Find Flights for Me Recap: Week ending 10/19/25

If you want to book using your own FNC or 150k Hilton points, check out July-August 2026 as there is decent availability.

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At least there was a heads-up on this one, but Singapore Airlines is enhancing its KrisFlyer award program, which also comes with an increase in points needed for an award flight. Saver business & first class awards are going up +5-10% and Advantage business & first class awards are going up +15-20%. Some economy rates will be down -5% but that’s not why you read my content 😆.

Here are some examples of how pricing will change starting on November 1, 2025 at midnight Singapore time. If you want to fly Singapore Suites on the A380, the pricing (usually only available as an Advantage award), will be up around +15%.

More details on the enhancement can be found here on Singapore Airlines’ site including impacts to Star Alliance partner awards and using Singapore miles to upgrade existing Singapore Airlines flights.

Looking to snag a first-class Singapore Suites ticket? Plan a whole year in advance. Make sure the plane type is the A380, although there is a risk that they change the plane type when booking so far in advance. Singapore does not fly the A380 to the US so you will have to fly to/from Singapore and Sydney, Mumbai, Hong Kong (occasionally gets A380), Frankfurt, or London.

Finally, in the middle of every month, Singapore announces up to 30% award discounts for last-minute flights with the Singapore Escapes promo. Book now through October 31 for travel in the month of November. Check it out, you could book JFK-FRA on Singapore airlines for 17.5k miles each way. Sadly, there are no business promos on the JFK-FRA route this time (otherwise it’s 56.7k points).

Earlier this week, Thrifty Traveler highlighted that JAL’s program has some sweet spots that most of us probably didn’t know about. With Capital One now a transfer partner in addition to Bilt, it could be worthwile to check out.

It’s a unique quirk when booking partner awards (such as British Airways, Iberia, or American Airlines) as a round-trip instead of a one-way. Their example is booking a Miami to Madrid flight, which is ~4,400 miles one-way. If you booked using JAL’s partner award chart, it would cost 60k JAL miles one-way. However, if you book the trip as a round-trip instead of 2 one-way flights, it will price at 85k JAL miles as the cost is determined by the total trip distance. Here’s a link to JAL’s award chart for you to see.

An often overlooked perk of Amex and Chase cards are the various offers that you have to manually add to your card. I’ve saved thousands across my cards over the last few years adding these offers.

This week, a notable addition was Amex adding a Virgin Atlantic Airways offer where you get $250 statement credit back after spending $1,800+ on Virgin Atlantic. This can be very useful if you are booking Virgin Atlantic awards (the tax/fees are usually charged under Virgin Atlantic). If you have a family of 4, you could easily hit $1,800+ in taxes/fees if you book a premium cabin to/from the US and London. Another way to hit that spend is booking a lot of ANA awards over the phone with Virgin Atlantic. Details can be found here (Award Wallet).

Many Chase cards also have a $20 Warby Parker offer as well. It’s the end of the year so make sure you use your vision insurance perks, which could potentially make getting glasses at Warby Parker a money maker depending on your insurance. Don’t forget to stack the purchase with a cashback portal.

With the process to add these offers very manual, you can spend a few minutes a day or week adding them and hoping you don’t miss any good offers. Another option that I found very useful was using CardPointers. There is a free version where you can use a browser extension and have it run every now and then to add offers. There is also a paid version + app that automatically adds offers with the app also telling you which card to use when shopping for maximum savings. My affiliate link helps you save 30% on the annual or lifetime cost. It’s well worth it in my opinion, as it’s only $50/year or $168 for a lifetime subscription.

You’ll still have to wait for the exact details, but it should be possible to earn Bilt points on mortgage payments sometime in 2026. Bilt has been talking about adding this capability for a while and it appears we are one step closer. This week, Bilt and United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM) announced a partnership (Bilt newsroom) but details will be announced in the coming months.

However, we don’t know if you will need a Bilt card to earn points, what the points earning rate is (will it be 1 point per $1?), and presumably your mortgage needs to be through UWM? More to come I guess.

I believe a brief introduction is needed as Rove is not very well known. Rove Miles is a unique loyalty program that lets you earn points by using their third-party travel platform and cashback portal. No credit card required to earn points is the major selling point and differentiator. Even with Rakuten, you would need a Membership Rewards-earning Amex card to get points instead of cashback. Rove has already partnered with some popular and also some uncommon airline and hotel programs. Classic programs include Cathay, Etihad, Finnair, AF/KLM, Qatar, and Turkish. But they also have the ability to transfer to Accor Hotels, Air India, Thai Airways, and Vietnam Airlines to name a few.

So what’s the big news? Rove announced a way to “triple-dip” points earnings on hotel stays booked through their platform. Generally (Amex FHR, Chase Edit, etc. are exceptions), booking a hotel through a third-party means no hotel status recognition, no loyalty night credits, and no points earned with the hotel loyalty program. Now, Rove will allow certain hotel bookings to be eligible to 1) earn Rove miles, 2) earn hotel points, and 3) earn points on your card.

Now through October 31, hotel bookings on the platform will earn 10x Rove miles per dollar spent before reverting to 5x points.

Important points to consider.
1) Rove serves as merchant of record. I’m not sure how Rove would code, but their site indicated potentially codes as travel or hotel.
2) Compare the prices and terms of booking on the third-party platform vs. directly. Third-party bookings can have different terms and pricing vs. booking direct. Generally, terms are worse, including being more expensive than a member rate and having a worse cancellation policy. But sometimes the price is better (in that case maybe best rate guarantee it?) and the cancel policy is better too.
3) Prepayment required for now. Although these loyalty-eligible bookings are offered for both refundable and non-refundable stays, you currently need to prepay for your stay.

An example below for 1 night on February 7-8 at Hotel 50 Bowery in NYC. It’s a part of the Hyatt brand portfolio. Rove is asking for $257.37 but booking direct with Hyatt is $235.58, around 8.5% cheaper. The Hyatt rate is for Hyatt members only, otherwise the non-member rate on Hyatt’s site is exactly the same as Rove’s pricing. This is in-line with how other third-party platforms price their rates (hotels give slight discounts to their members booking direct).

Still interested? Sign up for Rove and get 500 miles upon signing up (my affiliate link).

Not investment advice. American Express (AXP) reported 3Q results on Friday, and it looked good. The stock was up over 7% to end the day. Thank you Gary from VFTW for summarizing key points from the analyst call. I listen to too many of these for work already.

My key takeaways:
1) People don’t mind paying the higher fee. After the refresh (new higher fee implemented), the US Platinum card is seeing 2x new account acquisition vs. pre-refresh.
2) People like shiny things. Over 500k people requested the new mirror card.
3) People don’t know about retention offers. Very low percentage of retention comes from retention offers. Most of it comes from explaining the product to them. So… make sure you ask for retention offers for extra points. Data points on Amex retention offers here (FlyerTalk).
4) Almost everyone pays their bill, or at least the minimum payment. Only 1.3% of card member loans & receivables are 30+ days past due.

Looking to fly to Finland? Plan about a year in advance and you can snag 2x seats fairly easily. Finnair opens up their calendar and award availability 360 days in advance directly on their own program. Finnair generally releases 2x business class seats per flight as well. Finnair has good availability for 2x people for just 62.5k Avios per person (and $150-185 in taxes/fees) in business class each way in mid-September through early October! Best availability is between JFK-HEL, ORD-HEL, DFW-HEL, LAX-HEL, and SEA-HEL.

Other airports that Finnair flies to include:

This deal has a unique quirk as you will need to change your website location to be Finland (English as language) to see 2x award seats (Frequent Miler for more details). Otherwise, you will only see 1x award seat available if your location is set to anywhere except for Finland.

Take advantage of the 30% Chase transfer bonus to British Airways (you can move Avios freely between British Airways and Finnair), and you will only need ~49k points per person each way to fly business class! Or use British Airways Avios Boost to buy miles at 1.2 cents per mile.

Comprehensive review and photos of Finnair business class can be found here (Live and Lets Fly)

Waldorf Astoria New York City room rates start at $1,000+ but I used a Hilton Free Night Certificate to stay. The rate this weekend was $1,600 for the room I stayed in and I probably would have booked a $400+ Courtyard/Fairfield/Hilton Garden Inn hotel if I didn’t use the certificate.

How much would you value the certificate?