This week at Frequent Miler, Greg peels back the many layers to Qatar award availability, we examine 3% bonus offers (both investment and credit card rewards bonuses) that we know won’t last, Greg refreshes the tools we use to play the game and a lot more.
This week on the Frequent Miler blog…
Qatar Business Class: 5+ levels of award availability
In a fascinating trip down the Qatar award availability rabbit hole, Greg has discovered that the award space offered to partners is not created equally, with JetBlue having access to space that you can’t book through American Airlines or Alaska and Iberia sometimes able to book awards that British Airways can’t. This post is a great read for anyone hoping to find Qatar Airways award space in business class. I myself have been searching for something I’ve been unable to find, but this post gave me some things to keep an eye on.
How to find Qatar QSuites award space
The QSuites experience is excellent, but finding award space in QSuites can be a challenge. While we used to recommend looking for that availability via American Airlines, Greg’s recent discoveries regarding the various tiers of award space led him to essentially re-write this guide since your best bets for finding and booking these awards have changed quite a bit.
Reconsidering Bank of America Platinum Honors vs a large IRA transfer bonus
Set aside the Robinhood Gold 3% cash back card, the Robinhood and Webull IRA transfer matches have caught my eye and made me question the value of keeping our IRAs with Merrill Edge in order to keep our Bank of America Platinum Honors status (and associated bump in credit card earnings). I probably won’t spend enough on our Bank of America cards over the next 5 years for that to be the reason not to move our retirement investments, so I’m going to have to give this some more thought over the weekend and decide what to do with our money for the next few years because these bonuses are too good to ignore.
Podcast: Robinhood Gold 3%: Too good to last? | Coffee Break Ep06 | 4-2-24
On this week’s coffee break, Greg and I discussed both the Robinhood 3% IRA match and the coming Robinhood Gold 3% cash back credit card, including what we think makes each opportunity special and our thoughts on the relative strengths and outlooks for each.
Podcast: Which is the best Capital One Miles card? | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep249
Our latest full-length Frequent Miler on the Air podcast episode saw us discuss Capital One’s lineup of cards. While the title suggests that we discussed the best “miles” card, don’t forget that Capital One allows cash back to be converted to miles, so we also discussed the cash back cards that could become your daily drivers for earning miles. Beyond Capital One, we talked about JetBlue’s new dynamic baggage fees, Alaska’s award sale, and which credit cards can be had in multiples.
The Tools We Use (for playing the points and miles game)
This post is a great primer for someone new to the game, but it also makes a great refresher for someone who has been more focused on just a couple of aspects of the game. Whether you suddenly find yourself with elite status that you’d like to leverage with a match to another program or you haven’t used a shopping portal in a while or you need some help figuring out the best award search tool to fit your needs, this post has a collection of the tools we use to score big wins.
Nick’s latest “free” Carnival cruise: a mixed bag
For most of the last two weeks, I’ve been aboard the Carnival Venezia, cruising from New York to St Thomas, St Maarten, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Turks & Caicos. While I enjoyed the food well enough and the port stops were decent, I didn’t like this Carnival cruise as much as my cruise on the Carnival Pride in Europe a year and a half ago (or as much as my recent MSC Caribbean cruise). Part of that might have just been personal preference, but we realized some areas where we would choose differently next time.
That’s it for this week at Frequent Miler. Keep an eye on this week’s last chance deals to make sure you use them before they disappear.
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