Happy Friday, travelers! Today’s newsletter is packed with updates you can’t afford to miss: Strange (in a good way) new Delta SkyMiles credit card offers, an unfortunate change – with a potential silver lining – at the Chase Sapphire Lounge in Phoenix, maybe the biggest Google Flights update ever, and much more. Buckle up!
💳 Delta’s Best Card Offer (Ever?): 2 Free Flights + 50K SkyMiles
Amex and Delta just dropped one of the strangest limited-time welcome offers we’ve ever seen … and we’re here for it.
Through Nov. 4, the *delta reserve card* is offering a two-part bonus after spending $10,000 in the first six months:
- 50,000 SkyMiles, and
- Two roundtrip tickets in Delta Comfort to anywhere in the mainland U.S. (plus Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands)
That’s a first for Delta – usually it just piles on more SkyMiles and calls it a day. But these flight certificates are the real story: no blackout dates, no fare restrictions, and no cap on what you can book.
You just can’t book within 21 days of departure, and tickets must be booked and used by Jan. 15, 2028. Use just one of these and you could easily pull $600-plus in value – time it right around holidays or a particularly pricey route and there’s a very real chance you’ll get $2,000 or more in value from both certificates.
Meanwhile, the Delta SkyMiles Gold and Platinum cards got boosted offers of their own:
- *delta skymiles gold card*: bonus_miles_full
- *delta skymiles platinum card*: bonus_miles_full
The way these “as high as” offers work, you’ll need to apply to find out your offer – and you may not be eligible at all. But the good news is, Amex will let you know the exact amount before pulling your credit and officially submitting your application, so there’s no risk in checking!
And if you’re a small business owner – and trust us, you just might be – Delta has upped the ante here too, with up to 200,000 SkyMiles on the table. That’s the biggest bonus we’ve ever seen offered on any Delta card (by a wide margin), and more than enough to fly Delta One abroad (in some cases) … or maybe even roundtrip with one of our Thrifty Traveler Premium flight deals!
These bigger offers come on the heels of a surprising revamp earlier this summer: Delta added a second free checked bag for domestic flights and expanded rideshare credits to more cards – all without raising annual fees a dime. Combined with all the usual benefits like an annual companion certificate, Delta’s TakeOff 15 benefit, and Delta Sky Club access, these cards are worth a permanent spot in the wallets of many loyal Delta flyers.
Elevated Delta offers roll around a few times a year, so this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a juicy bonus. But this round is different … and the potential upside (especially on the Reserve) shouldn’t be overlooked.
If you’ve been kicking the tires on a Delta Card – or even if you already have one and want a pricier version with more perks – be sure to take advantage before these offers disappear on Nov. 4, 2026.
Get the full details on these cards and their exciting new offers!
– Jackson Newman, senior editor
🤝 Deal of the Day: Up to 100% Transfer Bonus from Bilt to Virgin
Heat scale (out of 3): 🔥🔥
Why we love it: Bilt’s September “Rent Day” details just dropped, and there’s a pretty solid transfer bonus to Virgin Red and Virgin Atlantic this month.
Exactly how big a bonus you get depends on your status: 25% for basic Blue members, 35% for Silver, 45% for Gold, and 75% for Platinum. Platinum status holders can use $200 Bilt Cash to buy up to a whopping 100% bonus.
As always, this bonus is available for one day only: Tuesday, Sept. 1. Get full Rent Day details here!
– Jackson Newman, senior editor
🎙️ On the Pod: Travel Card Fantasy Draft
🏈 It’s fantasy football draft season, so the guys set out to build the perfect five-card roster of travel rewards credit cards. What cards were drafted as “everyday earners” and which ones crept into the coveted “premium card” category? Tune in to find out. And don’t forget to vote for a winner!
Watch it now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
✂️ Chase Quietly Cuts Reservations at its Phoenix Sapphire Lounge
Getting into the Chase Sapphire Lounge at Phoenix (PHX) is about to get a lot less convenient.
Chase has ended advance reservations at its Phoenix Sapphire Lounge – somehow, the only one in its entire network that offered them. This past Monday was the last day to book, and Aug. 31 is the last day any existing reservation will be honored. After that, it’s walk-up only … just like every other Sapphire Lounge.
That’s a bummer on its own, but it’s an even bigger black mark considering both American Express Centurion Lounges and Capital One Lounges let cardholders join a digital waitlist instead of standing in line. Chase, meanwhile, is scrapping the one location where you could at least lock in your spot ahead of time.
Perhaps Chase is confident that its recent restrictions on Priority Pass visits for non-Chase cardholders are enough to ease the crowds? Or maybe it’s a sign that bigger news is coming: The Phoenix lounge – Chase’s smallest, at just 3,500 square feet – has been undergoing an expansion since late June, and Chase says it’s on track to reopen “by the end of the summer.”
The timing lines up a little too well to be a coincidence – it seems Chase is betting a bigger space won’t need a reservation system to manage crowds the way this one has.
The airport’s own daily construction log signals the new space is getting close to completion: Crews are currently installing appliances and furniture at both the lounge and its bar – typically the final tasks before a space reopens. Temporary walls are slated to stay up through the end of September, so a hard reopening date isn’t locked in, but the finish work suggests Chase is close.
Bottom line? Cutting reservations is a frustrating step backward for a lounge that’s long struggled with its tiny footprint – and means Chase won’t have a single lounge with a digital waitlist or reservation system, period. On the bright side, it could mean that a bigger, better space is arriving in the not-too-distant future in Phoenix.
Check out our full story for more on this change!
– Jackson Newman, senior editor
📡 On Our Radar
Welcome to On Our Radar – a weekly look at the news and trends we’re watching lately!
📍New Route Nerd Out: All These Funky Europe Routes … By the Numbers
This week, United and American both announced their new European routes for next summer. I look forward to this fun (for sickos like me) news cycle that we typically don’t get until early October.
Here’s the big takeaway for me: Before Delta has even unveiled its new routes, the big three U.S. airlines are scheduled to operate nonstop flights to 50 European cities in 2027. Fifty! 🤯 Go ask your friends at happy hour to start naming European cities and see if they can even get to 50 …
This is, of course, assuming these carriers don’t make cuts. I would consider it likely that at least one pin will drop off this map. But man … 50 European cities. It’s kind of crazy.
📊 So let’s get into the numbers. I analyzed the schedules of American, Delta, and United for July 2019 versus July 2026 using Cirium Diio. Then I manually added the newly announced routes to get to the 50 pins on the map above. (I counted Berlin-BER and the now-closed Berlin-TXL airport as the same destination.)
Pre-pandemic, American, Delta, and United served just 35 European destinations, meaning there will be nearly 43% more destinations served nonstop by the big three airlines next summer than there was in 2019. Next year, there will still be a whopping 19% more than 2026, too. (Again, assuming there are no route cuts.)
The growth isn’t just in number of destinations, though. Between July 2019 and July 2026, there was a 20.9% rise in available seat miles (the best metric to reflect airline capacity) and a 17.6% increase in the number of flights, too.
Interestingly, the brunt of the growth for 2027 is likely to be on smaller aircraft, with American and United both deploying business-class equipped A321XLR planes on the new routes to Vienna (VIE) and Porto (OPO) for AA and to Valencia (VLC), Ibiza (IBZ), Toulouse (TLS), and Luxembourg (LUX) for United.
This means the available seat miles growth rate isn’t likely to jump up as much as the new destinations rate will.
I hope you enjoyed this weird little data analysis as much as I did. And remember … we still haven’t gotten Delta’s routes yet! More to come!
– Gunnar Olson, travel reporter and flight deal analyst
🤯 This is Huge: Google Flights is Getting into the Points Game
I’ll admit it: When I first saw the news from Google this week, I pretty much wrote it off as a nothing-burger:
“Now, AI Mode in Search can show you the cost in points or miles for flights and hotels.”
We’re Google Flights evangelists around here, and I am something of a sicko purist: Standard search or bust. If it’s only available in AI Mode, who cares?
But I am … not a normal person, to put it lightly. The more we talked about this around TT HQ, the more we all realized this could be a game changer – a turning point in the endless search for the next great points deal … and one with both tremendous upside and enormous negative ramifications.
Let me spell out more clearly what’s happening: Right within Google, you can now search and pull in bookable award fares without navigating to countless other sites, logging into accounts, or enlisting the help of other third-party tools.
I did it just this morning, searching for roundtrip redemption rates to Chicago-O’Hare (ORD) this fall.
A few clicks later, I was booking with my AAdvantage miles – at exactly the rates Google put in front of me. Wild.
It’s limited at the start: Only American Airlines and Alaska/Hawaiian award fares are available – plus Choice Hotels, Hilton Honors, and Wyndham on the hotel side. But that will surely expand. In fact, Google says they’re adding Flying Blue, Lufthansa Group airlines, LATAM, and Accor hotels “in the coming weeks.”
So why does this matter so much?
To put it plainly: Google owns the internet. If it wants to become a major player in the points game, it will become a major player in the points game. And it has the relationships with airlines and hotel chains to make that happen.
That is going to put points redemptions at the fingertips of billions of travelers.
On the one hand, that’s great. Easier award searches, all in one place! Savvier travelers redeeming their miles! What’s not to love about that? We love it.
But there will be a price to pay.
Other tools like Points Path and seats.aero have found workarounds to pull points data into Google Flights results – not to mention the bevy of even more powerful award search tools that have cropped up in the last four or five years.
But this is Google we are talking about: This is simply on another scale. They have a built-in audience of billions that will dwarf what plugins like Points Path and others can do. How do you compete with that?
And if you think those services and others are a part of the reason why airlines are getting much stingier with award space these days (and I do) this is on another level entirely. If Google continues down this path, it will lead to an influx of travelers around the world redeeming their points, the likes of which we’ve never seen.
Could this be a one-and-done? Could Google try this out and abandon it? Sure.
But I’m betting this’ll be a watershed moment in our little corner of the points and miles world.
– Kyle Potter, executive editor
✈️ Other Travel Tidbits
- 🇲🇽 Volaris plans to launch service from Guadalajara, Mexico, to 7 new U.S. cities, including Minneapolis, Nashville, Raleigh, and Tampa. (Ishrion Aviation, via X)
- ✈️ Capital One’s 15% transfer bonus to Avianca LifeMiles ends Monday, Aug. 31.
- 🛂 Alaska and Hawaiian just boosted CLEAR+ discounts for Atmos Rewards elite members. Silver, Gold, and Platinum status now get $40 off ($179/year), while Titanium status gets $90 off ($129/year) – bringing Atmos in line with equivalent Delta and United status perks. (Alaska Airlines)
- 🎯 Rove just launched a big update, rolling out dining rewards, card-linked in-store offers, instant-earn gift cards, a revamped hotel booking tool (covering ~99% of loyalty-eligible rates), and an iOS app. (Rove)
