Month: January 2022

A few quick hits for today:

1. Sign up for a free baby registry through Babylist via the AA shopping portal and earn 1,000 bonus miles. Of course you should do this for everyone in your family with an AAdvantage account too. The whole process took me about a minute and the miles posted the next day.

2. If you have an American Express offer on a business card for $75 back at Verizon after spending $75, sign up for a new Verizon Prepaid line via the AA shopping portal for 6,200 AA miles at a minimal cost.

The “Unlimited” bring your own device prepaid plan with Mobile Hotspot came out to just about $78 for me when taxes were included, so the net cost is about $3, and I got a notification from AmEx about redeeming my offer a few hours after the purchase. I’ll cancel the plan in about 15 days after the miles have posted. (In case you want a treatise on this deal, see Frequent Miler)

Bonus: I got a new phone number that I can port somewhere else as part of another deal, probably for an iPhone SE because, well, trust me when I say that you can never have enough Apple Wallets around.

3. There is a new targeted no lifetime language (NLL) business gold card offer at this link courtesy of the venerable @nutella. The bonus is 90,000 Membership Rewards after $10,000 in spend and another 10,000 Membership Rewards for adding an employee card and spending $1,000 on that card. As usual, if you get a blank page after logging in and clicking on the link, you’re not eligible.

4. Register at this link for a 8,000 Choice points after two stays by March 12. Yes, Econolodge is one of Choice’s brands and even if the nights were free I wouldn’t stay at an Econolodge twice for 8,000 points. I could however find myself staying at a hotel in the Choice Ascend collection now that Citi ThankYou Points transfer to Choice at 1:2.

A typical weekday at Econolodge.

Introduction

Incidental credits (not to be confused with generic travel credits which are much easier to liquidate) show up on the PenFed Pathfinder Visa, the American Express Platinum family, BoA Premium Rewards, the Hilton Aspire, and UnionBank Rewards cards. Now that we’re in the middle of January, we’ve had enough time in 2022 to figure out what’s working with turning airline incidental credits into airfare instead of using them as intended, so here’s the 4-1-1 (cool kids still say that, right?).

If you want to be low maintenance, United gives by far the easiest option with its TravelBank wallet, which so far works for all card issuers. There’s bad news with TravelBank though: you’ll be flying United, which means it’s automatically worth somewhere around 90 cents on the dollar.

The Deets

  • United: Buy TravelBank credit directly. It expires in five years and can be used to pay for United flights; if you get an error during checkout at TravelBank, add your card to your United profile as a saved payment then try again [more info]
  • Delta: Buy airfare and pay partially with a gift card or travel credit, pay for the remainder with your card (don’t go over the incidental credit amount though). Alternatively if you have a co-branded American Express Delta card, pay partially with miles and the remainder will be credited [more info]
  • Alaska: Buy a seat upgrade after booking or buy a flight less than $100, then refund to your wallet after 24 hours [more info]
  • Southwest: Buy a flight less than $100, or book an international flight with taxes under $100 per ticket, then refund to a travel credit [more info]
  • American: Buy cheap airfare, then change it to a flight that you really want that costs more and pay with your credit card (don’t go over the credit amount though). If you want to gamble, you’ve got roughly even odds that award taxes and fees will count [more info]
  • JetBlue: Buy a flight less than $137 then cancel the flight after 24 hours and refund to your JetBlue wallet [more info]

Other Options

Of course you could use these incidental credits as intended if you’re basic, like for checked bag fees or pets flying with you [more info, but boring].

Why are United travel bank credits worth 90% on the dollar? Allow me to reference my favorite graph about United’s domestic fleet.

What started out as a slow weekend turned into a landslide:

1. In September there was a backdoor way to turn an American Express Clear credit into $100 in United TravelBank credit through a promotion for a new Clear account. The offer is now back, and it’s still a way to turn a Clear statement credit into a quick TravelBank hundo. The caveats:

  • The $100 TravelBank credit expires after six months
  • You have to fly United or United Express to pay for airfare with TravelBank funds
  • TravelBank funds can’t be used to pay for therapy or liquor, even on a United flight

Last time you didn’t actually need to complete enrollment at an airport for the $100 credit to show up in your account, likely it’ll be no different this time.

2. Check your Chase Offers for 10% or 15% back up to $37 for charges at a Hyatt property from now through Valentine’s day.

3. The demise of the Citi Premier 80,000 points bonus has been greatly overstated. You can still find it at this link, and don’t forget that you can get this bonus multiple times as long as you space your applications out by more than 8 days and you hit the bonus spending threshold after all of your applications are in.

4. Since around Christmas time reports have surfaced that the American Express Blue Business Plus card has been eligible for the 1.9 Million Membership Rewards offer for adding employee cards (20,000 points per employee card that meets the minimum threshold spend, up to 99 employees). To see if you’re eligible, you’ll have to call American Express and ask if there are any offers for adding employees to your card.

The Blue Business Plus variant of this offer is better than the Business Platinum variant though, because the threshold for earning 20,000 bonus Membership Rewards is $2,000 in spend versus the $4,000 spend requirement on the Business Platinum. If you maximize this deal it becomes a 12x everywhere offer for up to $50,000 in spend and 11x everywhere for the remaining $49,000 in spend, wowza.

5. The Free-quent Flyer has an excellent post on how to match your Hyatt status to MGM Resorts MLife gold status, and the instructions clock in at seven words. I admire the brevity.

Pictured: The weekend news dump.

I heard from quite a few of you this week and I appreciated your insightful questions and discussion. Thanks to all of you.

Now let’s sail into the weekend with a few items:

1. We’re far enough into 2021 to have good data-points on what’s working with American Express airline incidental credits and you can expect a writeup on that next week, but after a few positive reports we’ve gotten new reports yesterday that United TravelBank errors when you manually enter your credit card information.

It might seem like that avenue stopped working, but it didn’t. You can still purchase those United “incidentals” as long as you pay with a credit card that was saved to your MileagePlus profile.

2. You can get Star Alliance Gold status through February of 2024 by combining a promotion that started in April of last year with Singapore’s newly announced “loyalty measures”, and no, I didn’t make that term up. To do so, you’ll need to transfer 250,000 Chase, Capital One, Citi, or American Express points to Singapore (watch out for expiration of those miles after three years though).

This is very useful if you fly United domestically regularly because it gives you access to United Clubs while you have a same-day United flight, so you can drink yourself numb on cheap whiskey to reduce the pain of travel on your upcoming ERJ-145 or CRJ-200 United flight.

3. We had a nice three weeks without thinking about those pesky $200 MetaBank gift cards, right? Well, party’s over man. Staples is having a fee-free sale starting on Sunday running through the following Saturday for $200 Visa gift cards, limit five per transaction. To maximize:

  • Use a card that bonuses at office supply stores (duh)
  • Try for multiple transactions back-to-back, five per transaction

Unfortunately the Rakuten in-store card linked program for cash back at Staples is no longer around.

4. Related to the above? Maybe a little. The final payment date for Q4 2021 estimated taxes is Tuesday, and there are three major payment processors that accept debit cards. The IRS limit is technically two payments per quarter, but in practice they accept two payments per processor for each quarter at a cost somewhere around $2.50 each for using a Metabank debit card (EDIT: Thanks to Gary at VFTW for the correction on IRS limits):

Overpaying the IRS and getting it back as a refund was a nice manufactured spend technique in the before times, but now due to staffing shortages and tax code changes realize that refunds are now taking six months or more (though you do earn a 3.2% interest rate from the IRS while waiting for your refund).

Happy weekend!

The United ERJ-145 makes this cabin feel spacious and luxurious, but you won’t be focused on comfort after drinking the United Club’s “premium” Dewar’s Scotch.

1. Check your Chase personal credit cards at this link for a Q1 spending bonus. Offers have been seen on both co-branded cards and Ultimate Rewards earning personal cards, but none have been reported on the business side. Some examples:

  • 5x at Amazon, Grocery, and Restaurants up to $1,500 in spend
  • 5% cash back on at grocery stores up to $200 in spend
  • $50 back after 15 purchases each month, up to three months
  • 5% cash back at gyms up to $50 cash back

If you get an error message or a blank page, going incognito in your browser will usually fix it.

2. The best way to cash out Dell credits on American Express Business Platinum cards for most of us has been to buy Xbox gift cards for resale, and for essentially all of last year you could get 10% off of one gift card (per purchase) using the promotion code XBOX10 which made your effective cash-out rate even better. That code finally died, but a new one surfaced: GAME10

Note that when Dell starts cancelling your orders (they will eventually no matter what you buy), there are workarounds. Perhaps the simplest and also most annoying is to call the sales office at (877) 717-3355 and place an order over the phone.

3. Delta Air Lines has:

  • Extended existing travel credits and upgrade certificates through Dec 31, 2023
  • Made current tickets and newly booked tickets in 2022 valid through the end of 2024

Delta travel credits are particularly useful for cashing out American Express Platinum airline incidentals, so this is a nice change. (Book a ticket that costs a little less than your travel credit dollar amount + $200 and AmEx will see it as an incidental)

Dell’s order verification team for Xbox gift cards.

1. The American Express Business Platinum card’s annual fee is increasing from $595 to $695 starting tomorrow, so if you might want one of these cards in the next month, apply now even if you’re not currently eligible. If you’re denied you can always reconsider within 30 days with the original annual fee attached.

Note that reconsideration can bypass certain things and that American Express rarely pulls your credit, so don’t be afraid to probe.

2. A new version of the American Express Pay-Over-Time bonus has surfaced, this time for 30,000 Membership Rewards. You can check your charge cards for eligibility at this link. (Thanks to stillwaters23 on reddit)

3. There’s a $5,000 opportunity for from-home manufactured spend on Visa and Mastercards (Patreon subscribers have known about this play since August 1 of last year, but it’s now become more-or-less public with multiple threads on multiple forums including /r/churning):

Public.com is a stock trading platform that allows funding up to $5,000 total with a debit card. It also happens to treat PayPal Key as a debit card, so this is a one time $5,000 MS opportunity on Visa, Mastercard, and Discover credit cards (American Express credit cards don’t work with PayPal Key). EDIT: Rob let me know that you can fund $5,000 in a single transaction. The $1,000 per day limit no longer applies.

As usual, find a friend for a referral link to Public.com and make their day, but if you can’t find one, reach out to me and I’ll share mine. Be forewarned: the referral bonus is lame.

Wednesday thought: Is it ironic that the Public deal became public?

Over the weekend there was a 4x fuel points promotion for Kroger stores which usually causes BestBuy volume to crank up to an 11, but that didn’t happen this time. Sure, there was some BestBuy buying capacity to go around in select circles, but only at roughly 15% capacity of what would normally be available. What happened? Two things:

First, January is always really slow for gift card reselling and this year it’s even slower than normal, likely due to supply chain issues that mean retailers aren’t holding major sales.

Second, BestBuy stopped giving refunds on lost and destroyed packages to accounts of suspected resellers starting sometime around Christmas. With approximately three percent of packages lost, this means that less-crafty BestBuy resellers need to factor another loss into their cost of goods sold.

With somewhere around a third to a half of those resellers not yet figuring out how to work around the reseller flag, BestBuy rates were reduced by about 1.5%. Yay efficient market, but boo for gift card resellers.

Of course I have no idea how the BestBuy gift card market will actually look in the future, but based on watching BestBuy’s growing disdain toward resellers, I think the outlook for 2022 BestBuy gift card resale rates isn’t as rosy as it looked in 2021. Go ahead BestBuy, prove me wrong. I dare you.

BestBuy’s Kitty Sanchez to resellers: “Say goodbye to these, Michael”

Because American Express is still on its New Year’s bender, it’s given us a couple of tidbits related to the crazy offer for up to 1.9 million Membership Rewards points that surfaced in fall 2021 for Business Platinum cards. (Refresher: $4,000 spend on an employee card gives 20,000 bonus points, and you can have up to 99 employee cards per Business Platinum card):

1. According to multiple AmEx call center representatives, the offer on Business Platinum cards is scheduled to be available through late April. Of course that could change at any time so don’t treat it that as your reason to procrastinate.

2. An anonymous friend let me know that there’s a similarly structured offer on his Delta Gold Business card offer for 5,000 SkyMiles for $1,000 in spend, per employee card. Chris let me know that an identical offer was present on his Delta Reserve Business card too, effectively making both of these deals 6x SkyMiles up to $99,000 in spend.

As we learned in the 2021 recap, this offer doesn’t show up online and you have to call and ask about it to enroll, because reasons. So, if you have Delta business cards or any other American Express business cards, when you’ve got a moment give the number on the back of your card a call and say “Are there any offers for adding employees to this card?”

I’m still not sure who’s actually running the show over at AmEx, but wow guys, keep it coming.

American Express’s CEO barking clucking out orders for new card member promotions.