Ep. 594 — Travel Rewards Deep Dive with Noah

Adding a recommendation to monitor/set alerts for prices/points - both before AND AFTER booking. I booked a trip to Hawaii a few months ago for this summer, and rechecked the other day to find the points rate dropped by 32,500 per ticket! I called the airlines for rebooking, and ended up with a massive savings - enough to go again next year!

I know this is a bit niche but I wonder if there's any advice for people outside of the US. I'm living as an ex-pat and holding on to my Chase Sapphire for now but now sure if the points "game" only works in the US.

Would be nice to do a travel tips for Canada episode and bring an expert in to the podcast

Hi,

This episode was so timely, as my 1% win about using Travel Rewards was in the newsletter today!

A postmortem: I had to cancel the dream trip to Spain because I had a medical emergency 4 days before my flight and required surgery that day. I'm grateful that the emergency happened at home 10 miles from a world class hospital and not 40,000 feet in the air over the ocean. And the good news is that while I prepaid for most of the trip with almost 300k points, I got almost all of them back. So we can do the dream trip some other time. And I got a crash course in the travel insurance offered by my CSR card. I'll do more research on travel medical coverage, as my emergency could have happened anywhere and any time.

New question: We are interested in traveling to central and south America. It looks like our Chase UR and Alaska miles aren't very applicable; the main airlines serving those regions are delta, American, and Avianca. Could someone recommend a card that transfers to those airlines? Amex? The podcast emphasised how helpful it is to have a diversity of types of points; searching on flights in those regions, I'm seeing how that would be helpful.

Thanks for the help! Suzanne

I’m a travel rewards fail (so far) - I’m much better at accumulating points than spending them. It seems silly to use them on things that I can afford out of pocket so I only use them for things I don’t want to lay out cash for, like 5* hotels and hopefully some day a lie-flat flight to Japan. I’ve never calculated the cost per point but maybe I’m not getting the most efficient use out of my points. I think I need to listen to the episode again at half-speed to figure out the math.

I listened to this episode while I was out walking today. The reframe of "these points start out being worth what I could get for an equivalent cash back bonus" was simply mind blowing. I've definitely struggled to find "good" redemptions.

The "London problem" is very real. I've travelled there a few times and I was always surprised when I thought I had a good points deal and then say that it had another $500 or $600 in taxes and fees. Considering that I could get the flight in cash for a bit over $700, the points just never made sense for that.

Where I have managed to find some good deals is with hotels. When I went to England a few years ago I managed to find some Marriott properties that were priced really well in terms of points. It was really weird because within a relatively small area I found several hotels at a cash price of around £300-400/night, but those same properties had wildly different points costs. I managed to snag one for an amount that worked out to around 3-4¢/point. And when I transferred the Chase points over to Marriott, it turned out that there was a 40% or 50% transfer bonus going, which was super nice.

I think that since I tend to wait and book travel fairly close to departure (2-6 weeks), finding award flights is challenging. However, I hadn't considered booking refundable fares, which could be really helpful. If I have a vague notion of going somewhere around a particular time, I could try to find a good award redemption and book it refundable. That's not a strategy I've thought of trying before so I'll have to see if that opens up more possibilities.

Thanks for a great episode with tons of ides and food for thought!