🤗 Cheap award flights and status matches for all

Gooood morning, beautiful people! And welcome back to another rendition of the Daily Drop Weekend Round-Up!

A lot went down this week in the travel world, so let’s get straight to it 👇

✅ Earn SIX Hyatt free nights through their promo, Brand Explorer.

✅ Fancy a transfer bonus? Check out these current ones (plus see which cards have elevated offers right now!).

✅ Catch up on our latest YouTube video where Brendan tells us everything we need to know about Marriott Bonvoy.

✅ Hyatt is running a killer promo specifically for Florida hotels (register before August 30th).

🏆 Favorite pick of the week: Flying Blue status match for U.S. residents (get Delta lounge access!)

Who doesn’t love KLM and Air France’s loyalty program, Flying Blue?

They give us fun promos each month for cheap award flights around the world, and in general, their overall system and award redemptions outside of these promos are still pretty great.

But this week, they became even cooler for us U.S. residents because they’re offering a Flying Blue status match opportunity!

In order to get this status match, you do need to hold status with another airline in the first place (hence, the “matching” part…).

But fortunately, it’s a long-ass list of eligible programs.

So there’s a good chance that if you have status with another airline, you might be eligible to match to a corresponding tier of Flying Blue status for 12 months!

The one annoying part of this status match is that you’ll still need to pay a fee depending on what tier you’re matching to:

• $99 for Silver status

• $299 for Gold status

So, yeah…

But if you’re okay with that in exchange for 12 months of additional status perks, then great!

And perhaps the best perk if you do pay to match to Gold is that you’ll gain access to SkyTeam lounges worldwide 👀

And because Delta is part of SkyTeam, that means that yes, you’ll get access to the coveted Delta lounges that were stripped away from many Delta elites this past year 😬

If you’re eligible and don’t mind paying the fee, you can learn more and apply for your status match here.

🏃🏻‍♀️ Runner-Ups

🥇Bilt’s 100% transfer bonus to Alaska Airlines

Oh, hiiii. Bilt?

We haven’t seen you drop something to this level of cool in a while. Welcome back 😎

And in true Bilt fashion, this is a famous Rent Day promo!

On July 1st ONLY, Bilt is offering a transfer bonus to Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan ranging from 25% all the way up to freaking 100%.

This transfer bonus is based on your current level of Bilt elite status:

And to be clear, the Blue tier of “status” is actually… no status. It’s just their base membership tier.

So even if you have NO status with Bilt, you’ll still get a 25% bonus which is very on par with other transfer bonuses that we see.

I imagine many of you fly Alaska, so this is already a win. But you could win even more by taking advantage of Alaska’s partners…

For example, you can use Alaska miles to book flights on American Airlines. Here’s an example for just 4,500 miles one-way 👇

But with a 25% transfer bonus, you’d only need 3,600 Bilt points. And that 100% bonus? Just 2,250 points 😯

If you want to get REALLY fancy with this, thanks to Alaska’s program getting revamped, there are a ton of other fantastic sweet spots.

One of which is being able to book the oh-so-coveted Qsuites on Qatar 👀

If you’d like a few more examples that involve this transfer bonus, check out our full newsletter section from earlier this week.

But don’t forget, you can only take advantage of this on JULY 1ST.

🥈 Award Drop: American Airlines flights for 5k miles

Perhaps in the spirit of celebrating ‘Merica next week (it’s the 4th of July), American Airlines is offering a limited-time award drop with flights going for as little as 5,000 miles!

This sale is valid for flights booked by July 2nd, 2024, for travel between August 19th - December 13th, 2024.

Beware there are blackout dates on September 2nd (Labor Day), and then for dates between November 21st and December 1st.

What’s cool with this sale is that both domestic and international flights are eligible 🙌

More specifically, flights from the U.S. to Mexico, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific are eligible.

What’s not super cool is that flights must exclusively be on American Airlines and can’t be on any of their partners. Womp womp 😒

Overall, this is still a great sale with some solid opportunities for discounted award flights!

So if this interests you at all, and you have a stack of AA miles to burn, hop over to our longer newsletter section where we provide some examples of flights you can book for later this summer, fall, and early winter.

OR you can head straight to AA’s redemption deals page and get booking!

📣 Quick Callouts

• ❌ Expired: Best Southwest offer of the year (85,000-point welcome bonus!)

• ❌ Expired: Virgin Atlantic 40% award sale

• ❌ Expired: Frontier is offering $30 flights for its 30th birthday

• 🤗 Good deal: Get a 30-night hotel pass for just $499

• 😊 Cool: Buy IHG points with a 100% bonus

• 🙌 Interesting: Get free top-tier hotel status for… a hotel program we never talk about

• 🤓 Travel Trivia: Which airline was named the safest in the world for 2024?

Well dang, there were a lot of great travel happenings this past week, huh?

Before you ride off into the weekend sunset, tell me this…

See you next time 🙋🏻‍♀️

52°22'35.4"N 52°15'17.4"W