If you follow churning blogs or forums, you’ve no doubt seen that US Bank has double cash back rewards running through Saturday. But, I think based on the content out there, most of the major content creators haven’t actually used it, so let’s add some practical notes:
There are multiple aspects of the double cash back promotion. Not only are card-linked offers doubled for the next three days (which is the only thing I’ve seen written), but the US Bank shopping portal’s earnings are also doubled for the next three days.
It can be really hard to find US Bank rewards landing pages. So, I’ve linked to both variations, just make sure you login to your US Bank account first before trying these links:
Did you even know US Bank had a shopping portal, and that it earns points on point earning cards? Did you know that Lubbock is considered the one of the world’s capitals for burrowing owls? Did you know that owls can even burrow in the ground? (Wow, we’re off track today, my bad)
The card linked offers are their own kind of special:
– You have to add card-linked versions of the offer during the promotion or they won’t double – They work for any personal card on your account, and maybe for any business card too – Grocery stores occasionally show up – Gaming works like Chase Offers or BankAmeriDeals – The card-linked portal often just shows a spinner, and when that happens, try later (I don’t have a better solution, but if you do, please let me know)
This promotion is actually much more lucrative than you’d probably think. Always be probing, and good luck!
Mr. burrowing owl is shocked that content creators aren’t always experts when they write on a topic.
First, let’s look look at the 90th and 95th percentile for arrival delays by marketing carrier (or, in other words, how many minutes past scheduled arrival captures 90% or 95% of all carrier arrivals)? Note that this includes regional jets operated by partner airlines like SkyWest, Endeavor, and United Express.
Marketing Carrier
90th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
95th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
American Airlines
51
83
Alaska Airlines
31
53
JetBlue
83
138
Delta
31
63
Frontier
73
120
Hawaiian
34
54
Spirit
66
113
United
43
85
Southwest
36
62
2023 Arrival statistics by marketing carrier.
I’m most surprised by JetBlue here, given that to have a 95% chance of arriving in time for your connection, you need to pad your connection time by nearly 2 hours and 20 minutes. On the other hand, I wrote this on a JetBlue flight that was delayed by about 3 ½ hours, so I guess confirmed? Well played JetBlue.
Operating Carrier Arrival Stats
Now, let’s look at the same thing for major airlines flying mainline aircraft, excluding any regional jets, since often we’re able to avoid regional jets for positioning flights or connections and historically they don’t perform as well:
Marketing Carrier
90th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
95th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
AA
51
97
Alaska
31
55
JetBlue
83
138
Delta
31
66
Frontier
73
120
Hawaiian
34
54
Spirit
66
113
United
43
85
Southwest
36
62
2023 Arrival statistics by operating carrier, major airlines.
Note that AA’s operation has worse (!) performance when its regional partner airlines are excluded from the statistics and we only consider mainline flights. I had to go triple check this data because wow, that sucks AA.
What about data for the regionals only, when they’re operating on behalf of one of the majors?
Marketing Carrier
90th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
95th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
Endeavor
27
63
CommuteAir
36
82
GoJet
40
80
Envoy
32
62
PSA
32
70
SkyWest
32
70
Piedmont
25
62
Horizon
22
45
Mesa
68
129
Republic
23
53
Air Wisconsin
61
114
2023 Arrival statistics by operating carrier, regional airlines operating for another carrier.
My mental model for regional jet carriers is usually: avoid GoJet and Mesa, SkyWest is most likely to get you there. The data proves that’s only somewhat correct for 2023 though.
Major Hub Arrival Statistics
Ok, but what about a given hub? We all know that some function better than others, so let’s look at arrival delays at the top 15 airports by total number of commercial flights, plus one bonus airport.
Airport
90th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
95th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
ATL
33
71
DEN
44
86
ORD
41
86
DFW
46
94
CLT
38
83
LAX
39
74
LAS
50
85
SEA
27
53
PHX
37
70
LGA
43
85
MCO
63
109
IAH
44
92
EWR
48
93
DCA
36
73
BOS
56
102
SFO
47
84
JFK
56
107
LBB
44
81
2023 Arrival statistics by airport, ordered by total number of air carrier flights in 2023.
So I guess avoid positioning flights to Orlando, Boston, or JFK if you can help it.
Also for fun, these are the worst airports for delays:
Airport
90th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
95th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
PVU
87
160
PSE
93
152
BQN
86
137
SFB
73
130
TTN
83
129
2023 Arrival statistics by airport, ordered by biggest 95th percentile arrival delays.
We can dissect this data in a million different ways, but we know winter storms make things worse and summer thunderstorms don’t help either. So let’s look at when you’re most likely to be delayed, by month.
So, build extra time in for positioning flights in June and July.
What about breaking this down by day of the week?
The takeaway here is probably that the day of week doesn’t matter much, unless it’s Tuesday.
Conclusion
If you’re interested in seeing the raw CSV data (which ended up in an SQL database), let me know, I’m happy to share. Otherwise, good luck on those award flights!
First, a warning about Google Wallet, renamed to Android Pay, renamed to Google Pay, which split into Google Wallet and Google Pay, and then was all renamed to Google Wallet once again (I wish I was kidding about all of this, but I’m not):
Since around December, Google Wallet purchases aren’t earning 3x points on the US Bank Altitude Reserve card. They’ll probably fix it retroactively at some point, but for now stick to Apple Pay or Samsung Pay, both of which have been much less schizophrenic about their names and still earn 3x.
The POID is K4IY:9897. Note that Blue Business Plus cards may also be eligible, but that’s unconfirmed. If you try, I’d suggest chatting with AmEx after three business days to see if a spend offer is attached before spending. (Thanks to MicroChurn)
Norwegian carrier Play has 25% off of fares to Berlin, Dublin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, London, and Norway booked by tomorrow night for travel between April 2024 and February 2025, excluding July and December.
Play is a low cost airline, so you’re going to have to fly economy and suck it up, buttercup to take advantage of this one.
Play Airlines headquarters’ official welcome sign.
EDITORS NOTE: In 2024, I’ve introduced Guest Post Saturdays. If you’re interested in contributing, please reach out!Today’s guest post from community member Hank, who’s least memorable travel experience was flying 70 hours of AA economy with an unknowingly broken kneecap.
Affiliate marketing payouts. Banks pay hundred of dollars per credit app a website can lob their way. That’s actually quite new. Historically there wasn’t any money in blogging, so the tiny crowd in it did so as a passion project. Ben was a broke college kid with an insane tolerance for mileage runs. Brian Kelly was still a marketer at Morgan Stanley. Gary was…. pretty much exactly the same.
Because there was no financial incentive to spell out deals they lasted years, not weeks or days. There were no spoon feeding mega blogs, just arcane hints on Flyertalk. There were under 1% the current number of people in the miles space because everything was smaller…
Scale. Back then earning 1.2 million miles got you written up in the WSJ and a movie deal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Phillips_(entrepreneur) For some people nowadays that’s a bad month. The highest signup bonus was 20,000 miles, not 200,000. All that means…
Award space everywhere. There were 20+ interesting ways to go to Asia every day. Cathay Pacific had 6 daily flights from NYC by itself, usually with F award space. No one had any miles. That means if you did you likely enjoyed some amazing travel experiences because…
Things were harder to monetize (a good thing). If you had 120,000 US airways miles you were heading to Hong Kong in first class for lunch because there wasn’t anything else to do with them. They’d be devalued in a year, award space was plentiful and liquidation wasn’t a serious option.
Now that same trip is costing you 300,000 Amex or Chase points. Those have real cash value, at minimum $3,000. Would you spend that on a lark for weekend lunch? A passionate hobby has evolved into a successful business, but as is often the case the magic and allure sadly begins to fade.
– Hank
“A duck looking sadly back at a small pond with a Lufthansa first class duckie in it, while a giant ocean filled with dollar signs fills the background.”
Southwest has extended its schedule through January 8, 2025, which includes Thanksgiving and Holiday travel dates. Now isn’t guaranteed to be the cheapest time to book holiday tickets, but it’s certainly not the most expensive time either and if prices do drop you can collect the differences as mileage refunds or travel credits. (Thanks to Brian M)
These are Pathward gift cards, so have a liquidation plan in place. Current Pathward liquidation limits at major retailers are $480 every six minutes. There are still in-person and online liquidation plays, always be probing.
Wells Fargo launched the Autograph Journey card with a 60,000 point sign-up bonus after $4,000 spend in three months. Points are worth 1 cent each, and the $95 annual fee is not waived for the first year. The card also includes a $50 annual airfare statement credit.
MEAB mini-review: Earning points on an ongoing basis isn’t easy without access to specific merchant coding, the hotel transfer partner is Choice which is already available with Capital One and Citi, and the airline transfer partners are widely available in other places too. It’s another bank to churn and therefore still interesting, and Wells Fargo is historically pretty abusable; but, you can do better with ongoing spend at other banks. On an arbitrary scale of 0-34, I’d give this a solid 18.
Stephen Pepper notes that Wyndham points can be purchased for 0.93 cents each through April 21. Wyndham only allows 100,000 base points purchased a year, but under this promotion you can net a total of 200,000.
These points typically resell at above 1 cent per point which, if nothing else, should tell you that the markets think this is a great deal and the only reason I’m writing about a points sale.
Have a nice Thursday!
The Wells Fargo Autograph Journey exclusive launch mug.
American Express terms and conditions for new credit and charge card applications famously don’t tell the whole story about whether or not you’re eligible for a bonus. Instead when applying for a card there are just a few rules: If you get a pop-up telling you that you’re not going to earn a bonus during an application, you’re not going to get it. If you don’t get a pop-up, you will. If you get pop-ups on most or all of your applications, you’re in the colloquial “pop-up jail”, or PUJ as we’re collectively calling it.
American Express’s Current Inmate Count
We’ve seen a significant increase in pop-up jail incarcerations in 2024, presumably related to American Express’s concerns about its ability to maintain record profits in exactly the way that Boeing can’t. To quantify this to an (only partially scientific) extent, I used churning.io to search for the number of occurrences of “PUJ” on reddit.com/r/churning in several time periods:
Month
“PUJ” Comments
Jul 2023
3
Aug 2023
6
Sep 2023
7
Oct 2023
39
Nov 2023
25
Dec 2023
42
Jan 2024
78
Feb 2024
54
Mar 2024 (month to date)
70
The pop-up jail trend according to frequency analysis on reddit.com/r/churning
Yes there are measurement errors and biases in this methodology. But also yes, there’s a trend that emerges and matches the general sense in the community that jail is becoming more common.
Breaking Free: Alt
The main method to break out of pop-up jail is to spend a lot on American Express co-branded cards, like a Delta card, Hilton card, or Marriott card. Yes – I understand that “a lot” is rather qualitative, but I’ll quantify it slightly by saying you should be spending well into five figures a month for this method to be likely to succeed.
But, let’s get to the whole point of this post, the alt method:
To get out of pop-up jail, close all of your cards with American Express, wait 90-ish days, then start-over like you’re a new customer.
– MEAB’s tome of apocryphal wisdom
Let’s call this one the “apocryphal sneak-attack” to go along with the related sneak-attack strike back. Good luck, and happy Wednesday!
A different kind of pop-up jail, courtesy of Microsoft.