✈️ The surprising tournament results are revealed

Estimated read time: 4 minutes and 39 seconds

Good morning and welcome back to another Friday edition of Daily Drop.

I’m exhausted after staying up late to binge a Korean reality show that I got pretty addicted to…

Thankfully, coffee exists - which you can all thank for making today’s newsletter possible.

Let’s get cooking:

• 🌍 Travel Tournament Round 2 (and Round 1 results revealed)

• 💳 Addressing your questions about business credit cards

• ✈️ First-class Friday: Bringing it full circle

🌍 Travel Tournament Round 2 (and Round 1 results revealed)

Okay, so before we jump into the second round of voting, I’m going to show you how y’all voted the last couple of days on the Round 1 polls.

And I gotta say, some of the results shook me to my very core. Here is where the brackets currently stand:

Southwest beating ANA? Lufthansa beating Singapore? AIR CANADA beating freakin’ ETIHAD??

As someone who flies Air Canada 50+ times per year, I can confirm that it should not be beating any airline on this list… by a long shot…

But hey, my opinion doesn’t matter. 

Your opinions do matter, which is why you’re going to vote on Round 2 for the categories of Airlines and Points/Loyalty Programs today.

You know the drill - just pick your favorite from each of the four polls below:

💳 Addressing your questions about business cards

Wanna know something?

Sometimes, I’m not the best at explaining things. I even forget to include details for the travel hacks and deals I tell you about.

And like a good Canadian, I’m very, VERY sore-y a-boot it.

Specifically, I’m referring to the other day when I told you about business credit cards and how you should all get them.

Many of you reached out to tell me that I was wrong about the fact that business credit cards aren’t reported to credit bureaus.

While what I told you is definitely true, there are a couple of details that I left out that probably deserve to be stated.

First of all, when you first apply for a business credit card, you will receive a hard inquiry on your credit profile, just like any other card. After all, the bank still needs to determine if you’re creditworthy. This inquiry is only a couple of points and typically recovers in 1-2 months.

The only other situation where your business credit card is reported to credit bureaus is if you go into delinquency and miss payments.

The reason I didn’t mention this is that if you have even the slightest chance of missing a payment, going into debt, or incurring any interest, you should not be playing this travel hacking game. 

In general, that should be understood - and we will be working under that assumption with everything we talk about surrounding credit cards.

Here is a chart that shows each individual aspect of your credit report, and which elements of it are affected by business cards:

As you can see, as long as you make your payments on time, the only aspect of your score that’s affected is the hard inquiry, which only accounts for 10% of your score.

Now, with all that being said, there are a couple of exceptions to all of this - Discover cards report to consumer credit bureaus… so… who cares.

Their cards are trash.

The other exception is certain Capital One cards. It’s unclear exactly what their policy is on this since they’ve never actually disclosed it to the public, but some people have reported seeing Capital One business cards show up on their credit report.

So if this is a concern to you, maybe avoid their business cards. You still have PLENTY of other options, and having a card on your personal report isn’t a big deal anyway if you’re being responsible.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let me tell you about an offer that is ending soon on what we consider to be the single best business card out there right now.

The [[ ink-business-preferred-credit-card.name ]], which is number one on our list of Top Business Cards, is offering a welcome bonus that could yield thousands of dollars in value for a $0 annual fee.

If I go into any more detail in the newsletter, the bank will scold me and make me cry. So I’ll direct you to our page that goes into the details of how this offer is WAY more valuable than it may seem at first glance.

Once you read that, you may be wondering what you can do with so many points. Simply carry on reading and I’ll tell ya exactly what you want to know. 👇

✈️ First-class Friday: Using the previous newsletter section to book luxury trans-Atlantic flights

If you sign up for the aforementioned credit card and find yourself with close to 100,000 Chase points, you may be wondering what to do with them.

Let me give you a quick example of how you can book a luxurious trip abroad using those points.

Right now, Virgin Atlantic has tons of availability throughout the year for both economy and business class seats. Since this is First-class Friday, let’s focus on the business class.

As you can see, you can fly across the Atlantic for just 47,500 miles each way in Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class, their version of business class.

Since you can transfer Chase points to Virgin Atlantic, you could use this welcome offer to book round-trip flights in this amazing business-class seat.

Now you might be thinking, “Mike, 47,500 + 47,500 is more than 90,000… what gives? You always tell us how good you are at math, but you sound like an idiot.”

Yes, it is true that round-trip flights would run you 95,000 miles.

But don’t forget that in order to earn that welcome bonus, you need to spend $6,000 dollars, meaning you’ll earn a minimum of 96,000 points when all is said and done.

Virgin Atlantic has tons of amazing new planes, some of the best air and ground service in the world, and is constantly innovating its products.

Flying business class will not only get you access to their luxurious seat in the sky but also their London lounge, which people constantly rave about.

You’ll have to shell out some cash for the taxes and fees, but this is an experience that would cost you around $3,000 each way (on a good day), so you’re getting an amazing experience at a huge discount.

Saving $4,000+ because of a $0 credit card is still a win in my book!

If you’re really reluctant to pay the taxes, you could also cover them at a rate of 1 cent per point with a card like the [[ capital-one-venture-x-rewards-credit-card.name ]] or the [[ capital-one-venture-rewards-credit-card.name ]], which I know many of you have anyway!

Keep in mind, the $0 card we’ve been talking about is technically a cashback card.

That cashback can be converted to points only if you fit certain requirements, so make sure you read the full card description before signing up.

Happy travels!

Well, that’s gonna do it for this week, my friends!

Thanks for participating in the tournament this week - I think it’s a lot of fun to do this kind of thing and see exactly what kind of travel you all enjoy and where your allegiances lie, even if you are WRONG about some of them…

Just kidding… kind of… 😉

Anyway, we’ll keep the party going with the rest of Round 2 next week, so don’t miss your chance to vote again.

Have a great weekend and I’ll see you on Monday ❤️

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