Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is happening now! Follow us as Greg, Nick, and Stephen compete to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines before November 23rd. Who will complete the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
Got Delta MQMs and not sure what to do with them? Wish you could see both the cash price and award price when running flight searches? Wondering which is your best Capital One transfer partner for booking a flexible award? This week at Frequent Miler, read posts that answer all of those questions and a lot more.
This week on the Frequent Miler blog…
The Last Ever Delta MQM Rollover
This whole Delta rollover thing is pretty fascinating to me, but I’m definitely looking at it from the outside — no MQMs or MQDs for me. Still, I read Greg’s post and the takeaway for me was that if you’ve got a bunch of rolled over MQMs, the smart play is to wait until late in the year to decide what to do with them. You definitely don’t want to forget to make your choice, but neither does it make much sense to choose without knowing that you didn’t magically come across a way to earn a boatload of MQDs on some weird paid ticket before you start choosing one way or another. If you’re concerned you’ll forget, you might want to set a few calendar reminders and schedule a couple of emails to hit your inbox in December (you can schedule a send with Gmail by hitting the little “down” arrow next to “send” and schedule it to send any day and time you want in the future).
Points Path: An easy “set and forget” award search tool
They say that the devil is in the details and the former Devil’s Advocate can now be found putting out Points Path, which is a cool browser extension that yields both paid and award results when using Google Flights. What I like about this tool is that it shows both the cash and the points prices in real-time, which saves a few steps if, like me, you’ll check cash prices first for domestic itineraries and then wonder next what American, United, and Delta are charging for awards on their own metal. Wonder no longer, just install Points Path.
How to get free cruises by gaming casino status matches
One of the most valuable hidden credit card benefits of the past several years has been the ability to rack up free cruises as a result of matching activity made possible by the Wyndham Earner Business credit card. If you’re ready to take to the high seas, you’ll want to see this post to find out how to float on to offers from several major cruise lines.
5 free Marriott nights | Coffee Break Ep01
This week, we debuted an entirely new type of podcast episode: Coffee Break. Don’t worry — Frequent Miler on the Air and its longer format isn’t going anywhere, but we’ve added an additional weekly episode that will focus more tightly on just one timely topic for 20 minutes or less. This week, we discuss a couple of new Marriott offers so that you can decide which is best for you (or whether neither makes sense).
AwardTool: a powerful new award search tool
There’s a new award search tool in town that sports some awesome features. Unfortunately, it comes with some controversy as there are accusations being levied in the comments about similarities to Pointsyeah and questions about the source of coding and coding comments. I’m out of my element in sorting through the technical details, so I might just have to wait and see how this shakes out. I can say that I do very much like Award Tool’s features.
Chase Sapphire Preferred Credit Card Review (2024)
The Chase Sapphire Preferred was long the gateway drug to credit card rewards, luring people in with its transferable points and travel & dining bonus categories (at one time novel in their own right). These days, the card is less compelling ongoing spend other than travel (and then mostly for its travel protections) or dining (though you can match or exceed its return on dining with other cards). However, for a lot of people the Sapphire Preferred will be the card to keep in order to be able to transfer their Ultimate Rewards points to programs like Hyatt, United, Air France Flying Blue, and more.
American Express Everyday Preferred Credit Card Review (2024)
I completely agree with Tim’s assessment that this card is too much squeeze for the juice. We still have one in my household, but the only reason was because we’d never earned a welcome bonus on the no-fee Everyday card….and that’s just not a good enough reason to keep it. It’s been on my to-do list to cancel the card this week. I used to find this card exciting, but these days it isn’t wildly interesting even with the bonuses for doing 30 transactions per month — and then you’ve got to do 30 transactions per month.
Award ticket change and cancellation fees by transfer partner
Got transferable points? The power of transferable points is in transferring them to airline and hotel programs to book awards. However, the change and cancellation policies of airline programs can vary drastically, so it is important to know what you’re getting yourself into before you book. We’ve updated this guide to now include all of the transfer partners of all of the major transferable currencies and we’ve updated it with recent changes like the huge new cancellation fees being imposed by Etihad Guest.
100+ Hawai’i Hotels That Can Be Booked With Points (Hyatt removes many properties)
Tim’s guide to all of the points-bookable properties in The Aloha State needed an update because Hyatt has moved some notable properties to the “Homes & Hideaways” collection, which dramatically changes the value proposition when using points (to the extent that they were removed from the guide altogether). There are still plenty of great options though. I’m personally writing this post from the Grand Hyatt Kauai, which is showing its age a bit in places but still remains one of my favorite places anywhere.
Amex Referral Offer: Get bonus points & 10x on up to $25K spend at restaurants
I’m including this quick deal as I expect it may be of interest to even casual hobbyists. Amex is running a great referral bonus here and if you are strategic about it, you can end up with 14x at restaurants for three months on up to $25K spend. It’s easy enough to refer your own Player 2 to another Amex card — perhaps even a fee-free card — and trigger a nice dining bonus on top of the points you ordinarily get for referring them. If you have a coming wedding or other large event with a big dining expense, you could rake in a ton of points with this deal.
Orientbank Istanbul, Marriott Autograph Collection: Bottom Line Review
When I had a night in Istanbul in December, I considered this property, but Tim had been there recently and warned me off based on the tiny rooms. I’m glad he did. Like him, I had taken the reviews noting tiny rooms as perhaps coming from people who aren’t used to big city hotel rooms, but Tim’s description cured me of my doubts. It sounds like some pieces of his stay were really good — and other pieces needed to be emergency-repaired by a dentist (true story). I’m glad I went with a Hyatt.
That’s it for this week at Frequent Miler. Keep an eye on this week’s month-ending last chance deals to make sure you don’t miss any set to expire in the coming days.
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There is an argument to convert more MQMs to MQDs early. If I convert more MQMs to MQDs now, combined with some partner flying, I’ll be granted Diamond status through the end of this year and for all of next year. The alternative would be to wait until close to the end of the year and do only the minimum conversion necessary, but I’d have missed out on Diamond for most of the year.
Everyone has a different experience, but I’ve been pretty lucky on Diamond driven first class upgrades combined with boarding last, last year I was running at about 75% without using RUC or GUCs so it’s worthwhile to get to Diamond earlier in the year.
The math is simple. As an example, 100,000 MQMs convert to 10,000 MQDs. The value of these MQMs converted to redeemable mileage would be 50,000 redeemable miles or at 1.2 cents a mile, $600. $600 for $10,000 MQDs seems like a great deal to me.
or it converts to one year of DM for every 100,000 MQM’s converted??
wait which one is about not losing 75% of your points?
LOL that’s what i was trying to figure out too!
I believe that’s a reference to “the huge new cancellation fees being imposed by Etihad Guest.”
Correct! I should have put that in the summary. Etihad has a new cancellation penalty of 75% of the award cost if you cancel within 7 days departure (and even far in advance you lose 25% of the miles!!).