Battle of the $350 airline cards: AA, Delta, United (and Alaska) | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep344 | 2-6-26
Frequent Miler on the Air
Frequent Miler
4.9 • 640 Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2026
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, we'll take Hyatt on a mattress run, we'll answer "Is Tyler crazy for liking the Bilt Paladium card?", and Nick disagrees with our entire main event!
Giant Mailbag
(01:07) - Tyler disagrees with all the negative feedback that the Bilt program is getting
(06:01) - Read more about Greg's thoughts on Bilt changes here
Card News
(08:18) - Atmos Ascent ($95 card) offer
Learn more about the Atmos Ascent card here
(10:24) - Southwest consumer card offers: Companion Pass + bonus points
Learn more about the Southwest consumer card offers here
Mattress Running the Numbers
(13:08) - Hyatt's overlapping promos
Learn more about the Hyatt Bonus Journeys here
Learn more about the Hyatt House / Hyatt Studios promo here
Bonvoyed
(21:00) - Chase makes it harder to track Ink Business Cash® 5x spending
Learn more about this here
Awards, Points, and More
(22:09) - Capital One: 30% transfer bonus to Japan Airlines Mileage Bank
Learn more about the transfer bonus here: https://frequentmiler.com/30-transfer-bonus-from-capital-one-miles-to-japan-airlines-mileage-bank/
(25:26) - Citi is still allowing product changes between AAdvantage and ThankYou point cards
(29:03) - Rove "Built Better" promo
Main Event: Battle of the $350 airline cards: AA, Delta, United (and Alaska)
(32:40:09) - Comparing $350 airline cards: AA, Delta, United (and Alaska)
(35:33) - Earnings on spend
(40:25) - All offer standard airline card perks such as free checked bags, priority boarding, Global Entry/PreCheck
(41:57) - Lounge access
(42:55) - Elite status-related things
(48:12) - Companion tickets & flight discounts
(52:38) - Coupons and other stuff
(56:11) - Which "pays for itself" best without requiring much spend?
(59:52) - Which offers the best elite accelerators?
(1:01:08) - Which offers the best companion ticket?
(1:01:38) - Which is best for solo fliers?
(1:02:26) - Which offers the best earnings on spend
(1:04:44) - Which is the best of the best?
Question of the Week
(1:11:53) - Do you need to have 5 employees before you transfer miles with the Citi business AAdvantage card?
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Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie Yoder
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Voyescape podcast. |
| 0:03.9 | You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. |
| 0:10.8 | On today's show, we take Hyatt for a mattress run. |
| 0:14.3 | We answer, is Tyler Crazy for liking the built palladium card? |
| 0:18.7 | And I disagree with our entire main event. |
| 0:22.5 | Frequent Miller on the air starts now. |
| 0:26.8 | Today's main event, Battle of the $350 airline cards. American Airlines, Delta, and United, |
| 0:34.3 | all have $350 annual fee airline cards, and we're going to compare them head to head. |
| 0:41.3 | But we're also going to throw in the Alaska Summit card because that one's $3.95. |
| 0:46.5 | So it's sort of in that 350-ish, you know, ballpark. |
| 0:51.6 | And that's what we'll be exploring on today's main event. And if you want to jump |
| 0:55.1 | ahead to that or you want to come back to it later on to listen to parts of it again, remember, you can always find the timestamps in the show notes. Just expand the description box. If you're watching on YouTube, you've got to expand that. It's not intuitive as to where that is. And if you're listening on a podcast platform, you should be able to find it in there. Wherever you're watching or listening, speaking of that, don't forget to like this video. |
| 1:13.6 | Give us a thumbs up. |
| 1:14.5 | Leave us some stars, and leave us your comments with which of these cards makes the most sense for you. All right, let's drag out this week's giant mailback. All right. Today's giant mail comes from Tyler. Tyler says, I disagree with all the negative feedback that the built program is getting. |
| 1:29.3 | Here's my take. |
| 1:30.6 | The built palladium card gives you 2x points on everything, plus 4% built cash. |
| 1:36.7 | If you plan to spend 50,000 per year on the card, it appears to yield the following. |
| 1:42.0 | $50,000 times 2 equals 100,000 points. 4% built cash plus $200 |
| 1:49.0 | automatic annual cash is $2,200 in built cash you have every year. That's not even including |
| 1:56.1 | what you get with the sign-up bonus. The 1,000 of that built cash can be used to add 25,000 points to spend if used in the |
| 2:03.5 | right increments. |
| 2:04.5 | So he's talking about one of the built cash options is to redeem $500 in built cash in order |
... |
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