Sweet Spot: Bop around Europe for 4k points

Good morning and welcome back to Daily Drop!

We’ve got a good travel tip, a piece of news, and some fun reader survey results today, so let’s dive right in:

• 🍬 Sweet Spot: Fly around Europe for 4k points

• ☠️ Bilt drops another transfer partner

• 📊 Survey Results: Which seat do y’all prefer?

🍬 Sweet Spot: Fly around Europe for 4k points

We’ve received a lot of good feedback about highlighting points and miles sweet spots, so today, I thought I’d cover another one that will apply to MANY of you.

Flying around Europe used to be super cheap and easy, but that has changed a lot in recent years.

If you don’t want to get crammed like a sardine into a RyanAir or EasyJet flight (which is what I normally do), it can get pretty expensive.

Thankfully, there’s an easy sweet spot to help. And it comes from our friends at Virgin Atlantic.

Normally when we talk about Virgin, we talk about flying to Europe on an excellent airline, often with good award pricing and solid transfer bonuses.

But what you might not know is that you can also use Virgin Atlantic miles to book flights on KLM and Air France for as few as 4,000 miles on flights in Europe.

You’ll have to pay more in taxes and surcharges than you would for a U.S. domestic flight, but it can still be an excellent deal.

What’s better is that you can book the flight above in business class for just 8,000 miles.

What’s even better is that Virgin uses the starting and ending point of an itinerary to calculate the distance flown and, therefore, the award price.

For example, if you fly from Athens to Amsterdam on KLM, Virgin will charge 9,000 miles in economy. 👇

That’s already not a bad deal, especially considering it costs 16,500 miles when booking the same flight through KLM’s own program…

However, if you book the SAME flight on the SAME day but continue to Rome from Amsterdam, you’ll pay just 7,500 Virgin miles for BOTH flights.

Because Virgin prices the award based on starting in Athens and ending in Rome, you’ll pay fewer miles to fly further.

If you “accidentally” miss the second flight to Rome and just stay in Amsterdam, you will have saved 1,500 miles on that flight… just saying… 🤐

Another reason we love Virgin is that there are frequent transfer bonuses of 20-30% from various U.S. banks.

So, if you wait until a bonus like this rolls around, you could transfer some points over and be able to book tons of intra-European flights.

Those 4,000-point flights would cost just 3,000 points, and that 7,500-point flight would cost just 5,700 points.

So here’s the bottom line:

We spend a lot of time talking about the best ways to fly to and from Europe on the cheap.

This lesser-known sweet spot is a great way to save money flying around the continent on some awesome airlines once you’re there.

As a reminder, you can transfer points to Virgin Atlantic from the following programs:

• MR Points

• UR Points

• Capital One Miles

• ThankYou Points

• Bilt Rewards

If you want to rack up some quick points, here are a few cards that I just signed up for because of their excellent offers:

• 🏆 Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card

• 🤯 This business card (offering 120,000 points)

• 🍔 This card with some tasty new food credits to offset the annual fee

☠️ Bilt drops Hawaiian Airlines as a transfer partner

Well, this is awkward.

Because Bilt has sort of been on a downhill spiral recently with other less-than-ideal news… like completely devaluing their Rent Day spending starting in October 😬

And with continued 💩 news, Bilt just announced on X that they would be losing Hawaiian Airlines as a transfer partner.

Womp womp…

Wow, what a lucky coincidence for Bilt that their partnership ended the same day that news broke of the Hawaiian/Alaska merger moving forward. 😑

And yep, upon checking Bilt’s official list of transfer partners, Hawaiian Airlines is no longer there…

However…

Remember late last year when Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian announced they were planning to merge their programs?

It appears this is now actually happening for real… and there are plans to move forward… but also, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Bilt also pretty confidently stated that, given the pending merger, customers would be able to resume booking Hawaiian flights with Bilt points in the future because Alaska is also a transfer partner.

But there are still a lot of unknowns, like if Alaska and Hawaiian’s frequent flyer programs would truly and seamlessly combine into one.

But should you really care about this loss?

Honestly… Hawaiian was never that great of a transfer partner to Bilt—considering Bilt points themselves hold double the value that Hawaiian miles do.

But again, if you’re a fan of Bilt and you’re a loyalist to Hawaiian (or just really, really like flying to Hawaii with the airline), then yeah… this sucks.

Overall, it’s always a bummer to lose a transfer partner, and Bilt was especially sneaky and quiet when announcing this loss.

Plus, there was ZERO heads up about it 🤔

So… we’ll have to wait and see if the Alaska and Hawaiian merger comes to fruition, but for now, Bilt and Hawaiian’s partnership is dead. ☠️

📊 Survey Results: Which seat do y’all prefer?

Last week, I gave you a survey asking which type of seat you preferred to sit in (assuming there was no extra cost to do so).

The results were a little bit surprising… but not terribly so:

Personally, I’m an aisle guy like most of you.

I like the ability to get up and walk around, get things from my bag in the overhead bin, use the washroom, etc.

But I had assumed that the window seat would be the overwhelmingly popular option.

And who the hell chose “middle seat” as their preference??? There were TWENTY of you who chose that.

And no judgment, but that needs further explanation. So please write in and explain yourself.

Anyway, it’s always cool to see your opinions on these things. 😁

Oh, Delta… They’re like the dramatic friend who is over the top about everything, all the time.

And unfortunately, their program is a shell of what it’s been in the past… 🫠

BUT, I know many of you are still Delta loyalists and are sitting on a fat stack of Delta SkyMiles.

And even if you don’t have a ton of Delta miles, you might still be wondering how the heck to use them (and use them to your advantage).

So, in this week’s podcast, we’re gonna talk about how you can maximize those Delta SkyMiles and squeeze every cent of value out of ‘em 💪

You can listen along here or check it out on YouTube 🤗

That’s all for today, my friends. I’ve bombarded you with a lot of content today, so I’ll leave you alone…

…at least until tomorrow. 😉

Take care,

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