87. Behind the Scenes at PMTFC Conference: Insights, Highlights, and Travel Tips

Welcome to Point Me to First Class, the only show for employed professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners who are looking to optimize their higher-than-average expenses to travel the world. I'm your host, Devon Gimbel, and I believe that your expenses are your greatest untapped asset if you know how to leverage them. Ready to dive into the world of credit card points and miles so you can travel more, travel better, and travel often? Let's get started.

Devon: All right, Andrea, pop quiz. It's a true or false question. Delta SkyMiles are worthless. 

Andrea: Oh. 

Devon: You've got to give me your honest answer quick. You can't think about it. True or false? 

Andrea: True.

Devon: Okay. I'm so glad that you answered that honestly. Okay, full disclosure, that was clearly a little bit of a dramatic question. I don't think that Delta SkyMiles or really any particular points or miles are entirely worthless. But if you had asked me a month ago if there was anything in particular that I was excited about using Delta SkyMiles for, I would have said no, absolutely not.

In general, I favor other airline points and miles much more than I do Delta SkyMiles. As people who listen to this podcast probably know, my local airport, Chicago O'Hare, has very few Delta flights. When I travel domestically, it tends to be to other airports that also are not Delta hubs. But my views on Delta SkyMiles changed when I learned a very specific tip about a particular sweet spot for using them. 

I learned that tip from one of the talks at the Point Me to First Class conference. That is what we are going to be diving into more today on our episode. Now, not Delta SkyMiles specifically, but a recap of the Point Me to First Class conference. 

This was a three-day event that, as you know, you co-hosted with me together at the Park Hyatt Chicago Hotel in downtown Chicago just a few weeks ago. This was a three-day event that included points travel talks given by 11 different speakers, I think, touched on so many different ways to earn more points, use them better, and just travel easier in general.

But I'm aware that not everybody who listens to this podcast was able to attend our conference. There's probably some folks who are fans of the podcast who may not have even realized that we were holding an actual in-person points conference. 

So today, we are going to be recapping highlights from the conference, lessons learned, and how those of you who were not able to join us live and attend the conference can still jump in and get access to all of the conference talks that you can still benefit from. So first and foremost, I want to formally welcome you back to the podcast. Andrea, thank you so much for joining me today.

Andrea: Thank you for having me.

Devon: More than that, thank you for co-hosting a conference with me. It was so much work, but it was so much fun. I cannot honestly imagine someone it would have been better to do this with. So thank you for all the effort that you put in. 

Andrea: Thank you for letting me convince you to do this, okay? I feel like there were some persuasive efforts that went into this, but we agreed on it together, and we made it happen. 

Devon: That is very true. Maybe we should backtrack to that point, first of all, because if you had asked me a year ago when am I going to throw a conference, or am I interested in throwing a conference, I would have said this is not even on my radar screen. I mean, there's a lot of things that I have my hands full with, especially trying to create this podcast, trying to live my life, spending an inordinate number of hours just randomly searching for really great award flights online in my spare time. 

I'd never thought about putting a conference together, but you really were the driver behind this. So tell us a little bit more about why this was an interesting or important thing to you, and why did it matter to you to try to convince me to do this, knowing that I was a little bit resistant to it at first? 

Andrea: I wouldn't say resistant. I think you were very logical in making sure that we could do it and do it well, which is great. So throwback to November 2023, where we sat and probably had a glass of wine at the Travel More conference and talked about hey, wouldn't it be really fun to do a conference geared toward the Point Me To First Class community where we could get together and we could really talk about advanced stuff.

You were like yeah, I really want to do an advanced course. You shouldn't take my course. I'm going to make an advanced course. I was like great. When? You were like probably in the next few years. I'm a little busy. I was like, cool. So I kind of latched on to the whole very vague and very generalized comment that we both agreed on, that a conference would be really cool geared towards kind of intermediate to advanced people, geared towards the community, and basically was like, let's make this happen. 

Devon: Yeah. At first, I mean, not at first. For a very long time, I was like oh man, I don't know. Is this something we really want to take on? Because it is a tremendous amount of work. I think a lot of people listening to this podcast can appreciate identifying as perfectionist or someone who's a little type A or a little, shall we say, compulsive about the work they do.

I knew if we were going to agree to do something like this, we wanted it to be a really incredible experience for the people who might be traveling from out of state to come join this, even people who are local, but taking the time to come to this type of conference. 

But I think what ultimately sold me was that I think there are some really, really incredible things that getting together in a conference type setting can offer people that you just can't match through any other type of learning. It was really exciting for me. 

Andrea: You mean, it wasn't my pro forma. 

Devon: You did put together an absolutely amazing pro forma that was very, very convincing. That alone would have taken me seven years to get around to. But the idea of bringing people together, and also very selfishly, I love learning from other people who know things about points and miles or specific aspects of points and miles that I don't know yet. It just seemed like let's give this a shot. Right. We did.

I mean, we pulled this thing together, and we're going to talk about what we thought was really great about it. Things that now coming out of the conference, we are already thinking about could be improved, could be done better, could make for an even better, better experience than it already was. But before we get into.

Andrea: Better experience for?

Devon: Ideally for the attendees, because I think that is the thing that matters the absolute most. Certainly, I learned some things on the back end about what not to do as someone organizing a conference, like do it all between two people who also have full time jobs and families and other things going on in their lives. But you live and you learn. 

But for the purposes of this conversation today, I would love to hear from you. What is it that you think is unique about a conference, or what did you think was special about the ability to get together with 150 other folks who love points and miles over a few different days and learn in that type of setting? 

Andrea: I mean, as it goes to say, we met at a points and miles conference. We hatched the idea of a points and miles conference at a points and miles conference. Like the community of a points and miles enthusiast conference is an amazing place to be in, especially if it's something that you're very interested in.

Getting to meet other people, getting to meet other women and other physicians at our conference, getting to just share ideas and everything within the community. It's just such a great place to be as far as like you feel like you're around a bunch of people who aren't looking at you kind of weird when you start talking about credit card points and miles. They're as enthusiastic about talking about it as you are. 

Devon: I couldn't agree with you more. I remember in the planning phase of this that you actually flew in from where you are based in Little Rock, Arkansas. You came up to Chicago because we wanted to do a walkthrough of the Park Hyatt together to look at the conference room setting and everything. Your husband had come with you, and the three of us were having lunch. I remember we're sitting there on the terrace of the Park Hyatt Hotel eating our lunch outside. I don't even remember exactly what we were talking about. 

Andrea: You were nerding out.

Devon: Yeah, we really were. I mean, we were getting really, really granular to the extent that your husband, bless him, who's a lovely man at one point just looked at us.

Andrea: He's a very tolerant man.

Devon: Exactly. As I think, honestly, a lot of partners are because in most partnerships, there's the person who's very emotionally invested in points. Then there's the partner who tolerates the other person. I remember at one point, your husband was just looking at us and he said, “I have no idea what you two were talking about, but I'm so glad that you have each other to talk to about it.”

Andrea: Yeah, because otherwise I'm trying to talk to him about it. 

Devon: None of our partners want that.

Andrea: No.

Devon: I mean, let's be honest. Most of our partners are not at all interested in that. But I think that is one of the amazing things about being at a conference, that the people who self-select to go to something like that are the ones who are already genuinely really interested in connecting with other people in what can be, honestly, sometimes a little bit of a lonely hobby.

A lot of us spend the majority of our time learning about points or miles or geeking out about it alone, right? We're at our own computer. We're listening to our favorite podcasts. We're learning in a very sort of one-sided way, and it doesn't feel like sometimes there's a lot of people that you can share that with real time.

To me, that is the beauty of having a conference type of setting is, of course, there's amazing things that you learn. We're going to get to what our favorite things were that we learned specifically ourselves from this conference. But I think that that in-person element is really so special.

When I think about this conference in general and kind of what stood out to me, I think about it from two different aspects. Like I think about it as just someone who was attending the conference who got to benefit from learning from all of these amazing speakers. Then I think about it as the person who in this scenario was one of the hosts of the event.

As an attendee, I think one of my favorite things about attending this conference, and truly about conferences in general, is not only that you get to learn from experts. I mean, we get to do that, again, sort of from the comfort of our own computers. We can learn from so many things that are on the Internet now.

But I think what's really different about a conference is that interactive piece. The ability to ask somebody questions real time about their area of expertise I think is such a unique opportunity. So many times we don't have that available to us. Maybe you'll send a message to somebody online that you are learning from and you ask them a question, and they'll actually find your message and respond back. That is great. 

But I think to be in a conference setting where there's actual time built in for Q&A panels and to be able to go up to any of the speakers and say hey, I really loved your talk on this topic. How do I do this part of it? To get a real time answer, I think is so unique and so fun.

I think as an attendee, that was one of my favorite parts of the conference is that I got to sit at a table with other speakers, and I got to harass them and pick their brains about what they do best in points and miles. I could lean over and say hey, what do you think about this? They were sort of trapped. They had to answer me because we were sitting there next to each other. But I think everybody got to benefit from being able to actually interact with each other, with the speakers.

Then from the perspective of someone who is in this case a co-host of this event, I think as an event host, one of the things that I loved the most about this conference was just being able to see those interactions and those connections being formed amongst the people in the conference. Being able to see people who maybe only met each other online actually getting to meet in real life for the first time or people establishing connections for the very first time with other people that otherwise they wouldn't have been able to meet. I think that that was something that was really special to me about the conference. 

Andrea: Oh, I definitely agree. Like watching a community build on it  was just amazing. One of the things I was like, I really, if there were a next time, we really need to put like your social media name and your actual name on a name tag because there were so many people that I was like I think I know you, but I've known you from Facebook. But your name is not that. Like it's spaced out and separately. What I say in my head is your name and what your actual name is, it's not the same thing. 

But in addition to that, like building a community, but also like the content was leagues beyond anything that I've heard on a podcast, anything that I've sat in at a conference. Like our goal was to gear this towards the intermediate to advanced user and not to discount the beginner experience, but there's just a lot of content available for them to start dipping their toes in and start learning out there.

It was more like well, we want to really gear this to the lesser known things in the community, and let's gear this content towards that. Man, the speakers really delivered on that aspect. 

Devon: Oh, I could not agree with you more. I mean, I do think let's acknowledge that we have some bias here that this is a conference you and I decided to put on together. We had a hand obviously in creating the speaker lineup. So, again, we need to indulge.

Andrea: So obviously it's the best thing that I've ever attended, you know.

Devon: We got to pick the topics that we thought were going to be the highest yield to the broadest range. Again, people who are at that more intermediate to even possibly advanced level in terms of award travel. So let's kind of dive into that now. Can you share kind of what were some of the things that were just your favorites to learn about personally from this conference? What did you take away from this conference that you think is really going to help or impact the way that you approach travel in general? 

Andrea: Okay, I'm going to be totally biased here and say that every single talk was absolutely amazing. We sent out a post-conference survey, and every single person rated very, very highly on our one to five scale. Like no one, there was not a single talk that rated poorly. I think that goes to show like the dedication to the speakers on really putting time and effort into their presentations. Man, they did such a good job.

I know like some of my moments when sitting in the conference was like when Kevin was like asking what do you think the points price is? The lowest points price to get from this destination to this destination. He would like start like 60,000 points, 40,000 points. Then he would reveal the answer. I was like oh, there's a flight to get from here to there for 30,000 points? Like I didn't even know that existed. Then he would go oh, yeah, here it is. You know? 

Devon: Yeah, I thought Kevin's talk was fantastic. For those of you who are wondering, we're referring, of course, to Kevin Zanes. He's known as The Points Analyst online. He's been a guest on this podcast before. Kevin gave this incredible talk specifically on flying business class, some redemption sweet spots, special promotions, and secrets. It was a little bit of everything, like a spotlight on some of the best award redemptions that are also not the typical ones that you hear about.

I thought that his talk was incredible. I agree with you that I took something away from every single talk, but his was a great one. Were there any other takeaways or highlights for you about any of the other talks from the conference?

Andrea: I mean, all of them. Kelly showing us all the secret award search calendars. You showing us every single Fifth Freedom flight in the world paired with Devan and Kelsi’s ANA Around the World and being able to like put those back to back and look at, well, here's some Freedom flights that you can book, and here's an ANA Around the World. Like, like my mind kind of blew up at that moment. Then day two, Sujatha's links and setting up folders. Then Cherie's like tips on, okay, I'm leaving for a trip tomorrow. 100% I have downloaded and utilized Packr from her talk for my trip tomorrow.

Devon: Totally agree. Now, just for the record, I feel like I need to be transparent and honest and say yes. So I gave a talk on Fifth Freedom flights. I think this is just such a fun topic in the world of points and miles. It's something I've never covered on the podcast before. So this is not like recycled material that everybody has already heard, at least from me in the past.

While I did definitely manually create a picture of the globe with all over 150 Fifth Freedom flights actually marked on that picture, I did not actually cover every single one of those in my talk. But I did highlight some of my favorite and most high value Fifth Freedom flights that people can take using points and miles.

But I also learned so much from the speakers. Again, I think this really goes to show that no matter where you are in your points and miles journey, if you've been doing this for six months, if you've been doing it for six years, if you consider yourself more of a beginner, or if you feel like you're fairly experienced at points and miles, there's always something to learn. 

I don't think anybody, even those of us who do this professionally, or people who've been doing this, again, for a really long time, nobody knows everything about points and miles. It's not possible. You could never amass all of that knowledge as one human being.

So I think what's so fun is when you do already have kind of a baseline level of confidence in terms of earning and using points. Then you go and you hear from another expert in the field in their area where they've spent so much time studying, they spent time really looking into things and booking award flights or earning points. There's always something you can take away.

This is where I really changed my mind about Delta SkyMiles. So you mentioned Sujatha who spoke on the second day of the conference. She is the person who was talking about one of the best uses of Delta SkyMiles actually being not to book necessarily Delta flights or even to book flights domestically within the U.S. But being able to use Delta SkyMiles to book SkyTeam flights outside of the United States.

One of the examples that she gave was, for instance, you can book an Air France flight that flies from Paris to Nairobi. If you wanted to book that directly through Air France, which is a favorite beloved award program of so many of us in the points and miles world, if you're going to book that exact flight through Air France itself, it would cost you 100,000 points. 

But if you book them through their partner, Delta, it actually only costs 65,000 Delta SkyMiles to book that same exact Air France flight from Paris to Nairobi. When I heard that, I really was like I think I've been wrong about Delta SkyMiles. Now, I know that probably the vast majority of people who listen to this podcast are going to be based in North America, based in the U.S.

But for someone like me, who's really interested in sometimes building out a little more creative itineraries, I'm totally open to breaking up an itinerary. Like if I'm trying to fly from the States and land eventually in Nairobi, I don't have any problem flying one carrier from the States over to Europe, over to Paris, if then I can construct from that a really, really great deal.

I think that hearing from her about this one specific kind of sweet spot or use of Delta SkyMiles, it really made me rethink that program. I'm not about to hit the transfer button and move all of my Amex points over to Delta. But now I feel like, oh, wow, I have another tool at my disposal. I probably would not have specifically thought about that previously. So I loved learning that.

Then I also have to second, we had Kelly, the Points and Miles Doc, give a talk about award search calendar tricks. She did such a phenomenal job. I love the way that her brain works. I love the way that she puts information together. I think this, to me, is another huge benefit, specifically of the conference format, which is that I have really started to understand over time the extent to which I'm a visual learner. 

It is really, really challenging for me to process information only by hearing it, which is probably going to sound kind of ironic as a podcast host, as someone who tries to put out education and information in a purely auditory format. But for me personally, I learn so well when I can hear someone talk and pair that with a visual cue. There's something specifically about looking at award search calendars that being able to see walkthroughs of that I think is so helpful for me.

Kelly had so many great not only still images, but she also had little video screenshot clips about how you can actually navigate through some specific award search calendars to be able to increase their utility. Again, as someone who is pretty darn familiar with running award searches, I loved that I learned new things from that talk specifically.

Then the last thing, again, not the last thing I took away from the conference, but the last thing that really stands out to me in terms of something I learned is that also on the final day, we had Dr. Cherie Chu. She had a talk just about travel hacks to save time and sanity. You mentioned how you've already started using some of her tips for your upcoming trip.

One of the things I took away from her talk, which I actually think is going to have an enormous impact on my travel life, were her tips for doing laundry in your own hotel room. Because laundry is one of those things that I feel like is the bane of my existence when I am traveling, especially when I'm traveling with my kids. 

Now, I'm not going to go into too much graphic detail here. But we had an incident on one of our family trips. We were gone for two weeks last winter. We were at a resort that is a little bit secluded, which is something that we loved about this resort. But just to kind of set the scene, we were not at a resort where you can walk outside. Then within five minutes, you've walked into a fully resourced kind of like bustling city center. I mean, we were very far removed from a lot of regular amenities. This happens on vacation sometimes. 

At the very beginning of the vacation one of my kids had a lower GI situation. Basically what this entailed was that I thought I had packed more than enough changes of clothing specifically for my kids for a two-week vacation so that we would not have to do laundry. I was wrong because I had not factored into this whole scenario that one of my kids would have a situation. 

So long story short, we needed to do a lot of laundry. When you are at a resort and you don't have a lot of options, most people probably know doing laundry through your hotel, it is not cheap. I was not expecting to spend $272 on laundry. That was not part of my overall travel budget for that trip. Sometimes that is what happens.

So hearing from Cherie, kind of her approach to doing laundry in a hotel room, that would have saved me, that tip alone literally would have saved me over $200 on a single trip. So I'm really excited now for our future trips to take some of her suggestions with me. Because you never know what's going to happen on vacation. It's really great to have some tips to take with you before something like that happens. So those were just some of the things that I learned personally that I'm going to be taking away from this conference. 

Andrea: I'm dying on mute over here because I don't want people to just like listen to me cackling in the background listening to you talk about that. So I like muted myself, but I'm just over here like rolling at your story. I will say this has become my podcast soothe. I feel like there are certain podcasts, like your podcast, the Frequent Miler Podcast. There's some podcasts that I listen to every week. It's like oh, man, Mondays are great. I get to listen to my podcast and get ready. Saturdays, I get to do my laundry and listen to Frequent Miler.

There's some other podcasts that I listen to as well. There's some great content out there. But I don't listen to every single one of them the way that I do yours and Frequent Milers. Because after I've listened to three or four Southwest Companion Pass podcasts, I'm kind of like, you know what? I'm good. You know I don't need to listen to a fifth episode about Southwest Companion Pass. Like everyone is doing a great job covering this. Absolutely fabulous.

So the recap and the digital access has become my daily podcast. I play it. Luckily, I'm enough of an audio learner that I can drive to work and listen to it again knowing that I will have to go back and take screenshots of slides as they play. 

Devon: Absolutely. For those of you who are really intrigued about what Andrew just said about this recap, about being able to watch these videos again, we're going to tell you at the very end of this podcast episode information about how you can also get access to all of the replays from the conference if you want to learn from the same experts that we had host or have join us at our conference.

But before we get to that, there's a couple more things that we wanted to make sure that we discuss today. One of those is that Andrea, you and I just shared kind of what we personally really took away from this conference, things that were tips that we learned that we're going to start using in the way that we think about travel and plan travel. But thankfully, we're not the only ones who learned something from this conference.

Andrea: Absolutely. 

Devon: As you mentioned, we did want to make sure that we polled everybody who attended the conference to hear from them. You know, what did they think went well? 

Andrea: I mean, just in case we decided to do this again, like, it would be great to get some feedback, right? Just in case.

Devon: Absolutely. we, of course, also want to know, like, what could we do better? Because no matter how hard you try at something, it can always be improved. But do you want to share with us kind of some of the highlights that you found when you were going through these surveys about what did other people take away from this conference? So that people listening to this admittedly don't think that we're just entirely biased as the folks who put on this conference, that we learned a lot from it. But we weren't the only people who took away some really valuable information. 

Andrea: Right. I apologize that I can't credit any of the attendee feedback comments because I intentionally left no blanks to put in name or email address because I was just like I want it to be anonymous. I want them to be as honest as possible. 

So overwhelmingly, very positive feedback. One of my favorite comments was, what should you say to someone considering coming to the Point Me To First Class conference? It was, “You should go for a wonderful weekend of helpful, practical information, of course. But really go for a weekend with wonderful women, and two men, who care as much about points and miles as you do.” I added in the two men part because there were two men who attended the conference, or one man who attended and one man that spoke.

Full disclosure, white chromosomes are entirely invited to any event that we throw on. Of course, we are always going to be supportive of women in the travel space. But this was by no means an event that was exclusive only to women, but it is very, very friendly to those of us who have maybe been to conferences or other types of settings where we've been in the minority as women.

So the event is open to anybody and everybody who's interested in learning. One of my favorite pieces of feedback that someone provided about the conference was specifically talking about some of the speakers in their talk. Someone said that Kevin's talk was exactly what they wanted to know about finding business class tickets, and that Kelly's was also perfect because they really needed to know about calendar searching. I think I love that comment so much because those were two of the talks that I learned the most from. That was not the only feedback that we received. 

Andrea: Yeah, another one was someone said, “My favorite part of the conference was some of the laugh out loud moments.” There were some definite moments like this. I mean, when you get a group of women together who are highly intelligent, highly successful, wonderful women, and you say we're going to go over the hard things. No one blinks or is intimidated. Everyone took the challenge and was like yeah, we're going to learn hard things, and we're going to present on hard things.

So the laugh out loud moments were like Sujatha like putting up a slide like be a pluripotent stem cell. Like that, everyone died. Like it was amazing. The rest of the comment was, “I also thought that the speakers were amazing, and I learned a lot from all of them. This is, I think, the first conference that I've ever been to where I took extensive notes and then went home and reviewed those notes every night in the hotel room. Then after I came home, I reviewed the notes again. I set up a browser favorites folders exactly the way Sujatha suggested.” It was an awesome comment. I was like, yeah, same. I feel the exact same way. 

Devon: I agree. I actually have no one else can see this because I don't do anything with this video, but I'm holding up right now just for Andrea to be able to see. I have a little page of notes that I took from the conference as well. I still have it sitting.

Andrea: I can confirm it exists. 

Devon: Yeah, it's still sitting on my desk right here next to me because I'm still looking at this when I'm trying to put into practice some of the things that we l earned about at the conference. It was that good that even someone, again, who feels like pretty baseline confident about a lot of things and points and miles. There were so many things that I took away from this conference because they were so helpful for me.

Overall, I think that this conference really was a success. I think it was a success for the people who attended. I'm really proud of what we put on, but that doesn't mean that it was perfect. Like I said before, I think there are always ways that we can improve. I think after we finished this entire event, and we had some time to kind of decompress and process, there were things that you and I were already getting excited about doing differently, doing better if we were to do this whole scenario again.

So I want to talk a little bit about what would we do? What would we add? What would we change? What do we think would improve this conference even more in the future? So, I'm going to go first and then I want to hear your thoughts on this. 

So I think the things that we could do better when I think about what about the first iteration of this event was not as successful as I would love it to be. I think one of the main things, honestly, was our planning in terms of how much advance notice we could give folks. 

So to provide everybody a little bit of context, like Andrea mentioned at the beginning of this episode, she started kind of suggesting and nudging and proposing that maybe we think about considering possibly doing this together around November of last year. So this was November of 2023. We had ideas about where we wanted to host this conference. I did want it to be in Chicago the first time so that it was local to me, and I could drive there and easily access it.

Long story short, by the time we found the venue that we really wanted to hold it at, and we'd gone through all of the contract negotiations and everything, and we had signed a contract so that we could announce the dates of the conference, the location, and everything. We announced this whole conference, I believe it was the first week of April of this year, 2024. We held the conference September 20 through 22.

So for all of you mathematicians out there, you can very quickly deduce that that was actually not a huge amount of advance notice, especially for people who sometimes need to put in for vacations at work 8 to 12 months in advance or already have their travel schedule planned throughout the year.

So I think that if we were to do this again for my own sanity, but also for the benefit of people who want to come to a conference like this and do have to do some travel planning, I would love to have at least one year of advance notice where we could announce we're doing this conference on these dates in this location. People have at least 12 months ahead of time where they can figure out if they want to be able to attend. So I think doing this on what felt like a little bit of an ambitious time frame was a challenge for us this year. That is something that I would do differently. 

The other thing that I think I would do differently is when we planned this, I mentioned that it was a three-day conference, but really the way that we structured it was that we had a full day of talks on a Saturday. So Saturday morning to Saturday afternoon, early evening. We had a half day of conference talks on Sunday, specifically so that people would have time to get back to area airports and be able to fly home Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening if they needed to be back at work on Monday morning. Then we also hosted a welcome event for all the attendees on Friday evening.

So we essentially went from Friday around 5 p.m. until Sunday around 1 p.m. While I think that that was great in terms of, again, making it more possible for people to be able to come and not have to take a lot of time off of work, one of the consistent pieces of feedback that we received in our survey was that people actually wanted it to be longer. They wanted it to be more days, or they wanted to be able to have an opportunity to have more time to meet and socialize with attendees. They wanted to actually have more talks but maybe distributed in a little bit of a different way.

So I think if we were to do this again, I think that I'd be more willing to have it be maybe an actual full three day event and not try to compress it into essentially like a day and a half or an evening and a day and a half, knowing that some people might not be able to attend the entire thing. But that would give us a lot more room, I think, to be creative with our schedule and with also having a little bit of downtime as well. So we can hold it in a location where people want to get out of the conference venue and spend some time in the area.

Then I think the last thing that I would do differently, not because I think that it was bad that we didn't do it, but it was something that didn't even occur to me when we were originally planning this conference that while we were there really struck me as something that would be such an added positive in terms of the experience is that the way that we planned it for this year is for folks who are kind of used to traditional conferences, you go into a big conference room you have a schedule, you have talks lined up kind of back to back. Then some breaks built in. That was the way that we had structured it this time. 

Again, I wouldn't get rid of that completely. I think it's amazing to learn topic-specific material from experts. But I think, again, taking advantage of the unique opportunities that being in person really affords us, what I would love to do next time is maybe more of a hybrid approach. Where we do have these very traditional talks given by people they're standing on a stage, people sitting in the audience get to listen, get to ask questions at the end.

But I would love to do one afternoon of kind of voluntary breakout sessions that are a little more hands-on for people to be able to work really closely with one of the speakers or one of the experts in more of like a workshop type of setting. 

So something like for instance this year, one of the best talks we had, one of the most highly rated talks was Kelsi and Devan Sullivan, the Point Sisters, gave a talk about how to book an ANA Around the World award ticket. I think wouldn't it be amazing if you could then sign up and do like a two-hour workshop with Kelsi and Devan or with a speaker in their area of expertise, where you get to sit around a small table with them, 10, 15 other people, and actually walk through how to do something specific. 

So I think it could be so much fun to include some sort of workshop or more interactive component into the conference schedule because, again, that's something that I think is really challenging to do in otherwise kind of online format or virtual format. So those are the things that I think would make an already really good conference even better. But what would you do differently, theoretically, if we were to do this again? 

Andrea: Theoretically, if we were to do this again. Okay, I have a list and it's very hard for me to not instantly go to okay, what's the next thing? Like when we first started talking about this podcast episode and recording this, I was like well, I'm just going to talk about what I'm going to do different because I just want to look forward. Okay, number one, I want to work on getting CME credits. Okay, yes, I did talk to a CME accreditation body.

Whenever we were planning this conference, we were on a time crunch. At the time, it seemed very daunting because they basically kind of laughed at me when I told them I wanted to get Points and Miles Conference CME accredited. They were like yeah, no. Personal finance can never be approved for CME.

Since then, I've kind of done a little more research and realized like there are some ways around this. There are some topics that we can cover that are adjacent that we could possibly get CME accredited. So that's a goal. A goal. Okay. Number two, I had the great privilege of attending a conference the weekend after ours, which was great.

Devon: Which is very ambitious. I don't think that I had the emotional or physical energy to interact with any human being for about two and a half weeks after the end of attending an in-person conference. So I am very impressed by your stamina.

Andrea: I mean, I had signed up for this. I get very ambitious when I look at things on a calendar and an email. Then when it actually comes to fruition, I'm like oh, man, I kind of overextended myself. But Curtis and Rena, they plan Skinsanity every year, and they do an absolutely fabulous job. I'm 100 percent going to steal some of their ideas in that we went and each night there were hosted dinners.

Where a group of eight to ten people would sign up for a dinner. the host would create a reservation at a restaurant. It would basically be oh, you could sign up with this person. Probably the conversation is going to revolve around this topic at this restaurant. So you could pick based on the restaurant I really like sushi. I want to go to a sushi restaurant. I don't care what they're talking about. Or, oh, I really want to meet this person and sit down and have a talk with them. Or I really want to talk about this topic. Everyone pays for their own dinners. Like it's not like a thing where you have to sign up and pay in advance. Like literally there's 20 Amex Gold cards put down. But yeah, hosted dinners is another thing that I want to incorporate.

To mirror what you said, starting sessions earlier and extending the conference out longer I think would be really great. Another thing is, in addition to hosted dinners, doing more breaks for people to actually get to go pee. I'm sorry for anyone who had to have an extended bladder. I was very, very ambitious and very excited about hearing all these people talk. I did not want to cut them short at all. So, yeah, I didn't add in any pee breaks. I'm sorry. 

But more breaks and honestly some structured time to just chat with people and network and get to know people. Because I think, again, that's such a great aspect of being at a conference. I think adding in more time to do that would be amazing.

Devon: I agree with you wholeheartedly. So, I think that there are so many things that you and I have bounced ideas around about what could be even better if we were to do this again. So while we are not yet prepared to announce that there's officially a second Point Me To First Class conference, what we can tell you all is, obviously, we've been thinking about it. So not only that, but if we were to do this again, we would absolutely want to give you all at least 12 months advance notice. So you're not having to rearrange your schedules last minute to try to fly somewhere in preparation for a conference. 

So if attending a future Point Me To First Class conference is something that sounds interesting or intriguing to you, the best way to stay in the loop about that is just to get on the Point Me To First Class email list. Those are oftentimes the first people to hear about anything that's happening in the Point Me To First Class world.

So if you are not already on our email list, go ahead, put your name on it. There's going to be a link for where you can join the email list in the show notes, the episode description, so that you don't miss any news about a potential future conference. Spoiler alert, one thing that you can be sure about. What? Tell me. 

Andrea: I'm sorry. I'm going to do something really mean to you now. Okay. True or false? 

Devon: Okay. 

Andrea: There will be a future Point Me To First Class conference.

Devon: Oh. Okay. I'm not trying to be cagey, but I don't think, like if you had me hooked up to a polygraph test, I think either answer could be true and either answer could be a lie. What I will say is that it would be amazing to have a second Point Me To First Class conference. What I was going to say a little bit earlier is that, spoiler alert, you can most likely expect that it will be at a Hyatt property. 

Now, behind the scenes, Andrea and I have been, and by Andrea and I, I mean Andrea, has been incessantly messaging Hyatt through Twitter. I don't even know what it is anymore. I never knew how to Twitter, tweet, whatever, even before it changed its name. But Andrea is the technological one of the two of us, and she has been Twittering whatever, the Twitter thing, at Hyatt asking about opening dates for future Hyatt properties. 

So I'm not going to lie and tell you all that I don't have my eyes set on the Hyatt that's allegedly been opening up in Turks and Caicos for the last seven years. There's a Park Hyatt that's opening up in Cabo, and there's also some incredible Hyatt properties domestically as well. So if there is a spoiler alert, that is the spoiler alert. So one of hundreds of different potential possibilities. But, like I said, if you want to know updates as they actually come real time, just get on the Point Me To First Class email list.

For those of you who were not able to join us live or who are just hearing for the first time today that we actually did host a Point Me To First Class conference and you want to have access to all of the incredible talks, all the incredible information that was shared at that conference, the great news is that you can do that. Because we made sure to record all of the talks. We also recorded all of the speaker Q&A panel sessions where audience members were able to ask questions of all of our speakers.

We also included about 10 additional pre-recorded talks that we were not able to host live. So if you want the benefit of learning from all of these really, really great topics, from how to book an ANA Around The World ticket from Kelsi and Devan Sullivan, from Flying Business Class Redemption Sweet Spots from Kevin Zanes, you want to learn all about the secret award search calendars that Kelly covered. 

You want to learn about how to maximize the Bonvoy program for Marriott, or some incredible redemptions from Hilton and why that's an undervalued system. You want to hear from Sujatha Murali about all of these hidden gems, the sites and strategies to maximize efficiency and minimize misery when it comes to award travel. Andrea gave a great talk on AI-powered travel hacking, how to leverage AI for your travel. 

We also have talks about booking all-inclusive resorts, earning points, points travel for large families, how to earn points for folks who are involved in real estate investing, so many actual topics beyond that as well. You want to sign up for that? You can do that. Like I said, we recorded the entire conference. We have everything all packaged up in this nice little online library that you can get access to at any point if you're interested.

You want to do that? Go ahead. You can find the link to sign up for online access to the digital conference in the episode show notes and also in the episode description. You can very easily find that at points.pointmetafirstclass.com/PMTFCconference. Again, I don't expect you to write that down or memorize that. We'll have that for you in the episode show notes, the episode description. 

You can read more about all of the topics that were covered at the conference and also get your hands on replays to watch at your own convenience as many times as you want. So with that being said, I hope that some of you are now intrigued about either learning from the conference we just held or possibly joining us for a future conference. Andrea, more than anything, I want to thank you not only for joining me today. I always love having conversations with you but.

Andrea: Thank you for having me.

Devon: Thank you for being the brainchild behind the first Point Me To First Class Conference. Thank you for all of the work that you put in. 

Andrea: Thank you for letting me basically convince you to do this. 

Devon: I don't regret it. There were moments in the planning that I thought I might actually lose my mind. Being on the back end of it, I really do think it was a wonderful experience. It was a great experience for me. I hope it was a great experience for everybody who attended. I think that this is just, again, another really fun way to learn about points and miles. 

So for those of you who attended live with us, thank you for coming. It was such a pleasure to meet you, to talk with you. For those of you who, like I said, are maybe just hearing for the first time ever that there was a Point Me to First Class Conference, I hope that you took away something interesting or entertaining from our conversation today. As always, have a wonderful week, everyone. We’ll see you same time, same place next week.

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of Point Me to First Class. If you want more tips on turning your expenses into travel, visit pointmetofirstclass.com to learn more. See you next week.