Award Travel Updates: Alaska, Avios, Citi & Bilt Changes Explained!

Season 3 Timeline And Why Updates

Season 3 of this podcast has been more drawn out than I expected, and I ended with the episodes coming out over the course of more than a year. I try to make podcast information and episodes as enduring as possible, but Points News moves fast sometimes, and in this final season three episode, I want to go through any significant changes that have happened since I recorded initial episodes covering these topics. Welcome back to Points for Normal People. I'm Katie and I'm here because I know that travel costs add up, especially for a family. But I believe that travel isn't just for the rich. That's why on Points for Normal People, I share the tips and tricks that my family has been using for over a decade to help you use your everyday expenses and credit card welcome offers to supercharge your travel points so that you can pay for entire vacations every year. Season three has been a long one. Episode one dropped in March of 2025, and I'm recording this final episode in May 2026. Now, most of what I taught in season three is still true. The principles of how award charts work, the idea that partner airlines can give you sweet spots, these haven't gone anywhere. But some of the specific numbers and the specific programs being classified as sweet spots have shifted. Throughout the year, the best way to stay up to date is to be on my newsletter list. All of these changes have already been mentioned in the newsletter and also updated in any relevant articles on my blog. We also always try to update show notes if any info changes after publishing an episode. So if you're listening and want to make sure the podcast is still up to date, be sure to look at the show notes after you listen. As I always say, there are no crises in Miles and Points, and none of these changes are devastating. They're more like shifts to be aware of. The first shift is the official merger of Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines. When I recorded episodes on those airlines a year ago, the Alaska Hawaiian merger had just been approved, and we were waiting to see exactly what would happen with the rewards program. On August 20th, 2025, Alaska and Hawaiian officially launched a brand new combined loyalty program that's called Atmos Rewards. That replaced Alaska Mileage Plan, and in October, Hawaiian Miles fully also transitioned into Atmos Rewards as well. So now all your Alaska Miles and Hawaiian Miles are now Atmos Rewards. It took a little longer for Hawaiian to officially become a member of the One World Alliance, and that just happened in April 2026. So Alaska was already a One World member, and now Hawaiian is officially as well. Even before this addition of Hawaiian to the One World Alliance, you could use Hawaiian miles effectively to book onto OneWorld partner flights after the merger because you could first move them to Alaska and then book on a OneWorld partner flight that way. And now all those points are combined anyway. But now the reverse is finally true as well. So you can use miles from One World Partner Airlines to book Hawaiian flights. In episode 7, I talked about using Thin Air Avios and Cutter Avios to book Alaska flights. So now you can do that same thing with Hawaiian Airlines flights as well. Before Hawaiian officially became part of the One World Alliance, if you wanted to book a Hawaiian Airlines flight with points, you basically needed Hawaiian miles or for a window of time jet blue points. But that ended back in June 2025 as well. Now you have a much easier path to do this because these can be booked with Avios, and every major bank transfers to an Avios carrier. Now, unfortunately, another shift is that FinAir isn't quite the sweet spot it was a year ago for Alaska Airlines booking. And this is another change to be aware of. Now it does remain unchanged for American Airlines. Episodes four and seven talked a lot about FinAir Avios' sweet spot for domestic award booking. So at the time I recorded that, FinAir charged just 11,000 Avios for any economy flight on Alaska within the continental US. Flights to Hawaii cost just 12,500 miles on Alaska Airlines. But earlier this year, when FinAir created a new award chart for both Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines together, they also increased pricing on these routes. Now for flights on Alaska Airlines or Hawaiian Airlines booked via FinAir, you'll pay 17,500 Avios for trips within the continental US and 19,500 to go to Hawaii from most of the US. And they added another pricing band from the East Coast to Hawaii, so that now costs 28,500 Avios. Now, for longer flights within the continental US, this still isn't horrible, especially if you can take advantage of a transfer bonus when you move points over to Avios. I'd say it's about average pricing. So it's no longer really a sweet spot. The pricing on flights to and from Hawaii for most of the US is still actually better than what you'll usually find, even booking directly with Alaska. So I'd still call that a sweet spot, even though prices went up by 7,000 Avios for those routes. Especially considering that Avios are generally easier to come by than Outmost Rewards points. But if you're on the East Coast, that's a really big hike on the flights to and from Hawaii. And I wouldn't necessarily call those routes a sweet spot anymore. Again, sometimes it still might make sense, especially if you already have those points or if you've got a transfer bonus, but it's not necessarily a sweet spot. Now the chart for using FinAir Avios to book onto American Airlines actually remained the same. And that means there's actually a bigger differentiation now, especially on those flights to and from Hawaii. American is even more of a sweet spot in comparison. So American Airlines flights within the continental US always cost more than flights from North America to Hawaii for some reason on this Finair award chart. So American Airlines from the Continental US to Hawaii is just 15,000 Avios each way in economy. And the flights within North America are 16,500. That 15,000 Avios to Hawaii is still a really nice rate, especially for East Coast travelers, but really for anywhere in North America. The 16,500 price within the continental US isn't great, but again might work out if you got a transfer bonus moving miles over to Avios, or if you're able to use it for a high-priced route. Overall, you just need to know that if you were trying to book onto American, Alaska, or Hawaiian, and don't have any American miles or at most rewards, you still have options on how to book this with points. Often this will boil down to a decision between Cutter Avios and FinAir Avios. For short and medium flights, Cutter Avios is usually a better deal than Finair. Cutter still charges 9,500 Avios for flights under 650 miles in economy. That's like a route from Chicago to Nashville or New York to Atlanta. For longer American flights, especially again American to Hawaii, FinAir still by far has the edge at that 15,000 flat rate. But ultimately, as always, you need to compare the partner programs before you transfer anywhere. Don't assume Avios is automatically cheaper. If you have Atmos or American Miles, those rates still might be the lowest. I also wanted to add a few practical notes from people who have actually been booking these recently. The thin air chat queue has gotten worse. People are reporting that the chat tells you that the queue is full often and you can't even join. We're hearing much better luck booking by phone. Phone booking fees are waived for those partner awards because they aren't bookable online. So booking by phone is actually the fastest and easiest way to book these. And good news on flexibility: ThinAir has not been charging the 50 euro cancellation fee per person on these American and Alaska Partner Award tickets. If you cancel, you'll just forfeit your taxes, which is just$5.60 per person each way. But it's important to note that does not apply to ticket changes. If you change a ticket, you still pay 50 euro per person plus the taxes. So it's better to cancel and rebook, not to change. One more thing that helps is that Avios.com now has a transfer tool that lets you move Avios between any of the Avios programs on demand. So you can keep your Avios in whichever airlines account is most convenient and move them when you find the best chart for a specific flight. Staying with our One World Airlines, we have some other good news, and that is that it's now a bit easier to earn American Airlines miles because City added American Airlines as a transfer partner. City is the only one of the major bank currencies that transfers to American. So it's nice to have a path beyond just opening American Airlines cards. Now that information was already included in our City episode, but new since we did the American Airlines focused episode. But even though that City Thank You Points episode was published fairly recently, we've already had a few negative changes. First is that fairly abruptly, City cut the transfer rates to two specific hotel partners. Choice privileges went from a one to two ratio, where 1,000 thank you points became 2,000 choice points. Now it is 1 to 1.5. So 1,000 just becomes 1,500. I prefer went from 1 to 4, where 1,000 thank you points became 4,000 IPfer points, down to 1 to 2, which is a 50% cut. Unfortunately, these were both programs I had highlighted as sweet spots, and I was excited about them. So it's sad to see them change so quickly. City points are certainly still valuable in general, but less so for these specific redemptions. We'll have to wait and see if we see future transfer bonuses to either one that bring back better rates momentarily. Now Wells Fargo still does transfer to choice at a one to two ratio, so that will be the best option for now for booking those choice hotels. Choice does sometimes also run decent promotions for buying points, where for certain properties you can get a really good deal on a property by just buying points and then using them to book that hotel. But this really varies by property. One more bad news City update is that City ended points sharing between cardholders on May 17th, 2026. This also came without much notice. Up until then, City had let any two thank you cardholders share 100,000 points per year. Now, points sharing with City was never great because points that you shared expired 90 days after you moved them. But it did give people an option to pool points. This will no longer be possible. So this mostly affects a two-person household. It might mean both people decide to keep city cards open longer term if you want to keep your options open for transfer. In our household, we'll probably focus on just one person being more enmeshed in the city thank you points ecosystem long term rather than splitting between the two of us. And when one of us decides to close our card if the annual fee is coming due, we might just transfer all our points to American because we know that those are always going to be easy for us to use. There were also some changes to built rewards since I published my built episodes. Since then, Built launched some more specific information about built cash. Now the built rollout has still been a bit of a mess, especially in the first month, a lot of people were complaining and reporting issues with things like mortgage payments not paying properly, being improperly charged fees on their cards, and promos not being honored. But mostly all of that seems to have finally settled down. It's still a pretty convoluted reward system, but as I said in my previous episode, it does have potential value for people willing to put the time and effort in on it. I'm not going to go into all the specifics of the built program here because it took a whole episode before. But I will just provide an update on built cash strategy. Built cash is a separate rewards currency from built points. It didn't replace built points, they kind of work side by side. Built card holders on the new built 2.0 cards earn 4% back in built cash on their purchases. So this built cash earning was announced before the options for actually using built cash was announced. So when I filmed my built episode, the only redemption we knew about for sure was using built cash to earn points on mortgage payments. When the full list of ways to redeem built cash was released, I actually laughed because it was just another long, very complicated list. But most of it is just noise and should be ignored, and there are really only a few options worth mentioning. The first I already detailed in that built episode because it was the one we already knew, which was unlocking points on mortgage payments. Every$30 of built cash you redeem this way earns you a thousand built points, capped at one times your monthly rent or mortgage payment. So you're effectively converting built cash back into built points by paying your rent or mortgage. We have a calculator on our blog that shows exactly how much you'd need to spend each month on a built card in order to earn enough built cash to fully offset your rent and mortgage and those points that you could earn on it. That's still what I think is the best option overall. The second one of interest is a points accelerator boost. This one is currently exclusive to the higher tier card members, so you'd have to have the obsidian or palladium cards. If you have one of those cards, you can use$200 in built cash to activate a bonus where you earn an extra point per dollar on the next$5,000 of spending. So you're essentially using$2,000 of built cash to earn$5,000 points. But you also need to put$5,000 on your built card to do that. This is only going to make sense if you routinely have more spending than just what you use to meet minimum spend requirements on new cards. For many people in our community, you're just going from one new card to the next. So you're not in a position where you'd ever have another$5,000 to spend just to unlock 5,000 points, which overall is not a great return on investment. But if you have more spend than you can put just on new cards, and you have some spend that's not optimized in particular high-earn categories, this could be a way to do that. If you have the higher annual fee palladium, you're already earning two points per dollar everywhere. So with points accelerator, you're effectively earning three points per dollar everywhere. If you have the obsidian, which earns 3x on dining and groceries, with points accelerator, you could earn 4x in those categories. And you'll actually re-earn the same built cash when you're done with your points accelerator. That's because you use$200 built cash to unlock points accelerator. But in the process of spending$5,000 to use up that benefit, you'll actually earn another$200 in built cash since you earn 4% built cash on that$5,000 spent. So it essentially replenishes what you used. You can do that up to five times a calendar year. So in theory, you could boost up to$25,000 of spending in a year. Again, I don't think this is a slam dunk. I'm personally not doing this, but I do think it could make sense for someone who has high spending and wants to do more to optimize it. And those are all the big changes. It wasn't so bad, right? I also wanted to give a few behind-the-scenes updates as well. So my team and I are working on a few big back-end web projects that ultimately our hope is will make the website more robust and easier for us to keep updated, but also more useful for you. One of those is really reworking the way we enter credit card information on offers and benefits on our site. And that won't affect your view of things too much, but it will make it easier for us to keep everything up to date. That's exciting for us. And what I'm excited about too is that it will allow us to provide more views of credit card information so that you'll be able to sort offers better and find cards that better fit what you're looking for more easily. We already have a lot of card benefit calculators on the site, but this will also allow us to have those for more cards more easily, keep those updated better, and as well as add downloadable checklists for our cards as well. If you've taken my free course, it's been hosted over at Teachable, but we're also in the process of moving that course over to be hosted on my site itself. When that happens, you'll get new information on how to log in. And over the next few months, I'm hoping to add some new lessons and update other ones. We're also moving the podcast website to be specifically hosted on our site as well. I will likely take a few months off from releasing podcast episodes in order to get all those back-end projects wrapped up, and because summer's coming and it's a little harder to script and record episodes consistently with summer travel. But I will be back with season four before you know it. As I mentioned last episode, I will be switching to a less themed format for season four and beyond. So I will be including more topical episodes. If you have episode requests, please send them in. I'm also hoping to start featuring different little community point success stories at the end of episodes because so many people have told me that they love to hear how other people are using their points. So if you would like to share or brag about a redemption, please reach out to me by email. We'll put the email down in the show notes. I also wanted to say I appreciate so much all of you who have left a review on Apple Podcasts or written me a note to let me know you appreciate this podcast. I hear again and again that you appreciate the focus on normal people redemptions, and that's what I will continue to keep focusing on here. If you aren't on my newsletter list, of course, I will give you one more plug to get on there. That's because that's the best way to make sure that you see all the updates and card offers as they come out, especially when the podcast is off session. And it's just a once-a-week on Saturday morning, so I promise not to flood your inbox. Thanks so much for spending time with me today in this season learning about how we can unlock these secrets of travel points. Look forward to seeing you next season in season four.