Year: 2023

  1. Kroger has a 4x fuel points promotion on third party gift cards and fixed value Visa and Mastercards running tomorrow through Sunday.

    We’ve had fewer than six days without a 4x fuel points promotion this summer, and instead of depressing the fuel points resale market, new buyers are coming out of the woodwork with extra supply and rates are increasing. Incidentally, if your buyer isn’t assuming responsibility for shutdown accounts within a business day, find a new buyer.
  2. Do this now: Register for double elite qualifying miles for flights within California between August 15 and November 15.
  3. Do this now: Register for double points on Marriott Home and Villas bookings two nights or longer. You have to book by July 21 and stay this year to qualify.
  4. If you missed yesterday’s post because you’re subscribed via email and the wrong post was sent, you can see the content here.

Pictured: The reason MEAB snafud yesterday’s post.

  1. Hyatt’s partnership with MGM is ending on September 30. Why might you care?

    – If you don’t go to Vegas: It’s been a really cheap way to manufacture Hyatt Globalist status (but there are still other opportunities)
    – If you go to Vegas: Look into Caesar’s status leveraged with the Wyndham Business card

    You still have until Thursday to status match Hyatt to MGM or vice-versa for status through early 2024.
  2. Do this now (if you hold a Hyatt credit card): Register for Hyatt’s newest Q3 promotion, 20% back on award stays at hotels in the Independent Collection between July 11 and September 17.
  3. The Southwest Premier Business card has an increased sign-up bonus through August 28 for:

    – 60,000 points after $3,000 spend in three months
    – 60,000 points after another $12,000 spend in nine months
    – A companion pass after $15,000 total spend

    For the math challenged, $15,000 spend will earn 120,000 bonus points. This card won’t affect 5/24. Incidentally, if you apply for this card on the last day and call Chase to push your statement close date back, you’ve got a good shot at stretching the companion pass out through February 2025.
  4. Dell is now 15x at Rakuten and 5x at AA, so you can try again if your Monday orders were cancelled.

Math challenged just means you find different loopholes.

Introduction

Lest you have any misplaced notions about whether or not I know what I’m doing when it comes to travel hacking, let me clear the air: I don’t.

What Happened?

Yesterday I was booking a set of partner business class award tickets on United for flights from London, which if you’ve ever played “figure out how to avoid the world’s biggest airport award surcharge”, you’d know that this is one of the only good, above-board ways book a ticket from Heathrow airport without paying hundreds of dollars in cash with your miles. (Yes there are also less above-board ways, but this isn’t that kind of trip.) Anyway, this was the situation:

  • The award cost was 80,000 points plus $5.00
  • I wanted two tickets, so the net cost was 160,000 plus +$10.00
  • I had 128,000 MileagePlus miles

I got partway through the booking up to the payment screen and realized I’d need another 32,000 miles. Which takes us to what happened next:

  • I transferred 32,000 Ultimate Rewards to United
  • I reloaded the booking confirmation page and saw that my balance was as expected in the header
  • I clicked buy

Later, I checked my MileagePlus account and saw that it had approximately 32,000 miles hanging out. It took a couple of minutes to unravel what happened, but the punchline is:

If you don’t have enough miles to complete an award booking, United will sell them to you without making it obvious that it’s happening.

The net cost was $800 for 32,000 miles, oof. This was completely my fault and I should have looked more closely at the checkout screen before clicking buy instead of just noting that my balance had updated in the upper right corner, but (just kidding, there is no but – mea culpa).

Sometimes you beat the award surcharge, and sometimes the award surcharge beats you.

The PSA

When you’re transferring points to an airline or hotel currency as part of a booking, look at everything closely. Especially so if it’s United, and especially so if it isn’t United.

Happy Tuesday!

UPDATE: By chatting with a United’s MileagePlus team supervisor over SMS, I was able to get the charge reversed and the miles deducted. Thanks to everyone who offered their own experiences in being MileagePlused.

Stay tuned for a future post on how I accidentally paid another $800 to use fast-track security at Heathrow 💪 (probably).

I’ve learned of a super-secret, not-at-all-publicized, private sale called “Prime Day” that’s happening tomorrow and Wednesday at Amazon. If you’re a buyer’s group gamer, this is potentially the World Series of sending stuff to some place in another state that you’ve never heard of, so make sure you’re ready. In the mean time:

  1. Office Depot / OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300 or more in Visa gift cards through Saturday. To scale:

    – Try for multiple transactions
    – Link your cards to Dosh
    – Buy the “Everywhere” variety for lower fees if you can liquidate them

    It’s still relatively easy to liquidate the $200 variety of cards in store, and there’s always BravoPay to liquidate from home.
  2. Dell is currently 10x at Rakuten and 4x at the AA shopping portal, so get your Business Platinum cancelations in at higher rates.
  3. The Chase Aeroplan Visa card’s sign-up bonus is back to 100,000 Aeroplan points. The bonus is:

    – 60,000 points after $4,000 spend in three months
    – 40,000 additional points after $20,000 spend in the first year

    You can turn this into a $1,250 statement credit via Chase Pay Yourself Back. Just don’t use Pay Yourself Back on points earned outside of the Aeroplan card or you may find your Chase accounts shutdown.
  4. Meijer stores have to good promotions through Saturday. Both are limit one per account:

    – 10,000 MPerks Points with $100 or more in Happy, Choice, or One4All gift cards
    – $10 off of $150 or more in Mastercard gift cards

    Meijer stocks both Pathward and Sunrise gift cards. Now if only it was possible to have more than one email address so you could have more than one MPerks account.
  5. The American Express random number generator is back in full force with a new 170,000 Membership Rewards sign-up bonus on the Business Platinum card at the normal card landing page. To get the offer to appear, you’ve got to have the random number generator roll a 4 on its internal dice, which really means to keep trying with:

    – Incognito or regular browser sessions
    – Clicking the link or pasting it into the browser address bar
    – Different browsers
    – Hitting the application through a search engine
    – While being connected to a VPN

    I consider this application and link to be completely safe. This application has lifetime language, but that doesn’t matter for most purposes; instead just stop if you get a popup telling you that you’re not eligible for a sign-up bonus before submitting the application.

Happy Wednesday!

Pictured: “We Buy MyPFS Deal Buyer Retail Maker” buyer’s group HQ. Totally not sus.

July is apparently a good news and bad news sort of month. For example in the apparently not-a-joke competitive sphere of competition eating Joey Chestnut won a 16th hot dog eating contest on Tuesday, but to win he had to eat 62 hot dogs so there’s that.

In our world we’ve got a bit of bad news too:

But, there’s good news:

  • Rakuten will have 10x back at Dell (and probably Saks) on Monday, so you’ve got time to strategize your American Express credit liquidation
  • The IHG credit card’s sign-up bonus has bumped to 140,000 points and a $100 statement credit at IHG properties after $3,000 spend in three months
  • The Barclays Wyndham Business card has a targeted offer for 5,000 bonus points:

    – 1,000 bonus points per month for any purchase in June, July, and August
    – 2,000 additional points for $3,000 in spend or more over all three months

    Yes, we’re past June, so really this is a 4,000 bonus point offer going forward. Look for an email from [email protected] to see if you’re targeted. (Thanks to Welcome Offer)
  • American Express sign-up bonuses do eventually post

Have a nice weekend!

Another good news / bad news situation.

  1. As a general reminder there are two types of American Express no-lifetime language (NLL) links: generic links and links tied to a specific offer code. There are newly targeted heightened sign-up bonuses at the generic link versions:

    – Blue Business Cash: $750 after $15,000 spend in 12 months
    – Blue Business Plus: 75,000 Membership Rewards after $15,000 spend in 12 months
    – Business Gold: 90,000 Membership Rewards after $10,000 spend in three months
    – Business Platinum: 120,000 Membership Rewards after $15,000 spend in three months (but this one isn’t currently active)

    The Business Gold also has an additional 5,000 Membership Rewards for adding an employee card during application and spending $1,000 on that card within three months. Also yes, employee spend counts toward the $10,000 sign-up bonus spend. (Thanks to Jimmy)
  2. FM notes that the Ink Business Preferred’s 100,000 Ultimate Rewards bonus after spending $8,000 in three months is also available via referral links, so if you’re going to apply the card use a link from a friend or another player.
  3. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard, the Kareem Abdul-Jabaar of Citi credit cards and an original Unsung Hero, has yet another targeted promotion for a statement credit or bonus points once a month for July, August, and September:

    – 10% back for between $700 and $800 in spend at gas, grocery, and restaurants
    – 8,000 bonus ThankYou Points for $700 or more in spend at gas, grocery, and restaurants
    – 10x ThankYou Points on $1,200 or more in spend at gas, grocery, and restaurants up to 18,000 points

    (Thanks to TV and Brooke)
  4. Check your dashboard for American Express Business Green and Business Gold cards for targeted upgrades to the Business Platinum. Offers are reportedly for 100,000 Membership Rewards points and also may include gas and grocery spend bonuses too.

The new McDonald’s credit card that just missed the publishing deadline.

Introduction

When you book a British Airways award ticket on AA or Alaska metal, you may want to swap your frequent flyer number from the British Airways Avios version to an AA AAdvantage or Alaska MileagePlan account so you can use elite benefits or co-branded credit card benefits on your award tickets. Yes, you can call the airline to do this manually over the phone, but who wants to do that? (Answer: masochists, duh)

There were four ways to do this, but the only one I chose to write about in the past stopped working a few months ago because karma:

  • The FinnAir trick (no longer working as far as I can tell)
  • Call the airline and have them swap it
  • The Royal Jordanian trick
  • The British Airways “I swear I’m not me” trick

We’ll focus on the third one.

The Royal Jordanian Trick

Royal Jordanian is a oneWorld airline based in Aman with a serviceable but forgettable hard product. Their IT is above average for an airline though which is great for us. To swap your frequent flyer number:

  • Visit rj.com
  • Click “Manage Booking”
  • Enter your British Airways record locator and last name
  • Click “Update my Contact” and enter your new frequent flyer information

Note that sometimes the Royal Jordanian website will give an error when you save your updated information, but the number is saved anyway. It usually takes about five minutes for AA and Alaska’s systems to see the updated number and apply benefits accordingly.

Happy booking!

Using RJ.com to update a BA booking on AS metal with an AA frequent flyer number, but as a backpack.

We’ve seen American Express 99 employee card bonus offers for more than a year and a half, and if you’ve taken advantage of a few of these you’ve probably also learned to deal with slow American Express IT systems that weren’t designed for your 600+ card shenanigans. The slow responsiveness seems especially prevalent when asking for a retention offer or to close a card.

But, what if there were a magical phone number that let you skip American Express’s phone tree, enter your card number directly, and then you’d be sent immediately to the retention department with your card information pushed to the rep’s computer? And what if the rep had minty fresh breath?Then you’d be living on Earth in 2023, because there is just that type of number:

866-376-4552

What’s the provenance of this number, you ask? An American Express chat rep gave it to me while his system was hung trying to load a particular card to look for retention offers. He said their systems were faster and better and that seems true based on my experience. I can’t speak to the minty breath though, you’ll just have to take that one on faith.