Day: January 19, 2026

  1. Airline shopping portals have new winter bonuses:

    – AA: 1,000 bonus miles with $500+ through January 22
    – Alaska: 1,200 bonus miles with $300+ through January 23
    – United: 1,000 bonus miles with $300+ through January 26

    Watch for Southwest to show up to the party late, much like their flights and premium travel focus.
  2. Safeway, Albertsons, Vons, and other Just4U stores have 10x points on Zillions gift cards through Saturday, and on Saturday we’ll get Safeway math where 10x+4x = 12x too.

    Some of these cards convert to Amazon and Home Depot cards, but converting them is, shall we say, sometimes extremely painful in much the same way that the J4U Alaska back door has been painful.
  3. Office Depot / OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300+ in Mastercard gift cards through Saturday. These stack too, so buying $600 or $1,200 is better than buying $300 or $900.

    These are Pathward gift cards.
  4. The Bank of America AirFrance / KLM FlyingBlue card is making changes:

    – Adding 3x dining
    – Switching from Mastercard to Visa
    – Adding an additional 140 XP with $25,000 spend annually

    You can hold multiples of this card which is even more interesting than it used to be.
  5. In a move that affects me and only approximately three other churners, the US Bank FlexPerks American Express card is being “upgraded” to an Altitude Go card in February. This sucks because:

    – Points won’t be worth 1.5 cents each for travel with the Altitude Go
    – The Altitude Go isn’t a third party American Express

    FlexPerks was the best program that no one ever talked about, but it’s from another era and effectively a thing of the past, much like Southwest.
  6. Bilt Rewards heard you loud and clear, and released a Friday message with plenty of additional drama to help ease the concerns of its fans. The summary:

    They’re making the program “simpler” by adding another option with its own complexity, in addition to the existing complexity. Now, just wait until they react to learning that you can earn more by spending less with the new program. (Thanks to Chris and TeddyH)

Happy Monday, may it be unlike Bilt’s!

Pictured: The Bilt 2.1 fix to the Bilt 2.0 rollout.