Author: matt

Bank of America is a strange bank, and the Alaska Airlines card is even stranger. Often, you can find about twelve variations of the sign-up bonus for the personal card by looking in different places, like in-flight, at the gate, at the check-in counter, online, or by calling and asking. There’s a new variation which as far as I can tell is the best offer they’ve come up with that’s publicly available over the internet (you’ll currently find it by searching Google for “alaska airlines visa” and clicking the sponsored link, which probably costs BoA about $4 per click) Update: Thanks to Gary from VFTW who wrote in to share a better public offer than the google search method. Links and text below have been updated to include the better offer.

As usual, I’m not here to push credit cards on you but I am here to help you maximize them if and when you apply. To that end, here’s the current offer from the above Google search:

Note that BoA personal cards have anti-churning language that’s not present on the business cards, and the personal cards have the 2/3/4 rule, which basically boils down to you can only get two BoA personal cards every two months, three personal cards every 12 months, and four personal cards every 24 months.

By itself, the card is mildly interesting, but because it’s BoA and it pairs well with BoA business cards, it can become intriguing:

  • BoA is a great target for CheckFreePay, and historically they’ve been extremely liberal on getting payments from the service
  • BoA will only make one hard pull of your credit a day regardless of the number of applications
  • BoA will let you open “a few” business cards back-to-back, even following a personal card application

So if you want Alaska miles (like to use 70,000 miles to Japan in JAL First or 60,000 miles to Japan in JAL Business class), I’d suggest the following steps:

  1. Sign up for a personal Alaska card
  2. Sign up for a business Alaska card
  3. Sign up for a MilesEarnAndBurn’s Unsung Hero BoA Business Rewards card (here’s a link for a $750 sign up bonus, no annual fee)
  4. Repeat steps (2) and/or (3) while you’re still getting decent sized credit lines

In the end, you’ll have one hard pull, one new account on your credit report (the personal card), hopefully a handful of new business cards, and a few great targets for CheckFreePay and other shenanigans.

Yes, this image is a repeat but I’m too proud of it to not bring it back for this article. Thanks again to Danny for the inspiration for the picture.

In a move straight out of American Express’s playbook, Chase stole the show in the last 24 hours:

1. The travel hacking blogosphere blew up yesterday with article heads like:

“ZOMG!!!! Aeroplan Transfers have come to Chase and they’re launching a MIND-BLOWING Aeroplan credit card soon too!!!1!!“.

It’s true, you can now transfer your Chase points to Aeroplan which is mildly useful and somewhat complimentary to Star Alliance awards with Chase’s transfers to United, especially when 1) used for domestic United flights and for 2) flights with a stop-over. Just make sure you run the numbers on both United and Aeroplan before deciding where to transfer your miles for an award. You’d never transfer miles without a particular award booking in-mind, right?

It’s also true that an Aeroplan credit card is coming to Chase, and at some point it may be something you want to include in your portfolio for the sign-up bonus. Toward that end, register here for a bonus 10,000 points on top of the normal sign-up offer at launch, in case you end up going for it. Just promise me you won’t buy into the hype, ok?

2. The referral bonus for Southwest cards has increased to 20,000 points per referral with a cap of 100,000 points earned from referrals per calendar year. Never refer yourself, but by all means refer a Player 2.

3. Check your Chase Southwest cards for a spending bonus of 1,000 Rapid Rewards points for spending $1,000 at restaurants, home improvement stores, and drug stores before October 31. (Thanks to DoC, though the link in his article doesn’t seem to be correct as of this writing.)

A picture of a drawing pad with a child's drawing of a girl on one side and practice words on the other.
The American Express playbook.

There are a few things to keep on your radar today:

1. Delta is having a flash sale to quite a few international destinations from the US, starting at 10,000 miles round trip. Check Dan’s Deals’ comments section for known routes, or just use the flexible date search with cities like AUA, PTY, SJU, EZE, PLS, CUN, UIO, MIA, and similar from your home airport.

2. Emirates Skywards has an interesting type of promotion that I haven’t seen before: Earn one mile for every minute you spend in Dubai between October 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022, up to 5,000 miles. Register here if you’re traveling to Dubai and note that you’ll have to book a paid ticket on Emirates ticket stock, which means tickets issued by Emirates that start with 176, to be eligible. (Thanks to planesurf on reddit)

3. This isn’t strictly related to manufactured spend or travel hacking, but I know a lot of you went in on the iPhone SE Xfinity deal last year so I’m going to let it slide into the blog for now (believe me I don’t want this blog to turn into a blog that posts about coupons for free bread or about deals on 12-packs of diapers):

Apparently Xfinity has a rewards program and your rewards are based on subscribed services and length of time with Xfinity. I’ve been told that having a Xfinity Mobile plan unlocks better rewards and it certainly did for me. I signed in here, clicked ‘Join’, then had a bunch of awards available to me including a $100 Visa Gift Card (physical). I picked that one and passed on the others which were honestly pretty lame. Hopefully you’ve got something worthwhile too.

And a final, bonus news item to keep track of: TravelBloggerBuzz notes that American Express is starting a new financial advising arm. Anytime new technology and big money come together, you’re likely to find bonuses and manufactured spend opportunities. So keep an eye on this one.

Pictured: The slippery slope of a travel blog posting about non travel hacking related topics.

Lots of targeted offers came in this weekend, I have no idea what makes the last weekend in July special but apparently it’s big. Check your accounts for all of the following:

1. Discover sent me an email offering $10 off of $50 at HomeDepot.com. Watch for an email with the subject: “Don’t miss out on $10 back”

2. Dean let me know that Discover is emailing another offer for $25 back for adding an Authorized User and making a single purchase (any size). The subject on this one is “This $25 cash back could be yours”

3. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard (a future MilesEarnAndBurn Unsung Hero card) has been sending out spend offers for 15x bonus ThankYou Points or 10% cash back on utilities purchases, up to $50 total cash back. I didn’t get this one, but my Shop Your Way Rewards boosts seem to come near middle of the month (thanks to Sam at Milenomics for pointing that there are different bonus schedules for this card.)

Apropos of nothing, Plastiq is a good way to pay utilities with a credit card, especially if you sign up for a new account with a fee-free promotional credit.

4. Co-branded Chase Business cards are seeing new targeted spend offers for 5x at Home Improvement stores or for Shipping charges, up to $10,000 in spend. This deal was seen on the Ink cards in early July, but the new round seems to be targeting all business co-branded cards, like the Southwest Business card or the United Business card. Check for eligibility at: https://chase.com/mybonus.

5. Bitmo had quite the run of targeted offers for gift cards this weekend and hopefully carrying into today. Check your activity feed for the offers, or check this tag at GC Galore to preview what we’ve been seeing. Bitmo is a great platform for gift card resellers because it uses PayPal for credit card processing, and there’s almost always a card that’s giving 5x or statement credits at PayPal (like the Discover IT card in Q3).

If you’re new to Bitmo and want to sign up for an account, use a referral because the referral bonus is usually bigger than the regular bonus (4,500 points). As always, try and find a friend to refer you, but if you can’t find one you can use my link, which I’m adding only because it’s almost certainly a bigger offer for you if you use it but please double check during signup that you’re getting at least 4,500 points: *

6. My PenFed PathFinder Rewards Visa has a targeted offer for 5x at Bed, Bath, and Beyond for the month of August. This one is actually exciting because there’s “no limit” to the number of points I can earn (hah, we’ll see) and last I checked BB&B sold Visa Gift Cards, though maybe that changed in the last year. Look for an email with the subject: “Earn 5x Points at Bed Bath & Beyond!”

Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see one of these show up from American Express today.

I’m going off-brand with today’s post, but stick with it, it’ll be worth it I promise.

Introduction

I use ITA Matrix essentially every single time I’m looking at airfares and often for reference when I’m searching for award travel. Not only that, but it’s quite possibly the most powerful tool that exists for an advanced travel hacker when dealing with airline tickets: It’s great for hidden city ticketing, fuel dumps, free one-ways, forced fare buckets, aircraft selection, forced routing through a particular hub, and avoiding married segments to name a few. There’s so much to this tool, and I’m going to make this post the first in a series about ITA Matrix for travel hacking, starting with Delta companion tickets.

There are two types of Delta companion tickets: 1) The domestic Main Cabin variant that you get with the Delta Platinum card, and 2) the domestic Main Cabin, Comfort+, or First Class variant that you get with the Delta Reserve. There’s a lot of nuance to where you can use these tickets, but for the most part just assume that you can use them on any round-trip Delta route within the continental US’s lower 48 states.

Fare Codes

When you purchase airfare or redeem miles, you’re booking into a specific fare class which is potentially different for each and every leg. Delta companion tickets require specific fare bucket availability for your itinerary:

  • Platinum: L, U, T, X, and V
  • Reserve: I, Z, W, S, L, U, T, X, and V (and W & S have further restrictions that in practice don’t really matter)

So, to look for Delta Companion ticket availability, you need to be able to look for specific fare buckets. This is child’s play with ITA Matrix. It also gives you better results than Delta’s booking engine will, and often lets you find cheaper tickets that qualify for the companion fare than you’ll find on Delta.com or by talking to an agent and having them search for you.

The Actual Search

  1. Visit matrix.itasoftware.com
  2. Make sure “advanced controls” are enabled (the link to enable them is right under the destination city)
  3. Enter your “Departing From” and “Destination” airport codes (e.x.: LAX and ORD)
  4. Enter DL+ in both the “Outbound routing codes” and “Return routing codes”, which forces the engine to return only Delta flights (bonus tip: enter DL without the ‘+‘ if you want only direct flights)
  5. Enter the fare buckets for a companion certificate in both the “Outbound extension codes” and “Return extension codes”. This one is rather obtuse, so cut and paste the following:
    1. Platinum variant: f bc=L|bc=U|bc=T|bc=X|bc=V
    2. Reserve variant: f bc=I|bc=Z|bc=W|bc=S|bc=L|bc=U|bc=T|bc=X|bc=V
  6. Enter your dates
  7. Choose 2 adults
  8. Click “Search”

I’m going to break my “one picture per post” rule in this series because I know some of you are visual learners. My search box for a Reserve companion ticket will look like this:

Sample search for Delta Reserve companion ticket

Booking

Normally I use bookwithmatrix.com for booking anything from ITA Matrix because you just cut and paste the booking results table into that website and it’ll forward you to Delta (or another OTA if you choose) with the exact flights and fare buckets already pre-filled. With companion tickets though, Delta doesn’t let you do that; instead, you’ll have to start your booking at delta.com/redeem and go from there.

If you can’t replicate the results ITA Matrix produces with Delta’s booking engine, first try setting up your airfare using a multi-city search. If that doesn’t work, you can call and give the agent each of the exact flight dates, flight numbers, and fare codes and they can manually book it for you. I’ve only had to do that a single time though, so it’s likely a rare occurrence.

Fin

I use all of my Delta companion certificates every single year, and they’re really valuable.

A final travel hacking tip: Delta says you need to use your co-branded Delta American Express card to pay for airfare when using a companion ticket. Don’t trust them, they lie. Any American Express will do, like the Personal Platinum which awards 5x on airfare.

Delta’s companion ticket rules aren’t always, uh, rules.

Happy Thursday.

Simon

Simon has a promotional code for 48% off of all fees when ordering Visa and Mastercard gift cards online, use code FS48JUL. Don’t use an American Express to buy these; sure, it’ll work but you won’t get any points or meet any spend thresholds.

I usually prefer to MS just about everything on my American Express cards so I in turn tend to ignore Simon, but now I have a need to run up a bigger balance on my Citi card portfolio and some of my normal methods aren’t currently cutting it. And no, this isn’t because of the AA mileage transfer partnership.

Southwest

2. Southwest is having a decent fare sale that ends today. Yes, they have those a lot, but this one is interesting because it encompasses the Thanksgiving holiday season and it’s likely that the free change window will pass over Thanksgiving in the next several days. So, let’s get hacking!

For a quick primer on the Southwest free change window, see Spring Break, Southwest Style.

Kroger

3. Kroger 4x Fuel Points on gift cards is back, and yesterday I saw Best Buy gift card rates jump as high as 97% for about 12 hours. Let me tell you, I dropped what I was doing and made a run to several Krogers in my area. If your gift card buyers weren’t offering at least 96% yesterday, consider whether you should seek another buyer?

Just don’t forget to add the coupon to your Kroger account and make sure you use the right Alt-ID. I don’t know why I was off of my game yesterday but I managed to do each of those once. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

Bonus

Bonus content: Delta seems to have devalued domestic SkyMiles award prices yesterday. Hopefully it’s a glitch, but if not, you can always get at least once cent per mile with Delta’s Pay with Miles as long as you have at a co-branded Delta American Express card, so always do the math!

Maxwell’s Equations can be used to figure out SkyMiles redemption values. Don’t see it? You’ll have to trust me on that one, or just assume they’re worth a penny in the worst case.

Let’s boost a few things today:

1. Check here for 40% off at Amazon, up to $40 back when using at least one Membership Rewards point at checkout. Third party gift cards with a face value of $100 are a great way to take advantage of this one to boost your wallet.

2. According to an email in my inbox this morning, Brex has apparently been running a 20% transfer bonus to all partner airlines since July 12, and the promotion runs through August 8. News to me!

To make it easy to decide if it’s worthwhile to you, here are their partners and the normal saver Business Class cost to Europe:

  • Aéromexico: 95,000 miles each way
  • Air France/KLM: 53,000 miles each way
  • Avianca LifeMiles: 75,000 miles each way
  • Asia Miles: 70,000 miles each way
  • Singapore Airlines: 95,000 miles each way

When you factor in promotional awards or award chart and region loopholes, those numbers can come down even further. There are also particular sweet spots for Asia Miles to Asia (shocking), and for Avianca to Europe or the South Pacific. I will be taking advantage of this one.

Even this turtle is getting a boost.

1. Check Office Depot or Office Max stores for $15 off of $300 in Visa Gift Cards between now and July 31, which will net you $1.10 or more on the purchase itself. Also, note that the “Everywhere” versions of these cards can be a bigger bang for your buck but will work at a smaller set of retailers. Finally, make sure you link your card with Dosh too. It’s not supposed to pay out on gift card purchases but almost always does anyway, netting you even more.

I’ve been waiting for this to appear for a while and I’m glad it finally showed up. I know where I’ll be visiting a few times a day each day this week. (Thanks to GC Galore)

2. GoBank cards have been a good way to liquidate gift cards at a Walmart register, fee free. About a week and a half ago, Walmart started charging $3.74 per load which made the card much less useful. That appears to have been a mistake and we’re back to fee free loads of up to $1,000 again.

Is it a coincidence that the above two bullets showed up on the same day?

Is it a coincidence that these lines are coincident? Ugh, math jokes.