Estimated read time: 4 minutes and 39 seconds

Good morning and welcome back to Daily Drop, the newsletter that’s about to pay for itself when it saves you like $700 on your next flight to Europe.

You’ll see what I mean in a minute:

• ✈️ The best way to fly business class to Europe

• 💳 Meet the Bilt Card Lineup

• 🛍️ How to maximize shopping portals

✈️ The best way to fly business class to Europe

If there’s one thing I know about you all, it’s that you love Europe. If there’s another thing I know about y’all, it’s that you probably prefer to fly to Europe in business class.

Sadly, that’s easier said than done.

It’s hard to find availability most of the time, and the airlines that have great availability often have taxes and fees that can make you poo your pants when you see them.

Case in point: British Airways.

British Airways flies all over the U.S., all over Europe, has some really nice planes, and has solid business-class award availability.

But when you book with a program like American Airlines or Atmos Rewards, you’ll see some insane cash charges.

Let’s take a business-class flight from Boston to London on British Airways, leaving next week. Here’s what it looks like booked through AA and Atmos:

That’s right. On top of all of those precious points you’re shelling out, you need to give them another $700 or $1,000.

Booking the same flight with British Airways’ own miles will save you a tiny bit of cash, but cost almost double the points:

And that, my friends, is why you always see these flights available to book. Nobody wants to pay those fees.

How to get the award flight WITHOUT the fees

There are certain programs that have access to those same BA flights but charge wayyyy lower taxes.

First is Cathay Pacific AsiaMiles. It might sound strange, but Cathay is a transfer partner of multiple U.S. banks, so getting miles with them is easy.

Looking at that same Boston to London flight next week, you’ll see they’re charging 63,000 miles… but only $224 USD in taxes and fees:

So you’re paying a bit more than programs like AA and Atmos, but saving $500-700 in cash. I’d say that’s a solid tradeoff.

But there’s one way that even beats that.

I’m talking, of course, about using Japan Airlines (or JAL) miles.

Booking that SAME flight from Boston to London next week results in a price of just 42,000 JAL miles and the same $224 in taxes that Cathay was charging:

That’s fewer points than any of the other programs AND the lowest taxes and fees.

The best news? We have a bunch of ways to get JAL miles easily.

How to earn JAL miles

One of the most accessible ways to get JAL miles is from Capital One.

They transfer to JAL at a 4:3 ratio, but they are having a transfer bonus right now that makes that ratio closer to 1:1.

This transfer bonus comes around every few months. And if you don’t have any Capital One miles to use on the bonus this time, you’re in luck:

The Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card is currently offering 75,000 bonus miles after spending $4,000 in the first 3 months, on top of $300 to use on hotel and vacation rental bookings through Capital One Travel in your first cardholder year.

Boom. There you go.

Get those miles now, then next time this transfer bonus comes around, you can book round-trip business-class flights to Europe and even have a few hundred bucks to use toward a hotel. 😉

But there’s one other way to get JAL miles without needing a transfer bonus to make it worth your while:

Bilt Rewards, which transfers to JAL at a clean 1:1 ratio.

And if you want to know the fastest way to get Bilt points, you’ll want to read about Bilt’s credit card lineup. 👇

🛍️ How to maximize shopping portals

If everything I’ve told you so far wasn’t enough, there is one final way to earn some super easy Bilt points.

You may not know this, but you can actually earn Bilt points from Rakuten, the online shopping portal.

By the way: If you’re new to Rakuten, you can sign up using our link and get $50 back after you spend $50. 🤷🏼‍♂️

The default is to earn cash back… but you can also link your Rakuten and Bilt accounts to earn points instead, which you can then transfer to programs like JAL or Hyatt.

There are some nuances to this (along with some other shopping portal tricks), so I’m going to let Brendan explain it all to you in this week’s Daily Drop YouTube video about all things shopping portals:

That’s it for today, folks! I hope you learned a neat trick today and get yourself to Europe in a cheap(er) business class seat.

Take care and see you tomorrow.

Love,

43.6532° N, 79.3832° W

With contributions by Sam Anthony and Katie Begnoche.