NextCard.com Tools to Maximize Points, Miles & Credit Card Credits | Bilt, Dining Stacks, Paze & Hotel Maps
Justin Vacula of the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast welcomes John from NextCard.com to discuss tools for maximizing credit card benefits, tracking statement credits, finding dining stacks, comparing hotel booking programs, and getting more value from points and miles.
John explains how NextCard.com helps users manage credit card benefits and uncover stacking opportunities across programs like Bilt Rewards, Chase, Paze, dining portals, luxury hotel programs, and more.
The episode covers NextCard’s maps, calculators, and tracking tools, including MealMaxxer, Bilt calculators, Bilt Mobile Dining maps, Paze credit maps, and HotelMaxxer. Justin and John discuss how MealMaxxer helps identify overlapping dining programs and restaurant stacking opportunities.
They also explain NextCard’s Bilt tools, including calculators for comparing housing rewards, flexible Bilt Cash, and strategies for redeeming Bilt Cash before annual expiration. John also shares how the Bilt Mobile Dining map can help users find eligible dining locations.
John also explains HotelMaxxer, which aggregates luxury hotel programs such as Amex Fine Hotels & Resorts, Chase The Edit, Bilt Home Away From Home, and United Renowned Hotels, helping travelers compare pricing, credits, perks, and booking options across programs.
The episode also covers free vs. Pro features, privacy and security considerations, future improvements like better points tracking and expiration alerts, DoorDash credit maps, and P2 account strategies.
Liked what you heard about in the show? Use Justin’s NextCard.com affiliate links.
Timestamps
00:00 Podcast Intro Theme
01:04 Meet John From NextCard
01:49 What Is NextCard?
02:43 Who NextCard Is For
03:35 MealMaxer Dining Maps
04:00 Bilt Calculator Explained
05:18 Bilt Redemption Planning
06:20 How John Uses Bilt
07:26 Bilt Mobile Dining Map
08:38 Stacking Rewards Strategies
11:52 Paze And Clover Credits
13:41 Keeping Maps Updated
15:25 Chase Sapphire Reserve Dining
16:44 Hotel Maxer Overview
17:57 Using Hotel Credits
19:22 Free Vs. Pro Features
20:06 Automation And Security
20:47 Support the Show
22:49 Upcoming Features Roadmap
26:14 App Plans For iOS And Android
26:33 DoorDash Credit Map
28:25 Listener Question: P2 Accounts
30:00 More Tools, Maps, And Bonuses
33:33 Japan Trip Bonus Math
35:12 Wrap Up And Credits
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Rough Transcript:
Travel at low cost with points and miles. Credit card rewards bring the smiles. Many adventures, tales to be told. Make and save money, the world will unfold
Fight the war on happiness, pick up the gold. Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast breaks the mold
You’re listening to the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast. I’m your host, Justin Vacula, here to help you make money, save money, and travel the world at low cost. Jon from NextCard.com joins me today to talk about helpful miles and points tools you can use, including BILT calculators, dining maps, hotel maps, and much more.
Maximize your credits, save time, and get more value with NextCard.com . On [00:01:00] with today’s episode, recorded July 24th, 2026. Welcome to the show, Jon. Hey, everyone. I’m Jon. Quick intro myself. Opened over 50 cards. Currently have around 40 still open right now. I’m the classic guy who’s traveled to a lot of places worldwide using points and miles, business class, all that good stuff. Also used to work at one of the award travel companies.
I started working on NextCard as a side project. It’s ended up growing quite significantly over the last few months, which has been really cool to see. Super excited to talk further about it, Justin. Good to hear that you’re experienced in this space. As usual, the answer to everything is more credit cards, and when you have more than your age, as Taylor Thomas from QCGC has said, you know you’ve had some success.
Indeed. Indeed. For listeners hearing about NextCard.com for the first time, can you give us a short elevator pitch? We essentially think of it as like a all-in-one tool that you can use [00:02:00] to track all of your credit card credits, maximize your card benefits and as the name says, find your next card pun intended.
We have a lot of useful tools and for pretty much like every single card out there. Meal Maxer, as you were saying earlier, Justin, Bilt Calculator, a map for Clover and Paze restaurants. We just launched the FHR Maxer today actually, a tool that basically aggregates all 3,400 Amex Fine Hotel and Resort properties onto a map and showcases nightly pricing data.
We have a whole suite of tools that people can use to figure out how to maximize their credit card benefits. Very good. And you’re offering a lot of tools that other sites aren’t offering, so we’re going to get that later in the episode. Yeah.
But first, is there an ideal user? Might it be a beginner with two or three cards, a points enthusiast with 20 or more, or maybe both? It really is a mix of the two. Even if you only have one card, and it’s a Chase, Amex, Citi, or a Capital [00:03:00] One card, we can auto-enroll in all your offers, right?
So that’s already at the bare minimum. If you’re someone like me who has 20, 30, 40 cards, you will find a ton of value out of NextCard as well because the automation that we have, the tracking, the tools are just very useful and very popular to those types of people. We’re really trying to serve anyone in between those two spectrums.
We’ve noticed that people who have a significant other, or as we like to call it, a p2 essentially, or p3, which is basically people that you help with their points and miles in your family or relatives, they really like using NextCard because it centralize everything.
And you can basically track everything in one area.
And MealMaxer , this isn’t about cooking, this is about finding locations with services like InKind. Rakuten Dining, I believe, is also on there, Chase Sapphire exclusive tables, Bilt mobile dining for the $25 redemption of Bilt Cash and much more.
You also have a lot of resources for people to better understand and redeem [00:04:00] with Bilt. Because America loves math, you’ve created a new calculator, the Bilt Calculator.
Why we have so many of these Bilt products and why they’re so popular is just because, we started working on NextCard right when all this Bilt stuff was happening. We shipped a very popular Bilt calculator that helps people really understand how the Bilt cards work.
The timing was great. We shipped the BILT calculator the moment we realized, like, how confusing everything was. And then along the way, I got my BILT PhD and just, yeah explaining this repeatedly over and over again to people, and the calculator was obviously an extremely useful visual to help along with that as well.
And the calculator probably for low spenders that are just looking to spend on the card and use Bilt for the housing payments. The high spenders, of course, they’re gonna have lots and lots of Bilt Cash, and I’ve talked about that in a lot of episodes, that probably if you’re sitting on $500 or more in Bilt Cash, you’re just gonna redeem.
But there are some people who don’t have much spend, maybe [00:05:00] they’re low spenders, they’re using different cards, and they’re wondering how to get the best value out of their Bilt cash, and that’s something that you provide.
Flexible Bilt Cash is just generally the better method overall, right?
But I think the beauty of the calculator is we compare between housing rewards and flexible Bilt Cash scenarios so that you can see which one works the best for you. And then we also have another separate tool called the Bilt Cash Redemption Calculator. I think a lot of people have actually been using this recently. The whole idea behind that tool is to essentially help people calculate and project how to use their Bilt Cash throughout the rest of the calendar year.
Because all the Bilt Cash you earn in 2026 will expire, unfortunately, on December 31st, except for $100 worth of Bilt Cash that will roll over. But the idea behind that, that calculator is to essentially help people understand should I use a points accelerator? Should I save it for transfer partners?
Do I just use it all on my rent or mortgage payment, essentially? Yeah. The points accelerator’s among the lowest cent per Bilt Cash, but for people with a lot of Bilt Cash, getting that 1x extra [00:06:00] points, if you’re putting in a lot of that spending, can be very valuable, especially if you’re putting high value on the points transfers to Alaska and Hyatt.
So that would also lead into that calculation of should I continue using the Bilt card, or how much value am I getting out of it? Yeah, exactly. That makes a lot of sense.
Where are you finding the most value with Bilt? Are you redeeming all your Bilt cash aggressively? Are you being selective about it?
Bilt cash-wise I am running low. I am doing this thing where I have my Alaska Airlines or Atmos Summit card, for example, that pays my rent, and then I have my Bilt Palladium being used for mortgage payments right now.
Where I find the most value out of the entire new Bilt system right now is just ease of use, right? According to my calcs, I’m earning right around three and a half points per dollar spent, which is crazy, because as you were mentioning, Justin, I can transfer those to Alaska and Hyatt and get pretty good value out of that.
And I also have my parents just using the Palladium. The [00:07:00] beauty of this is that they don’t need to figure out which categories to use anymore. Because prior to this beautiful Bilt 2.0 I was labeling different credit cards for my parents to use with little sticky notes.
The Palladium has been really useful to prevent that sort of situation from happening. 2X on everything. 3X with the accelerator, and then more value if you’re gonna value that Alaska transfer or whatever else you happen to be doing.
And the Bilt Mobile Dining is a tool in these dining maps that you have. Yeah. Bilt Mobile Dining is still pretty interesting. Justin, do you know how many Bilt eligible restaurants there are with mobile checkout? Ooh, I would think that most of them are in New York, but maybe outside of New York I don’t think it’s more than 100.
Yeah. And then maybe including New York, I would guess maybe around 125, 150. Yeah, right around there. I think right now it’s 140- Wow … in total across the US, so not a lot of spots. And mobile checkout sounds [00:08:00] really cool on paper, but I think the unfortunate part of it is just there’s not a lot of eligible restaurants, right?
Part of the idea behind building that map was basically it’s so hard to even figure out where the restaurants are, and Bilt has a PDF with them, but they launched that in March 2026, and I don’t think they’ve been updating it. And then you can also try asking the concierge, but it’s annoying.
That mobile checkout map basically just maps out all the restaurants. It makes it very easy for anyone to figure out, like, where can I use my Bilt cash every month if I want to do dining? But if you’re in Seattle, there’s nothing really near, nearby you, unfortunately.
You gotta go to Las Vegas. Zatynia. Yes. Inside of the Caesars Palace Forum Shops or Caesars Palace. Yes. And is there stacking potential? Because you have not only Bilt Mobile Dining and the Meal Maxer dining maps, you also have other programs.
I like two things. I like deals, and then I like to eat food. But eating out, and I’m based in San Francisco can be expensive, right? So I always found myself naturally in the deal mindset [00:09:00] trying to surface what I call stacking opportunities, right? Stacking opportunities as in taking a dining rewards program like InKind, which is already a pretty good deal in itself and then trying to figure out can I take InKind and then put it together with I don’t know, Amex Resy credit or a Sapphire Reserve OpenTable exclusive tables.
I would take the two lists and just try to see what between the two of them would overlap and work. I f- eventually figured out, but I was like, “Why don’t I just put this into a tool?” I was perusing different sites and different conversations, and people were always like, “Oh, look at this opportunity between InKind and,” I don’t know what stacks with it.
Bilt, for example, when you pay tip or can you pay InKind using your Sapphire Reserve dining… Yeah, people kept on asking this, and I was like, “Why don’t I just make a tool that aggregates everything in one?” There was nothing like this at that immediate time. And yeah, as we’ve mentioned previously there’s 13 programs on there now.
Bilt Mobile checkout is a little trickier to stack with some of these other programs because you’re paying through the Bilt system. But there are, like, ideal worlds where you could pay [00:10:00] $25 of the Bilt cash and then pay the rest of the bill using InKind, for example. That is what I would consider a stacking opportunity, for instance.
That’s a good one, and I’ve done that in Vegas too. I had some issues where there were multiple people at the same table, and they had to bring it up as different tables, but eventually the server figured out splitting tenders, splitting checks, all those things were possible, at least in my experience. So that’d be nice if you ordered maybe $50 worth of food, you could put $25 in Bilt cash against that, and then use the rest with InKind, Chase, Resy, something else.
The map can show which of these can overlap and allow for the stacking opportunities. Yeah, exactly. There’s definitely significantly easier ways to stack that don’t necessarily involve bothering the server too much. A classic one that I always like to talk about is Amex Resy and DoorDash Going Out.
DoorDash Going Out is this new one, for example, that is based on your credit card. If you add your Amex card to DoorDash, it will [00:11:00] go on the Fidel API rails. I don’t even know if Fidel API rails, I’m just reading. I remember reading it, basically, right? But the idea is Fidel can basically see the transaction actually happening at the restaurant, but those are the same payment systems that the Amex credit uses or the Resy credit is triggered on.
That is a very easy stack because if you have an Amex card, like a Gold or a Platinum, and you eat at a Resy restaurant that’s also part of DoorDash Going Out you’ve just used a true stacking opportunity doubling up, and you can also triple up potentially with Rakuten dining here as well Oh, that’s really good.
And I recently got the Rakuten credit card that’s giving bonus earnings on the Rakuten dining as well, so that can be a play. Yeah, for sure. Although I don’t think you’d be able to use the Amex Resy credit for that one with the Rakuten card unfortunately. But that could be part of a tip- Yeah
or if you go over the allotment, I think that can be- Yeah, exactly. There are just so many cool stacking opportunities around. You can also do this with Paze Clover, for example.
And for listeners, that’s P-A-Z-E. This is a digital wallet where you get [00:12:00] $10 back as a statement credit up to 10 times per card. I’ve gone through Chase cards, Capital One cards, US Bank cards, and how about this? For the first time, I’m using a debit card for dining. I’ve been using that at Dunkin’ Donuts as I’ve exhausted all my credit card credits with Paze.
Yeah. Imagine my excitement when I found out my Chase debit card, which I haven’t touched in maybe six years, had up to $100 in Paze credits. That made me very happy obviously. Yep. US Bank for me. Yeah.
Clover is a point of sale system.
It’s like Toast or Stripe at restaurants, for example. And the idea is these restaurants will use Clover to accept payments. Some of them have a ordering system on a Clover website, and what we have surfaced essentially 28,000 spots where you can pay with Paze at checkout, and then actually trigger that credit, which is awesome.
I have this cafe I go to in San Francisco that I really like. Go there pretty regularly. And I’m basically paying with Paze every single time I check out, and I get [00:13:00] my two lattes or my sandwich for $10 off every single time, and that’s great. Oh, good.
Especially if you can get it just over, and you’re only paying less than a dollar out of pocket. That’s what I’ve been doing- Yep … with the Dunkin’ orders. Exactly. And some have even been able to add tips through these programs. So if your total was maybe around 8 or $9, then you could tip and put it at $10 and a penny, and you’re only paying a penny out of pocket.
Yeah. That has worked for me. I like the Paze scenario as well for Clover restaurants because they aggregate it all into one final payment. I have no idea how it’s profitable for Paze, but Big marketing rush Yep. Exactly. Don’t interrupt them.
Let it keep coming through September. Yeah. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I will never remind them.
Restaurants are often entering and leaving programs, so how does NextCard.com keep up with all the shifting? I know with Chase Exclusive Tables, a lot of restaurants left the program and new ones joined. I went to Vanderpump in Las Vegas at Paris Hotel and [00:14:00] Casino, and I believe that has left.
At least that’s what I’ve heard. Might have to go to Esther’s Kitchen is the one location now. How is NextCard keeping up with all the shifting?
Funny you actually mentioned the removed Sapphire Reserve restaurants. So I think a high level, essentially what we do is we just keep track of things once in a while.
Obviously, I think the one downside of the tool is that we don’t have live data. It’s occasionally refreshed, and we have pretty clear disclosures. I was– I think they’re nice and bolded that we’re third party, we’re just an aggregator. People do occasionally ask us “Oh, why didn’t this work?”
And I’m like, “Sorry, I don’t know.” We have pretty accurate data overall. But speaking on the, for example, that Vanderpump restaurant. The beauty of our system is that it has allowed us to basically be one of the only tools out there that has a map of the restaurants that were recently removed from the Sapphire Reserve Dining Credit program.
And the reason why I’m mentioning this is because there’s that 60-day grace period that was not really officially announced, right? They sent out an official email about it, [00:15:00] but in that email, they didn’t even specify what were the 90-ish new restaurants.
Only third-party tools like us really actually had that answer because we’ve been keeping track of things every week or so. The ability to basically have snapshots has led to really powerful insights that people have actually really appreciated. My word of caution is that there can be a lot of different tools and options out there, but I think just being careful about which one has correct data is always an important factor to keep in mind.
Can you explain this 60-day grace period to listeners? For anyone who has a Sapphire Reserve this is a very interesting thing that you’ll probably only find out if you read some deep Reddit threads or you call the Chase line themselves. About 65 restaurants were removed from the Sapphire Reserve Exclusive Tables program on July 8th.
What the Chase social media team on Reddit basically said was that if you eat at any of these restaurants, you will actually get the credit automatically posted. So essentially, it’s like a, “Sorry that we’re removing 10 restaurants in Vegas, but you have 60 days to actually use the Sapphire [00:16:00] Reserve credit at any of these places.”
So the rough deadline there is around September 6th-ish. And the list we have is essentially the best effort reconstruction of what restaurants were removed previously for that grace period Ah, interesting. Okay. So it’s still possible to go to those even though they don’t show up on the list.
Hopefully you wouldn’t have to call in. The credit will automatically register. It seems like people are going to a lot of these spots and getting credited. I know somebody went to Vegas and they were able to get credited for their meal as well automatically.
Essentially the master list is technically 460 until September 6, and then once those 60 removed restaurants fall off, then it actually goes down to that 400 that we have currently right now.
Ah, more devaluations. The war on happiness continues. Yeah, exactly. Let’s move on to hotels. You have Hotel Maxer as part of NextCard.com. This is tracking the Edit FHR Bilt Home Away From Home. Any other programs that are in there? United Renowned [00:17:00] Hotels. Okay. Yeah. That’s a benefit of the United Club card.
Is that right? Club and the Quest. Yeah. Okay. And we also recently just added Google Hotel pricing.
I have a lot of these cards with different credits, and it was just really annoying to figure out.
A lot of the individual bank portal sites are painful to use, and I’ll put it in a respectful term there. We have the Amex Fine Hotel Resorts data, we have the Chase Edit data, we have the Bilt Home Away From Home’s data. We realize that a lot of the hotels are actually the same properties.
There’s a finite number of luxury hotel programs out there in the world. Hotel Maxer is the only tool that will aggregate all these programs onto one map with pricing data. I use it to basically figure out what are the best hotels in the places that I’m planning to travel to.
I know some people use it to find the best deals in general, surprisingly or unsurprisingly, will plan their trips depending on where their hotel credits are. That’s the whole idea of Hotel Maxer, basically aggregating pricing across all these hotel programs into one area.
Definitely wanna use those benefits [00:18:00] given that we’re paying the annual fees, especially if you’re keeping the cards for more than one year. I try to put them into trips. For instance, I had a cruise out of Miami. I looked for BILT eligible hotels in the area and stayed two nights before the cruise, so that worked out pretty well, and I’m sure others are doing that with fine hotels and resorts.
Or they’re taking a special trip like I drove four or five hours to Vermont to use an edit credit because there was really good value there, and I accepted it as an adventure- Nice … and had a good time. What was that edit hotel again? I think my friend also booked. Ooh, Kimpton Taconic, IHG. Yes.
That’s Taconic. Yes. Again I think it’s funny that a lot of people are just mentioning the same hotels ’cause these are the ones that have just naturally just surfaced up because we just find them as good deals.
Yes, it’s the 250 from the edit credit and then an additional 250 as it’s part of participating IHG properties, so you get $500 off, and two nights came to a little bit under 500 from what I remember, or very [00:19:00] close to it. That’s awesome.
Points boost is another funny one. The Edit Max here, for example, has points boost data. I will caveat that all this information is not updated live, so always make sure to check the final bank page and the issuer travel portal site for finalized information.
Just being able to surface opportunities in general to understand where prices are reasonable it has been very useful and a very popular feature as well.
We’ve heard a lot about all the different features. People will ask which parts are free, and then what’s added with a paid membership.
And for listeners, one way you can support the show, I will have links in the show description and on hurdygurdytravel.com where you can find nextcard.com affiliate links to support the show.
There’s actually a lot of free parts of NextCard. We’ve made it so that as long as you have a free NextCard account, you can actually do quite a bit with all the tools. We have a pro membership that will allow you to do date search on Hotel Maxer, for example.
You’d be able to search the dates across [00:20:00] all the programs to potentially surface which ones are the best opportunities for you to book. That’s one paid feature. Another paid feature is basically with automated credit card tracking. The idea there is that you can load in your credit cards into NextCard.
And just to be clear, you don’t need to link up anything with banks. We don’t store your account logins. I’m actually very security first. The way we do the automation is all through Plaid, so we never see your login, nor do I ever want it, and the Plaid automation is all totally optional with NextCard Pro.
So if you want to track everything by hand using our systems, that is totally possible and for free. But the automation, I think we’ve seen people use it for tracking, like their credit cards, their significant other’s credit cards.
It’s been very cool to kinda see how people are using the automation tracking.
We’ll take a short break and come back to the show talking more about NextCard.com .
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Simply cancel existing flights and rebook when Autopilot emails you about lower fares. Find my link in the show notes. Returning to today’s show with John from NextCard.com . We heard a lot about the features that NextCard.com [00:23:00] offers. Are there some upcoming features or features that you would like to see?
Yeah, good question. I know a popular tool that we have had to temporarily take down was EditMaxer. That’s been down for a bit. Hoping we can bring that soon. That’s been constantly on my radar. There’s some other things related to point tracking, for example, that we are figuring out right now.
We do have the ability to track your balances across different loyalty programs like Alaska and your Chase Amex points. I think the upcoming feature is trying to figure that out with multiple people.
It’s a twofold problem of trying to figure out like how you can track your significant other’s points, for example, and then also track it frequently without needing to store login. Because again, I’m trying to avoid having to store too much sensitive information essentially .
And this would maybe allow people to see if points are expiring and then, oh, we’ll transfer these points, use these points so they don’t expire. Would that be a possible feature? Yeah. We technically already do that with award certificates.
Let’s say you have certificates in [00:24:00] Hyatt or you have Marriott certificates, we can also all track that within NextCard and then we know when everything’s expiring, so we can send you notifications and reminders when things are starting to near their expiration date.
What we’re trying to figure out is how to track point balances more frequently. Yeah, some listeners have said that they’ve had large balances with Wyndham. They’re worried about Wyndham points expiring. They’re worried about United TravelBank expiring, and this could be helpful to have tools to stop that from happening.
Yeah, exactly. United TravelBank, for example, is a, a difficult one just because of how they break it down. It’s not like a very clear “Here’s X expire,” because there’s so many like different components that go into it essentially.
Yes, and even Wyndham, it’s based on when you earn the points is my understanding. Oh, okay. That they last a few years from when you earn them. I got the new Wyndham personal credit card, the Wyndham Premier, and allegedly holding that card, points will not expire. Although I’m still unclear about will that apply to the [00:25:00] past points earned from using the Wyndham Earner business card.
Time will tell on that, but usually logging in manually will show you, but it could be cool to just refresh something and see about that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Noted, I will keep that in mind. Yeah, the Wyndham stuff has been interesting. I have the Earner business , and it was news to me when they shifted everything and I wasn’t very clear on when the timeline is actually happening.
America loves confusion. Do we still have 8X on gas or do we shift into the new program? I think I’m still in the 8X club. Same here. But time will tell on that too. Yeah. Only the statement tells the truth. Don’t go so heavy and then only end up with a 1X or whatever the lower earn might be.
That would be unfortunate. Truly.
Is there a feature that users request that you haven’t been able to build yet but would like to? One that people requested is trying to figure out how to track the DoorDash Chase credits and the Instacart credits.
That one has been very tricky ’cause it’s not a statement credit. It lives in your DoorDash account. Other features is syncing everything at once across all your airline and hotels. That one’s again, [00:26:00] hard because we don’t store your login.
The last one is probably with improving P2 tracking and putting into centralization. We just stumbled upon as an initial feature that we when we launched and people just haven’t had seen too many use cases of it.
Any app on the horizon? I was trying to avoid that discussion. Yeah that is- … that is probably actually the number zero item that people keep asking.
IPhone app is on the way. It’s just one of the things that’s on the docket just needs to get done. Cool. And then maybe Android after that one too. That’ll be even harder, right? Yep. It’s just more surfaces to maintain.
That’s the downside of everything. Is there a tool or feature with NextCard that you think deserves more attention than it currently receives? It’s a good question. The one that I feel like is not super well-marketed right now is probably the DoorDash non-restaurant credit map. Long story short, if you have a Chase card, most consumer and some of the business cards come with these DoorDash credits.
These DoorDash credits can’t be used on restaurants. They can only be used on [00:27:00] grocery, retail stores, et cetera. So it was annoying to use the DoorDash map because they don’t have, again, non-restaurant filter for you able to see where everything can be used.
As you can probably tell, if I have a problem and I think enough people have a problem, I’ll build a tool. We mapped out all 184,000 non-restaurants that are eligible for that DoorDash credit. Initial reception so far has been really awesome. Just haven’t really marketed super heavily just given some of the other stuff that we’ve been doing, but it’s been really useful for me.
Wawa was, for example, one of the things that I’ve always known worked. Being in San Francisco I’ve been able to find delis where I can order sandwiches and food, which I think is a cool loophole use case of that credit itself.
Wawa definitely has the food items too, and I was using it until they shifted it- Yeah … or devalued it, where it was $10 off of 10 or more was my understanding or my memory on that, but now it’s only 10 off of 20 or more, not as good. For pickup orders, right? Yeah, pickup orders. The funny part that we noticed I would’ve loved to put a minimum order filter, but it’s very strange.
It seems to vary by account. [00:28:00] My mom’s account doesn’t have this minimum, but if I go to the same exact store with my account, I have the minimum. Wow. America loves confusion. Yes. And inconsistency … I think the DoorDash team is basically automating, is there a Justin or a John using this product?
War on the J’s of the world. Yes. Maybe Jason taking some hits. Exactly. Exactly. My mom’s name just not beginning with a J, so I think she’s safe for now. For now at least. It’s not Jolene. Nope. No idea. All right. In the clear for now. We have a listener question.
One way to support the show is subscribing on subscribestar.com or youtube.com, and we’ll ask your questions for podcast episodes. Pablo asks, “I’m curious about NextCard, if they think adding someone else to your account is a good idea, maybe a family member, spouse, or someone else that you help manage accounts for.
And what about the idea of a second account? If you make a second account for them, can that also be a thing?” People prefer to have that one centralized account just because of the [00:29:00] visibility. And incidentally, the funny use case that I personally use NextCard for is I use to track my parents’ cards, my significant other’s cards, my brother’s cards.
Pablo your question, I’m doing every single one of the eligible people to track everything for. And the beauty of that is I can see if my dad has used his credits, for example, I can basically track and make sure that things are being posted properly.
I can see how many Paze credits I have left to use across all my cards, because it’s up to $100 per card. The beauty of the centralized system is I don’t have to log into different accounts. I can see all the annual fees everyone’s paying.
For me, having to dig through 10, 20, 30 different accounts, stitching everything together does not sound fun. That has been a beautiful use case of NextCard, and I’m glad I built it for at least myself.
But I think there’s a lot of other people that actually like it as well. Oh, good. So you wouldn’t have to do John Wawa one, John Wawa two, and so on. Yes, exactly. Kinda glad I just do john@nextcard.com and keep it all centralized and clean. Very good. [00:30:00] Any other features about NextCard that listeners should know about?
We just have a lot of tools. There’s a lot of fun things on here. I’m on Threads, I’m on Reddit, and I just keep an eye out and just see what people are complaining about, and I think that’s always been a very useful way to back into what are the best things to make.
There’s just a lot of cool things on here, like Hilton Aspire credits, for example, we have that map as well. Oh, okay. The Hilton Resort credit. Yeah, exactly. There’s basically a … very similar to Hotel Max or Edit Max, as we’ve been talking about, basically mapping all 400 hotel Hilton Aspire Resort-eligible properties and then finding pricing for them.
Instacart could be a bit tricky, as some locations have pickup fees, order minimums- Yeah … and more. But with all the grocery stores, I imagine that would be a very difficult task. What do you think about that? Like Instacart credit tracking, or what specifically?
Just saying which locations might be the best to use the Instacart credit. Oh, I see. Yeah, that sounds difficult. In the process of developing all these tools, we have discovered what I call, like to call [00:31:00] limits, and there’s a limit of how much- … you can display on a map before things really start to hit the fan.
The DoorDash map, for example, is a fun optimization problem that I quickly realized, ’cause we went from displaying, I think, at most 20,000 properties or things on a map to 180,000.
We run a popular request for the Bilt data, for the Bilt Hotel Credit in general, like not exclusive to just like HomeAway from homes.
But there’s just like a lot of data points to aggregate.
Any other card features that are being tracked or that there’s some tool for that listeners should know about? We have things like transfer bonus tables, different maps individually for each of the individual programs. We were talking about Frankie, Blackbird Seated.
Credit card benefits-wise, I think the mere fact that we track over 150 cards and have pretty much every single credit and benefit tracked within the NextCard system is already pretty awesome.
Those are two new ones for me.
Frankie and Blackbird. What’s that? Yeah. Is that a pirate hangout? Unfortunately not. They give you [00:32:00] food. They give you cash back on food, though, which is great. It’s essentially very similar to In-Kind, I would say, or Rakuten Dining, essentially. You go to a restaurant, you do some qualified activity, and then you get points or, Blackbird likes to call this their rewards Fly Dollars or something weird.
It’s all the same thing at the end of the day. Just spend, get X percent back, and you profit on your merry way, essentially. Ah, that might be able to stack with that $150 Chase card, huh? Yes, exactly. Hopefully ooh, that’d be nice. Yeah.
How can people connect with NextCard ? Other ways that people can find NextCard online? Yeah. I like to do this thing called monitoring my email too much, so you can always shoot us an email at john@nextcard.com or hello@nextcard.com.
You’ll probably see me perusing on Reddit. Threads, for example, is also where I usually frequent. If you make a free NextCard account, you’ll get weekly emails from us with card reminders and cool things that useful emails.
I like this model of there’s a problem, people are complaining about it, and let’s make some tools to address it. Yeah, exactly. That’s always been the framework of life. I like to solve my own [00:33:00] problems.
Starting early I think it’s pretty easy once you get maybe one, two cards, and then people often say, “Oh, it’s tough to keep track of all these things.
It’s tough to use the benefits.” So it’s nice to have options to solve these problems. With a lot of things to track, it’s just really painful.
We just have a very good system and very nice system to keep track of everything centrally. You have lots of free tools, and if you want more out of NextCard.com, you can support the show. I’ll have links in the show description, and you can also go to HurdyGurdyTravel.com to see the NextCard affiliate links.
Any upcoming travels for you? Any recent cards? Yeah, upcoming travels. This is actually a good example of putting a bunch of things together. Japan 2027. You wanna guess which bonus I leveraged, Justin? Which signup bonus or benefit or- Which transfer bonus Oh, which transfer bonus.
Oh, it’s probably JAL, Japan Airlines from BILT, right? Yes, of course. Yep. As you probably did the same, I got the Palladium. With the bonus after hitting the [00:34:00] qualifying requirements, I got automatic gold status. When that BILT transfer bonus came out, I was like, “Wow, holy crap, this is insane value.”
I think the tier back then was 75%, just for gold, but I paid $150 in BILT cash to upgrade to the 100% tier. So I think I transferred a total of 70,000 BILT points, but then I combined it with the ongoing Capital One 30% bonus to get a total of 220,000 Japan Airline miles. The reason why I booked it in tw- 2027 was because I was trying to get the saver fare seats, which only cost 50,000, 55,000 points each.
Booked for me, my significant other round trip to Japan all in business class. So super excited about that for 2027 at least. That’s the flight side of things, yeah. Very good. Japan loves math too. What we had a 70%, a 30%, so 100% success on that. Yes. Good math there.
Managed to snag the Hyatt House Shibuya with a suite upgrade award alongside I think one of the Osaka Hyatts. Something along those lines. Long story short, essentially avoided the devaluation before they started [00:35:00] going to this five tier award system . Getting really complicated.
Yeah. Yeah, the off-peak, the peak, and then the different award bands. Yeah. It’s complex
Very good. Thanks for coming on today. Cool. No worries.
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