Mastering Avios | Ep241 | 2-10-24

[@wetherington13]

@frequentmiler team - As the giant mailbag mentioned P1, I cannot tell you how hard I laughed when Carter shared this with me! You gave me the gift of laughter on a really terrible day as I am in the ICU with my mom. Your timing (as always) was impeccable. You know P1 is spending lots of time talking about Frequent Miler when your P2 starts listening! And he's definitely learning all the FM ways - thank you again, you guys are amazing!

[@frequent-miler]

Glad to hear it! You're very welcome!

[@carterwetherington153]

You guys rock! Thanks so much for the laughs. Cheryl laughed so hard at the giant mail bag section!

[@RandyBertrand]

Turkish huge devaluation will make them irrelevant for International Award Travel. The only reason I put up with their bad Customer Service and hilarious bad IT was their International Sweet Spots. Thank you Nick for your early warning on Feb 7th on this devaluation! It spurred me to action and I booked 2 Throne seats from Lisbon To DC in October for 45k points and $51 each. The availability dried up quickly after we booked as everyone else slowly became aware of the Turkish debacle and jumped to use the Sweet Spots. This is why I subscribe to all your email releases. You guys rock!

[@corile]

Episode on Friday 😮

[@druiz012]

This video made my friday evening but ruined my Saturday morning. Lol. 😅... I booked QSuites for 95k avios and $165 from SEA-DOH and an A380 from DOH-BKK. My only Avios booking so far. Trip is in Sept.

[@wrxdrunkie]

💯

[@ari_doubleu]

11:53 well my understanding is that although they don't search Google flights, they do search the same kind of system, which is called a GDS and is used by both OTAs and airlines to look up as well as book airfare. To look up specific flights you run a query that looks a little bit like the old command line prompts on Windows. There isn't a separate GDS for each alliance! Which means that presumably, Turkish needs to filter for star alliance carriers in the query, kind of like in ITA Matrix, so this is probably just a badly written query that produced those results. However, I believe first world airlines probably filter through the results from the GDS before showing them to make sure they're accurate, so this does point to a structurally bad IT team on Turkish's end.

[@icanseaclearnow]

Video release on a Friday. Are we getting bonvoyed by frequent miler? or will there also be an episode on Saturday. 😂 Thank you all for the continued knowledge shared.

[@nicholascoyle3210]

Another thing I really like about Iberia Avios is that you have options with the number of Avios you can use on a redemption. This came in handy for me past summer when I booked flights for myself and 5 family members to Spain. I didn’t have the full 20k Avios needed for each person but thankfully there was the 6k Avios + more cash option. I used that option and that turned out to be very economical for us, since the cash we paid was much less than what Iberia was charging for cash tickets on those days. I’m not sure if it’s only Iberia that gives you this option or if the other Avios airlines do also.

[@frequent-miler]

Yep, great point. British Airways also offers multiple options

[@Phlegethon]

Bilt needs a lot of revolvers for those transfer bonuses to be NPV positive: those points likely cost in the realm of at least 0.01 each maybe 0.015 cents and they get nothing off the transactions.

[@Rhodesters]

I hear you mention "sweet spots" a lot for different airlines and hotels. Maybe a main event idea in the future? Listing all the current sweet spots...

[@frequent-miler]

Good idea!

[@carlinrob]

What about expirations? Moving points, does that extend the expiration?

[@terrisun6331]

So early this week 😂

[@Rhodesters]

Let's go! Fri-yay!

[@noeapantoja]

What a pleasant surprise!

[@boiseding8498]

Nick mentions and I was disappointed not to have a significant analysis of the round the world multicarrier awards on British

[@ohmedk]

If you book with Iberia you can say Adios to your Avios…

[@finbarrsheehan8304]

I hope people didn’t need Hyatt just for slh, those points prices are about to quadruple 😅

[@648949414]

We living in future😂

[@MillsM]

That's early

[@ajlee2421]

Un related question apart from points and miles is what is y’all’s actual source of income apart from frequent miler. Always been curious 😅 @frequentmiler

[@frequent-miler]

Nick, Tim, and I are full time with Frequent Miler -Greg