Frequent Miler origin story - Stephen's story | Coffee Break Ep63 | 7-15-25
Frequent Miler on the Air
Frequent Miler
4.9 • 640 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’ve been gradually telling the “origin stories” of each team member in Frequent mIler. Today, we’ll talk about how Stephen came to join Frequent Miler.
Frequent Miler origin story - Stephen's story
(01:04) - When did Stephen first get into the points and miles travel hobby?
(04:41) - Stephen remembers the stackable IHG promo codes
(05:39) - Stephen's wife helped him pull the trigger on some early credit cards like the US Airways credit card with a bonus after just one purchase
(07:54) - Stephen recalls his earliest credit cards (which he has noted in a spreadsheet, of course!)
(09:35) - In 2016, Stephen and his wife decided that (in two years), they would start a roadtrip to every state in the US. They prepared by piling up on hotel credit cards.
(11:30) - When did Stephen get into gift card reselling?
(14:29) - How did Stephen get involved with Frequent Miler?
(15:36) - Stephen remembers being excited that Frequent Miler had linked to his website! He was also very active in the Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group.
(16:51) - Stephen remembers being invited to write for Frequent Miler to help cover Nick's paternity leave. He wasn't sure it would cooperate with the roadtrip he was about to begin, but his wife helped encourage him to go for it! (A Frequent Miler author theme).
(18:23) - Nick talks about how he came to recommend Stephen as his paternity leave coverage. Stephen's useful posts in the Frequent Miler Insiders group made him the first person Nick thought of.
(19:62) - How did Stephen become the "king of stacking"?
(22:21) - Stephen talks about how his time at Frequent Miler has been.
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Music Credit – Beach Walk by Unicorn Heads
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at |
| 0:07.1 | voyescape.com. Welcome to Freakimilers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to |
| 0:15.6 | miles and points. And each coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or your money back. |
| 0:22.7 | On today's coffee break, we're going to be interviewing Stephen Pepper to learn his origin story. |
| 0:30.0 | Steven's been working with us for a number of years now as one of our primary authors. |
| 0:36.4 | And we want to dig into how he got started, |
| 0:40.1 | how he got started with points and miles and how he discovered frequent miler and what |
| 0:45.0 | ultimately led to him joining our team. Welcome, Stephen. Thank you. It's good to be here finally. |
| 0:50.9 | I'm excited to hear more of this because I feel like I know, obviously, I feel like I know you pretty well, but I don't actually know how you really got started. I know about your first ever points redemption because we wrote a post about that at some point, but I don't really know how you get started in points and miles and in the broader sense. So I'm curious to hear more about it. |
| 1:11.7 | Cool. |
| 1:12.6 | Glad to share. |
| 1:14.0 | All right, Stephen, let's just dig in. |
| 1:15.4 | Let's start from the beginning. |
| 1:21.7 | Like, when did you first start thinking about points and miles with respect to travel? |
| 1:28.3 | So like going back, I guess it's 20 years now or something like that. This was back when we were still living in the UK at the time. |
| 1:32.3 | I wasn't really into points of miles too much. |
| 1:34.3 | I had been collecting IHG points just because we had stayed at holiday in at one point, |
| 1:38.3 | and so that ended up kind of like becoming our default loyalty brand of choice |
| 1:43.3 | when we needed to stay somewhere. |
| 1:45.0 | But there wasn't kind of too much involvement in the points of Miles game, |
| 1:50.0 | although back then I was much more into grocery store points. |
| 1:54.0 | So over here, like Tesco and Stainsbury's were two of the biggest ones, |
... |
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