From Points to Paradise: Mastering Luxury Travel with Mile Method

All right guys i got my own method with me today we're live we're going we're in it what's up this is the trevor and trevor podcast tnt tnt tnt so what's up i wish we had the the better upgrade so right now we're in the hilton double tree and it's uh it's an average hotel which shows how spoiled we are because this is a hundred and fifty dollar per night hotel free with hilton points it's the pool is really nice the rooftop free breakfasts but compared to some other hotels i've stayed at

in bangkok it's just average and i really wanted to have the upgrade suite to do this in the in on the couch in the living room but you don't have it true yeah some of the hotels out here are pretty baller man it's crazy so what are your favorites in bangkok uh the hyatt regency is nice yeah so for all the mile and point geeks out there it's 15 000 hyatt points which is nothing there's credit card bonuses for you know a hundred thousand so a single bonus could be eight nights you know over a

week at a really nice hotel a good location true i'll probably stay there after this actually yep i'm just hotel hopping and hyatt's cool because you can transfer chase points yeah to hyatt yes and they.

Have really good redemptions yes hyatt is by far the the best hotel chain with redemptions it's nice man but didn't their then they just kind of make their redemption program a little bit less like they're at the point they lost a bunch of boutique hotels okay so that was a bummer but there's always things changing with this point program i always tell clients potential clients you can't change that it's the whole philosophy of worry about things you can control right so yeah it's a bummer

but two years from now there'll be another change and maybe it's an improvement. Maybe, you know, just focus on things you can worry about, which in my mind is earning as many miles and points as possible. So you can jump on opportunities when they arise. What are your favorite programs? Whichever one gets me where I want to go. That's another philosophy with all of this is there's no loyalty.

You earn the credit card signup bonuses, book the whatever business class has the best redemption, stay in the best possible hotel with the points that you have.

It's it's kind of an art to like finding the best hotel rooms and best redemptions right yes yeah i don't know it's like a lot of research yeah and that's why it's always best to have as many points as possible yeah right as many options as you can even this hilton double tree for example not the nicest hotel in bangkok but i have a million hilton points which i need to use at some point. So anytime there's a decent redemption, jump on it. Do Hilton points expire?

No. But over time, all programs devalue. So sitting on a million points, just like sitting on a million dollars, it's not a good idea because it loses purchasing power. Yep. That's true, man. And speaking of that really quick, I want to segue into Bitcoin because things are changing.

And I'm watching this kind of on a daily basis with the financial industry, with the stocks and crypto and all that and how it's all connected and becoming more interconnected. But the most fascinating thing to me is that Bitcoin is kind of starting to become more mainstream. It's taking over people's necessities, like their everyday life. You can now consider the blockchain chain as part of your everyday life but it just makes sense because people are attracted to the.

Best asset so if everything else is having mediocre returns or currencies like the dollar if it's losing purchasing power people always flee to the best asset and you're pretty deep into bitcoin yeah yeah yeah so what got you fascinated in the first place or like when was that when did that start a guy a friend told me about it and then i just went down the rabbit hole yeah but what really got me interested in it this was a friend this was a while ago, he told me that he didn't have

any u.s dollars to pay taxes what what are you what are you talking about i knew this guy was doing well he was making money and that didn't make any sense to me so i luckily i asked him what what do you mean you don't have money to pay taxes like i save in bitcoin coin and that's what got me interested because. If you have something that appreciates in value, you should have as much of that as possible. That makes a lot of sense, actually.

So just like his extra money that he has is saved in Bitcoin, which instead of losing purchasing power, it's more volatile. But it's been going up a lot more versus how much the US dollar is going up. But it's not volatile on a four year timeline. It's not. Right, right. Yeah, exactly. That's the big goal. And you don't need something. You don't need like perfectly straight when it's just savings. Right. You know, you're not doing anything. The idea is that for that to grow.

Right. And the same way people invest in stocks, they're not looking at the daily movement. Why would you buy a stock and then look at the price every day? You're just going to sit on it for 10 years. Yeah, exactly. Or 20 years or put it in your retirement portfolio. The same idea.

It's wonderful. I think the world's changing because of blockchain technology. I think it's going to really make things a lot better, a lot more transparent, especially in banking and stuff. Yeah. The big picture is, if you think about, I mean, we both travel a lot. But it's a pain in the ass to exchange however many currencies there are around the world. It's a huge inefficiency for global markets to always be dealing with multiple currencies. True.

And before our current time period, there was never a way to have a currency that could trade across borders. So that's the future. is that we're going to, I don't know how long, what timeline, but people will look back. It's like, what were they doing with all those 97 different currencies or whatever it is? There's not 97. You think there ever is going to be like a paper version of Bitcoin that people can carry around with them? Would that make sense?

I mean, I guess the only drawback of Bitcoin is that you can't carry it with you. Like, it's only digital, right? Well, how do you pay for most things? Well, it's all digital. But if you don't have your smartphone on you, you know, like, how would you use it? I mean, it makes sense as a savings device. In Africa, they're sending with text messages on flip phones. So, that's pretty cool. So, yeah, you do need to be connected. Some kind of connection needs to be, yeah, in order to make it work.

Yeah. So fiat currency can ultimately be printed and printed and printed until it's completely devalued, right? But Bitcoin cannot. Sure. That's the whole idea. And the people were really getting off subject with that. I'm fascinated by all of this. Again, big picture, because the details of all these things are so overwhelming.

It's constant learning. It's it's macroeconomics it's game theory it's everything but the big picture is is there is a group of people who can just create money whenever they want and you and i have to work our ass off if you if you really understand that concept you understand that that's not a fair system at all rigged completely rigged yeah and that is just true you say that simple thing and most people they just whatever that's weird but that is the

truth there are people who have a magic wand and can do whatever they want in this world because they can create infinite money. And all the rest of us have to work. And then they steal that money that we work for. And the United States has not only the biggest debt now ever, will continue to have more debt, but has also an unlimited credit limit. It seems like they always raise the debt ceiling and it's just like Congress has to sign off on it and it's done.

There's no, you know, it seems infinite. Is it really? we're definitely being added to some list right now yeah right.

The yes it is really that simple is that the system is not fair i mean our lives are pretty good my credit's limited i don't have unlimited credit right i just rack up trillions there's certain people who are are using the system to their advantage i would say we are mostly because of arbitrage with online business but take the great majority of people the unfair system is not working for them and it's getting harder and harder because of the loss of purchasing power so this whole

thing it's it's getting strange yeah yeah it's changing it's it's changing things you know and people are becoming aware of this because of more information.

So things are changing. Like the funny thing is that, you know, even though Bitcoin is now worth, you know, almost $70,000 as of today, it's at all time highs, whatever, is people still kind of look at it like the mainstream, I would say probably 95% of people out there probably still look at it as a very volatile, you know, digital, you know, almost like a, like it would be something at a casino that, you know, you go out and you try to make a lot of money with or something.

It's not something that has a whole lot of societal value to it. But I feel like it does have a lot of value and it's not just the Bitcoin itself. It's the technology it's based on and it's been changing things. And I think it'll continue to change things. I would say the people that still think Bitcoin and really only Bitcoin because everything else is bullshit that think that this is a fad or this is going away.

They haven't really thought about money at all. They've never thought about that scenario that there's these people with a the magic wand that do whatever they want. If you really just take a moment to think about that, you start to understand why it's valuable. True. So what are some of the most valuable point programs in your opinion? Whichever ones get you where you want to go. So this is a common question when I deal with a lot of prospects contacting me for my service.

It's a lot like Bitcoin. The details are intricate. It can seem complicated on the surface and it kind of is if you don't know what you're doing. But again, the big picture is there are these credit card signup bonuses that you can click buttons, you can earn quickly and you can redeem them for flights. That's big picture. And then which flights and which bonuses and which hotels and how to do it, those are all the details.

And that's where you need a little bit more knowledge, a little bit more skill. But any American who's aware of these credit card signup bonuses, the one thing they're not aware of is how valuable they are.

Maybe they earned a bonus or here's a concrete example from yesterday. I helped a prospect apply. A guy contacted me on Instagram. I hate talking in business terms, prospect, a guy, a guy on Instagram. He's not a client, but he said, Hey, how does this work? I asked him a few questions. He wasn't exactly a great fit for my service, but I said, with your limited spending, you could earn one bonus right now.

If you apply for this bonus, you spend the minimum amount on the new credit card, earned this single bonus, redeemed the single bonus for one business class international one way. That was the Chase Sapphire Preferred. So the way that they advertise this credit card signup bonus is they advertise it as one cent per point, which with a 75,000 bonus, one cent per point, it's $750.

So I told him that this bonus is worth one international business class one way, which is worth about five thousand dollars and then later he messaged me and saying hey, it only says this is worth seven hundred fifty dollars right where are you getting this five thousand dollar figure and i explained to him that you have to transfer the points to airline partners and that's how you get the outsized value right so anytime you're redeeming miles and

points for one cent per point it's a bad redemption because you can do that anytime time through the the travel portals like chase.com american express.com so that that's kind of a good baseline to know if you're getting good value for your miles and points is anytime it's one cent per point horrible you should do better so what are your favorite ways to like research airline point programs because there's so many different airline point programs you

know and like who knows which ones to use for which particular route what's your kind of method for figuring that out.

Studying it for 10 years yeah yeah yeah but there are sure it takes a lot there are platforms that make it easier now the reason that in recent years i've been able to expand my service is that now there's ways where you can more easily search award redemptions book flights whereas before you had to do everything manually you had to log in to 10 different airline sites and search date by date by date one way by one way and then search the return one way and it was very cumbersome

and now there's there's websites like point.me. Rome.travel there's a lot of aggregators like they act they make it simple like google flights where you just type in point a to point b travel date and then it'll spit out the best redemptions so that that is an entry-level way to find good flights and then from there just the more knowledge more skills, the better you can find. And you provide a service, right? For helping people to do this.

Yes. So the service that I do is I help clients earn 1 million miles and points with credit card signup bonuses and redeem them for two luxury vacations.

So that's the current offer. I've noticed though, with a lot of people, when I say two luxury vacations, which by the way, each vacation tends to be about 20 to 40 thousand dollars in retail value which people don't believe at all which is another obstacle when people say you can pay this low fee and get up to eighty thousand dollars worth of free travel i think a lot of people just don't believe it one.

But another thing i've noticed is digital nomads for example they don't do honeymoon style vacations, they just want to travel do a bunch of one ways around the world so i do have a bit of a marketing problem where my service works for different kinds of people you know for digital nomads fly around the world have all your one ways basically free and for honeymooners have a forty thousand dollar honeymoon basically free and then people who want to take an annual vacation so i'm

not doing a good job of telling these people that it's the same system for all three use cases yeah well it makes sense marketing is very uh cumbersome takes a lot of work again i should just be saying you can get 95 discounts on all travel but then it doesn't feel specific enough to each person you know on it's funny how like the messaging can make a big difference like right off the bat when somebody sees it as to whether they give a crap about it or not you know right right it's like

oh yeah that sounds cool but that's not really what i'm interested in whatever i i feel like okay so personally before i got into all this i always felt like it was scary to sign up for so many credit cards all at once even if it's only a few i was like whoa dude like is this number one is it legal number two is it safe you know that kind of stuff what do you tell people when they when they come at you like that?

Well, welcome to my life. That is, it's such unconventional way to do things that it's just most people write it off right away without looking into it. Like Bitcoin, they might just not even investigate at all because it's so different. But applying for multiple credit cards helps your credit scores. Number one, the reason these the reason is boring details, debt to credit ratio. You always pay your bills in full every month.

So having more total available credit is a positive factor for your credit scores, because as you're approved for each credit card, let's say one credit card gives you a ten thousand dollar credit line. Then you're approved for another and it gives you a five thousand dollar credit line. it. You're approved for another, it gives you a 20,000. So you just increased 35,000, your total available credit by 35,000. And the more available credit that you have, the better your credit score,

asterisk, if you're not using it. So you still pay off your bills in full. If you were to have $35,000 worth of available credit and you use 35,000, that's a huge negative.

You pay off off your bills so your debt is zero but your total available credit goes up and up and up yeah and that is a hugely positive factor for credit scores incredible yeah yeah credit's one of those things i think a lot of people maybe struggle with because you know it's a little bit confusing but credit's pretty simple you know like you said debt to income ratio is the main thing it's simple if you pay off your bills in full never carry balances that's it yeah it

really doesn't matter if you have 10 cards or a thousand so what's like the maximum amount of cards someone should be applying for like every year or whatever like is there kind of a certain level let me rephrase the question what is the maximum amount of dollars you should earn each year as many as possible yeah as many as you can because more is always better so this this whole reframing of how people think about this is important because each credit card bonus is

free travel do you like to travel, you should have as much free travel as possible. And even if you only have say one annual vacation a year if you're sitting on millions of points that one vacation will be a 40 000 vacation i found it's really hard to go over 40 000 that i think the the biggest client trip we've ever booked was a 57 000 maldives and thailand honeymoon moon. So the retail value was 57,000. And I think the clients paid about 2000 out of pocket. Did they get first class tickets?

Business class. Business class. The big, what pushed up the price was the overwater villas in the Maldives. So the retail value on some of these overwater villas is $5,000 a night. Yeah. I stayed in the Waldorf Astoria overwater villa last year and it was $5,000 per night.

Retail value i paid zero but you paid with points right yeah and waldorf is marriott or hilton okay so it was an actual house living room wait how many hilton points did this cost per night so this is another trick like i said there's the more knowledge the more you can get better redemptions so the trick to staying at these types of high-end properties is to use free night certificates. So I used an Amex Hilton free night certificate, which can be redeemed for any standard room.

So it doesn't matter if the room is 200,000 points per night, 150,000, 20,000. If it's categorized as a standard night, you can use the free night certificate. And because I triple up with credit card bonuses with my parents, I had three free nights. ah that's a good little hack there use your family for more bonuses yeah of course so couples it's a no-brainer yeah.

Because you can double up on the free travel more money more opportunities more points more free travel smart yeah so that was that little trip from thailand to the maldives was a 23 000 trip and i paid a couple hundred but you know how the maldives is once you get there it's like the food is like 50 bucks a meal and you know but the other the other trick is yes that is true if you have hotel status you get free free you just gotta budget out

for that and you know maybe try to to figure out some sign of bonus that'll for that too really i found i'm not a big eater yeah free breakfast right free breakfast you just go all out yeah yeah and the breakfast is so the biggest meal of the day is breakfast yeah you go to breakfast you have a nice two-hour session eating everything off the menu and you're full for the day and they they got in in maldives the resorts have like mimosas

and the breakfast is insane right it's just like you get and also it's very international because their clientele is basically all the rich people from the you know most so in in the maldives chinese indian american those those are the big ones so you have with the buffet breakfast you have a whole indian section for typical indian foods okay you have a whole section for chinese foods like dim sum and everything yeah dim sum and then you have the regular, you know, European American section.

Cheeses, fruits, juices, whatever you want. So it doesn't have to be that expensive when you're in the Maldives, if you know how to leverage hotel status.

So what's like the the biggest trip you personally went on as far as like point redemptions and luxury or you know so my my life for the longest time is one continuous endless trip so i do i do track my annual you know redemptions but i don't do a good job of tracking my own retail value but i do track when when i book trips for my dad so he recently came to visit Denver, Thailand, and Japan. And I think this most recent trip we did together was a $30,000 trip.

He must be so happy that you're into this stuff, right? He's a country counter. So he has, I definitely got my OCD, whatever I have, you know, being very meticulous with details, definitely got it from him. And he loves to go to new regions just to say he went to a new country.

So what i can offer him is perfect because he can just fly all over say he went there and brag about it to his friends yeah he's loving life comfortably very comfortably yeah business class he is so spoiled that he just expects business class all the time i mean that's what he gets it's funny because like everybody thinks about like nomading as this thing you have to do where you're like backpacking you know but these days i mean maybe like 30 40 years ago but like these days? Come on.

If you're American with access to credit card signup bonuses. Right, yeah. I guess if you're not American, it's harder to get bonuses. It's a little bit more difficult to have this level of comfort and luxury. Is there any other country that has bonuses like that? Canada, Australia, UK. But it's not even a tenth of what's possible. There's just not as many banks and options and cards and stuff. I have more non-Americans contacting me than Americans.

And they always message me, is this possible in Australia? Is this possible in the UK? And I, I don't have a good reason why they don't do it. Other than my theory is other countries try to protect their citizens from getting, from getting too indebted with the bank. Oh, that's funny. Because with this whole system, like I said, if you're paying off your bills in full every month, there's only benefits because you're not paying interest. You don't have any debt.

But there is the potential that if you're not responsible and disciplined, you max out a bunch of credit cards. So when I talk to someone who has some red flags that could potentially do that to themselves, I say this isn't for you. Yeah. Because imagine racking up $30,000 worth of credit card debt and not having a plan to pay it off. That's not a positive. That's not what I want to do to people.

And I think other countries, they might be a little bit more cautious and not even want to give their citizens the chance to do that. Whereas in the US, they hand out credit cards like candy. It's like the most capitalist country. Anchors are the politicians. Yeah. So wherever they can make money, that's what they're going to do. It's the wild west. That's cool, man. I love living this lifestyle. So how long have you been doing this for?

For myself and my family since 2011. Wow. Which is 13 years. And as a business since 2014.

So this year is the 10 year anniversary. Decade long anniversary. Which is crazy. We were talking about this earlier. earlier when I started my own method my service it's evolved a lot you know like I said now we're offering a lot more travel booking services but when I started in Chiang Mai in 2014 my goal was, laughably small I wanted to make a thousand dollars a month to travel that that was that was my goal because I really had more of a and also a thousand dollars

was a lot more back then Oh yeah, sure. Yeah. So true. I thought if I could only make a thousand, I'm living the dream. I can travel, I can do whatever I want, which was true at the time. And then of course, you know, you put in the work and things get better and better. You make more money, but a thousand dollars. Also my mindset at the time was when you don't pay for flights, you don't pay for hotels, a thousand dollars goes pretty far because your only expense is food.

And for really 13 years, my biggest expense is food. I have no car. I have no rent. I have no mortgage. I'm sure that's the same for most people too. Well, most people have mortgage is definitely a big expense. For sure. Yeah. But like your biggest like non-structured expense or whatever you want to call it, you know, variable expense would be like food. But another big difference, like I said, about how we arbitrage what we do.

We have online businesses that earn dollars, but we're living in Thailand, Bali, Latin America. And food is a fifth of what it costs in the U.S. Especially if you go to food courts. I just kind of realized that. I don't know why I didn't realize this recently. But food courts, man, especially here in Thailand, Singapore, any expensive country, you can get a meal for two people for like six bucks. And a good meal. Yeah. A really good meal. Exactly. So $6 is French fries at a bar in the U.S. Yes.

So that's, that's another thing that until you kind of take that first trip to Southeast Asia, Latin America, even Africa, you realize that, wait, the salaries are lower, but people do. Have really depends, but you can have a higher quality of life with less money because that's the reality. A lot of people are making the majority of people around the world they're making very low salaries. In Thailand, the average salary is 600 a month, maybe, I think. Yeah, that's true. It's pretty low.

In Bali, it's probably 700, 800 a month. And they're probably lower than that. They're paying rent. They are buying food. They are paying for their car, gas. So the majority of the world, that's how they live. And the average American, 800 is just covering a few insurance bills maybe. Right. No one could live on $800 in the US. I mean, unless you live with your parents and don't do it. Right. And that's because it's a different economy, different prices.

And that's why arbitrage is so huge for people like us that do online business. That's true. Yeah. So when you first started with Point Redemptions, you were already traveling before that, right? A bit. Yeah. So the way all of this came about... I, in high school, I studied, I lived with a host family in Barcelona and that cliche kind of opened my eyes to the world. And then I was also very interested in Spanish because of that host's family I stayed with.

So I studied abroad in Costa Rica, Mexico, still loved Spanish, still loved Latin America, saved up money, did a bicycle trip across South America. And at the end of the bicycle trip, my savings were running low.

And somewhere along the line i heard about these these mythical people that could travel for almost free and i started looking into it when i was finished the bicycle trip in argentina and that's really what what i did for weeks i just became obsessed reading these forums and blogs and learning how to do this and i applied for my first credit card bonus from argentina and then just never stopped. So that was 13 years ago. Incredible. What was that first bonus?

American airline, a Citibank American airline bonus, which I ended up redeeming for my first ever one way to Japan. What was your first business class flight? Do you remember? That is true. That is an interesting thing to bring up because when you start, at least in my experience, definitely not my client's experiences because we go straight to business class. But in my experience, when I started all of this, I did not have the quote unquote abundance mindset.

I was very stingy with my miles and points because I didn't understand that you can just do this forever. So when I applied for that first Citibank American Airlines bonus, which was the equivalent of, no, actually it was a round trip. It was equivalent of a US to Japan round trip, one single bonus with $75 in taxes. I flew economy because I thought, I only have limited miles and points. I need to ration them.

And then only later did I realize I'll just earn bonuses every three months forever and have millions of miles and points so I can always fly business class. But for many years, I was still doing economy just to save miles and points because I didn't fully understand how sustainable this could be. I really thought that I'm, it's a secret. I'm gaming the system. They're going to find out that I'm taking their miles.

Yeah. yeah but the truth is they want to give you the miles yeah and that that's a big mindset shift i think so what was your first business class flight ah it's a good question. Do you remember because i was so stingy for so long the first business because usually you remember it's like a big you know big deal you know like, I don't remember. That's the crazy thing. Wow, crazy. Because you fly business class now. So the general rule I tell people is anytime you cross an ocean,

definitely business class. Right, yeah. Even recently, I flew Japan to Bangkok, and it was a last-minute flight. I booked it the same day. I was actually at the airport when I booked it. With points? Yeah, with miles. Wow. So the only redemption available is economy.

Economy so southern japan to bangkok it was i think a five-hour flight horrible yeah economy class it's horrible yeah i'm so spoiled now that even a shortish flight five hours was tortured what airline was that again that was thai airways oh really there was a non-stop from they have some old airplanes from fukuoka southern japan to bangkok was it an old airplane was that why it's just economy it's crap yeah it's well obviously yeah well sometimes like the newer airplanes

are a bit better than the older ones yeah but economy it's still just limited spacing it's you know maximize profit squeezes many people in so i have been flying business class almost exclusively for years now but my most recent flight was economy and i was reminded how horrible it is that's really bad it was a six hour flight five or five hours yeah anything Anything beyond like four hours, usually it's kind of like three, four hours is like the little limit where economy is comfortable.

But it depends what level of the game you're at. How many miles of points do you have? Yeah, yeah, of course. And then also it's planning into the future. How many trips do you have? Yeah. So if you only have enough miles. That's the thing too. Yeah. For say the next two trips, you, you need to plan out to make sure you have your trips covered. Right.

But there does arrive a point if you're doing this, like I do with my clients, earning bonuses every three months where you just have so many miles of points that you know every single trip will be covered and then you only fly business class it's kind of art to like finding these flight redemptions sometimes because sometimes the airlines you know they like like singapore for instance because i use that a lot because i'm flying from bali to seattle they'll have a wait

listing for a lot of their stuff and for business class especially and they have two different types of things they have saver and advantage and saver you know is like i think like 107,000 points from Bali to Seattle, where advantage is like 125. So you're spending almost 20,000 more points. So that's a quirk of Singapore Airlines. And every airline has its own quirks that you just kind of have to know, study.

There's nothing intuitive about it. You just have to play with it and learn it, which is why my service is valuable too, because I've already done all of that. I can deal with that on the client's behalf. So they don't have to... It takes so much time. What is this waitlist thing? What is the Sabre award? What is the difference? Every airline has its quirk. And then every bank, mileage, point program also has its own quirks.

Another thing about Singapore Airlines is it doesn't show up in Point Damien. So there's certain airlines that don't appear in the search results. So if you're exclusively using some of these new sites and you don't know which ones don't appear, you might miss out on valuable redemptions because they just don't show up in the results. Just like until recently, Southwest flights, regular paid flights, they didn't show up on Google Flights.

So if you were relying 100% on Google Flights to get from A to B, you might have completely forgot about cheaper options on Southwest because they weren't appearing in the search results. So for somebody who's just like first getting into this, who's kind of curious, maybe they're not quite ready to sign up for your service yet, they're just like dabbling, but they're curious.

What maybe is like one of the first things they can do? Like I'm thinking and maybe they could just like you know choose one of the cards that's got a great sign up bonus and sign up for it and see it and and if it works then they'll get more excited you know for more of this kind of thing what do you think this is a big problem with my business model because.

The way you like i said i've been doing this since 2011 pretty much applying for bonuses every three months there's fewer bonuses now because i've already gotten all the best bonuses but what i I do now is I stagger the bonuses between three people between my mom, my dad and myself. So doing this for three people. But to get back to your question, the what I would suggest people is contact me. Because yes, you could apply for a single bonus to dabble and understand how easy all of this is.

But even that very first bonus, if you apply for the wrong card in the wrong order, you make yourself ineligible for other bonuses because the trick to doing this sustainably is applying for the right cards in the right order to maintain your eligibility for as many signup bonuses as possible.

And people just don't understand that. So they'll apply for a bunch of cards and then by the time they want to take it seriously and do this sustainably like I do, they've already messed up the system because they've already made themselves ineligible for all the best bonuses. And again, when each bonus can be a $5,000 business class international one-way, you make three mistakes and you just burn $15,000.

But people don't know what they don't know. So it happens all the time where people dabble and then maybe they come across my Instagram or they see what I do and they think, oh, I want to do this. I want to take it to the next level. And then I have to tell them, you messed up. Like you're just not eligible anymore because you did it wrong. Okay. So that's a big problem with what I do, because how do I communicate to people that there's a proper way to do this?

And even just deviating a little bit can really mess things up. Yeah, definitely. Well, I mean, I've been down that path before where, you know, like, number one, I was afraid to sign up for credit cards. I remember when I first got my business card, I was so happy because I could finally, like, start my own dropshipping store. That was, like, the main, like, big thing for me was, like, if I can get one of these cards, then I'm good.

Like, I'm backed. I can drop ship my own stuff instead of having to do with the partner and use his credit card. So as soon as I got that, I was excited, but I didn't know about signup bonuses yet. And then finally I came out here and I heard about you and then I contacted you and I was like, yeah, this sounds really cool. Credit card churning, they call it, where you sign up and then you get the points and then you close the card or downgrade it after a while to avoid the annual fees.

It started working. but after that I realized maybe I can go do a lot more of that on my own and then I started sign up for all these cards and what I realized is the pitfalls of doing that is number one having way too many inquiries hard inquiries on your credit report and way too many new cards in a certain period of time can screw you over for your ability to get really valuable signup bonuses, throughout the year if you do it on like a slow consistent basis right yeah

so the one one way way to look at all of this, you know, applying for multiple bonuses a year or every three months. Is the reason it works is that you're doing everything so perfectly that you are the perfect customer. You know, that's, that's how you have success with this is it's not by breaking the rules. It's by following the rules. There's no way to break, break the rules. The banks are smart. They have good algorithms.

So you can't trick the algorithm. You can only make the algorithm like you so that that's that's what you do you you have to know the rules and you have to follow them so perfectly that the banks want to give you the bonuses you can't trick them into giving you bonuses it's it's a very sophisticated algorithm in a way it's sophisticated in a way it's a very stupid algorithm because there's no reason we should be able to do this right,

so i actually take that back it's not a sophisticated algorithm but you do need it to like you that part makes sense because if it was such a good algorithm they would cut us off, because we're clearly getting outsized benefits sometimes they do like if i try to sign up for a new amex card for instance because they only do the soft pulls they'll have the pop-up that says you can't earn the sign-up bonus you've already gotten it right so.

How do you get around that like is there is just have to wait longer that's one of those quirks with amic yeah that it does happen and it happens after you've applied for many cards i'm curious can you start a separate llc and then sign up for business cards under a different llc and that won't happen you've experienced no because it's connected to your personal will still be connected yeah so even with business cards you have to enter your your personal social security number Right.

There's a lot of theories on how to make that Amex ineligibility pop-up go away. But okay, background. So with American Express, sometimes when you try to apply for a new credit card, you fill out the application and right when you're about to submit it, a pop-up shows up saying, unfortunately, you are not eligible for this walk-on bonus. If you continue with the application, you will not earn the bonus. They make it very clear.

So you cancel the application and then i guess amex doesn't like me anymore and there's a lot of theories and forums on how to get get around that and really the only one that people semi agree on is you have to spend on your current amex cards to get back in the good graces of amex because if they see that you're spending on current cards you're making them money because when you spend on credit cards the banks or the credit card provider like Amex, they make a merchant fee.

So until you're a profitable customer, they like, okay, we're going to cut you off. No more bonuses until you show us that you're a good customer. That's, that's, I guess, one way to look at it. So if that ever happens to someone and you want to apply for more American Express bonuses, just start spending on your current cards again and hopefully that'll make it go away. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, And you really don't know exactly why it's happening

and nobody's over there is going to tell you why. No. Yeah. Their customer support is only going to say, sorry, but we're not going to give you that. We can't give you that information. We don't have access to that team or something. And the Indian behind the live chat has no clue. The Filipino. What the algorithm is. Why? And also they don't care. Yeah, that's right. But there's a lot of travel hacking communities out there. You know, what are some examples of ones that you like to research?

I mean, if you see, I'm always a little bit leery to give out like blogs, because if you you follow blogs they're going to tell you to apply for a bunch of credit cards yeah of course yeah because they make affiliate commissions yeah right because they make money when when you apply for a credit card with their link yeah they get a commission so just keep that in mind if you guys go on a website and they have a credit card sign up link they're getting a commission right and and.

They're telling you to apply for they make every credit card sound urgent because the credit card offers change constantly limited time all the time so literally all the time the the bonus on one credit card might be 100 000 today 75 000 in a month and then four months from now 150 it just changes and that's part of the game you have to follow it you have to know when it's when is the best time to apply for the best bonus but

again with the blogs you go to a blog like the point guy and every he's very good the copywriting his team they they really do use urgency and scarcity city to convince you that this is life and death apply for this card. But if you do, they have no way of knowing what point in the sequence you're in.

And they don't really care if you make yourself ineligible for a bunch of bonuses that will cost you tens of thousands of dollars because they are short-term thinking on getting their commissions. Right. And that's really the reason I started my service is because when I'm working one-on-one with clients, I can make sure that we are applying in the right order for the right bonuses to get you to a million miles.

Whereas those blogs, they really just don't care and they have no way of knowing where you are because they have millions of readers. Now, it's amazing. PointsGuy is actually a publicly traded company now, right? Like they're on the stock exchange. I don't know. I noticed that. I must have missed that. Yeah. You can buy points guy stock, which is insane. They had a public offering. I don't pay attention. I didn't know. I think last year or something, a couple of years ago.

But he does have millions of monthly readers and the commissions are very high. So you can run the numbers. He's making a lot of money. And by the way, a lot of people who land on the points guy, they think it's still just one guy. Right. It is a corporation. I'm pretty sure he got bought out in the corporation to get public or something like that. They have skyscrapers in New York with huge teams of writers that are trying to convince you to apply for whatever random credit card gives them

a commission. Of course. So again, I will emphasize to anyone listening to this, if you want to do this in a sustainable way, which we're talking about luxury travel for years, sure, check out the blog, see what they're saying. But you have to understand what it is. It is a commission factory. And I don't want to say they don't have your best interests at heart because you can learn good knowledge and information.

But just don't apply for every card they tell you to. Yeah, so don't be irresponsible about it. And again, just contact me because I'll ask you a few questions and then I can tell you which is the best next card. And then you click some buttons and you just earn $5,000 and you might think, hey, maybe I should do this more often. Right, that's the fallacy. So, because it really is that simple. I know, it's too easy, right?

That's one of the best ways to make money online, honestly. I always tell people that. You want to make money online and you're an American?

Just look at credit card bonuses. there is i've actually thought a lot about this there is no better roi right than spending i mean because you can be apply for and be approved for a sign up bonus in five minutes yeah so if it's five thousand dollars what is five thousand you know do the hourly wage on five thousand dollars in five minutes there is no better roi unless you are jeff bezos and the number one thing that stopped people from getting started with this stuff is just

mindset it's like what they learned in high school or from their parents or whatever right you know you shouldn't be signing up for that many credit cards that kind of thing i know i had that mindset for a while because that's what my parents are like you know and that's why my whole i don't even know if i would call it marketing because i just share testimonials and screenshots because people i want people to see that look this works this works this works for this person for

me for my family and hopefully they see enough examples that they start to realize that this is not going to tank my credit scores i can redeem for the flights that this guy promises yeah it just it seems too good to be true and that's why a lot of people pay no attention when they should. And it's great for business owners to have these credit cards too. There's some credit cards that are specifically really good for business owners.

Like if you're doing online business dropshipping and you have ad spend, the Amex Business Gold or the Chase Inc preferred cards are wonderful because they give you 4x or 3x points on ad spend, which can be transferred and used for maybe up to two, three cent redemption or more, certain airlines, certain flights. And you're making then 10, 15% cash back equivalent, you know, or more on your ad spend, which is wonderful.

And And then, you know, if you're dropshipping, you can put your cost of goods sold onto certain credit cards like the Chase Income Limited or Capital One Spark Miles or Cash or, you know, there's other ones too that work like 2% cash back cards. And those can get you tons of points. You know, if you're doing, let's say, even let's just be conservative. You're doing $50,000 to $100,000 a month in sales on a dropshipping store, you get 10% margin.

So you're putting $40,000 to $80,000 or whatever per month on a cost of goods card. card, maybe you have like four or 5,000 a month on ad spend. You know, you're looking at like 20,000 points a month just for the Amex biz gold on it, on your ad spend. And then another, you know, 120,000 points in a month on, you know, or up to 150,000 points a month for cost of goods sold. And that's almost 200,000 points a month just with your business.

So let's break that down because that means nothing to most people. So 200,000, you can fly us to Europe business class for 55,000 to 70,000. So what you just said is could be up to two business class round trips to Europe every month. That's at the low end. Let's just say at the high end, 70,000. So 140,000 round trip, you're getting three business class one ways to Europe every month just for doing what you're going to do anyway.

And then once you accumulate and you have those balances, then you you can switch out cards and start running hotel points. Because not all points are the same. Some points have better use cases for business class flights. Some have better use cases for hotels.

So the ideal strategy is to have, especially with the business, have these cards that have the multipliers for ad spend, which there's a few of them with different types of points, build up your balances, say to half a million or a million, and then move on to the next one, build up your balances to half a million to a million. Then you have all your bases covered for flights and hotels. And then if you want to get some extra profit with cash back, you can do that.

You know, I have one client who spends $2 million a month. I don't know if I told you about this guy. I won't give away his niche or anything, but the cash back alone on his card is 50,000 a month, which is insane. So it was very difficult to convince him that you could actually get a better ROI by moving away from cash back and building up your balances, you know, to a million each to make sure you always have business class flights. You always have all the best five -star hotels.

Let's get certain balances to a million each and then go back to your cashback because 50,000 a month is insane. Yeah. So you want, that's a good gravy train to be on. True. But even so the ROI on having a million point balances with certain programs, if you travel is better. So like I said, there's, there's strategies depending on the person. That's a crazy example because most people do not spend 2 million a year.

Definitely a higher example. Yeah. But. But I have other clients who spend $3,000 a month and we're still able to get the same business class flight. It's just different levels of how you do it. Yeah. And when you add signup bonuses on top of that, maybe every few months, let's say you get another 100,000, 200,000 in points, you know, maybe more or less depending on the bonuses.

But I mean, yeah, then per year you're getting, I don't know, from the low end, even just with the signup bonuses, you're getting a million points a year, maybe, you know, 500,000 to a million points a year. On the high end you can be making you know 10 million or whatever some crazy amount of points that would just result in you basically living like a king as often and wherever you want you know so let's let's go back to the example of someone who does not spend a lot of money.

For me to accept a client with what I do with my service, it's $3,000 average monthly spend. That's the baseline minimum. And if you spend $3,000 per month, you can earn two bonuses every 90 days. And let's just say on average, that's about 150,000 points every 90 days. So every 90 days, you're earning a business class round trip to Europe. And then you just keep stacking them every 90 days, every 90 days. If you're a digital nomad type person who's traveling constantly, you earn and you redeem.

So you might not have the chance to build up your balances because you're always redeeming them right away, but that's not everyone. And if you're doing the two bonuses every 90 days, by the end of the year, you have enough points for a full vacation, luxury vacation, even the Maldives, if you want to, like we said, and that's, that's a 20 to $40,000 vacation. The problem is most people suck at long-term thinking.

They lack discipline which is another value add of my service because i will remind you hey we're applying for cards hey 90 days we're applying for cards and i'll tell you exactly which cards to apply for with the exact link and i've had clients tell me that if it wasn't for the reminders they wouldn't be doing it which means they would just be not earning tens of thousands of dollars that they could be yeah and one of the things i did throughout your service was to

create a spreadsheet well i mean you you created a spreadsheet for me for the signup bonuses which organized everything and kept it really simple and then after i realized i could use the same kind of concept to organize all my different credit cards into like different lists and stuff and you know i mean just the way you like organize the application schedule it's like you got the card with the link you got the date you got how much spend is required the points

you'll get it's It's really simple. Yeah. It's just as simple as possible. Yeah. And some of the cards I honestly had never even heard of. And they're like the signup bonuses are all over the place. Sometimes like points, sometimes like some cash, whatever, but like they're different banks. And, and there's kind of a, there's a total reason behind doing that, right?

It's all customized based on where you tell me you want to travel, how much you spend your application cancellation history to make sure that we're getting all the bonuses that you're eligible for. But let's go back to your comment. You just said the bonuses are all over the place so that that is a common question because there's okay there's one bonus which with alaskan airlines for example and all the time i tell people to apply for this bonus.

And they reply but i don't fly to alaska sure okay okay miles and points can fly to alaska because alaska goes more places than just alaska many of these points or even mileage programs let's take when I told you I redeemed my first redemption to Japan those were American airline miles but I flew a partner airline Japan Airlines so these miles and points can be used to fly partner airlines which aren't even in the United

States this is how I've been able to fly all over the world 139 countries using American air mileage programs from the United States because of these partner airlines that you can book. So the, the, what you said about having all these different bonuses, which seem scatterbrained and just random, but the way that I'm thinking about it is if you tell me you want to go to Paris for the summer.

The, when I'm putting together the puzzle and shifting around the matrix, one bonus gets you to Paris, maybe with one airline. And then the second bonus gets you home. You're flying two different airlines, but you always want to think in terms of one ways. So one bonus gets you there. Another bonus gets you home. Two bonuses, business class round trip. And it's just a different way to think about it. Just gives you more options, yeah.

Because there's three main alliances, right? Star Alliance, what are they? I forget. I have a whole- Sky Team and One World. Yeah, Sky Team and One World, right? So it's like all the big airlines are connected to each other.

So if United doesn't have that route, but one of their partners do, you can use United points with that partner or you know book it with that airline through united and you know maybe sometimes you'll get even better redemption rates that way too and this is another huge benefit of being diversified with miles and points because you know some people are flexible they can travel say on any two-week period which is great because then whatever the best redemption is within that two-week period,

jump on it great but some people are have less free time they're more structured with their schedule. So let's say you only have three days that you can depart from the US to Asia. Let's say you have United miles, you search all the redemptions with United, nothing good. But if you have miles and points with all these different programs, then you can search all the different programs. And between all of them, you're going to find a good outbound flight to Asia.

Okay, you're in Asia. Now you got to get home. You also have a limited schedule. So you search all the different programs. And between the different programs, you're going to find an option there's a lot of different ways that we can be creative with routing with using partner airlines and we it always works if you have big mile and point balances with all the programs.

So cool all right so let's switch gears really quick because in the last well since i've known you probably i don't know six years maybe seven years yeah we were talking the other night we forgot how we met yeah i honestly don't even remember how exactly it was a mutual friend but I'm pretty sure someone connected us and I think it was through dropship lifestyle that community but but yeah so in back in that time your business was quite a bit

smaller than it is now and so was mine you know we were both kind of you know just starting to get going and figure things out and stuff since then you've been able to grow mile method into this really big and awesome thing streamlined a lot of stuff I know we were hanging out in Bali talking about this stuff trying to figure that out yeah tell me about that it's exciting well big as in it's still me and an executive assistant, but we have better systems.

So that's one thing I've really been focusing on is how do I take all these different details and all this, which can be complex systems, because we're dealing with multiple banks, multiple airlines, multiple hotels. Every client has their own unique situation. It's a lot of information to manage. So I've really in recent years, just really figured out how to systematize it. And a big thing, and this is not just for what I do, but I would say for any business owner, Notion is amazing.

Notion is incredible. I, if it wasn't for Notion, I, I don't know how I would be managing what I, what I manage. So Notion's like a, it's multiple things in one. You're not using a Notion? Yeah. I mean, I've seen Riley use it, but it's a management platform. You can connect it to Zapier. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can, you can make all kinds of automations.

So I'll give you an example of one of my automations and it's, it's also, I'm using it to one 10th of its potential, probably 1% of its potential.

Cause I don't have all the automations hooked up, but when a client, so as part of my service, if a client wants to book a trip, we have a type form, which is just a really a quick survey a four minute survey they enter in their travel dates just all their travel information where they want to go on which dates they upload their mile and point balances so we can see exactly what we're working with and then that gets uploaded into notion it goes to a certain section my assistant sees

it processes it starts working on it i evaluate it's just step by step by step by step and all these things i was doing manually before and now we can it's it really is more of an assembly line where things are standardized from every step how we we request information is standardized how we send out information like the emails to clients where it's ready to apply because it's different for each client we we've set it up in a way where For the things that are different,

we can change only those things, but everything else is the same formula. What I'm trying to say is Notion's amazing. Yeah, it sounds amazing. Yeah, I should look into using it more because I usually just use like the Notes app that's built in Apple and it's very limited. Obviously, you can't really connect anything to it. Yeah, and really the business idea is the system we use is the same for everyone.

What is different is everyone's unique details because some people want to travel to Asia and they've applied for these cards. Some people want to travel to Europe and they've applied for these different cards.

So the system is the same you just have to really focus on managing what's different and and providing the same service customized to each person which is really unique to service-based businesses but maybe not i think with what you do it's the same emails it's the same everything you have templates you have i think the fulfillment is different but as far as like directly customer service probably very similar yeah sops or sops you know right yes that's everything

i just said could be summarized as sops or sops no matter what business and every business has certain things that you do repetitive tasks yeah because it makes it better a better business right right so if you focus on making those repetitive tasks as streamlined as possible and i i still have a ways to go i i can still improve what i'm doing but compared to what i. Was doing a few years ago it's much better yeah for sure to the point that i almost want to

apologize to clients from five years ago right because it's so much better than it was five years ago i want to go back and tell them hey come back to us we can because they're also re-eligible yeah because this whole system after we've got after we've earned a client a million miles two years later we can probably earn them another million miles yeah yeah yeah i'm probably going to do that like after another year or so things get off my credit report yeah probably

come back for sure and that's also a good business principle is.

Repeat clients you know someone has worked with you they already trust you you've already gotten them results those are the people that you should be contacting to re-up their service not trying to convince new people so thank you for the reminder yeah for sure i should definitely go back and and contact some of my clients from five years ago and say hey let's do it again and it's going to be much better this time email marketing man you know everything obviously

instagram dms work great too it just depends on what platform people are on right i mean but yeah Yeah. So SOPs, Notion, repeat clients, repeat clients, referrals.

Referrals are huge too. Obviously. Even today when I was waiting for you by the pool, client, I think from actually five years ago, which is, which I'm not even making that up. She contacted me saying she has a friend who wants to start the service because they want a bougie 40th birthday trip. And my client from five years ago is sitting on a stack of miles and points.

So she can book business class, she can book the best hotels, but if her friend comes, her friend is not going to want to pay $5,000 for the same business class or more if it's round trip, which, you know, so her friend is not going to want to drop 10,000 just to fly next to her next to her. So she needs miles a point more. They can't do the trip together. That's a good example of the quality of life difference between having miles and points and not.

Do you want to drop $10,000 for a single trip? And that's just the flights. Or the other option is to fly economy. But your friend is going to be up front. And your friend is going to arrive happy and rested.

You're going to be miserable. And you're going to want a day to rest and catch up. True. And the reason that is, by the way, for people who might not have gotten that in business class, you have a bed. You know, some people just, they never look into business class either. So they don't really know what it is. I always tell people that flying business class or first class, it's a floating all inclusive hotel because you have the bed,

you have the three meals, you have unlimited drinks. You can also order up anytime. So they have this set meals, which are multi-course meals.

But if you are watching a movie laying in bed and you're hungry, you can just say hey could i have a steak yeah and sometimes depending on the airline those yeah we'll cook you a steak right now yep yeah they have like a whole list of snacks you can get whenever you want you know they have snacks the steak is more first class where they'll get you whatever you want at any time yeah that's true but business class they have a snack menu which is basically another meal menu

yeah yeah so going more along the vein of first class there's some really really amazing first class experiences you can get right now number one what like some of the best i think are emirates eddie hod they have these like suites singapore has it too right suites class kind of thing where you have like your own separate apartment room a shower well the shower is only emirates okay that's the only commercial airline that has a shower i flew emirates first class my parents

have flown emirates first class you have a spa in the first class you you can, I think they give you 30 minutes. I'd have to double check. I think it's 30 minutes in the private spa bathroom area to yourself. You're naked, you're showering, you're doing whatever you want. They give you five minutes of hot water. So you can go in the shower and then, you know, push it, rinse off, whatever, but you have five minutes. And then if you ask politely, they'll double it. They can give you 10 minutes.

Cause some people amazingly, they have that experience or they fly emirates first class all the time for some reason and the novelty of the shower just kind of wore off right so some people don't even use their allotted shower time which is why that you can double it if you ask because there's available spots yeah. How crazy is that? I mean, why should we, the plebes, be able to be in a spa at 35,000 feet taking a hot shower and then go back to our bed and have caviar? It's crazy.

And I think when I booked it out of pocket, I paid 20 bucks. So it was miles plus 20 bucks. And how was the difference in miles from the suites versus like the business class, was it? Well, the thing about Emirates first class is that's one of those redemptions that's been and devalued. So it's much harder to book it. You used to be able to book it with Alaska Airlines.

Like I said, there's different partner use cases for different miles and you could book Emirates with Alaska Airlines miles, but they've since not allowed first-class redemptions. So that kind of was a moment in time. Never got taken advantage of too much. But the other ones are still very, I won't say easy because the availability is limited, But if you plan for it, some of these most exclusive first class, they are bookable with miles of points.

Yeah, I was looking up the Singapore ones and trying to figure out exactly how to do that. And it turns out, I guess you can only get the Singapore suites on the Airbus A380s, not the Boeing. Yeah, it's not on every plane. Yeah. It's certain planes. So when you're on their travel portal and you're trying to book a suites class, it's not going to necessarily tell you if you're actually going to get that suites class or if it's just like a regular first-class seat, regular.

So you have to check and see exactly which airplane it is. And I looked it up on some blog article, there's a list of exactly which routes that they offer it on. Singapore did London, Singapore did Frankfurt, and a couple others. So that's a good example of how to use the blogs.

I would say using the different blogs for this type of knowledge, learning the best, or even seeing business class reviews, first class reviews. There's people that their full-time job is to fly and make videos and do a very detailed breakdown of the menu, of the cabin class, of even the bathroom, of the slippers, of the amenity kit. So that's valuable information. And you can Google it and find it very easily. What I would say you want to stay away from is the credit card information.

Right. Unless you really... It's skewed, of course. But the reviews are very valuable. Yeah. And you can find that type of information easily just by Googling. I wouldn't say the worst things, but a disappointing thing is when you book a business class flight and you're all excited about it. And then you get on just to find out it's an old airplane or it's just outdated or weird. Something is weird about it. It's happened to me a couple of times. It shows how spoiled you are.

Right? This is not the absolute best free first class business class cabin. It's the second best. But honestly, if you're spending that many points and you get this plane from the 90s and you're just like, man, the TV is this big. It's happened to me before, but it's fine. Sometimes you get really lucky. You get the brand new airplane too and everything is super amazing and big and beautiful.

It's hit or miss sometimes. But all those are, are most of the, the best first and business class cabins besides Emirates first class, they, they are bookable. Yeah. But if you really, especially first class for those ones, obviously they're in demand.

Yeah. I mean, everybody wants to fly those. So what I tell clients is if that's your goal to have one of these ridiculous aspirational first class cabins where it's basically an apartment, you kind of need to plan your trip around the availability.

Right. you know you don't you don't say i want to travel on these dates give me the absolute best first class you have to be a little bit more flexible that if the if this is your travel period but the best first class redemption is here you need to shift your travel date of course yeah because otherwise it's just you book the trip around the availability not the other way around and that's also a good tip for any trip is here's an example i have a client he wants to get scuba certified find,

so he lives in Knoxville and he's flying to Roatan, Honduras. Honduras is famous for diving. They have good, I was there recently.

It's beautiful. They have good diving. They have very cheap sort of certification programs. And without consulting with me, he, he paid for a certification course on very specific travel dates, or I'm sorry, like he had dates for his course and then he contacted me saying, Hey, I'm going to go get certified. I need to be there on this date. And the best redemption was a day after. Yeah. So he could have flown for, I think it was for $6 or $12 round trip.

If you would have left a day later, but he was locked in on these certain travel dates. Yeah. And I think he might have canceled or shifted his dates, but that's a good example of you want to, if you can be semi-flexible, even just a day or two before or a day after, then you start planning your activities based on the best flights and the best hotel.

I found booking flights, it's always best to at least start looking through to six months in advance because depending on the program, business class just isn't available or at least isn't available for the best redemption rates.

So here's the thing. But sometimes, sometimes that's not true. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes business class, the best business class availability opens up 72 hours before departure. 72 hours. Yes. Because they open up seats that are not sold. So instead of having a seat just go empty, they'll give it to someone as a mile redemption. So, so that's like real flex. Like you gotta be really flexible.

I mean, sometimes a week in advance or 72 hours, but if you're, this is great for digital nomads because let's say you're in Thailand, you want to go to Europe, you know, you're going to go to Europe and you're very flexible. So you can just look at it. Okay. And there's a good redemption. I can travel within three days at any time. Let's go. And most hotels aren't going to be a hundred percent booked unless there's like

a crazy event. So the hotel thing really isn't that much of an issue usually. I mean, hotel redemptions don't change like last minute. It's all, it's all supply and demand. So like you said, it depends on events. It depends, yeah. Like I have one client, they wanted to go to Paris this summer.

And then I vaguely remembered Summer Olympics. Oh yeah, in Paris, that's right. Yeah, like I don't pay attention anymore. But I did see, wait a minute, isn't there something going on in Paris? Wow. That's why there's no hotels. Because the whole world is trying to go to Paris, right? That's right, yeah. So those types of things, major events, I would, you know, concerts, let's say Austin, in Texas, South by Southwest, the whole city is booked.

You're just not going to find good hotel redemptions because there's limited hotel rooms and everyone is trying to book them. Yeah, one time I went to Singapore and there was a Taylor Swift concert or something. Every hotel was booked. The whole city. Yeah, it was crazy. Everything was full. I had enough points to get booking at the, what's that big hotel with the cruise ship thing on top?

The Marina Bay Sands. Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. for you one of the coolest looking hotels is it like kind of outdated or is it still like really nice like modern that's beautiful yeah it's super nice yeah the i gotta stay there someday.

The view is incredible for those listening yeah the marina bay sands was it in crazy it was they went in they showed it in crazy rich asians yeah yeah it's the it's the famous hotel that has two towers it's the same hotel but it's two separate towers and then there's a boat looking infinity pool yeah I think there's three towers I think it's three three times yeah and there's a boat looking infinity pool that sits on top of the three towers and you you

can go on the pool the only way to access the pool is to pay for a hotel room there there is no trick to going to the pool yeah you have to be a guest you can't pay separately to access just the pool. I tried. That's too bad, you know, cause they probably, well, it'd probably be overcrowded. Yeah. It keeps it more exclusive. For sure. And when my dad and I stayed there, a hotel room was 250, 300. Oh, okay. So we, we, we stayed there, we paid cash because we wanted to go use

the pool. Yeah. And it was amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I tried to book it at one point. I think it was like $500, $600 or something like that. Maybe more. But yeah, I think the coolest hotels I've seen, well, I mean, I have kind of like limited travel experiences, but one of the coolest places I've seen is Dubai. It has some of the craziest, most expensive places. Like what's that one hotel that's on like a little island off the water? Yeah, the Palm. Yeah, the Palm, right? Palm Jumeirah.

Yeah, there's several hotels. And they're only suites and they're like a thousand bucks a night and up minimum, you know? Yeah. I have thoughts about Dubai. The Palm is an experience. I've never stayed there personally. I booked my parents into the Waldorf Astoria for free. And the problem with the Palm is it's so far from everything because once you're out on those artificial sand islands to get to anything in the city, you have to take a long taxi course and it's only taxi.

Again, it's like one of those luxury experiences where like everything else beyond that is going to cost a bunch more money just because you're already out there right like the maldives it's kind of a similar issue and surprisingly maybe after when we're done we can flip it and show people bangkok because we're looking at bangkok right now we're looking at skyscrapers in bangkok i'll just do it really everybody out there but the thing with dubai is yeah this is bangkok okay back to the

podcast the thing about dubai is it's like bangkok what we're looking at with these skyscrapers but most of the hotels are actually affordable as far as the the nightly paid rate right true so even some of the high-end hotels in dubai i think they have excess capacity that's why they just built so many hotels that they're not at full capacity so supply and demand they have to reduce the cost and you can stay at some really nice hotels for you know 300 a night I don't pay because

I have my points so I can stay at those same hotels.

In the better suites for free but if you didn't have points you can stay in nice hotels fairly cheaply for the hotels that don't have like their own hotel reward program or whatever that you can transfer points to do you use the travel portals to book those i only book free hotels if i can't stay there for free i pay no attention yeah for sure but but what i mean is like you you would use like chase points it's very bad value yeah the reason you wouldn't want to do that is

let's take a four seasons for example a lot of people want to stay at four seasons especially because of uh the white lotus the new the new show which i've never seen i haven't seen it but people love it it's they always film these shows in the four seasons but let's say you want to stay out of four seasons there is no point program where you can book for free but you could use chase points or amex points as a cashback redemption but it would be horrible value because it would be one cent per

point approximately right so an example of that would be one night at the four seasons if you're redeeming chase points it might be 90 000 points because it's a 900 per night hotel of course so one cent per point is it worth it no because 9 000 it could be business or first class international it's worth way more money so the math on that is one night cash back at the four seasons, 90,000 points.

So that's $900 value. Yeah. Or you could redeem those same points for a business or first-class international one way and get 5,000 to $10,000 value. Yeah. We're talking retail value.

This is what people always, some people they, they get into the details and they say, but I would never pay that anyway. Neither would I. But the truth is that is the retail price. Look on Google flights and tell me how else are you going to book this $9,000 one way or $5,000 one way. You either have to pay cash or redeem points or do all these other kind of convoluted tricks with buying miles to get a 30% discount or go through one of these.

Have you ever done that, by the way? I mean, I have. If it makes sense.

Well, I had more miles and points than I could possibly do. You wouldn't need to. I mean maybe like a program you didn't have points in or something yeah it's another option to get a 30 I don't know 20 to 30 discount yeah but the problem with that strategy is you can only buy so many miles per year so if you're doing that consistently you you would have to open up multiple accounts which is an option I guess it's just all of like I said this is a convoluted way to get discounts buying

miles and redeeming at a discount or just get credit card sign up bonus true incredible this stuff got this stuff goes deep guys and you can get into some crazy lifestyle stuff i mean you know asia's amazing the rest of the world is amazing too but i like it out here a lot actually yeah bangkok has a lot of hotel redemptions so right now we're in the hilton today actually i'm checking out and going to a hyatt hotel This week I'll also stay at another IHG hotel,

which is a chain with Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, Intercontinental. Yeah, I'm basically living out of hotels for free. My friend Ryan, Ryan Garrido is doing the same thing for a while. Actually, I think he's still doing, no, I think he got an Airbnb or something in Koh Samui, right? He's been there for a while. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's cool. Another guy doing drop shipping. But the last time I was in Bangkok, I booked 30 days for free at a hotel.

Best location, a corner suite upgrade with this type of view. The bathtub had a view just like this. So you could soak in the tub, see the city.

And it had free breakfast and free evening lounge access which is free drinks free food yeah so basically breakfast and dinner was also included yep that's one thing i'm not sure if we touched that yet or not but getting status which is definitely possible through credit cards on some of the programs yeah hyatt specifically you have to stay at a hyatt for 60 days in a calendar year right or maybe more interesting to drop shippers is there's a credit card where if you spend 120 000 a year

you get globalist which is top tier hyatt status well i didn't know that what card is that it's the chase hyatt business card oh wow so for drop shippers that's very reasonable well i'm getting that one.

Asterix there is a time and a place there's a there's a certain time in the sequence to apply for a card like this there are other more valuable cards to get first but for drop shippers who travel this this card where if you spend 120 000 on the card you get top tier hyatt globalist status which is free upgrades free breakfast free lounge access yeah and a few other benefits, essentially what that does you get free upgrades even on point redemptions so let's say

you book a lower class room for free free zero dollars and then they upgrade you to the suite also for free so that makes the retail value of let's say you book a room and it's 300 a night with the free upgrade that suite might normally cost 600 per night so you're essentially doubling the value you of your free point stays plus free breakfast and free lounge access. So for a lot of people who travel, that card does make sense for dropshippers.

And because Hyatt Global is, Hyatt's top tier status is one of the best out of all the hotel top tier statuses. Yeah. Just like the way they treat you. Yeah. Late checkouts, free breakfast, free upgrades. Their lounges are amazing. Lounges are amazing. I was just in- Best properties. Some of the craziest, sickest properties. I just spent two weeks in a Hyatt, Grand Hyatt in southern Japan, a city called Fukuoka. And I treated the lounge like my co-working space.

So you could go there at any time during the day, have free drinks, free coffee. And then in the evening, there's alcoholic drinks, which I'm not drinking at the moment. But if you want it every evening, you can go have wine, you can go have whatever you want. Sobriety is the best. And then they have a buffet dinner every evening. And in Japan, the quality was incredible. They had sushi. They had sashimi. They had, it is a restaurant that you have free access to every single night.

So you don't have any expenses. Yeah. You don't have. Saves you on Starbucks. Saves you on breakfast. You're not paying for coffee. Lunch, dinner. You're not paying for breakfast. You're not paying for dinner. You can bring a date probably, right? You're not paying for hotels. If you're single, you can bring a date. You can bring anyone you want into the life. A friend. Yeah, exactly. Like a business colleague, whatever. Yes. So these are benefits that most people,

they just don't understand that they exist, one, and how valuable they are. Yeah.

Whereas for those two weeks, I mean, I had to force myself to leave the hotel and go eat amazing Japanese food. How many points was it per night for that? That was a crazy redemption. It ended up being... It was only 12,000 a night. Wow. Yeah. Really? Yeah. That is great. And I had the upgrade too. Gotta try to stay there. So that hotel right there, Hyatt Place, which is where I'm going after this conversation, is only 5,000 points per night.

Yeah. It's one of the last, I know it's 5,000 points of any program anywhere. Because even the old Hilton 5,000 points a night, most of them are 10,000 now. Yeah. Yes. So again, for listeners, there are credit cards that give you 108,000 points. So at that hotel, which we just showed you, one of those skyscraper buildings, you could stay there 21 nights for a single signup bonus. You could have a whole month in Bangkok. I was going to say almost a whole month.

Almost a whole month. Yeah. With free breakfast. Yeah. Because I don't think the Hyatt place has many upgrade options. I might. I checked the availability of the suite upgrade and I think it's taken, so I'm not going to get it.

But there's a pool so you call them and ask them no i looked at the availability oh okay so if it's available so you can just kind of tell that way as a but it might still be available it's just not listed for some reason right but i'm really not that picky you know like i'm already staying for free i'm just gonna go to coffee shops and work all the time i'm not really that bougie where i get upset if i don't get the the best suite upgrade but i usually do get it anyway as long

as you when you're at the front desk checking into your hotel and you have your high status just make sure you ask it doesn't hurt to ask like yeah can i do you have any really top tier suites let's see because sometimes on the app it tells you if you got the upgrade yeah so let's just check because i check in this afternoon because like if you don't ask most of the time they won't they won't do much they'll just put you in like the whatever and and if you ask in an early nice

way and you make friends with them then they're way more likely to actually put you in all the hotels if you have top tier status because the the receptionist doesn't know if you're gaming with points or if you've just paid and spent a lot of money with the hotel so for them you you are a high status customer because that's what it says on their screen they believe that you spend a lot of money and that they want to maintain your loyalty.

So if there is an opportunity to upgrade they want to give it to you because you are the guy you're the guy who deserves it so let me check and see it's good to have status, check into the hotel they give you a welcome drink blah blah blah depending on the hotel, There's something weird with my Wi-Fi right now. Yes, there's some really nice hotels here in Bangkok. I haven't stayed at the Park Hyatt yet though. I want to stay there. 25,000 points per night last time I checked.

And of course, it probably changes periodically, but maybe it's worth it. I don't know. What was the one I said? Oh yeah, Waldorf Astoria. It's the Hilton program. The free night certificates work there, but it's not really worth that much. It's like maybe 300 bucks a night I think normally. Right. I think because the Hilton certificates, they expire.

So if you're not using them, then it's like, all right, we'll figure out what we talked about earlier. That same free Hilton free night certificate you could redeem for a $300 night in Bangkok. Or a $5,000 night in the Maldives. So if you're really trying to maximize the value of your miles and points, you probably want to save it for a more expensive redemption. But if it's about to expire, then why not use it for that $300?

You got to be careful. I even made the stupid mistake of letting one expire by accident one time, and I felt so stupid.

In fact, I was even more stupid than I thought because I had actually used a more newer free nights certificate to book a stay, and that one expired and it was like the same week or something and i just wanted to slap myself because they're they're worth so much you know yeah and there's actually a hotel in bali now that's really nice that works for the free night certificates called the amana in uluwatu area i think i saw when

you stayed there it's super nice like a suite or it's your own villa you know so i was really impressed i was like that's great because then i can just do little staycations in bali like if you guys go out to bali definitely check out the amana it's part of the hilton program so yeah you had a private pool it was a villa you get your own villa private pool yeah It's like a $1,000 a night hotel or whatever. It's super sick.

We're so used to this that I would never spend $1,000 per night on a hotel. But I've stayed in so many. I can't even count. $1,000 plus per night hotels. Or free night certificates. And there's a bunch of them in Bali. Right. And most people will never stay in a $1,000 per night hotel. Even listeners, they might be listening to this like, what? That's insane. It sounds insane. But I've stayed in so many, I lost count because of the points. It's free.

So it really, all of this is such an up level to your life. And the money you save, you know, for business owners, reinvest in your business, buy some Bitcoin, buy some stocks. You just have excess money because you're saving so much money that you're not spending on flights and hotels. So whatever you want to do with your money, you're going to have more of it. And that's a good thing.

Yeah yep it's it's very very cool this lifestyle so you guys are interested go check out mile method mile method.com and instagram i'm really only active on instagram yeah i kind of cut and paste the same things on twitter but instagram is where i hang out so mile method instagram if you want to get in touch and i'm always just posting a bunch of examples so if you want to see what we're talking about you can see what my clients do what i do i always do room tours which is kind Kind of cool.

So if you want to see all the hotels that I stay at, I always do a room tour. I put the retail value and the point redemption. So you can see what these hotels look like and maybe plan your own trips based around some of those. Yeah, definitely. Cool guys. Well, thanks for being on the podcast. It was fun. See you guys.