Travel, Hotel, and Credit Card Points Strategies for 2022 with Richard Kerr
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited to have you here. As I mentioned in my short episode a few weeks ago, I want to bring more travel and credit card points content to this show in 2022. So I am excited to be joined today by Richard Kerr.

Richard's a veteran naval officer who left that career behind to become one of the top experts in the world on travel loyalty programs, credit cards, and points strategy. He's the founder of the Award Travel 101 Facebook community and spent six years at the Points Guy as a contributor, an editor, and the director of travel partnerships. He's now at the up-and-coming credit card company Built running travel rewards, and he's also the founder of the Award Travel 101 Facebook community.

We're going to talk about where he thinks points and miles programs are heading in 2022. We're going to hear some of his favorite redemptions out there, learn all his travel hacks, both on the booking and travel side, and get an update on the new built card and how to get off the waitlist. I am sure I'm missing a few things because there is so much to cover. Let's jump in.

Richard, thanks for being here. Hey, man. My pleasure. And that word you used to describe your show, upgrading. I'm all about it. Yeah, I'm constantly seeking out upgrades in all aspects of life. So before we get started, I would love if you could just share what led you down this rabbit hole.

Yeah. A really long story short is I was in the Navy, and at one point I had to choose between spending $3,000 on last-minute economy tickets to see my family after I had not seen them for a year because of deployments or just skipping Christmas and not seeing them. And I chose to spend the $3,000 for my wife, and I thought there has to be a better way.

Luckily, I found that better way. And for whatever reason, it clicked with me. And down the rabbit hole I went, spending the next almost seven years in the Navy, being able to travel around wherever we were stationed, having family travel thanks to Points and Miles. And I took it and literally and proverbially ran with it. And can you briefly touch on what you were doing before Points and Miles?

Yeah. So before doing points and miles full time, my last job in the Navy was the logistics officer for Marine One, the president's helicopter. I got there when President Obama was leaving office and President Trump was coming in and I had a lot of jobs there to make sure that helicopter could fly parts gas all over the world.

But the one thing I'll let you the inside tip on that President Trump loves his tropical starburst and his Pringles. The man hammered him. So we had the credit card of which was, of course, not earning any points because it was a government card. But I bought a lot of starburst Pringles for Marine One in my last year. The week would finish and I would have a trip planned to hop somewhere for the weekend, wherever we were, of course, on points and miles. And I just decided I want to do this full time. Navy's been great, but I'm out.

So you've built up probably an arsenal of knowledge that few others have. So just to kick off, I want to talk about the current state of things in the Points and Miles world and maybe recap where we're at and what some of the big things happening the last few years are. And maybe we start with airline and hotel programs. And I'll kick us off saying, I think one of the biggest trends I've seen, and I'd love to hear your kind of take and maybe explain what it means is...

this kind of trend towards these fixed redemptions to a more dynamic program. Yeah.

You know, loyalty programs, in my mind, should exist to drive recurring business. And you might think that's very simple. What it's turned into for many airlines and hotels is it's a revenue arm more than anything else. And in the case of most of the big airlines and some of the hotels, the revenue arm that is the loyalty program is worth more than the airline itself. We saw during COVID, several of the large carriers take out loans against their loyalty programs to get cash to keep operating. And

Once that they figure this out through all kinds of deals and partnerships and, you know, passengers and hotel guests being willing to buy points at what I think are crazy rates.

That's it. They honed in on it. And that's led to the state of what we see today in most large loyalty programs, which is nothing is fixed, nothing is predictable, and everything is designed to drive maximum revenue rather than, in my opinion, in most cases, earn repeat business. Now, you might think that's a really bad thing. At the end of the day, you and I and people who listen still get to do amazing things because of points and miles. So it's not all doom and gloom. It's just a different environment than we're operating in.

Yeah, so a couple listeners have sent me this YouTube video that I'll link to in the show notes where I can't remember the name of the guy who did it walks through. Here is exactly how these businesses work and why you should really think of the miles programs as banks almost. And so I'll put that. Yeah, I'll put that in the show notes. But and just to clarify, it used to be that there was a chart and it said, hey, if you want to travel from the United States to Europe, it's this many miles. So that's what it is.

And now, I don't know if there's any airline that's fully 100% dynamic dollar for point other than the ones who've always done it, Southwest and JetBlue. But the main American Delta, United, you can still get some of those low-cost, non-dynamic awards. But they've taken all of the award inventory that's not at the low price and made it seemingly sometimes, at least with Delta, I'm not going to spend a million points to fly to New York this weekend. One way.

Yeah, no, there's overall, there's still deals to be had. And actually bring up the point of Delta. I can't keep Delta miles in my account because I'm constantly redeeming them for economy domestic flights.

Because in the world of dynamics, as high as things may be, there are still low deals out there all the time. And maybe it's because I'm an Atlanta guy, but oftentimes Delta is the most expensive out of Atlanta. But to your point, every currency and program now almost has its uses. If you want to fly luxury premium classes, don't collect Delta SkyMiles. If you want to get your family of four to the B2B,

the beach or grandma's house a few times a year, I think Scott miles can make it happen. So along with the bads of, you know, now some of the redemptions are crazy priced. Almost every program does have the great deals. American has these web fair deals where you can fly one way in the U S for 5,000 miles and,

to like really good, like on the weekends, on holidays. So it's just kind of wild. And to my mind comes back to you, there's no predictability left. You're not really sure what to prepare for. And what do you think about hotel programs? What's been going on with hotel loyalty? I always try to figure out a better and more polite way to say this, but I usually fail. Unfortunately, Marriott has destroyed its program to a point where I don't know why you would invest in the Bond Boy program anymore. And I'm sure you have lots of listeners who are going to be

up in arms about that because they love their Marriott. But we're a couple weeks out of time of recording from award charts being completely Marriott. IT on a good day is a broken disaster. The phone agents are not empowered. Social media team can't do anything for you. Probably a high likelihood your points are going to be calculated incorrectly from every stay. And goodness, if you have certificates and points that you want to combine or use to do anything outside of the norm,

It's just not going to happen. So it's really a shame because SPG was amazing. Marriott Rewards was pretty good. They've combined them and they've just, I have no idea what the strategy has been over there except trying to minimize costs for hotel owners. So Marriott, I'm sorry. I just, I'm going to go to the portal and earn 10X venture rewards rather than try and collect the Marriott points. As far as everyone else goes,

There's still a gold standard in my mind of hotel programs, which is the world of Hyatt. Their points are just incredibly valuable. You can book luxurious aspirational stays as easily as you can book, again, that room for your family where you just need to stay next to the airport for one night. And then everybody else has got their uses. I mean, Hilton continues to offer huge signup bonuses, continue to be able to find value there. As a traveling family, again, you can now book connecting rooms with points, which we just did in Orlando, which is great.

I'm not a big fan of what they've done with some of their elite benefits, like not giving free breakfast anymore. But it's fine because I just going to stay at Hyatt. So overall, I think it's still a war charge going by the wayside, except for Hyatt. It's not predictable how many points you're going to have to need or you're going to need more. And it's all about maximizing the revenue off of these programs rather than encouraging repeat loyalty. So it's very interesting to see how quickly it's changed.

And what do you think happens in the coming years? Is Hyatt going to follow the way of Marriott? What changes do you think happen 2022 and I guess beyond to these programs, both airline and hotel? We could talk for a very long time about the difference with hotel loyalty programs is that the majority of the hotels in these programs are not owned by Hyatt or they're not owned by Marriott. They're owned by individual investors who pay marketing and licensing and program dollars to the big corporate, but ultimately,

They have a huge say to Marriott that says, we're not going to do this elite breakfast because it's too expensive for us and you don't reimburse us enough. And the corporate's hands are tied a little bit as far as most of the programs go. I think what we're going to see happen, which we've seen a really big update in 2021, the beginning of 22, is hotels actually leaving programs like Marriott. They've lost a couple businesses.

hotels in Venice in the last few weeks. They've lost tons of properties to Sonesta. And if you haven't heard that hotel chain, Sonesta, I guarantee you, you're going to hear it over the next couple of years that they've almost tripled in size in just the last two years by acquiring hotels that are leaving programs like IHG and Marriott. And unless those franchise agreements are fixed, I don't see things getting better.

Now, what Hyatt's done a good job is their franchise agreements and their terms and conditions of the program are written so that there's very little gray area. Like the properties know what they're getting into. They know what they're going to get reimbursed.

And Hyatt does a great job of making sure that things are executed well. So I don't think and I don't hope we're going to see Hyatt go the way that other programs have gone because of how they've structured these agreements with the property owners and how popular that program really is and continues to be with its members. Like the program really does drive repeat guests. So I hope we see things kind of stay where they are as far as these programs are going to continue to struggle and this program is going to

Continue to do really well. Do you think anything changes with flights and flight airline loyalty this year? If you'd asked me that last year, I would have said no. But then American came out and said, we're going to completely redo how elite qualifying works in our program. And it's really quite interesting. And I think it's great.

If you're not familiar with American loyalty points, give that a quick Google on the machine and read up. But basically, you don't need to fly American anymore to get elite status, which is really quite amazing statement to say. You can earn status off of spending on their co-branded cards, off of shopping with their partners, booking hotels and vacations through them. And you can go fly American twice a year and have top tier status. I would argue rather easily for anybody that's really trying.

So that's really interesting. And it's going to be even more fascinating the rest of this year to see how that goes and how it's picked up. And typically in the airline industry, it's rather copycat what airline A does, at least amongst the big three. And B and C are quick to follow. So I'm sure Delta and United are watching with great interest how this is working and what kind of revenue is going to drive for the Advantage program, of which I'm a loyal member of American, which we can talk about for several reasons. But I think it's great. I think it's interesting.

And we will see American could turn around if they don't like what they see after the first year and say that was a really interesting experiment, but no more. Or we could see Delta United go, you know what? That's a great idea. Let's follow. And you don't even need to fly airlines anymore to get status, which again is a remarkable statement.

Yeah, yeah. A hack here. I have listeners sometimes write in and say, I have this business. I'm spending millions of dollars a year. And it seems to often be on categories that are nothing. Someone said, I'm a contractor. I spend almost a million dollars a year on hardware and supply stores, and I could put it all on a credit card. What should I do? And I'm not going to tell you what to do. It is a very personal question. But...

If you value status on American and you've got a bunch of spend that's not going to earn you five points or four points or three points, an option is to use that spend to buy yourself American status at least this year. And we'll see how long that lasts. Yeah. Because on top of that, you get redeemable miles as well. And American miles are fantastic. Great value to do luxury or weekender flights around. So yeah.

I find myself very much more engaged with the Advantage program, which is what they're hoping for. You know, shopping portals and things like that, American offers earn you status. So I could tell the wife, hey, if you're going to be doing any shop as we can, you know, to go to that Advantage eShopping portal, right? Because we want status again next year.

Yeah, the shopping portals, I think, are underrated in that sometimes it's a point here. You could use Rakuten or anything to get a point. And sometimes you get these crazy offers where it's 10, 20 miles per dollar. And so, you know, it's frustrating to look. I think there's a site. I'll link it in the show notes. And I want to say it is Cashback Monitor. Cashback Monitor.

And they'll give you both the shopping portals and the cashback portals for both of them. And it's pretty cool. I've gotten 10 points per dollar before on, I think, American.

So at the end of 2021, a crazy deal came out that was for every dollar you donated to Conservation International, which is like a featured MasterCard charity. You got 40 miles per dollar and you're thinking, hey, that's pretty good. But at the end of the year, American also had a 5X on all portal bonuses going on as well.

So you got 240 American miles per dollar donated to Conservation International and American honored it. And people went all in on this thing. Like I have friends and colleagues that donated $25,000 to Conservation International to get millions of American miles at they pre-funded five years or 10 years of travel for 25 grand all in business class, by the way, because once you have

20 million American miles. Like it doesn't matter. You can book whatever you want, whenever you want. And it's really quite fantastic. It sounds like a story from days of the past, but this was six weeks ago and I did get a little taste of it. I did donate, I think 300 bucks and got 72,000 American miles, which is more than enough to fly business class across the Atlantic. So I look at his buying business class for 300 bucks. It's crazy.

Yeah, I've been trying to think about... I've never been the social media person who's just all over it. I looked at a survey I did with listeners and they're like, that's what they want. So I'm going to start using my social media solely to just post when these crazy deals come out. So give me a follow if you want. I'll stay on top of them. Sorry for everyone who missed the American one. I also missed it. The end of the year was just too crazy.

But, you know, on top of that, I guess you probably get a tax write off on the donation. You do. It keeps going and going. And if you look at there's some great websites out there that rate charities like I always go and look at the charity navigators. One of them that tells you like the expense ratio, like Conservation International was an A plus plus in every category. So you felt confident.

Giving that money to this. And I just want to know who was the guy or gal that set this deal with American. What kind of Christmas party did Conservation International have after probably getting millions of dollars of donations over the course of a couple of days? Like, good job over there.

Who lost out in that? Like, is this American losing money? No. There's some really great insights into this deal specifically by my buddy Gary Leff at View from the Wing, who wrote several articles over who was funding this. What basically happened is the charity paid none of it because they wouldn't agree to be in these portals if they were taking a lump of it. It basically came down to MasterCard.

funding it because this was done through the MasterCard website called Simply Miles, where you link a card and anytime you use it at a participating merchant, you get bonus miles. Great details of the math. Basically, nobody lost, believe it or not, in the way that this works, again, because of tax write-offs and the pricing that you can have when you control it and the way that you can carry that liability of these miles. And while we think it's millions and millions of miles is a big deal from these promotions,

The grand scheme of things, the amount of miles that were given out on this based on how many miles are outstanding in the American books was inconsequential. And then if you ever want to go into loyalty accounting, it is a complex and a rather amazing space about how they can defer the liability of these unredeemed miles to where nobody took a hit for this happening in the charity one. Really fascinating stuff. Wow. OK, so I'm going to link to that Gary's article. What a fantastic blog. At the end, we'll recap some of the favorite people you follow and blogs.

But that's all hotel loyalty. I think a big thing that everyone listening here wants to talk about is credit cards. So I kind of want to talk about the space because we'll get to built. But a lot of crazy things have been happening in credit cards in the last few years. And it feels like all of the issuers, the big issuers, the big four at least, are merging to the same place. And then Citi is just like...

went whittling on the side. I don't know. I don't know what to say. Wilting on the side. Where do you think we're at? It seems like the average person that used to collect five or six cards now has three priority pass memberships could buy global entry for their entire family. Yeah. I'm curious what you think of the state of cards.

And one way I think it's a race to the bottom. You cannot have the customer acquisition costs that these cards are now having and expect to make money because the demographic that's getting these cards in large part, they're not going to revolve, meaning they're not going to pay 25 to 30 percent interest. And you're just getting the interchange off of them. So looking at recent examples of the Capital One Venture X, you cannot go in an airport, turn on a sports show or look at commercials right now without seeing this thing. It was like when the Rose Bowl Capital One Venture X, I was in the airports this weekend. I see it.

That's on top of giving people 100,000 venture miles, which costs Capital One money, on top of a $200 vacation rental credit, on top of paying blogs and content creators who knows how much per card approval. So with all of that marketing, tangible signup benefits and everything, like the quick numbers show you they're over $2,000 per customer acquisition cost.

I don't know how they make that back. I really don't. And I think it's the Chase Sapphire Reserve reincarnated. When that thing came out in 2016, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Everybody had to have it.

But then that first report came out that showed how much money Chase lost on the customer acquisition costs and how far it like to the magnitude of 20 X what they expected to lose to get these customers. And what do we see now? Five years later, that car is being moonlighted because it's losing a ridiculous amount of money. Customers are not revolving. And we've seen the value propositions of the Chase Sapphire Preferred move to be arguably better for a $95 annual fee rather than $550 annual.

Which is why I really scratch my head when I see Capital One come out with this and go, great for the consumers. Don't get me wrong. My wife and I both picked this thing up and now we have hundreds of thousands of venture miles, but they're not making any money. So why wouldn't they take all of these efforts and make the venture card, which is a wonderful card, especially for people who just don't want anything complicated and want to get miles and all the great improvements Capital One's made with their loyalty program and replay the Chase Sapphire Reserve playbook where you go,

Awesome. But just make the venture card better, not do this luxury card thing to your point that like I don't need another priority pass membership. I don't need another global entry deal. What are we doing here? Is it because FOMO is because you just have to have something out there as a loss leader to get new customers? What do you think, man? Like why? Why? Why throw this out and know you're probably not going to make money?

Yeah, because my perspective is that if I look at all these cards and I talk to people I know, everyone seems to have come to the terms that they're going to hold a card that has a $500-ish annual fee. And because Capital One didn't have one, it was kind of like, well, it doesn't make sense. Like, even if the extra incremental perks for the card aren't worth the extra fee, it just feels to me like it's never felt like Capital One had a card worth holding. Yeah.

And what was funny, so then VentureX comes out, huge signup bonuses. I get one. My wife gets one. I tell my sister to get one. And my sister's not thinking about the bonuses as much as, is this a card I'll spend on? And she looks at the card and she's like, well, it seems like the Venture cards just as good. There's three lounges. I've already got priority paths. So I was looking at it. I was like,

Man, I guess it was just like it convinced me to sign up for the huge bonus. But I feel like it's going to be hard at the end of the year to not consider downgrading to just have the Venture card for less. But assuming they allow downgrading. Yeah, 100%. I have a card. No, I agree. Like, why would you hold the Venture X long term over the Venture card? I don't know. The bonus earnings, the portal grade, etc., etc. But...

Overall, it's the competition of massive signup bonuses. So we've seen American Express the last six months has just let the wheels off and been like with the resi and small business offer. If you sign up for the right referral platinum card at the right time, you could be earning like 18 X on almost all spent like 18 points per dollar on your American Express platinum card.

And people are earning millions of points. How are we making money on this, folks? I just don't understand this. And is it because the executives in charge now, by the time the chickens come home to roost, are not going to be in that position anymore? They're just being lauded by how many new customer accounts are driving right now, which is a huge key metric for any bank executive is how many new accounts have you got? I don't know. It's pure speculation.

This eventually has to all be redeemed at a real cost. And I'm not sure what the banks are doing, how long this is sustainable, or if it's just one of those, like it's become so much money that it's money, money, and we can figure out other metrics and KPIs to show success of this in market, how much market share we gained versus real dollars and cents that are lost. So yeah,

Doesn't make sense to me. Doesn't make sense to a lot of my colleagues now over here at Built as we design a credit card and a rewards program because what we want to do is be sustainable. And the stuff I see now just isn't unless there's some magic key that I don't know about. Yeah. Yeah. I want to get to Built, but I'm going to get annihilated by people writing in if I don't go back and say, can you walk through this 18X? Because that's something that I think some people I know are going to ask me if I don't ask that question.

Yeah, there was an Amex Platinum offer that came out from Resi. Like, you can make a reservation at a restaurant with a partnership that said, hey, sign up for the Platinum card, get 125,000 membership rewards after 5,000 in spend, plus get...

10x points at all restaurants worldwide. And oh, by the way, get 8x at any small business. So if your small business is also a restaurant, 18x, you can also go on the small business website finder that Amex has. And probably a lot of the places that you shop all the time don't realize that they're small businesses and they're throwing like huge offers at you to go and spend there as well as statement credits as well as Amex offers to go and shop it. And it's just

Absolutely wild. You can just hit the Google machine, type in MX Platinum Resi Small Business, and you'll, number one, have FOMO because you missed out. It's just, and then to my point when I read these things go, who in the world is funding? Who in the world is funding 18X? Like, all this stuff. And is that still going on? It's not, sadly. About two weeks ago, it's gone. But a great story I got to share about my friend Nick Reyes over at Frequent Modeler.

He's been trying to buy a brand new car on a credit card, like let's find dealership to find the entire credit card. I was able to do this in 2015. He was very upset that he wasn't able to. So he was going to one up me. And sure enough, he did. He had an Amex platinum card that had a retention offer, a signup bonus offer and a small business offer. And he ended up getting over a half million Amex points by putting his entire new minivan on his Amex platinum card, but two weeks ago. And it's because he was able to stack all these offers. And in my mind, I go, wow,

The dealership just paid three to four percent to American Express. American Express just paid out five hundred thousand points like everybody loses in in the consumer wins big. So how is this ecosystem sustainable? I really don't know. But it's amazing what goes on.

Yeah, but as long as it's out there, take advantage of the big signup bonuses. Take advantage of some of these offers. And I assume by offers, you mean a lot of the offers that are in the portals when you log in and you view the offers that are add to card or there are other offers. There's Amex offers. American Express specifically comes out with these limited time dining credits they had last year. You get Uber credits that come on your Platinum Card.

It seems like you need a spreadsheet to keep up with all of these things. Citi has MasterCard merchant offers now. Chase has offers now. Bank of America does that says, hey, shop at this store. You spend 20 bucks and we'll give you either bonus miles or we'll give you 10 bucks back. And then what you do is you stack all of these together. Like I'm going in the weeds right now, people, but I just want to whet the appetite a little bit to know.

There's a better way to do what you're doing, most likely. If you want to earn American Airlines status, for example, when you have a MasterCard, say you want to buy some wine. There's some great wine offers out there from wine clubs, Wine Inc., Winc, W-I-N-C.com. They have city merchant offers. They're going to give you bonus American miles from SimpleMiles.com, and then you can shop through the Advantage shopping portal.

And you can essentially get by stacking these three deals together, like statement credit, bonus miles, and wine show up at your door for either nothing or very little out of pocket. And oh, by the way, you're earning American airline status on that as of this year. And it's become like,

Yes. What can I do to get like, I want to get some wine for Valentine's day next week as of recording this. Like I went ahead and ordered four bottles of wine from Wink, got 2,500 American miles. And then a statement credit from city that made it cost a dollar 50 for four bottles of wine to show up. Great. Happy Valentine's day wife. I hope she's not listening. Yeah.

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Have you played around with Card Pointers? It's an app and a Chrome extension. I have not. I have not heard of Card Pointers. Yeah. So Card Pointers launched this app and they also have a Chrome extension. And similar to if anyone's ever had one of the Rakuten or Shopping Portal Chrome extensions, they do this for the offers. So you're on a website.

And they do two things. One, they pop up and say, hey, if you're going to buy something here, this is the card to use. So you can go in and say, I have a Platinum, a VentureX, Chase Reserve, whatever. And then they'll say, hey, if you're going to check out on this website, make sure to use this card for the most points. But what they also do is say, hey, before you check out, Amex has an offer for this merchant.

So make sure you go to the Amex site and you load that offer in there. So I've been playing around with the app. Yeah, I have no relationship. The founder emailed me and was like, hey, thanks for mentioning us. I don't get anything for mentioning them. But these offers change so frequently on the card sites that if you don't have something to remind you, you just have to open up Amex and Chase and everything every morning and look. Yeah. Two things to jump back to card stuff you mentioned. You said they're moonlighting the Chase Reserve.

Do you think that that card goes away or loses all of its luster? Because I think a lot of people listening, that's their kind of go-to card. I think people need to reevaluate the value prop of the Chase Sapphire Preferred for, again, $450 less annual fee.

You're basically earning the same points. And then the additional benefits of the CSR where people are like, oh, I can redeem for 1.5 cents instead of 1.25 cents. But are you redeeming 750,000 points at that marginal quarter to make the annual fee $450 annual fee up? And they're like, oh, no, I'm not. I'm like, you don't need the CSR. I don't think the card goes away. I just think there's less and less incentive to hold it. And the signup bonus is never going to be 100,000 again. And they're going to do everything they can to their other products to drive people away from it.

Which is, again, it was the gold standard of the credit card industry five years ago. So it's really interesting to see that happen to the product. But I just want people to take a hard look at why you're going to pay the annual fee for another year.

Yeah. Yeah, I feel like Amex is in a similar boat where I find myself telling people, look, the Amex Platinum has a bunch of perks. And if the perks are worth the annual fee, maybe it's worth it. Most of the time, the reason I recommend the Platinum is because they're getting $150,000 or some ridiculous signup bonus. But when I think about what I spend my money on, the Amex Gold is kind of like... It's a trend now is that all these card issuers launch these super premium cards with huge signup bonuses.

But the card that most people probably should be using more regularly is their cheaper card. Yeah, because after they issue all those points, they can't afford to keep paying you points and bonus categories. But yeah, $6.95 for the Platinum card, the vast majority of people, I would argue, who hold that don't need to. And it's just become incredibly frustrating to use the benefits or what's now going around as the Amex coupon booklet.

Just to try and keep up with everything. And then when you come out on the same day with a SoulCycle offer and Walmart Plus, you're like, these are very different American demographics. Who are we going after here, folks? Like, who's this card for? Because I don't know anymore. It's wild. For me, the Amex Platinum, it's the coupon booklet. And it makes sense if you book a lot of flights. If you travel a lot, great. Yeah.

I don't know where you're getting 5X on flights that you can book on the airline's website and not have to book through a portal. But outside of that, you've got to really work. I got to work hard. I'm like, what am I going to buy at Saks this before the end of the year? I got to spend my $50. And I try to justify that those $50 are worth $50. But otherwise, I'm not.

I'm not actually buying this fancy hand soap or whatever it is on the list this year. And the last thing, and then I want to jump to Bilt, is City. All these conversations I'm having now are Cap One, they're Amex, they're Chase. They're now including Bilt. Like, is City out of the game? Are they trying to get in the game? City's struggled a long time with...

Thank you points are a great currency. There are big struggles that they don't have any domestic transfer partners. So if you want to fly domestically, it's a problem, which is, I think, Capital One's biggest knock right now for everything great they've done. They still don't have a domestic transfer partner. But thank you points as they stand on their own are a great currency. All the ancillaries of dealing with Citi are my problem. So if you've got new Citi cards about the fraud alert shenanigans that happen and the endless loop of trying to get out of these fraud alert shenanigans, you're going to have to

City IT really struggles. And then they decimated the City Prestige, which was an amazing card four or five years ago, down to a shell of its former self and not even open for applications anymore. I don't think anybody should be ignoring City. City Double Cash or any two City thank you points on every dollar is great that you can combine with the big sign of bonus of the City Premier, which has nice bonus categories. I think it's great. But sometimes City just absolutely frustrates you from the customer experience that you don't want to mess with them anymore, which is what happened to me and my wife. I just...

endless fraud alerts, trying to get out of it. They're like, you have to give us the chase login and your chase account in order for us to verify you on Citi. It's a real story and it's a real thing that they do. And then you like think it's all cleared up and then you go and swipe the card, declined, fraud alert, call us. And you're just like, okay, I'm done. It's just absolutely maddening from a customer's perspective sometimes to use it. But I keep Citi thank you points in the bank account sitting around just in case they have access to a few programs that nobody else does.

They just really got to clean up that user experience and get them excited again. And again, decide who are their cards for and what do they want to be. Yep. That makes sense. So I want to talk about built, right? You guys have basically, you spent the last decade in this industry trying to figure out how it all works and reporting from every angle. And now you're actually on the ground building a new card and thinking about it with all that perspective. So,

I touched on it briefly, right? We talked about in a past episode, I think with Brian Kelly, he mentioned the built. We talked about how it earns points on rent, but maybe give a quick recap of what the card does and kind of who it's for. Yeah. So built rewards is a standalone loyalty program. Anybody can participate in the built rewards loyalty program if you live in the built rewards alliance. So we've gone out

and partnered with the largest real estate companies in the world. We have 2 million apartments in the United States now that are in the Built Rewards Alliance. If you download our app and pay your landlord through our app, and they're all directly integrated with us, we give you 250 points a month. Cost nothing. There's no fees. We just want to give you something where you previously got nothing. Preston Pysh: Need the card. That's just- No, that's just the loyalty program. And what's happening is, and why the landlords and real estate people are so excited is,

It's really expensive in many markets to find new qualified tenants or to retain tenants. There's been no marketing lever that they can pull to say, re-sign a lease with us, except for giving cash out of their pockets. And it's paying a broker a month's rent, a month and a half rent to go and find a new tenant. Now they can issue bill points. So if you're saying 250 points isn't a lot, that's not really going to get me anything. I'll tell you what the points are worth in a little bit, but

The landlords can say, hey, if you resign this lease, here's 20,000 points. If you refer a friend to this building, we'll give you 20,000 points or whatever the landlord wants to issue. If they have really want to attract somebody, 50,000 bill points to come and sign a lease. Sorry, you had a maintenance issue. We had no way to make that right. Now we're going to issue you 5,000 points and say, we're sorry that, you know, something in your apartment broke. And the landlords are like, holy smokes, this is great. This is a universal loyalty program to attract and retain residents. We're all in to the point that some of them are now investors with us.

But on top of that, we wanted to supersize earning ability, and we created the Build MasterCard. And this is a no annual fee card, soon to be open to anybody in the United States. We've had it on a wait list for now while we really perfect the product that's been out for less than a year. But very soon, almost everybody in the United States will be able to apply for the Build Rewards card. No annual fee card earns 1x points on rent, no matter where you live in the country. Any landlord, you can pay 1x.

You can pay in the built rewards app and we will mail your landlord a physical check. Now you can use your built rewards mastercard as an ACH and pay your landlord. Again, any landlord, any portal, rent cafe, click pay, all these things.

We'll give you a routing and checking account number that will charge to your built card. Earn 1x points on rent, 2x points on travel, and 3x points on dining. And it's a world elite card with all kinds of crazy benefits that are really quite absurd for a no-deal fee card. But in the end, we want to give people something where previously they got nothing. I don't know how many people ask you, can they pay their rent with a credit card? And you're like, you can, but the fee is going to wipe away any value that you get. Well, I mean, now it's possible. So we're really excited about what we've done.

Yeah, I've gotten that question plenty of times. And the answer is always no. It's never worth it until now. So card makes total sense. You pay rent. You should have the card. What about...

people who don't pay rent? What about people who own their home? I know a lot of people listening own homes. Yeah. And I get asked 3,748.5 times a day, can I pay my mortgage with this? And the answer so far is not yet. There's 109 million renters in the United States, and that is more than enough customers to try and go after for right now. But I want to let everybody know that we've heard the feedback loud and clear, and we would love to make that happen. And it's something we talk about regularly. But for now, just your personal rent that you can pay.

You know, 0, 1, 2, 3 value proposition is the same as the Chase Sapphire Preferred. That gives 1X points and I'll spend 2X on travel and 3X on dining. But they charge $95 annual fee. And we have the same and some different slash better transfer partners than they do. So to everybody that says the Chase Sapphire Preferred is my go-to card, I say, great. It's a great card. But...

Why would you not go to our card? But it's no annual fee. You earn the same amount of points and have access to American Airlines as a transfer partner. And it's a good conversation to get back and forth into. My motto has really been, we're going to wear you down. When we first came out in June, we continue to iterate and make the program better and better. I want to hear all the feedback. I listen all the time. I keep my head to the ground with the formal world I was in to hear what people are saying and the arguments for and against the bill card. And we're constantly iterating and we're coming out with some really exciting new things that

over the next couple of months that it's going to be like resistance, if you tell. Like eventually the quiz is going to be like, okay, like they've worn me down. Like I got to be a part of this and have access to all the great things that the card's doing. Yeah. And you mentioned...

American, which I think is interesting because I've always had this attitude of, I want to make sure I have points everywhere because if I want to take a trip in a certain place, I want to be able to do it. And American's been the hardest to earn points on, in my opinion. But there used to be these great offers for American cards. And I remember I used to be able to sign up for all three in one day and only get one credit check. Gone, I think, are those days. And

And then right now with super low interest rates, I've used Basque Bank to put some money in so that I earn a few American Airlines points each month. But this is interesting because I think the lead value prop might turn some people away for, I don't have rent. It is a place where if you want for no annual fee to start earning some points that you can get into American, that's great. But where else can you use them?

Yeah. So we have seven airline transfer partners, all one to one. So American Aeroplan, Hawaiian Airlines, Virgin Points, Turkish Miles and Smiles, and Emirates Skywards, as well as Flying Blue. And then two hotel partners. We have all three alliances covered, plus Emirates, which is not an alliance, but has a pretty expansive and global network. And then between IHG and Hyatt, pretty much anywhere you go in the world, you could use bill points to book a free hotel night.

So a really exciting list of transfer partners. And I'm not going to spill any beans, but I'll just let you know we're never done with that list. And we'll continue working to try and make it more robust and more exciting.

So you mentioned earlier, one of the problems with all these card issuers is that they're doing completely unsustainable things. And until the built card paying rent with a credit card, any landlord that offered that would just be losing money. And as a consumer using sites like Plastic to go pay your rent and then, you know, you're paying a fee. So how is this sustainable? Yeah, everybody, everybody asks this. How are you making money?

So, let's think about all the different revenue streams that we have. Number one, we have a credit card, which means we get the interchange. Every time you swipe it, people pay interchange for that card, and that's how card issuers make money. Second, we have our real estate people that are buying built points to issue to new current prospective residents. So, it's landlord-funded loyalty program on top of interchange.

And then the aspirational award for us is you can actually redeem built points for the down payment on a house. We can make homeownership a reality for renters. And we do that not only by being able to use points for the covering down payment on a mortgage, but we also report all of your on-time rent payments to all three credit bureaus, which every landlord in the country can do now, but 98% do not because what do they care? There's nothing in it for them.

And that's going to increase your credit score significantly, which makes you qualify for a much more favorable mortgage and saves you thousands over the course of buying a home. And with that comes the ability to be a mortgage originator. And the mortgage origination business is huge and a very profitable business to be in if you do it correctly. So, yeah.

Between the interchange, between being a mortgage originator and between landlords funding the program, this is very sustainable. And it's one of the first questions I had for our founder, Dr. Jane, when I went and met him and heard about this is like, I want to be something that's part of a sustainable business. I don't want to be hopping businesses in six months. And I don't want to be on the current VC hamster wheel of show growth at all costs. Despite if you're losing millions of dollars, you just need to show growth to get to the next round of funding. Like, I just didn't want to be a part of that. Personally, we did one round of fundraising last year.

We might do another, but we don't necessarily have to. It's a sustainable business model and we're excited about it. If you're listening to this, I am pretty sure you love upgrading your life, money, and travel. And that's why you're going to love the All The Hacks newsletter. Every week, I send out the best deals, top hacks, and my favorite recommendations straight to your inbox to help you spend less, save more, and get the most out of life.

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I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going to get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners. You can go to all the hacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. So one of the things you guys do that I think is fascinating is

is I've never seen a bit of content from Amex or Chase or Cap One saying, hey, here's how to get the most value out of these points. I feel like I'm always being pushed to use them in the worst way as possible. Hey, you can use your points for this terrible redemption, buy gift cards online, but they're never walking you through how to transfer your points to other airlines. And I've seen a couple videos you put out saying, hey, let me walk you through how

you could use your points to get to Europe for almost nothing. That's one example. But I'd love if you can share how should people do this? What is the advice you give to your cardholders on how to maximize points with so many transfer partners that the average person doesn't want to log on to

all seven sites and say, okay, what's it cost if I use this person or this airline? Or if I transfer to Flying Blue, then I book on Delta. It's a tough game that I used to tell people, you could sign up for all these paid services or you can go one by one. Is there an easy answer that you have for people?

The easy answer is unfortunately no, but we're trying hard. So we've done a couple of things like you mentioned. If you go into our app, there's a flights tab where I've curated a bunch of content that's separated out by airline. It says if you want to fly this airline, whether it's a partner of ours or not, click on that tile that we have in our app. And I very quickly with screenshots showing you how to fly it. So JetBlue is not a transfer partner of ours, but you can fly them with built points through Emirates. If you want to fly JetBlue, click on the JetBlue tile and very quickly I tell you how to do that.

The next thing we've done is we have a real-time award search functionality in the Built Rewards app now. Right now we have American and Aeroplan on it. So if you search any route in the world, it will instantly show you both Aeroplan and American results. All you have to do is tab between them in the app and we're working hard to get our other partners involved in that. So that's an easy way to do one search and see at least Star Alliance and One World availability as quick as you can. But the end result of all this and basically everything we've talked about today is

is if you want something really good, it's going to take a little bit of effort. And what my job is, and one of them is to make that effort minimal, but it is going to take some effort. Um,

So through the content, through the videos that we're putting out and through this new real-time award availability search, we feel like we're on the right path. And again, for being less than a year old, and as you said, nobody else is trying to educate their members on how to maximize points. We feel like we're in a good spot and we're on the right path to making it easy. And can people do that in your app and search American and Aeroplan availability if they don't have the card? Is that something anyone can do? Again, anybody can download the Built Rewards app and read all of our content, but you will have to join in order to get the logged in experience. But all of the content

And that search feature is available if you're not logged in and you haven't created an account. So we just want to be a resource. So whether you're like, I'm not a renter, but this sounds interesting, or I want to learn how to use these programs, like download the Built Rewards app and take a look at all the content and tools that we've created there. And you've been in this space a long time. Outside of the Built Rewards app, if someone comes to you and says, God, I got all these Amex and Chase points, what's your advice to them on how to not get stuck redeeming them at terrible places?

Yeah, there's some new technology coming out. This one that you brought out to me, card pointers. I feel like there are dozens of people out there making great products to make all of this simpler. Some of the ones I'd recommend, the card curator app is a great one that'll guide you in how to do these points in a simple process.

Max Rewards is another product out there that's helping folks make this simpler. And then there's some new technology not released yet that I'm excited about probably in the next six months that will be public facing that will basically tell you in real time, hey, this is how you can use your points to go where you want to go. And you just tell them what points you have. So the easy answer is to go check out some of these technologies that I've just mentioned. The hard answer is go to Google and search best way to use

X points. And I'm sure the points guy article that maybe I wrote will be at the top of the search results, giving you step-by-step breakdown. But again, probably just like you, when you have friends and family ask you these questions and you try and make it as simple as possible, you can tell pretty quick if their eyes glass over in three seconds, you're like, I'm going to go ahead and stop. Or some people they light up and they go, wait, there really is something here. This is not a multi-level marketing scheme. Like this is something I can get excited about. I think that's a lot of people listening here.

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Do you have, you know, favorite redemptions right now? Things that, you know, despite all the devaluations and dynamic pricing that are just these sweet spots and...

In the award charts? Yeah, 100%. Turkish Miles and Smiles to fly United specifically to Hawaii for 7,500 miles. That's 7,500 bill points or city thank you points transferred to Turkish. You can go to Hawaii. And then you can fly Turkish themselves, which is an amazing product to Istanbul, like 33,000 points in business class from the East Coast to Turkey out of all their destinations. If you have slept on the Turkish Miles and Smiles program, now's the time to wake up and either fly United or fly Turkish with it.

Beyond that, American Web Specials, the Delta Flash sales. If you don't have that page bookmarked that they update all the time, just really great domestic and international deals all the time. Probably be the top three that I would tell folks that are most relevant that they need to check out. Any good deals on Emirates for people who have been eyeing that Emirates first class experience? Yeah.

Back in the days when Alaska charged very reasonable amounts of miles to fly them, it was a lot easier. Now it's just going to cost you a lot. To Skyward's credit, they eliminated fuel surcharges, which took the program out of compliance.

complete irrelevancy to now a very relevant program. If you want to do Emirates first class, taking their fifth freedoms from Newark and JFK to Milan and Athens is going to be your best bet to do that under 200,000 Skyworks miles or transfer from Chase or transfer from Amex or transfer from built to make that round trip. It's going to be your best bet. The other only thing I'll say about that is sometimes Qantas can be a little bit better of a deal, charge a little bit fewer points and you can transfer city over to Qantas and take advantage of that.

All right. Any best redemption stories from your end? I got a lot. My very first trip, believe it or not, 2010, when United had favorable award routing rules that we call stopovers and open jaws.

My wife and I flew around the world in business and first class for 110,000 United miles by piecing together all of their, again, the routing rules. We did Seattle to Hawaii, to Tokyo, to Seoul, to Frankfurt, and then back to Seattle and Lufthansa first class and United business class and Asiana first class. And it was just fantastic.

Yes. And what you're talking about, for anyone who doesn't know, a lot of airlines have these rules where if you want to fly, you can add a stopover or you can change where you're going to and coming from. So you could book instead of a round trip ticket from San Francisco to Frankfurt and back, you could go to Frankfurt and fly back from Milan. Or you can stop over on your way there. And sometimes you can... Not every airline still has these

you know, kind of great rules, but some of them do still. I don't know if you remember which ones do now, but you can still take advantage of them. You can add stopovers to an airplane ticket for 5,000 airplane points. Airplane is their newly redesigned. One of those programs that's headed in the right direction and just did a fantastic job in their redesign. If you're not familiar with the ins and outs, we're familiar at all with airplane. Please go read up on that. Great articles out there explaining how you can get a

Just tons of value by seeing multiple destinations on one ticket by using stopovers and open draws. It's fantastic. And they're transfer partners of you got Chase and Built and American Express.

Yeah. So a lot of options to get in there. A lot of people always tell me, gosh, Amex doesn't go to United and I like to fly United. And I'm like, they go to Aeroplan. Aeroplan's got United inventory. So don't forget that if you have a card that has access to an alliance, it's not always perfect. Sometimes you might rather have American points than British Airways points.

But you can use BA to book on American. And sometimes for, I don't know if it's still the case, but BA used to be so good for these short flights. They devalued just a little bit, but if the availability is there, it's still a great deal. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Cool. Quick few things before we go. Travel hacks. Like outside of award booking, you've been to dozens of countries. I don't know how big the list is at this point, but what have you picked up both on the traveling when you get to places? What are your favorite hacks?

Yeah, it all pretty much revolves around the practical is what I like to tell people because there are all kinds of advanced things I get in the weeds. But the practical things of like, how do I get cash? Where do I do the exchange with getting screwed on the exchange rate? So I'll tell you what to do. I have a USA checking account. If you don't qualify for USA through military, you can use the Schwab account.

I go to a bank ATM in the country and pull out cash in the local currency. And that way it uses my bank's exchange rate, which is going to be fair. And it avoids all the shenanigans of exchanging cash at a desk or with one of these airport folks. And I do not use the bank or the ATM at the airport. I always go to the hotel and then find the most local or closest ATM, use my ATM card and pull out cash there. It's the best way to get cash. The second practical travel hack or piece of advice is a dynamic currency conversion, DCC.

This occurs when you go to check out of your hotel in a foreign country and it says, hey, do you want to use U.S. dollars or do you want to use our local currency? And most Americans go, oh, sweet. I'll just do dollars because I know how much that is. Don't do that. Always charge in local currency because what they do is they use a very unfavorable exchange rate. They end up charging you in the local currency anyways, and then your bank exchange rate gets you again.

So they make like on the order of magnitude of 10% worse than what the actual market exchange rate is. So always select that local currency if you're at a restaurant or if you're checking out of a hotel in a foreign country. Now it's called the dynamic currency conversion. I don't want to say it's a scam, but it is a revenue. It's a profit center. Yeah.

to do that. It's always local currency. Anything else when you get to a city, how you make sure you have the best experience? One of the amazing things about the Points and Miles community is pretty much everywhere you go, somebody is either there that's happy to help you or somebody has detailed explanations of how they did it, things to see and things to avoid.

So just after so many years in the community, very lucky that there's forums and places to put out a, hey, help me post. And again, people jump to the rescue. The biggest hack for that is become a part of this community. There are multiple Facebook groups that you can go and join. That's where I would tell you to start. Go and check out the Travel on Points. Go and check out Miles to Memories Facebook group, the Frequent Miler Facebook group.

If you're not on Facebook, you can head to the Reddit community. Reddit credit cards is a great place to go and check out and meet folks. And then flyertalk.com. So the best way I do that is literally go into one of these communities and saying either searching for that city and somebody's written up a detailed, awesome experience or asking, hey, I'm going to be going here. Does anybody have any tips? And people are more than willing to help out. That's a typical strategy.

Yeah, I'm in a lot of those communities too. And we're going to be kicking one off for all the hacks here sometime in 2022. You mentioned a lot of forums. What about any blogs that you love, people in the community that others should follow? Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. We mentioned Gary earlier. He's a borderline savant when it comes to the travel and loyalty industry, literally from a nuts and bolts perspective. If you really want to understand the inner workings of these things, you need to go and read View From Over by Gary. And if you're just a crazy points and miles, I want to extract maximum value of earning and redeeming points, Greg and Nick over at the Frequent Miler website.

is a daily must read. And then somebody that kind of takes a little bit of storytelling along with the nuts and bolts that are the folks over at Milestone Memories that you got to follow. So between those three sites, you're pretty much going to get everything that you need on a daily basis. And really the boarding area network as a whole, of which these bloggers all belong to the same network, boardingarea.com. Just get plugged in, spend a little bit of time. Don't get overwhelmed. Read something that catches your interest. And sure enough, you'll be down that rabbit hole with the rest of us in no time.

Yeah. I'll link to all those in the show notes. You mentioned some hacks that just broadly for, for cities. What about your hometown? You live in Atlanta. I'm curious. What do you, what would you tell someone listening? Who's taking their first trip to Atlanta that they should make sure they check off the list. Yeah. Besides checking out a world champion, Atlanta Braves baseball game, which I always recommend up at the new stadiums. Great time. Atlanta, I would say five years ago is a place where people said, Hey, I want to come to a weekend trip in Atlanta. I would have been like, eh, probably not. Like it's just not a weekend spot to do, but Atlanta,

But Atlanta's done a great job of turning itself around. The food scene, the revitalization of places like Underground Atlanta, the Ponce City Market are great places to check out. We have everything Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights site and museum to go and those sites to see. We have the largest aquarium in the world, the world of Coca-Cola, the College Football Hall of Fame. Like it's all right down there.

And plenty of things to go and see. So those are some of the top attractions that I think is worthwhile. And as far as the eats go every week, a new restaurants popping up in Atlanta. That's the new hottest upcoming chef. Also, the Georgia film industry has completely taken off outside of LA. Georgia is now the number two spot in the country for doing a movie and TV show. There's always celebrities in town filming something to places booming, man. Um,

So I would go and check it out to a favorite restaurants. Marcel is a French restaurant. Please make reservations far in advance. You want to go check that out and bring your significant other there for a great night.

And then Yebo Beach House, Y-E-B-O, up in the city of Buckhead where all the brand new hotels, the Thompson Buckhead's just opened, the Hyatt Centric Buckhead's just opened. Yebo Beach House, go and get some amazing South African fare there. And you can actually walk there from the new Thompson Hotel. It's going to be a great evening. So Atlanta on the up and up, man. We're excited. Awesome.

This has been fantastic. I'm sure there's going to be some questions out of this. We might have to have to bring you back on or do a follow up. But where can people find everything you're working on online? Yeah, of course. Again, download the Built Rewards app and check out everything we're doing there. But you can find me at KerrPoints, K-E-R-R, on Instagram and Twitter is where I am most active. Love to hear the feedback, great, bad and ugly about Built Rewards.

but also I talk points and miles and travel 24 seven. And I post my travel adventures. That sounds great. Thank you so much for being here. My absolute pleasure, man. Thanks.

I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it, especially Spotify, since they just added podcast ratings. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com or at Hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week.