Frontier Status Match (And Re-Match) And Miles Posting From Deal Of The Year

Ed Pizza: Test out your microphone. Say something witty about Antonio Brown.

Richard Kerr: inaudible immediately call me after I did that 1-800 number, inaudible.

Ed Pizza: Please continue to enjoy.

Richard Kerr: Please to continue to enjoy the most valuable points from the market. I will, thank you very much, Claire.

Speaker 3: Climb aboard. This is the Miles to Go podcast, your source for the latest in travel news, reviews and strategies you can't afford to miss. And now, here's your host travel expert and road warrior, Ed Pizza.

Ed Pizza: Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Miles to Go podcast. Mere minute after landing from his flight on a family vacation, Mr. Kerr is back with us for the first show of 2022. Welcome back, Mr. Kerr.

Richard Kerr: Howdy. New destination I've ever been to before, we were super excited to check it out.

Ed Pizza: MCO. Oh, my gosh.

Richard Kerr: Only 34 flights there, I think in the last two years.

Ed Pizza: It would've been 54 if it hadn't been for this darn pandemic.

Richard Kerr: That's very true. Yeah, that was according to ... It was, I looked at it, swarm. Still checking on swarm every airport.

Ed Pizza: Yeah, I do too because it tracks to jet lovers, which I'm like five years behind on logging my stuff into something else. So if we can get right around to that this year, it's going to be a big year for getting caught up on travel maybe. But not in January because things are going sideways again with, oh, my god. It's like wildfire out there. I currently have four of our restaurants that are closed and a whole bunch of people testing positive on a daily basis.

Richard Kerr: I'm sure it would be that way here in Georgia, but nobody tests. So there's no tests and there's no problem, right?

Ed Pizza: See, and look, let's be clear. It's not like I'm hearing any serious cases with Omicron. I'm sure there are some but the vast majority of them are pretty simple. But then, there's all the stuff that you have to deal with, travel rules. I was having this conversation with our buddy Julian Keel last night on the phone and we were saying ... We were talking about March and should I be planning travel for March? And it's the whole like, I don't think that like I'm boosted and all that good stuff.
I don't think I'm going to get like super sick, but I also don't know if I'm going to get back into the country or get into the country I'm traveling to for something that's in the next 90 days. So it still got me thinking, there's still just a lot of risks if you're leaving the country and coming back.

Richard Kerr: One of my New Year resolutions is to be an advanced planner, something I never do. I would say since 2017, my average run up of booking before travel is somewhere around seven or eight days for every trip I've ever done. Just because I made too many plans that always got changed, I was tired of eating at that time. There's change fee for everything, cancellation, redeposit. I was like, "Forget it. I'm not booking anymore until it's time to travel."
So it causes a lot of stress in a lot of different areas being so last minute all the time, as well as paying more. So I'm trying to get ahead of it and talking with Emily, my wife down in Orlando, while we were chilling by the pool. She's like, "Well, that's fine. Let's go. Where do you want? Can we go somewhere for our anniversary? Can we go somewhere?" And I'm like, "We could, but I don't think grandma and grandpa would be very thrilled if we're like, we're extending our stay 10 days."
So we'll be traveling domestically again for now until we get to a point where we're not going to get stuck.

Ed Pizza: Yeah. At the end of the day, at least for me, it's just not worth the hassle. CDC is now saying that they don't recommend cruising for anyone. Again, it's not that I feel like I'm going to get super sick. I do feel like with the number of cases, you'd have a bunch of folks testing positive on pretty much any cruise right now. And I think it was the Disney Dream that we were looking at just a handful of days ago that was refused port entry at Saint Thomas because of positive COVID cases.
So it's like, you pay all that money for a cruise and then not get to go visit the destinations that are on the list because of somebody else's COVID.

Richard Kerr: I feel like we got lucky and timed our cruise just right about a month ago. Well, a little bit more than a month ago now. I don't know, man. So literally, when I was looking at a last minute trip for New Year's Eve, I was like, "Where can we go where we're not going to get stuck, that's going to probably be open with things to do that's going to be warm?" Orlando once again. There's just nowhere else. Just a quick hop from Atlanta that's going to be worth doing right now.
So we went and had a great time now at the rebranded Hilton Signia? Is that how you ... I never heard anybody say it, but Hilton Signia Bonnet Creek. And we can talk about that. But we got other things to talk about first.

Ed Pizza: Yeah. And that was the exact same Hilton that was there before with a cuter name.

Richard Kerr: It's the exact same. If you ask me what the Signia brand means, nothing. It looks just like a Hilton. It feels just like a Hilton. It costs just like a Hilton. There's nothing new about Signia. So good job putting sign up on the building there, folks, but nothing different besides that.

Ed Pizza: Full disclosure that when you announced what hotel you were going to for that trip, A, I had never heard of the brand before and B, a guy who spends a ton of time focusing on Disney had no idea that that was the same property.

Richard Kerr: Yeah. I don't know. Well, we'll recap the trip after we get through some AA SimplyMiles shenanigans and some other stuff.

Ed Pizza: Well, look at you in a podcast post. I like this, Mr. Producer. Well, yeah, but before we get to that, quick reminder for you guys, shoot us any questions that you have so we can answer them on a future show. You can email us, ed@pizzainmotion. You can call and text 571-293-6659. Those are in the show notes for you just in case you're driving. And lastly, you can always see us up on social media, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I am @pizzainmotion. He is @KerrPoints and a quick clarification from last week, we read off a question and I made an assumption that one of our listeners who spells her name L-E-A was Lee and it's actually Lea. She was nice enough to correct me. So now that we've got that out of the way.

Richard Kerr: Come on, man, I'm gone for one week and you're mispronouncing names? Geez, man-

Ed Pizza: ... left-hand turn every single week, man, every single week. But you're here for the left-hand turns this week. And you mentioned SimplyMiles. We've got some listener questions to get to as well, which we will. But boy, SimplyMiles, it's just been the topic of the past few weeks.
So quick recap for folks, if you were targeted for this offer, I was not, you could earn 240 miles per dollar that you donated to charity through American Airlines SimplyMiles platform. SimplyMiles is like another shopping portal, if you will. It's now one of these 7,456 things that I need to remember to check that I never check frequently enough. And Mr. Kerr, you got a little taste.

Richard Kerr: A little taste, yeah. This was one of these promotions that came out where I went, "Hmm, I don't think they meant to do that." And true to form, when those things happened over the last few years and not even the last few years, last five, six years, usually not honored. However, Gary left. Our buddy went out and got some quotes from American that said, "Yeah, this is going to be honored." They gave me enough confidence to say, "All right, I'll put 300 bucks in. And if I get 72,000 miles or a transatlantic business class flight for 300 bucks, then it's a day. If not, I'll still get the 40 base miles per dollar and I'll grow some trees for 300 bucks."
So yeah, it ended up being honored. I was like, "Well, I should have gotten a lot more of a taste than 300 bucks." But I'm thrilled with ... That's a score, that's a win and I didn't need 7 million miles, again, like our buddy Gary who went head over heels. And a lot of people I know did $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, $6,000. I got a couple million miles out of it.
So, kudos to American SimplyMiles MasterCard for making this happen. And it was a little dicey there. They showed up in the SimplyMiles account and then they went away, nothing showing the American. Some other people's miles started showing their SimplyMiles accounts. And then finally they showed up in my account, I think on the 30th at 3:00 AM in the morning, which sadly was not 2022 or else it would've counted towards status. But no jump start on status for me. But I'm very happy with 72,000 miles.

Ed Pizza: And we're always quick to point out when airlines and hotel programs do things that we don't like. I think there's a couple of things to really commend American Airlines here for. First off, clear communication to our fellow bloggers like Gary to say, "Hey, yes, this is going to be honored." I have no problem with them ending the promotion when they ended it. They gave really no notice, but they had said like this was a limited offer. It caught fire. Certainly, you and I strongly believe they did plan it this way and it just sort of happened.
And so then they quickly posted miles in people's accounts. And yes, it was probably because they didn't want to give a whole bunch of people's status for next year. But the reality of it was from a customer standpoint, you guys put money into this. American said, "Yep, we're going to honor it." There was no back and forth. Or at least I haven't heard any back and forth from anyone and your miles are in your account and we're talking two weeks later.
So we think of all the things the airlines do wrong and things that we criticize them for, they did this exactly right for something that they just never intended to be this way. They didn't string it out. They got all the miles posted and everybody seems to be happy.

Richard Kerr: Yeah. And some really good analysis again by Gary on who paid for this, why it's not really a needle mover as far as American or MasterCard is concerned. The charity did not take a bite out of this whatsoever, the way that it's worked around. So whoever was in charge of Conservation International, I hope they got a nice pay raise or a nice Christmas bonus or the holiday Christmas party, because man, they got a whole lot of money in just a couple days out of this promotion.

Ed Pizza: A lot of people were calling this the deal of the year. I'm going to go out on a limb and say, this will be the deal of the decade. We're not going to ... We very rarely see things like this anymore. We see good deals. We see mistakes that people make. But I'd argue that this is as good as buying like boxes of cereal and donating with charity or gold coins or pudding or tags for the crosstalk challenges.
This is up there in the Pantheon of probably top 10 deals I've ever seen. And congratulations to everybody that got on it.

Richard Kerr: It's like prepaying for travel for three years for five grand, right? In premium cabin travel for the people that did that. This was such a great deal, which leads to it is now the new year, which means the new way to qualify for American status is in effect, although there's no tracker under your American account yet. You do still have two months to qualify for this year's status off of last year's numbers, a little extension so you got kind of a double dip. And I was trying to clarify with Ed how that's working just before this.
I did a mileage run down to Orlando. So I flew Atlanta to Orlando via Miami to cap off the 2000 EQD promotion that I got targeted with to keep the executive platinum for another year, which is just absolutely fantastic. But if these had posted this year, it would've counted towards, I think it's 200,000 loyalty points you have to get for executive platinum. I have the American Advantage shopping portal up and have reminded my wife, anytime you're going to shop online, do it through the American Advantage portal because those also count for status, just the new things to keep on the top of your mind as we are into 2022.

Ed Pizza: And as you alluded to, for folks who are looking for American status, if you're on the edge and you hold one of the credit cards, there are opportunities to double dip in January and February. And the example that I have in front of me was I was targeted, well, not targeted. I think everybody has it.
If you have one of the Barclay cards, if you spent up to $50,000 in January and February, you can earn up to 15,000 loyalty points and EQDs. So this helps you earn status for '22 and also counts for status for 2023. And I imagine that the earning levels overall will go down once the dust settles in terms of what you can earn going forward.
But it's really making me think about pulling out my Barclay card on bonus spend for the next couple of months because I'll have United 1K this year. I have Delta Diamond and this could be a very unique year in that I need to go double check. I didn't even check this before I logged in, but I should be Aeroplan Super Elite at this point because I did my run up to Toronto.
And if I could pull it off and find a way to earn enough points and get American Airlines Executive Platinum, I could be top tier on four airlines at the same time, which is clearly something I'd never even gotten close to.

Richard Kerr: What do you do with all that status? If it's not flying internationally?

Ed Pizza: Yeah, exactly. What a great year to have all that status and not be able to use it pretty much anywhere. And right now, the number of flights getting canceled is insane. I have a trip this week to Nevada and I have some colleagues that are going with me. One of them already had his flight canceled preemptively. I have a couple of their colleagues I know that were flying United this week that had their flights canceled preemptively.
Our buddy, Summer, had a trip last week. And when I went to go look up her flight, she sent us a screenshot. There were seven or eight flights from her home city to her destination, and four of them were canceled. Hers actually ended up going, but it's crazy. And so I'm watching my plane for my flight this week and just sort of like waiting to see if something goes sideways.

Richard Kerr: Flying this morning, I got a couple Instagram DMs from people that said, "Ah, you're lucky. At least your plane is leaving. We're getting an extra day here in Miami and a couple other places courtesy of people canceling the flights on them." And when I started to see our flight was, well, about two hours before departure was delayed 30 minutes, but I saw the inbound flight came in fine, which leads me to believe crew. There's no crew for this flight. And sure enough, we were about an hour late leaving because they were trying to get crew in from somewhere else.
And I was like, "Oh, man, that's just ..." You never know right now over the holidays with ... Or rather ambitious schedule and no crew because of sick days and all the stuff that they've got going on there. It's a wild time really.

Ed Pizza: It is. And you got to love Scott Kirby throwing shade back in October saying, "Hey, all these other airlines are having problems. You guys can confidently book with us because we took a unique approach to staffing our airline during a pandemic." And now they're, I wouldn't say by far, because gosh, by of the time we record this, it could be someone else that's melting down. But so far they are head and shoulders above everybody else with cancellations.

Richard Kerr: Yeah, having a really hard time. Some countries having a really hard time. If you live up there in Minneapolis, that's not seen very much good things there, but also Delta has had a lot of struggles. American was going well. It seems like the bug has finally caught up to American now over the last couple days. And they've started to have some cancellations.
But yeah, man. And that's the other thing, I'm booking Frontier flights for January right now because they're incredibly inexpensive. My daughter and I are going to fly back to Orlando because of this daddy-daughter trip. Daddy-daughter trip time, and of course you asked her, where did she want to go? She wants to go to Disney World. We didn't do Disney this weekend. So we're going to go do that.
But it's like 30 bucks per person round trip. And everybody's like, "Ah, but you're not going to get there." I'm like, "You're not going to get anywhere right now on anybody." So there's no advantage to booking a mainline carrier versus a low cost carrier right now. So I'm happy to give Frontier the chance to make it happen for us.

Ed Pizza: Yeah, and I do want to talk about Frontier and Southwest for a second, but I just want to rewind to that one little comment. Let me just make sure I get the wording right. We did not go to Disney this weekend.

Richard Kerr: Yeah, we didn't.

Ed Pizza: We, we. We did not. In other words, your family did not go.

Richard Kerr: Did not.

Ed Pizza: But just out of curiosity, did anyone in the family go?

Richard Kerr: I did go in the Hollywood Studios for about 30 minutes on New Year's Eve. So we all went to go ride the Skyliner because that's a cool free activity. And we actually took it to Pop Century to go playing the Pop Century Arcade because arcade at the Hilton Signia was a joke, quite frankly.
So while they were playing in the arcade, I decided to dip in. I've always wanted to see what a holiday crowd was like in Disney to see if I can grab a couple of rides, see what was going on. And I'll just say on what was a very light holiday crowd considering the way things had been over Christmas and New Year's over past years, nothing like, at least from what I saw this year, maybe you saw something different and even talking to a few cast members are like, "It's been nothing like previous has been ..."
But without Genie Plus, you still were not ... I couldn't ride a single thing. I walked in, looked around, looked at the map, tried to make a few things happen, chatting with cast members. And it was like, "Nope, I'm not going to get anything done here." So right back out, took the car out of Hollywood Studios, drove it over to Pop Century, put the family up. And that was the Disney for the weekend.

Ed Pizza: And on Frontier and Southwest, I can't comment on Frontier specifically because I haven't had any flights on them in quite some time. And we are going to talk about them a little bit more here in just a second. But Southwest, I fly them back and forth between Reno and Las Vegas. And I have a couple of folks on my team who rely on Southwest because they're in places like Denver.
And the thing that I've noticed with Southwest schedules is most of their early morning and late evening departures on the city pairs that I've looked at are gone. So if you want a 7:00 AM to Las Vegas, that's not there every day. If you want anything later than a 5:00 PM departure from Reno to Las Vegas, not there anymore. And there used to be like a 7:00 PM, and a 9:00 PM.
So their schedule seems lighter overall and they're avoiding the early and the late flights. And my guess is that that's probably intentional. And it's probably why we're not having a conversation about Southwest meltdown on over the holidays right now. They chose a much smarter way to build their schedule.

Richard Kerr: I don't know. I really have not looked at Southwest in a long time here out of Atlanta. They have quite a robust network.

Ed Pizza: And the old AirTran network.

Richard Kerr: You want to know why? It really is. This is going to sound a lot silly to some people, but their fares still do not show up on aggregators like Google Flights. Google Flights is my life and it always throws it out there and says, "Hey, there's a Southwest flight. We don't know the price, one another thing." I forget about it. Like if I needed to check bags and whatnot, I would do it. But between the Spirit, Frontier, Delta and American network, I just have not found the need to go to Southwest.
And oh, by the way, out of Atlanta, if you go to the Delta website and search your route and you go to the Southwest website and search your route, they are the exact same price almost all the time. I think a couple years ago, when that was the case in the few times over the last year, year and a half, I've looked at it, it's the exact same price as Delta.
I'm trying to think of what the advantage is. I get free check bags. There is a backup flight on Delta, 30 minutes later wherever I'm going. So I don't know why I would book Southwest over Delta at this point, if it's the same price.
So I really don't even consider Southwest anymore and maybe I need to, but it's just every time I get those fare email deals three times a week and you can filter it by departure city, there's no deals out of Atlanta. So it's kind of like, I don't know, not sure what their strategy is here, but certainly hasn't won me over.

Ed Pizza: And for those of you paying attention at home, you'll know that Mr. Kerr hid a little Easter egg in that sentence for you because he was talking about the advantage of booking Southwest over Delta. When in reality, he is using the American Airlines Advantage program out of Atlanta right now and not booking Delta either.

Richard Kerr: The most out of anybody. I did fly Delta today on the nonstop home.

Ed Pizza: 5,000 miles?

Richard Kerr: No, it was more than that because it was the Sunday after the holiday weekend when everybody was flying home and the Orlando airport this morning was an absolute zoo. And then the Delta baggage check belt broke. And that caused a really long check-in line. And I was traveling with car seats because we had a rental car. So I had to check them. That's why we got there early. A bit of a dumpster fire this morning, but it was fine. So, yeah, I don't know.

Ed Pizza: Yeah, we were down in Florida visiting family for a few days and we flew back midweek, which is traditionally a very slow time for flights. Like the 26th is generally speaking a heavy travel day. But then until you get to that last weekend before school goes back, generally slower travel days, and our United flight left disgustingly early in the morning, seven o'clock in the morning. On a United 737, there were two other parties in economy plus, that was it. And there were lots of empty seats in coach, and we still got charged 18,000 miles one way per seat for a flight that went out, had to be less than 50% load, which is just disappointing.
And I love the way that Delta does that, where they offer these 5,000 mile seats at certain times. I very rarely see that on United anymore. And this was a classic example of a flight where it really should have been lower than 18,100 points per seat on a flight that probably had 60 or 70 passengers out of 160 seats.

Richard Kerr: Yeah, I booked ... Today's flight was on 767, which is awesome. They fly that between Atlanta and Orlando. Atlanta to Orlando is Delta's most trafficked route of their entire route network. I didn't know that they fly the most passengers, Atlanta to Orlando and back of any route Delta flies. There's a flight every 30 minutes and they had 757s or seven 767s. I paid 14,000 sky miles per person about five days ago, which I thought for the Sunday after New Year's when everybody is trying to get home, I was like, "That's reasonable. That's fine. I'll pay that." It worked out.

Ed Pizza: So let's talk Frontier for a second. Frontier, we talked about this last year. Frontier had an incredible status match program last year, where you could pay a fee, unfortunately. You had to pay a fee, but you could status match to their different tiers. And if you had a high level status with someone else, you could match to their top tier. And both you and I took advantage of that and matched.
And you actually got a lot more use out of it than I did because shortly after they did the status match, they discontinued or they reduced the frequency on Dallas-Orlando, which is obviously one of the routes that I would use the most frequently for and have almost completely pulled out of Dallas at this point. But you got really good use out of the status because of all the freebies that you get with what they call The Works package, which comes free.

Richard Kerr: Yeah. It's free seat, free check bag, free carry-on and flexibility. You can do a change with no fee besides fair difference, which is huge for a low cost carrier. So I do that with the family a few times, again Atlanta to Orlando. I flew him somewhere else this year but literally just off, I think, three round trips. I mean cash moneyed man, it's like it came out hundreds of dollars ahead.
And when you're traveling with the kids, they got to have the little backpack for the carry-on because you got to have snacks and water because you never know what's going to happen with what was sitting on the tarmac and then checking the bag for the kids. It was just great. So, wish I could have used it more, but again, COVID slowed us down for 2021 travel plans.
But I was hoping they would re-up it. They came out pretty strong beginning of December and said we're going to match again for anybody. I think it was $49 including hotel status for about a week there, you can match to their top tier. And they said, we kept getting kind of hints in the background because those of us who did it last year thought this was awesome. We were like, "What can I do? Can I rematch again? I'm executive platinum. Again, can I rematch the 100K Frontier?" And they kind of said, "Check your inbox. Wait, we got something coming."
Eventually, you got an offer that said, "Hey, rematch again for $149 this time around." I never got anything. Even though I got the original one that said, "Hey, match your status," I wrote back to support. Just run by statusmatch.com, a third party service that's trying to do great things in the status match world. They said, "Sorry, you're not eligible, but keep your eye on your inbox."
I never got anything. So you got offer for $149 to rematch again. When I went to the website and entered my credentials, it said, just do the regular match for 49 bucks. And I did this while we were trying to record the podcast. So I was a little bit skeptical because I was like, I don't think this is going to work. But it seemed an automated process where it checked your credentials and sure enough, I logged in this morning looking to book my daughter on this flight and it says I'm a 100K until December 31st, 2022 again, so sweet.
And to their credit because of that, we're going to fly them to Orlando in a couple weeks instead of Delta. So they got my business that they would not have otherwise gotten.

Ed Pizza: Yeah. And so I was really torn about this, and I pulled the link up a couple of times, sort of fiddled around. And then I finally did go ahead and hit the button. And it was before Omicron really started to ramp up like crazy. And so now, I'm sort of regretting hit the button because I don't know what's going to happen yet, how long it's going to take for things to calm down.
But I did hit the button on the 149. I justified that as with the family of four, it would take one trip to pay for itself, easy. And I haven't figured out where, so I got to find one trip. But the thing with Frontier, I love what they're doing with Elite status and how they're taking care of folks and all that stuff. But their route network is ever changing. And so it's a little bit of a moving target to figure out when we're going to be able to fly them.
But I'll definitely say this. With discount then where kids fly free on a certain list of days and then being able to cover bag fees and all that stuff, I'm not going to use them for work until they have wifi except maybe on a super short flight. But yeah, I definitely paused at 149 because it meant I really need ... At 49 bucks, it's like, all right, well, I won't feel horrible if I don't end up flying them this year. It was worth giving it a shot.
At 150 bucks, that's why that's a a lot of dough. But I still felt like it was worth a try. And so I paid for it and oddly enough, I don't have status yet. I did get a confirmation that my application was accepted. They did take my money, but I don't have status yet. And you do, which I think is hilarious.

Richard Kerr: I don't know. I maybe I found the glitch in the matrix, I'm not sure. But if you're listening, anybody, frontierstatusmatch.com. I will put this to use to fly Frontier. Whereas if I did not have the status, I'll be honest, maybe I would fly on once or twice but probably not. But having this work status, and again, the flexibility, so actually just using it now.
A couple weeks ago, I thought my daughter and I were going to go a little bit earlier in January. Now, I need to push it back. I can cancel the ticket, retain the credit of that ticket, use it for the new itinerary that we're going to fly. And that's because of the 100K Elite status, like it's just amazing. Only pro tip I would add here is if you do have an Amex Platinum card, you can change your $200 incidental credit to Frontier and you can pay the 149 bucks or the 49 bucks and get that rebate if you do want to use it that way to do the status match.
So, if you got an Amex credits lying around, which all of us do because it's only January 2nd, everything's reset, you should be able to cover that fee for yourself. Ed, you know the newest Atlanta Frontier route that I'm excited about I might have to try?

Ed Pizza: I can't wait.

Richard Kerr: You're never going to guess it. It's Atlanta to Trenton, New Jersey, TTN. You can fly.

Ed Pizza: I know where Trenton is. I drove by it so many times over the years living up there and I've still never flown into that airport.

Richard Kerr: I don't know why we would fly to Trenton, but maybe we want to check out Philadelphia or something. It's not too far away from there, is it?

Ed Pizza: I almost want to come down there and do that flight with you just so I can get that dot and that line. But the problem with Trenton is, it's really ... It's kind of close to Philly. It's kind of close to New York, but it's not close to either one really. So, I don't know. Again, this goes back to, at least Frontier flies into Orlando as opposed to flying into Sanford. Trenton to me is Sanford, it's 45 minutes. Sanford is 45 minutes from Orlando. And I would say off the top of my head, Trenton airport is probably more than 45 to New York proper and probably a half an hour to Philly.
So it's not horrible. This comes back to, they can fill that plane at 50 bucks a seat because people want to go to that area and they're willing to pay that price. It was like back in the day, I think they even still fly out there a bunch. Spirit used to really hit it hard out of Atlantic City. That was an airport where they used to get a bunch of Philadelphia, call it just shy of an hour from Philadelphia to Atlantic City. And then a bunch of people up and down the Jersey shore would fly out of Atlantic City. So it's not too different than that.

Richard Kerr: You can do Atlanta to Atlantic City on Spirit during the summer now. But you can also do Atlanta to LaGuardia on Frontier. So if family needs to go to New York and our schedule is flexible enough because I'm pretty sure it was a super early morning late flight, the whole family probably could fly to New York City for well under a hundred bucks including all of the seats, the bags and everything. So, it's pretty cool.

Ed Pizza: Yeah. For family travel, it's really hard to beat the way Frontier has The Works going. So if you have anything that qualifies you to be able to match The Works, it's a no brainer at $49, which is still going on, I believe. If you have a trip you know you're going to take, I think it's still worth it at a rematch for $149. But I think you got to have a little bit more comfort if that's what you're going to do.
A couple quick things before we run out of time here. First, a clarification from last week. And this does sound familiar to me that I couldn't find confirmation on it in Terms and Conditions. We talked about the Hilton status match offer that's out there right now, really easy path to Gold or Diamond status with Hilton. But somebody pointed out online that ... And I apologize, I don't have it in front of me who so I'll just put it in the show notes. Thank you for pointing it out.
If you already have status with Hilton, you're not allowed to status match to a higher level. So if you're Hilton Gold, you can't status match your Hyatt Globalist to Hilton Diamond. You have to have absolutely no status with Hilton, which a lot of folks have Hilton status based on either some credit card or partnership or stuff like that.
Just word to folks out there, if you're trying to hit the status match opportunity, you need to have absolutely nothing with Hilton is what our belief is although I can't find details on that. I did reach out to somebody at Hilton to have them clarify that for us, but I didn't want people to get started on this in January and not have at least that little bit of warning. If we get official clarification from Hilton on that, I'll include that in the show notes or we'll talk about it next week when Mr. Kerr and I are back here staring at each other.

Richard Kerr: Speaking of Hilton, let me give everybody a brief overview of the Hilton Signia, brand new brand, Hilton, and what we-

Ed Pizza: I think you already did before.

Richard Kerr: Yeah, I thought so. We'd get to it later. Anyway, book connecting rooms, use two free night certs expiring from Hilton Aspire card.

Ed Pizza: And tell me before you get too deep, tell me the connecting room piece on Hilton from a technology standpoint. Does it work awesome?

Richard Kerr: Yeah, it does.

Ed Pizza: That's a really good piece of tech.

Richard Kerr: Yeah, it's really cool. The problem, of course, is then it also encourages you to pay for two rooms either with cash or points. So, I did. So the Hilton Signia, it's in the Bonnet Creek area which is a pretty convenient place to stay if you want to do all the Orlando stuff, does have quite a few amenities. But what I'll say overall is ... I kept using the phrase and I'm going to use it. It's the cesspool of mediocrity. It's not bad, it's not good. It's perfectly adequate, use free night certs and use points for two free connecting rooms that did waive the resort fee. It did not waive the parking fee. You're going to have a rental car if you stayed out on the Bonnet Creek area and you want to do anything.
But things were just always so-so. First of all, the $12-credit instead of free breakfast is offensive there because a breakfast buffet is $28 before tip per person. So, breakfast for four is running way more than $24.

Ed Pizza: Ouch.

Richard Kerr: So the prices there were even worse than Disney prices for food. And the food quality was very poor. Just things-

Ed Pizza: ... in all those characters, right? You had a nice character going?

Richard Kerr: Nothing.

Ed Pizza: No?

Richard Kerr: Nothing like that over there.

Ed Pizza: 30 bucks and no characters, huh?

Richard Kerr: The equipment and the amenities were just kind of just like ... Somebody just needed to care a little bit. They have a lazy river but there's like 12 floats for 185 guests. At all times, people were hawking pool floats. They weren't even really all that inflated. Somebody just needed to stick an air hose on all of them. One of the pelotons was broken.
The staff, anytime you ask them questions, didn't really know. It was just perfectly adequate for a weekend away as well, I'll say it. And it's never going to be back there. The Waldorf is attached to it next door. You can use all their facilities, which for a family not really much going on. For a family over at the Waldorf right now, kids club was closed. It was just perfectly satisfactory. Amy and Emily was like ... If they give a scale of zero to five, everything here would be a three, a three across the board, like meets expectations.
But I have no idea what the Signia brand is supposed to stand for. It felt and acted just like a standard Hilton. Really wish they would kind of clean things up. They're really on the edge of needing to reline that pool. It's so rough and old and spaces. And everybody was kind of looking at each other, like your feet were pretty torn up after going around and playing in the pool and throwing the football with my kids.
Did have water slide that was cool, but perfectly adequate. But I don't think it would be the top of my recommendation list. However, the connecting rooms was really great, didn't have to worry about a suite upgrade and all that stuff.
So in the end, great use of, that was the certs. And I had the $250 resort credit for my Aspire card, which is perfect because January 7th, five days after we record this, this is the 30-day mark where you have to cancel a card with Amex or you're liable for the whole annual fee. So that charge will post, be wiped away. And then I'll be closing the Amex Hilton Aspire card for this year because I stayed at Hilton once last year and once over New Year's and that's going to continue based on this previous day.

Ed Pizza: Yeah. And I'd say two things just for perspective for folks. One of our favorite breakfasts down at Disney World is Chef Mickey's, which is located at the Contemporary. It's a buffet. There's a musical performance where the characters come out, Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy come out during your breakfast. They come around and sign autographs. So for kids, it's a great meal.
And from a food quality standpoint for the parents, it is the least worst buffet that I've had at Disney World. It's actually decent. Again, it's not like over the top awesome but it's a decent meal. They usually have a carving station of like a ham or something like that or a brisket, all the breakfast stuff. We've never done dinner there. I've heard good things about the dinner too, but just for perspective, I looked it up while you and I were talking, it's 35 bucks for that buffet. So, for 7 bucks more, you get a better food. You get characters. You get the monorail whizzing by your table while you're eating lots of cool things there. So perspective wise, 28 bucks for that breakfast is a killer.
But I will say that the one upside to Hilton Bonnet Creek that you did not touch on, is and it still does qualify for the very small pile of benefits that are left for "onsite" Disney properties in that you can get early theme park entry if you stay at the Hilton Bonnet Creek or the Signia Hilton Orlando Bonnet Creek. And that means that you can get into each of the parks 30 minutes early, which is really key for being able to ride some of the big rides without having to pay for Genie Plus or Lightning Lane and/or getting a head start on some other stuff and then jumping into Junior Lightning Lane after.
So as you say, perfectly adequate property, but I wouldn't sleep on the ability to get early theme park entry there and be able to redeem your points to get early theme park entry for what that's worth.

Richard Kerr: Yeah. And it does have the advantage of you redeem points there for those. There is no resort fee versus redeeming points at the Swolphin, Swan or Dolphin. You're still going to be able to hook through resort fee.

Ed Pizza: That would be the Swolphin Reserve because remember there's three now. They had a baby.

Richard Kerr: Just don't stay the Swan Reserve. Just don't do it.

Ed Pizza: Yeah. Don't stay at the Swan Reserve. There is beautiful rooms but if you have kids, there's not a whole lot of Disney thing. But that's for another day. We do have one listener question before we run out of time. Josh wrote in to ask about a large credit that he has with Delta that he needs to burn up.
And so it was a two-part question. The first was, where should he go which, boy, we have a lot of fun with that one. But then he had a followup question after we talked a little bit more and he was asking about whether the Delta One suite was better than Air France business class. And that was like ... When I think about what you and I do on a weekly basis here, when I think about when I write on my blog and we talked to people, this is where I think we really help people make better decisions because by and large, Air France business class on a lot of their planes is still a slanted business class seat. They do have some live flat, but not much of it. And quite frankly, it's a significantly inferior product to Delta One, right?

Richard Kerr: Oh yeah, and three across in the middle. So you could be in an angle flat and having to crawl over folks if you're flying overnight when they're asleep. So, Delta One all the way over Air France business class.

Ed Pizza: Yeah. I remember when it was slanted business class seats four across on United back in the day.

Richard Kerr: I flew that to Japan several times. Never did it unless Emily or one of the kids was next to me because I'm not crawling over anybody in business class. And that's the snootiest thing you'll ever hear me say.

Ed Pizza: I got that. But so definitely, we like Delta One on any number of routes better than we like Air France. I guess when you're thinking about high level, I have an answer for him that I gave him but I'm curious where you'd be targeting a large Delta credit right now, where you'd be thinking about trying to burn it?

Richard Kerr: Where I would be burning a credit?

Ed Pizza: Where would you be traveling with a large Delta credit?

Richard Kerr: Oh, man. Orlando. They fly wide bodies there. I'm just not going overseas right now, man, because I'm not getting stuck. I might be willing to do something down in Bahamas or Mexico because you can get back from there. But besides that, I don't know. Whatever is a necessary ticket, I would be looking to burn it.
When it comes to credits overall, I don't ever save them up for anything. It's like I got to pay for the next flight? Okay, I'll use some of that credit because it's not use or lose it all on one ticket. I just did that for this Orlando thing like, all right, I got to get a ticket from Orlando suite. I got 200 bucks in credit from some canceled thing. There you go, let's just book it up.

Ed Pizza: For me, I would say where I've been seeing some of the cheapest fares on Delta is when they're starting or restarting routes like JFK-Sao Paulo and stuff like that. There were some really, really low prices when they relaunched that. So I think if you're looking for a place to focus on, Josh, I've been looking for routes that they announce or relaunch because those seem to be soft on price. And Delta doesn't seem to be afraid to drop some of the prices on those premium seats here and there.

Richard Kerr: Also that means never out of Atlanta. There are no good Delta fares out of Atlanta.

Ed Pizza: That's true. Thankfully, he's based on the West Coast where there is less of a Delta presence. So, he can find his connecting, maybe in the middle of Seattle, little Seattle over to Asia sort of thing going on there because you know how much Delta likes to compete in Seattle with their old frenemy, Alaska Airlines.

Richard Kerr: Seattle is like Seattle and Austin. Although Austin is becoming more and more defined for big boys but I like that Seattle continues to be the no man's land and everybody competes as hard as they can. So I wish that was the case back in the days that we were in Seattle for three years, right, when I was kind of starting points of miles and there was no such fierce competition back then, sadly.

Ed Pizza: Yeah. Well, I see you disappeared for a week and we end up going long here, 40 minutes of Richard and Ed for people to enjoy this week.

Richard Kerr: Got a lot more to talk about from this trip. We had lovely Disney meal last night, all kinds of stuff to talk about.

Ed Pizza: Yeah, I know we still had stuff left on the board, but we'll have to cover that stuff next week. As a quick aside, just want to say a quick thank you to Jeremiah every week for helping us sound great from a production standpoint. He puts up with all the cheesy audio that Mr. Kerr manages to squeeze into that microphone and still make you sound presentable.

Richard Kerr: He's quite a talent. Hats off to you, Jeremiah. Not many people can do that except ... Yep, nobody can actually.

Ed Pizza: Yeah. And I still can't make you look good, but whatever. I can make you pretty with enough Coors Light.

Richard Kerr: Fair enough.

Ed Pizza: All right, man. Are you on the ground this week or are you heading anywhere?

Richard Kerr: On the ground this week, probably in New York the following week, Orlando the following week, and then Savannah. So, three different destinations for January lined up.

Ed Pizza: All right. Well, I am tentatively doing Reno and Vegas this week. I did bail on CES. Didn't think standing inside a large convention center, a.k.a. Petri dish sounded like a good idea to me. So, I bailed on that. But I'm going to check on all of our restaurants and spend some time with the folks if things don't get too crazy over the next handful of days here. We'll see.

Richard Kerr: Enjoy Resorts World.

Ed Pizza: No, I am staying outside of town. As much as I like Resorts World, the closest upscale property to the CES convention center is just a bad idea. Nope, I'll be staying outside of town, just playing it safe for right now, just trying to keep from ending up locked in a hotel room somewhere for two weeks.

Richard Kerr: Heard that. Adios amigo.

Ed Pizza: All right, man, safe travels. We'll talk soon.