Recap Week ending 8/2/26

I just flew 10 flights in 17 days including flying Qatar’s Qsuites, Qsuite Lite (on 787s), and the very outdated Qatar 2-2-2 minipod as well. I also had a flight on the tiny DHC6-400 Twin Otter, the first time I ever flew on a turbo prop plane!! Trip review hopefully coming soon including breakdown of how I booked it, total cost, and recommendations.

Anyways, back to reality!!

Don’t forget to potentially update if your payout method for Rakuten if you were getting paid out in Bilt points. Starting for this quarterly payout (around August 15), if you don’t have any Bilt status (Silver or higher), you will get half the payout rate and get 0.5 points per 1 cent ($10 cash back = 500 Bilt points).

If you were previously getting paid out in Amex points, you may want to switch it back so that $10 Rakuten cash back earned pays out as 1,000 Amex points instead of 500 Bilt points.

You can freely switch payout methods on both the Rakuten app in settings or on the desktop site.

If you still don’t use or have a Rakuten account, you really should. If you ever shop online, you are leaving free money/points on the table. Don’t know what Rakuten is? Rakuten is a shopping rewards site that lets you earn cashback (or Amex or Bilt points) whenever you begin your shopping trip through its website or app. New Rakuten members can get $50 (or up to 5k in points) with my referral link here.

Or, learn more about Rakuten on my blog post here.

Speaking of Bilt, apparently the transition from Bilt 1.0 to 2.0 still has some surprises! Some people on Reddit are reporting that Bilt has sent them to collections despite not having any outstanding or unpaid balances through Bilt cards. This seems to only be impacting people who had the Bilt card during their Evolve era. Ouch!!! Sarah Dye, from Travel on Points was also impacted and will likely be giving a play-by-play of her experience.

This is a great reminder to frequently check your credit reports to make sure you haven’t forgotten to pay off a card, checking for fraud, or if Bilt decides to surprise you!

You can check your credit reports for free on the Big 3 credit agencies (Equifax, Experian, Transunion). Some services will also alert you via email when there are changes to your credit (score goes up or down, new credit pull, etc.). Most are paid subscriptions but I know Capital One’s CreditWise is free and CreditKarma is also free.

It’s also good practice to have your credit across the three agencies frozen to prevent fraud, and then “thawing” them when applying for new credit.

There’s a hotel program called Leading Hotels of the World (LHW) that many boutique hotels around the world partner with. American Express has been ramping up their partnership with the program in the last year including offering American Express Platinum holders the ability to get LHW Sterling Status (details on LHW site here).

This status gets you:

Now, American Express points can now be transferred to the LHW program at a rate of 4 Amex points to 1 LHW point (4:1 ratio). Doesn’t sound great at first but you can book a LHW hotel for as low as 4,500 points (18k Amex points). Digging deeper, the average redemption rate is around 2 cents per point as the points redemption rates are sadly variable and tied to the actual cost of the room. Importantly, there can be high taxes/fees on a reward night with LHW in the $100+ range, hurting the redemption value. Oh, and you can’t use the pre-arrival upgrades for points stays either.

Still, more options are always good and 2cpp redemption rates are not bad for luxury hotels!

Fly on Austrian Airlines business class across multiple US cities to or through Vienna, Austria. Book for as low as ~69k miles through Avianca Lifemiles or 75k through Air Canada Aeroplan.