Goooood morning!
This is our first weekend round-up newsletter of 2025, so let’s get right to all the travel happenings from this past week 🙂
✅ Have you filled out our Daily Drop Annual Survey (and be entered to win 50,000 SAS miles from Mike)?!
✅ How do we earn so many darn UR points from a card like this one or this one?
✅ Aeroplan’s up to 100% bonus on purchased points could help you fly business class.
✅ Would you redeem Hyatt points for… American Airlines status?
✅ These were our readers’ most popular cards of 2024.
🏆 Favorite pick: Earn bonus Bilt Points without the Bilt Mastercard®
You’ve probably heard us mention the Bilt Card from time to time… You know, the card that lets you earn points for paying rent (up to 100,000 points per calendar year).
But we don’t often give Bilt’s loyalty program—Bilt Rewards—enough of the spotlight.
And that spotlight is well deserved because you can sign up for a FREE Bilt Rewards account and earn bonus Bilt points without ever having the actual Bilt card 🙌
It seems too good to be true, but as someone who has never had the Bilt card, I can attest to this!
In fact, creating a free Bilt Rewards account is perfect if:
You just don’t want another credit card right now
You aren’t a renter and can’t capitalize on that earning category
But Bilt points still hold a ton of value and have great transfer partners like Air Canada, Alaska Airlines, United Airlines, and World of Hyatt (just to name a few).
So how do you get these bonus points without the card??
Eat through Bilt Dining (potentially thousands of points here!)
Ride with Lyft
Play along on Bilt’s Rent Day (participate in games, trivia, etc. on the first of each month)
Plus more!
If you want more details on how to rake in the most bonus points through each of these categories, we wrote an entire article about it.
Creating that free Bilt Rewards account is honestly one of the easiest and fastest ways to start getting some Bilt points into your account, and little by little, you’ll have enough to make a future travel redemption (which is the whole point of everything we preach 😉).
🏃🏻♀️ Runner-Ups
🥇Our website got a brilliant makeover
Have you heard?! Or more importantly… have you SEEN our new homepage?!?
We’ve been working behind the scenes to create the most functional and well-rounded travel site that not only makes it easy for you to catch up on the latest newsletters, articles, or resources, but we’ve also created some new content for you… 👀
Ranked credit card pages
If you scroll down our homepage, you’ll see our brand-new Ranked Credit Cards section!
The level of organization for these pages is making my Type A personality just buzz with carefully thought-out, structured, and perfectionistic excitement 😍
Honestly though… these pages are great.
Want to search for a card-by-points program or perks offered? How about airlines and hotel chains?
Or what about searching based on annual fee amount, best for buying groceries, and SO MUCH MORE.
Daily Deal Alerts
Yeehaw! The deals keep coming.
I imagine you’ve heard of Daily Drop Pro by now… Well, we’ll be publishing Daily Deals to our Daily Drop homepage, coming straight from the source.
Within each Deal Alert, you’ll find the cost, route details, the points equivalent, recommendations on where to stay, and even how to proceed with booking this deal.
This is simply a means to provide a little more helpful travel info on the best deals that come through—if you feel like browsing, you can check out our Daily Deals here.
🥈 Delta status, three ways
A new year is upon us, and that means planning out all your travel and other strategies for the year (at least for me 🙂).
And one of those strategies is likely whether or not you’re going to go for elite status with a particular airline.
Oftentimes, earning elite status early on in a given year means you can reap the rewards for the rest of that year AND the year after that… So we’re looking at strategies to get the benefits of elite status through 2026 😏
I know many of you love Delta, like a lot. So we figured we’d start there.
Mike wrote a super informative section earlier this week about three ways you can earn elite status.
In short, they are:
The old-fashioned way by spending money to earn MQDs to unlock various tiers of status (and maybe even getting one of the airline’s co-branded cards to give you a head start)
Using status matching as an effective “shortcut”
By earning status with a different SkyTeam airline… intrigued?
I’m not going to regurgitate all of the nitty gritty here, but if unlocking elite status with Delta this year is of interest to you, check out this full breakdown.
📣 Quick Callouts
❌ Expired: Alaska and Hawaiian flash sales
🙂 Good to know: Here are some great ways to use SAS miles
🙌 Great: IHG’s new 2025 promo
And just like that, another week has come and gone. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and I’ll see you next time ❤️
