100. The Podcast Turns 100 (Episodes)! Stories, Stats, and Surprises

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.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. Today is a really special day here because the Point Me To First Class podcast is turning 100, 100 episodes old. That is not 100 years old and that feels like a huge milestone worth celebrating. Every single Monday since the first episode of the podcast aired back on March 20th, 2023, a new episode has been released that aims to explore the vast landscape of the award travel hobby, including how to more effectively earn points for the money you're already spending and how to use those points to expand your travel budget for unforgettable travel experiences.

Creating a points travel podcast has been an adventure all of its own. It has been filled with challenges, opportunities, and lessons learned. And today in honor of our 100th episode, I wanted to give you a behind the scenes peek into the Point Me To First Class podcast journey, including why I started this whole venture to begin with, surprising statistics about the podcast and how I'll use what I've learned so far to make the podcast even better for you in the next 100 episodes.

Whether you're a long-time listener of the podcast, have been here every Monday since the beginning, or you just found your way here, there's something for everyone in today's episode. First and foremost, I want to genuinely thank each and every one of you for being part of the Point Me To First Class community and for supporting this podcast. If this is the first time that you've tuned in or the 100th, it's listeners like you that make this podcast successful and I want you to know how much I appreciate all of you.

And as much as I love thinking about points and talking about points, the point of this podcast has always been to empower you to expand your travel opportunities using points and your support is the foundation of this podcast's success. I'm so grateful to you for tuning in, for sharing the podcast and recommending it to your friends or colleagues, and for the times that you've reached out with an email or message telling me how something you learned on the podcast is helping you travel better with points.

Now I have some fun statistics to reveal to you about the podcast, but before we dive into the data, let's go back to the beginning. And I want to share with you more about why I started this podcast and what I was hoping to accomplish with it.

For many years, points was just a personal hobby for me, a very fun and very rewarding personal hobby. And it might have stayed that way, but three things happened. First, seeing untapped opportunity. Second, recognizing a gap. And third, boredom. Here's what I mean.

Let me take you back about 10 years to when I was first learning about credit card points and award travel when I had a light bulb moment one day. I had been reading all about using rewards cards to earn points and how to get outsized value for those points when I was sitting in a meeting at the medical practice that I used to work in. And this was a small physician-owned private practice. There were eight doctors at the time. Four of them were partners and owners of the practice and then four of us were juniors in the practice, including me.

So we used to have these monthly meetings with all of the physicians in the group where the partners would review running the practice, including things like what our case volume was, what the monthly practice revenue looked like and they would make plans for any upcoming expenses in the lab. And as you can probably imagine, running a pathology practice with its own laboratory can be quite expensive. There are a lot of supplies and equipment that has to be maintained, services and vendors, and the partners were talking about one particular piece of equipment that we needed for the lab and whether it made sense to purchase the equipment outright or to rent it from a vendor. And that ultimately the cost to purchase that piece of equipment, if we wanted to do that, would be $400,000.

And I remember sitting there in that meeting and immediately thinking, this is such a missed opportunity to earn points because we didn't use any rewards credit cards in the practice at all. They just had credit cards that had been issued by a local bank that didn't offer any rewards or our business expenses were just paid directly by check or by bank transfer. And that was just one piece of equipment, albeit a very expensive one, but our practice easily had over 7 figures of recurring expenses annually, and it seemed like from a points earning perspective, that was totally being wasted.

Now a couple of other things happened around the same time. About a year into my being in that practice, my husband who is also a physician, he was thinking about starting his own practice. And he's a psychiatrist.

And starting your own medical practice entails a lot of investment. Now, luckily as a psychiatrist, you know, his overhead is much, much lower than another type of physician who might need, you know, a lot of very expensive equipment or machines or a lot of supplies like vaccines, you know, to run their practice. So in the scheme of medical practices, psychiatric ones tend to be a little bit less expensive to run than other ones. But at the same time, we were still funding this entirely ourselves and there are not insignificant startup costs to getting an office suite, getting everything set up, you know, all of the services you need as a physician, your electronic health records and all of these things.

And I remember from that experience of having now been, you know, an employee in a medical practice and just seeing all of these expenses slip through our fingers in terms of earning points, I remember saying to him, you know, great, I'm so happy for you. And we are going to make sure that we are earning points for every single dollar, you know, that you need to spend to get your practice up and running and then to run it after that.

And so lo and behold, he started his practice. We got him off the ground. And then at that point, you know, our lives continued to grow and continued to change. You know, eventually we bought our first home. We ended up expanding our family. We had our first child in 2015.

And so I had a couple of year period where I was initially learning about points and miles and I was just seeing expenses as opportunities and increasing expenses kind of popping up everywhere. You know, in the practice that I was in, even though I wasn't a partner owner, I wasn't paying for those expenses. My husband had his medical practice, you know, our lives expanded, so our expenses expanded with that.

And I just saw opportunity after opportunity after opportunity. And I knew that I wasn't alone. You know, I have a lot of friends who are also in the medical community. I have friends who are small business owners who run online businesses and it was just like I couldn't avoid seeing it. Everywhere I looked all I saw were expenses that were waiting to be tapped into. And the more that I started seeing every expense as an opportunity to earn points, the more I realized this did not just apply to me. There were so many other folks with expenses, so many other folks with higher than average expenses and especially so many small business owners who were sitting in the perfect position to easily turn their expenses into travel using points, but they knew nothing about this world.

Depending on what your educational and professional background is, chances are you spent a lot of your youth doing things that took up a lot of time and energy. Maybe you were also in school. Maybe you also went through, you know, an extended training period where you were working 80 to 100 or more hours a week. You know, it's not like a lot of us are walking around kind of thinking about, wow, I wonder about points. You know, like if no one's ever talked to you about it before, there's no reason to know this or learn about it.

And it was really nagging at me that I could see this opportunity and there were so many people in my very, very close circle, my close community, who were perfectly poised to take advantage of this, and they knew nothing about this world. And I hated seeing that missed opportunity for so many people.

And at the same time, I'd been navigating this hobby basically by myself, soaking up all the information that I could find online on points travel blogs about earning points and strategizing award travel and how to maximize the value of points. But I reached this point where I kept feeling like I was looking for information that didn't exist.

I was looking for someone to talk about all of the different scenarios I was encountering in my life, all the different scenarios that my husband was encountering as a business owner, and how to really leverage those opportunities to earn points. And I didn't feel like there was any conversation about a lot of those scenarios. I didn't feel like there was information at that point that existed that I was really looking for, or just maybe no one was really talking about it.

And that was how to approach this points game when you have a lot of expenses to leverage, especially if that includes business expenses that are totally separate from your personal expenses. And I was left there just kind of wondering, how do we turn substantial expenses like paying off student loans or contributing to 529 plans into points? What are the opportunities for earning points on high expenses like quarterly tax payments or property tax payments?

If you have significant expenses from vendors who don't accept credit cards at all, what are the approaches available to circumvent that so that you don't miss out on earning tons of points? What's the best way to construct a rewards card portfolio that maximizes points earning if you don't want to constantly be signing up for new rewards cards? Or let's say you have a business structure where it's just not practical to have tons of credit cards in use or to constantly be changing those cards really, really frequently.

I also felt like there was a gap when it came to information and education available for using points in a way that really fit my life and reflected my travel priorities and also would make sense for the lives that a lot of my friends and colleagues were also living. You know, way back in the day, most of the points redemption information available online was really tailored to folks who predominantly traveled solo, who had extreme time and location flexibility, so that they could chase these outrageous first-class flight redemptions that left from a random airport on a random Tuesday in order to get insane value from their points.

And while I loved reading about those stories because they're interesting and they're entertaining, you know, when it came to actually booking my own travel, that is not what my life looked like. And so I didn't feel like I could apply kind of some of these typical points redemption stories and scenarios to the way I actually needed to travel.

Seeing the way that people would talk about the lengths they would have to go to, you know, to book certain flights and how they were able to get such great value from their points. That was not really attainable for me in terms of what was practical for me to use my points to travel most of the time when I was traveling.

Because even when I traveled solo, my schedule was fairly constrained. You know, I worked in a small medical practice. If someone is off, it really impacts the workload of the other people. And so we had to be really strategic. We had to request time off well in advance. We always had to make sure there was enough coverage of the practice for the subspecialty that I practiced that the people who were left there, you know, to work, we're not just going to be just overwhelmed, you know, with the amount of work there was to do. And once I had my kids, you know, travel really changed for me.

It often looked like needing to book flights and hotel stays during traditional school breaks at very high demand times of travel for a family of four. It's a very different picture than traveling solo with a lot of time and location flexibility. And you know, for international flights, I will always be honest, my preference is to fly on lie-flat seats. That was one of the biggest reasons I got into points to begin with. And so when you add into the mix, you know, all of my other travel constraints, but then also wanting to find premium cabin flights for multiple people, you know, with a fairly straightforward itinerary. So I didn't end up with three layovers with cranky kids. It really made my award searches look nothing like kind of the typical award searches that I was reading about online.

And in fact, most of what I could find on Points Travel Blogs was advice to not even try to find multiple business class flights on desired routes during high demand travel times. And so I had a challenge. You know, I got to figure out where do these opportunities actually exist and how can I make award travel work for me and for my family?

You know I think one of the benefits of having spend, especially if you have high spend, is that that spend is a resource. It can be much easier for folks with high spend to be able to generate a lot of points. I think that's one of the most amazing resources that we have available at our fingertips. But the flip side is that because we may not have as much flexibility with chasing the best deals out there, oftentimes the best deals for us aren't actually the lowest theoretical points totals for a given flight or for a given hotel stay.

And so what's required sometimes is a different approach, a different strategy so that you can still maintain getting a lot of value out of those points, but it may again just not look exactly like the best deals when you're traveling solo or you have fewer constraints to deal with. And through that whole entire process, it just became really clear to me, you know, I saw so clearly the challenges that other people were likely to have booking trips, even when they might have a lot of points at their disposal, but they still wanted to get really good value out of them. How do you have to approach an award search differently the more travel constraints you have? How do you navigate the sometimes complex world of airline alliances and partnerships to find hidden deals and uncover the best chances for finding coveted award availability? What new award redemption opportunities exist if you have the opportunity to buy points outright at the right price?

You know when I learned the incredible value of using points for travel, it was immediately obvious to me how many other folks were in an amazing position to benefit just as much from points as I have, but so many of them didn't even know this world existed. And for the ones who did, I felt like there was a really large gap in the existing points education that was available. And I wanted to fill that gap.

I wanted to share with other folks, people in my close community, but people even beyond that, what is actually possible when you know how to play this game? And even embedded in all of that is an even deeper mission for me personally. And that is increasing access to travel, especially premium travel for those who want it, to women and to help foster financial literacy and confidence among women.

I really want to help change the conversation around how women view spending money, how they build wealth by leveraging credit card points instead of cash to travel, and what travel opportunities are open to women that they never imagined possible all because of points.

And so my hope for those of you listening to this podcast is not only to love earning points and love the way that you book travel with those points, it's also to change the way that you view money, especially your spending and see it as a powerful tool to enhance your quality of life.

But as I mentioned at the top of this episode, starting this podcast didn't come just from wanting to connect other people in my community with the opportunity to take advantage of their expenses to earn points or from wanting to fill the gap in the existing points education that I saw out there. Because there was one other important factor in finally pushing this introvert over the edge into creating a weekly points podcast. And that was boredom.

Because for many years, as I mentioned, I had done points as a personal hobby and I loved it. And that was enough for me for a really long time. I kind of felt like I'd hit the jackpot when I learned how to do this and my travel opportunities changed so dramatically and I just really enjoyed that aspect of points for myself.

But in 2019 I left the medical practice that I had been in for seven years and stopped working, you know, 60 plus hours a week. And for most of 2020 that ended up being fine. As I took care of my kids, they were really little when the world shut down during the pandemic. But by 2021, 2022, life was returning more to normal. Still wasn't practicing medicine and my brain was getting bored.

I love learning, I love being intellectually challenged and stimulated and not practicing medicine anymore left a very big and kind of unexpected hole in my life. I had never anticipated stepping away from medicine when I did and I had no backup plan. My backup plan was to go to school for a million years, practice medicine until I was 65 and then retire and lo and behold that's just not how things had played out for me.

But at that point there were really only two things that I honestly knew how to do really, really well. One of them was practicing Dermpath and the other was points. And if I wasn't going to practice medicine anymore, I wanted to share what I knew about points and my hope was that sharing my perspective on the unique challenges and opportunities available specifically for folks with high expenses would help contribute a new and a different voice to the points education landscape. And so the Point Me to First Class podcast was born in 2023.

I had to write and rewrite and re-record that first episode, I think, four times before I got through a single take without messing up half of my words. I still haven't listened to a single episode after it's been recorded because being forced to hear your own voice is a rare form of torture. And I've never missed a Monday in the almost two years since the podcast was released. And that's how the Point Me To First Class podcast was born.

But that doesn't tell the whole story because a lot has happened since then. And now that you know more about the story behind the Point Me To First Class podcast, I want to share some fun facts with you. So we officially launched, as I mentioned, at the end of March of 2023. And within six months of its first episode, the podcast hit 100,000 downloads. And as of today, the day I'm recording this, the podcast has been downloaded just over 661,000 times.

And that really blows my mind. I think it just might be possible for the podcast to hit 1,000,000 downloads by the end of 2025, at which point I think I'll have to do some sort of epic points or travel giveaway to celebrate. So that's just even more incentive for you all to continue listening to episodes, go back, listen to episodes that you haven't caught yet, and share about the podcast with the people who you think would benefit from it.

We have reached listeners in over 100 countries, with the most listeners tuning in from the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, India, and Mexico. Of the 100 episodes released so far, 60 episodes have featured a guest or multiple guests, and 40 episodes have been solo episodes that are just my recording.

One thing that I am incredibly proud of is how many female guests I've had on the show. Because not only do I want to help empower women around their finances, their spending and travel, but it's also really important to me to amplify the voices of women in these spaces and highlight their experiences and expertise. And out of the 60 episodes so far that have featured guests, 92% of those have been female guests.

Our guest episodes have covered a range of topics from money mindset, exploring the main transferable points currencies, yearly breakdowns of points earning and points redeeming, and 11 trip reviews, including bucket list trips to Spain, Bora Bora, and Bahrain, all made possible by points.

The most downloaded day of the week for the podcast is Monday morning, which tells me that a lot of you are starting your week with a dose of points inspiration. Several of you have even reached out and written to me saying, your Mondays are made better because of the podcast or that now you have something you really look forward to every Monday morning. And that was actually intentional. When I was first planning this podcast, I was trying to decide what day of the week to have new podcast episodes air.

And I specifically chose Monday because for the longest time, especially when I was in residency, I would get very depressed on Sundays as another work week was about to start and I kind of dreaded Monday mornings. So I have new episodes of the podcast air first thing on Monday morning in the hopes that it makes that first day of the week. Especially if you're heading into work just a little bit more enjoyable.

So now I want to share with you the top five most downloaded and most popular podcast episodes so far, including one that surprised me. And I'm really, really curious if these five episodes happen to be some of your favorites, or if these will be surprises for you too.

Coming in at number five is actually two episodes, and those are the most recent 2024 year in review series, episodes number 97 and number 98. And I am so excited that you all love these review series as much as I do because they're some of the most fun conversations for me to record.

Number four on the most downloaded list is episode number 52, Strategy Transferable Points and Card Canceling Mistakes, Listener Q&A. And this is the episode that really surprised me because the Listener Q&A episodes are really different from all of the other episodes on this podcast. They are completely off the cuff, unprepared responses to randomly chosen questions that folks send me that cover a bunch of unrelated topics pretty briefly instead of doing a detailed deep dive into one specific topic. But these are fun episodes for me to record. I never really know what people are going to ask me and it's a very different approach than my typical episodes. So if these are popular, I am more than happy to bring these back, the Q&A format, for at least one or two episodes this year.

Number three on the most downloaded episode list is episode number 45. And this was 2023 Points Earning Review with the Points and Miles Doc. And this was the first time that I did a year in review series in terms of looking at an entire year of points earning and points redeeming between me and an expert guest. And this episode was even more popular than I expected.

When I came up with the idea to do this, I was really excited about it because I love numbers, I love spying into other people's points lives and hearing how did they earn points, how many points did they earn, you know, how are they using their points to book trips? And so I knew that this was going to be a really fun episode for me, but what made it so amazing is that so many of you really responded to this episode and this series as well. And the success of the 2023 points year in review is what really helped me to decide to do a points earning and points redeeming year in view series every single January.

Now the two most downloaded episodes of the podcast have been actually the first two episodes that were ever released. Episode number 1, A New Way to Think About Expenses, and episode number 2, 5 Beginner Credit Card Points Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. And this has been really exciting for me because those episodes are really foundational to getting started in the world of points and award travel and I love that they have reached so many people.

But for all of the successes of the podcast so far, there have also been challenges, of course. I hope that it's apparent how much I love talking and teaching about points on this podcast, but the process of actually getting ideas or concepts out of my head and into a semi-understandable podcast episode can be really, really hard for me. And I often struggle to take what can feel like an interconnected web of ideas and facts in my brain and attempt to lay it out in a linear format that's coherent and useful.

And I also struggle with the ever-changing and dynamic nature of the points world. Whereas on the one hand that makes it really fun to learn and navigate in real life, trying to put out useful information, useful content on a topic that can and often does change dramatically over the course of just a few months, means that there are already a handful of episodes that have been published that are now almost entirely irrelevant or no longer up-to-date.

And I've also had to just entirely scrap episodes that have already been recorded when something about an award program or a specific points earning or redemption method literally disappeared overnight. But despite those obstacles, I continue to love the challenge of sharing what I know about points and award travel with you all, especially when it makes an impact on you or helps you in your points journey.

And every once in a while I get to hear from one of you about how the podcast has helped you. And it's really those messages that mean the most to me. I wanted to share a few of those with you all today.

So I've gotten messages like this one where a listener wrote to me, "I just want to thank you because after 25 plus years of traveling back and forth to Europe, I finally see a chance to achieve my dream of a first class flight. I have never done it, but I've dreamt of it. And with this podcast, I'm hoping to be able to take other trips. The past 31 years, every time I have a vacation, I fly to see my family. Both my husband and I have our immediate families in Spain and Italy. So after visiting, we never can afford personal vacations. This is hopefully going to change. Thank you for the podcast, I have told everyone."

Or another listener who wrote, "I absolutely love your podcast and this new hobby of points and miles. For so, so many years I earned one cent per point, I earned one point for every dollar spent and redeemed for cash back and had no idea what I was missing. And honestly, I was a reluctant travel because I couldn't afford to travel the way I wanted to. You've opened my eyes to this entire world of leveraging my expenses for travel and I am so grateful."

They go on to share some redemptions that they had already made. They also had this amazing points win where they earned almost a million points for paying tuition for three of their kids. And what they said was that "We would not be doing any of this without Points and Miles. So thank you. I'm loving every minute of this and I'm so grateful to you."

My sincere hope is that every single one of you who listens to and follows this podcast will have your own points success story to celebrate. And I would love for you to share it with me so that I can celebrate you too.

As much as I've loved growing the podcast to 100 episodes, I'm even more excited for the next 100. And that is where you come in, because I want to make sure that I'm creating episodes for you that are the most useful, the most interesting, and the most entertaining ones for your points journey.

So if you love this podcast and you want to see it get even better, here is what you can do. First, if you haven't already, please take a minute to rate and review the podcast on whatever podcast platform you love listening on. I already have over 1000 podcast reviews, but from the data, I know there's a lot more than that of you listening. And so I would love to see even more reviews help to spread the word about the podcast and make sure that other people who would benefit from it are able to find it.

Second, I know that so many of you already do this, but tell your travel-loving friends and colleagues about the Point Me to First Class podcast. Share with them your favorite episode so far or encourage them to just start at the beginning with episode number one.

And third, I would love to hear from you personally. I can make a few educated guesses from the data about what podcast topics resonate with you most, but I can do even better with your feedback. Tell me what you love, what you want to hear more of, and what you're dying to learn about by taking the Point Me To First Class listener podcast survey. You can find that online by following the link that's posted in the episode description and episode show notes.

All of your feedback will be used to improve the show even more, and I can't wait to hear what you have to say. So as I celebrate 100 episodes today, I'm really celebrating all of you who've stepped into this world of points travel, who've trusted me to help guide you, and who've made your dreams of travel a reality. It's been an honor to share these strategies and stories with you and I can't wait to see where the next 100 episodes take us.

Thank you for listening and have a fantastic week, everybody.

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.