Year: 2024

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.

  1. Southwest has a promotional companion pass offer valid through August 5 and October 2 provided you register and book two one-ways or one round-trip flight by tomorrow night, and then fly those flights by May 22. The qualifying flights need to be paid flights, and they have to be booked after registration.

    The bad news is that you’ll be flying Southwest, but the good news is it might be half priced Southwest this fall.
  2. Do this now: Register for double elite rental credits on weekend rentals with National for rentals between April 4 and June 9. If you maximize this promotion, they’ll also throw in a few empty bottles of no-name soda underneath the passenger seat of the rental car. (Thanks to FM)
  3. Do this now: Register for Wyndham’s 10 bonus elite qualifying nights with a single stay in the next 90 days. This is a targeted promotion in theory, but in practice likely works for everyone.
  4. American Express offers has an offer for $180 of of $1,200 or more in airfare booked by June 23. If you’re playing games on this one, know that you’ll probably have to call British Airways to cancel and refund.

Happy Tuesday!

Extreme couponers can parlay National’s free empty soda bottles into chiz stick.

  1. Preferred Hotels brand properties are now bookable via Choice Points at a special link. There are some great redemptions here, and a dare say that some of them are competitive with Hyatt or Hilton redemptions, especially given that Citi ThankYou Points are transferrable to Choice at a 2:1 ratio for Premier card holders.
  2. American Express has new employee card offers for 5,000 Membership Rewards after $2,000 spend for up to five employees:

    – Business Gold
    – Business Green

    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)
  3. Do this now: Register for double Hyatt elite qualifying nights at Dream hotels for stays through June 10.
  4. 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.

Continuing our “study the past to know the future” theme lets see how the miles world has evolved over the last 15 years.

  • 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.”

  1. 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)
  2. Staples has fee free $200 Mastercard gift cards starting Sunday and running through the following Saturday, limit five per transaction.

    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.
  3. United now allows pooled mileage accounts for up to five people total, but there are some serious caveats:

    – Pooled redemptions are only for United and United Express flights
    – Members have a 90 day block from leaving a pool and rejoining another

    That first point bears repeating: You’ll be flying United, or even worse, United Express.
  4. Southwest is running a fare sale for travel from April 9 through June 5 for continental US fares, and slightly different dates for fares to Puerto Rico.

    At least you won’t be flying United Express.
  5. Weis Markets have 4x points on $100 or more in third party gift card purchases through the end of March. (Thanks to GCG)

Have a nice weekend friends!

Pictured: Flying the friendly skies with United Express.

  1. Do this now: Register for Radisson’s spring promotion for 10,000 bonus points for every four nights stayed through May 31.
  2. Do this now: Register for IHG’s spring promotion for 2,000 bonus points for every two nights stayed in April or May.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

Introduction

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 20233
Aug 20236
Sep 20237
Oct 202339
Nov 202325
Dec 202342
Jan 202478
Feb 202454
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.

  1. Citi ThankYou Points has a 25% transfer bonus to Avianca Lifemiles through April 13.

    Avianca has a quirky award chart with plenty of hacks, but my favorite easy hack is to tack an economy flight on to the end of a one way itinerary to make the whole thing price lower. (Thanks to TheSultan1)
  2. American Express Offers has a new offer for a $300 statement credit after $2,000 spend through June 16.

    Note that if you have to cancel one of these tickets because reasons, Virgin Atlantic can be hard to deal with and may require multiple phone calls to chase it down. (Thanks to TeddyH)
  3. Kroger stores have a 4x fuel points promotion running tomorrow through April 2 on third party gift cards. If you use this as an opportunity for AmEx manufactured spend, find a way to separate your purchases from even dollar amounts, especially those around $500, $1,000, etc. (Thanks to Will)
  4. Do this now: Register for your targeted United MileagePlay offer. This one wasn’t the usual “Spend X on overpriced domestic first and get Y miles”, but was instead:

    – 400 miles for making a purchase with MileagePlusX
    – 400 miles for dining with MileagePlus dining

    I won’t be bothering with either for what is effectively $4.40. Hopefully you get something more exciting. (Thanks to FM)
  5. Air Canada has a 15% off paid fare sale for international flights from Canada and also for flights from the US to Canada with promo code PZEEXY91 for travel through December 13 booked by April. (Thanks to DansDeals)

Have a nice Tuesday!

A promo that unfortunately didn’t make the cut.

  1. The only thing more predictable than upcoming late-night show jokes about Boeing 737 manufacturing quality jokes is a regular transfer bonus to AirFrance/KLM FlyingBlue. This one is a Chase Ultimate Rewards 25% transfer bonus through April 30.
  2. Office Depot/OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300 or more in Visa gift cards through Saturday, limit 10. As usual:

    – Try for multiple transactions back-to-back
    – Link your credit cards to Dosh
    – Try even multiples of $300 for a chance at a better deal
    – Don’t forget your monthly AmEx Business Gold $20 office supply credits
    – The

    These are Pathward gift cards which often have a liquidation limit of $480 per six minutes per retailer merchant account. (Thanks to GCG)
  3. Yes, Bilt is losing AA in June as a transfer partner and now has Alaska. Yes, everyone wrote tons about it, yes it’s news. Yes, it sucks if you’re shutdown by both Citi and Barlcays because Bilt was a viable path to AA earning. No, it doesn’t warrant dozens of paragraphs of digital ink.

    For west coast travelers this is probably neutral news, but for everyone else it’s slightly negative, at least until AA devalues their award prices.
  4. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard has had a predictable cadence of spend offers for the last six months or so: the first offers are sent on the 1st of the month, and the second are sent on the 15th. Since the 15th just passed, we have a new round:

    – 7,500 Bonus ThankYou Points after $750 or more in online purchases
    – 250,000 Bonus Shop Your Way points after $1,000 or more in online purchases
    – 200,000 Bonus Shop Your Way points after $750 or more in online purchases
    – $70 statement credit after $1,000 or more in online purchases
    – $50 statement credit after $750 or more in online purchases

    (Thanks to Ben, David 99, Roberto, and TV)
  5. Heightened offers for Delta cards are available during trip checkout, and each includes a $400 statement credit after a single Delta purchase:

    – Personal Gold: $400 statement credit and 50,000 SkyMiles after $3,000 spend in six months
    – Personal Platinum: $400 statement credit and 70,000 SkyMiles after $4,000 spend in six months

    I had to try two different browsers to get the increased offer to appear during checkout. You don’t need to actually book a ticket. (Thanks to DDG)
  6. Chase Offers has 10% back on up to $650 in spend at Hilton properties through March 31. (Thanks to FM)
  7. Meijer has two good deals for manufactured spend, especially if you scale with multiple MPerks accounts:

    – 37,500 points with $250 in third party gift cards (excluding Amazon and phone cards)
    – $10 off of $150 or more in Visa gift cards

    Meijer sells both Pathward and Sunrise gift cards

Have a nice Monday!

Inspecting Boeing’s 737-MAX9 door plug fix on an award flight booked with bonus FlyingBlue miles.