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🤙🏿 Welcome back to the Better Than Points Newsletter - the premier place for all things Credit Card Points News and Travel

My name’s Luis and I’m the one writing this (hit me up here!)

My birthday was yesterday!

I did a lot of nothing and it was great.

So today I’ve decided to bring the heat.

You'd better have your pen and pencil ready for this one because school is in session.

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✈️ Delta Actually Has a Solid Deal Right Now… They Just Don’t Tell Anyone

I know I’ve been dogging Delta lately, but every once in a while they drop something worth paying attention to.

The problem? They don’t advertise it.

Most people never see these award sales unless they’re already hunting or they’ve got alerts set up.

That’s why I use Thrifty Traveler.

They find award + cash flight deals and email them to you, so you can book directly with the airline and stop wasting hours searching.

Here’s the kind of deal they’re sending right now:

✅ Delta One to Europe for ~97,000 SkyMiles
✅ Destinations include Barcelona, Dublin, Lisbon, Milan, Porto, Rome, Venice
✅ Best availability is surprisingly July + August (peak summer!)

If you have points but don’t have time to play the search refresh and repeat, this is hands down the easiest way to stay on top of legit deals.

They also have a free tier, so you can test drive what the alerts look like.

👉 Try Thrifty Traveler’s free tier (or go Premium to get the best award alerts).

Each week, I’ll share something cool I’ve discovered or tackle a question from the community. It’s my little corner to explore ideas, offer fresh perspectives, and hopefully spark your own curiosity.

After my email last week asking what you wanted me to cover more of, I had a handful of people ask me to show them how to get to Europe.

So I’m going to give you three ways to do it.

And honestly, the third way is my favorite.

The first way is pretty straightforward: Virgin Atlantic.

The reason it’s easy is because Virgin has a solid award search tool.

You plug in your from and to cities, and it pulls up a calendar view showing award availability.

Just make sure you’re looking for dates with the Saver icon, and test a few different routes to see what has the best space and lowest pricing.

The downside is the taxes and fees.

Virgin recently increased them, so even if the points price looks low, the cash you pay can be pretty high depending on the route and cabin.

The second way is Flying Blue.

Flying Blue, Air France & KLM award program is great because they’ll often release multiple award seats at once, which makes it more family friendly.

The easiest way to start is using FlightConnections to see which routes Air France and KLM actually fly, then plug those into your searches.

You’ll need a Flying Blue account to search points pricing.

The main hack: leave the date window blank.

When you search with no date, it pulls up the calendar view, and you can quickly see which days are cheapest.

This is also a great alternative if you want to book Virgin Airline routes but avoid Virgin’s higher fees.

You’ll usually pay more points than Virgin, but less cash.

Think closer to $300 in taxes and fees through Flying Blue vs $700+ through Virgin.

The third way, and my favorite, is Air Canada Aeroplan.

They usually have the lowest fees, the most partners, and one of the best all around award programs.

Aeroplan has 50+ airline partners, including a bunch of European carriers, so you’ve got a lot more routes to work with.

Business class to Europe for around 60,000 points is very doable when space is there.

You can log into Air Canada and start searching East Coast airports to major European cities.

And if you want to speed the whole process up, Seats.aero (even the free tier) can help you find dates with availability way faster than clicking day by day.

I'll drop some of those ones that I found in the Flight of the Week section.

I like Aeroplan because the math usually works.

Low taxes and fees, reasonable points pricing, and more chances to find seats through all those partner airlines.

It was inevitable.

Hawaiian got bought by Alaska, Hawaiian wasn’t exactly printing money, and now we’re already starting to see cuts.

And one of the ones that honestly bums me out the most is the free meals.

If you’ve never flown Hawaiian, you used to get a meal and a snack. A lot of the time it was that egg sandwich (which wasn’t bad), and you could even grab a glass of wine with your food.

Effective July 1, 2026, that’s going away.

They’re framing it as a “positive,” saying it’ll give people more options with an elevated onboard service.

But the catch is you’ll have to pre-order your food, and it won’t be free. It’ll cost $11 to $17.

That’s a big L.

Those little touches were part of what made Hawaiian feel different, especially on long flights to Hawaii.

Why not just bake it into the ticket price instead of nickel and diming people onboard?

I get they need to cut expenses and tighten things up, but for anyone flying economy, it sucks having to pay extra for something that used to be included.

Color me surprised, Delta actually added benefits to a card without jacking up the annual fee.

Delta just dropped a new card design for their 30th year partnership with American Express, and they snuck in some new goodies, including a $120 annual rideshare credit.

Depending on how much you travel, that’s a nice little offset for the Delta SkyMiles Gold card (which has a $150 annual fee). It definitely chips away at it.

But the bigger win is bags.

Without raising the annual fee, Delta increased the free checked bag benefit.

Now Delta SkyMiles Gold, Platinum, and Reserve Amex cardholders get a second checked bag free, which adds up fast on roundtrip travel and helps cut down on the packing anxiety.

One note on the second bag perk:

It only applies on Delta-operated domestic U.S. flights, not international. Same rule as the first free bag.

And unlike the first checked bag benefit (which applies to up to 8 passengers on the same reservation), the second free bag is only for the cardholder.

The only way someone else on your reservation gets that second free bag is if they’re also an eligible Delta SkyMiles cardholder.

Still, it’s nice to see Delta giving cardholders a little more without changing the annual fee, especially when everyone else seems to be raising fees and taking perks away.

And selfishly, as someone with a kid who has to lug half the house through the airport, I will happily take a couple extra free bags.

Alaska’s Atmos program is hands down one of the best award booking programs out there.

Great pricing on Alaska flights, solid value on American Airlines, a bunch of strong partners, and they’ve always kept fees pretty low.

Which is why this change is annoying.

Starting July 1, 2026, their award booking fee is going up from $12.50 per person to $20 per person.

And it’s not just once.

It applies per person and per direction when you book an award ticket, whether it’s on Alaska or partner airlines.

So yeah, it adds up.

That said, it could be worse.

Plenty of other programs hit you with bigger booking fees plus fuel surcharges, and Atmos still doesn’t play that game.

So overall, not the end of the world, but it’s still a junk fee that didn’t need to exist in the first place.

The one surprising bright spot is that they kept the waiver in place for the Atmos Rewards Summit Visa Infinite (the $395 annual fee card).

That card includes an award booking fee waiver, and it applies to an unlimited number of bookings as long as:

So if you book a lot of Atmos awards, that waiver can help offset this change.

You just have to make sure it pencils out with the annual fee.

Overall, it’s still a decent card to consider if you’re heavy on Alaska/partner redemptions.

Check out these crazy award deals!

This section includes some of the best award flights of the week bookable with points and miles.

Chat with TravelBot - my AI clone. It’s trained on every newsletter I’ve published along with my 10+ years of points and credit card knowledge 🧠.

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This section includes some of the best links videos and articles of the week around the points and travel community