Estimated read time: 5 minutes and 15 seconds

Good morning and welcome back to Daily Drop!

With Thanksgiving and Christmas right around the corner, I bet a lot of you are starting to look at traveling domestically for the holidays.

Today’s newsletter should help make that easier (and cheaper):

• 🤓 Travel Trivia Tuesday

• ✈️ How to book domestic flights with points

• 🌎 Travel Trivia Reveal

• 💳 Minimize risk, maximize rewards

🤓 Travel Trivia Tuesday

✈️ How to book domestic flights with Capital One miles

Domestic flyers still recovering from Southwest’s latest blow… I have some good news for you. Domestic travel isn’t dead. You just might need to know where to find better deals.

Here’s the weird truth: you can book fantastic domestic award flights with Capital One.

I know what you’re thinking: Capital One doesn’t directly partner with the big U.S. airlines except JetBlue, and at a 5:3 ratio. And at first glance, that seems like a deal-breaker if you care about domestic flights.

But…

Capital One is a transfer partner of a whole bunch of foreign loyalty programs.

If you play your “cards” right (pun VERY much intended), you can use those programs to book domestic U.S. flights for fewer miles and better value.

Getting Capital One miles is easy right now

And just to zoom out for a second…

The reason I’m telling you this right now is because the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card is offering a one-time $300 Capital One Stays credit instantly upon approval (to use on hotels and vacation rentals in your first cardholder year), plus 75,000 bonus miles after spending $4,000 in the first three months.

Factor in the miles you earn on that spend (the card earns 2x miles on everything) and you’re walking away with at least 83,000 miles to play with.

That’s a massive head start if you want to book domestic flights through these partner sweet spots.

How it works

Capital One lets you transfer miles from your card to 20+ airline and hotel loyalty programs — mostly at a 1:1 ratio.

Once your miles are in those programs, you can book flights on U.S. carriers.

That means you get the flexibility of a transferable currency plus the coverage of major U.S. airlines — without needing direct U.S. transfer partners.

Here are some of the best domestic redemption options:

1. Etihad Guest for JetBlue or American Airlines

Capital One transfers to Etihad at 1:1. Etihad’s distance-based award chart  can make short-haul U.S. flights go for as little as 6,000 Etihad miles on both American Airlines and JetBlue:

Boom, domestic for cheap. With the Venture card I told you about earlier, you could book THIRTEEN short hops like this.

As I mentioned earlier, Capital One does transfer directly to JetBlue, but at a 5:3 ratio. So that same flight would cost you more than 10,000 miles if booking direct with JetBlue.

So using Etihad is a neat little trick that most of you probably weren’t aware of.

2. Avianca LifeMiles or Air Canada Aeroplan for United Airlines

Capital One transfers 1:1 to both Avianca LifeMiles and Aeroplan. 

That gets you access to United Airlines award seats via the Star Alliance network, even though Capital One doesn’t directly transfer to United.

Short-haul flights will run you 10,000 Avianca LifeMiles (sometimes even less), where flights from the West Coast to Hawaii can run as few as 12,500 Aeroplan points.

Either way, transferring Capital One miles to one of those two programs is almost guaranteed to get these flights for fewer overall miles than what United itself would charge.

3. Avios for Alaska and American

That’s right – you can use Avios (the points program for British Airways, Qatar, and more) to book Alaska Airlines flights, giving you access to yet another beloved U.S. airline.

For example, short-haul flights can cost fewer than 10,000 Avios one way in economy, or 20,000 in business. 👇

This is not as good a deal as using Atmos Rewards points, but Atmos only transfers from Bilt Rewards (more on Bilt later 😉), so it’s not normally a super accessible option.

Plus, Capital One often has transfer bonuses to British Airways, making this deal even better if you get the timing right.

4. Air France-KLM Flying Blue for Delta flights

This is one of my favorites…

KLM/Air France Flying Blue – another 1:1 transfer partner of Capital One – lets you book Delta flights for as few as 5,000 miles one-way in economy, or 15,000 in business. 👇

That is a deal and a half, especially considering Capital One also offers semi-regular transfer bonuses to Flying Blue.

Longer flights will cost more, but this method is still a fantastic option if you’re a Delta loyalist.

The Venture card’s welcome offer alone could book you as many as 16 short Delta flights like this… not bad for a single credit card, eh?

5. Or just skip transfers completely and redeem for cash value

If you don’t want the hassle of search-and-transfer games, Capital One miles can be redeemed for travel at a fixed 1 cent per mile (up to 90 days after purchase), which actually makes sense if you’re booking a cheap cash flight on a budget airline like Frontier.

For example, this flight from Denver to Las Vegas costs $29.

You could simply use your Capital One card to purchase the flight, then use 2,900 miles to offset the purchase – no additional taxes and fees required.

Why this is the move

Many airlines (especially U.S. airlines) price their flights dynamically when using their own points programs.

With partner programs, you get access to fixed-price award charts. 

So even if Capital One did have U.S. airlines as partners, it often makes more sense to book through the programs I talked about today.

The bottom line

Capital One, despite not having many domestic transfer partners, actually has great options for booking domestic flights. You just need to know where to look. 😉

Don’t forget about the offer on the Venture card either. As you have seen, this single card offer could book you well over a dozen domestic flights.

🌎 Travel Trivia Reveal

At the start of this newsletter, I asked which country has the most time zones. And don’t get mad at me for this, but the answer uses the term “country” fairly broadly… 😅

The correct answer is: France… if you include all of its territories.

France and its territories span a total of TWELVE time zones around the world. Most people don’t realize just how expansive this list of territories is, as seen in the map below:

So it makes sense why France takes the cake regarding the number of time zones, even if we’re talking about more than just mainland France as we know it…

Still, pretty cool, eh?

I hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter, and I’ll see you tomorrow for more travel fun.

Take care,

43.6532° N, 79.3832° W

With contributions by Sam Anthony and Katie Begnoche.