booking – sometimes you’ll find an even better targeted offer than what you’ll find elsewhere.

Air France / KLM Flying Blue sweet spots for award travel

Is it possible to have award travel sweet spots when you don’t have an award chart? I’d argue that Flying Blue somehow pulls that off. With awards on its own metal that are reasonably priced at regular levels and some cities that price below expectations, Flying Blue is sometimes the best option even before considering transfer bonuses. If you’re able to thread the needle as some readers recently have with a 30% transfer bonus from Membership Rewards, those reasonable awards can become an excellent value.

That was this week at Frequent Miler. Keep an eye out for this week’s last chance deals.

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