Tuesday Triple

There’s a triple for today, but first let’s talk some blog meta: A week from Friday it’s time for the MEAB annual Travel Hacking as told by GIFs post, and frankly that post is a ton of fun but also a bunch of work. The biggest part of the work is deciding which travel hacking events or changes for the year were significant, and while I’ve come up with a dozen or two, I could use your help. Drop me a line and let me know from your perspective which events in 2021 should be addressed. Thanks in advance!

Back to our regular programming:

1. Delta is having an award sale to Cancun and Los Cabos from various US Cities. Sale prices depend on the city, but range between 11,000 miles round trip and 22,000 miles round trip. Use Delta’s flexible calendar search for the quickest results. (Thanks to DDG)

2. In a move that surprised absolutely positively no-one, Office Depot/OfficeMax has $15 back on $300 or more in Visa gift cards running through Saturday evening (or likely Friday evening, because, you know, reasons). To maximize the deal:

• Buy the “Everywhere” variety of gift cards for lower fees, but make sure you have a way to liquidate (Bravo is still a higher fee way)
• Link your card to Dosh
• Link your card to Rakuten’s in-store offer for 5x cash back at Office Depot/OfficeMax and activate the offer
• Check your Chase offers or Bank of America offers for $10 or more in cash back at Office Depot/OfficeMax
• Try and get at least two and perhaps more transactions through back-to-back with the cashier

A caveat on the Rakuten card-linked program: Every time you use an offer you have to go back to the site and activate it again.

3. Stockpile has increased their fee-free gift card purchase when using a credit card to $1,000 per-transaction. According to DoC, the annual gift card limit has moved from $1,000 to $2,000, but I don’t think either of those limits were or are true. I was able to get more even before the change. For best success though:

• Get a new IP address every couple of transactions
• Use a new email address every couple of transactions
• Use private mode in your browser
• Use a credit card like the Chase Freedom Unlimited, Citi Double Cash, or American Express Blue Business Preffered that earns 2x on these transactions (or the US Bank Altitude Reserve for true hackers). Update: Chaim from HelpMeBuildCredit wrote in to remind me that Stockpile doesn’t take American Express

Apropos of nothing, I’d like to share this here because no-one else would understand. This morning, my P2 said to me: “You’re the worst to shop for. All I can come up with is to buy you $1,000 in BestBuy gift cards and let you turn those into points or something.” 😂