Author: matt

1. If you have a Chase Freedom Flex (and really you should, 3x at drugstores like CVS is one of the best ways to earn to Ultimate Rewards), I’d suggest that you take advantage of the new offer for $1,500 in spend at 5x in the category you spend the most on, out of: travel, dining, home improvement stores, grocery stores (except Target and Walmart), drugstores, gas stations, select live entertainment (lol), select streaming services, and fitness clubs. You’re automatically registered as long as you activated your Q4 5x categories.

If any of these overlap with your Freedom Flex’s Q4 bonus categories (PayPal and Walmart), you’ll earn 9x instead of 5x. My current churning life regret is that I only have one Freedom Flex card.

2.There’s a relatively new targeted spend offer on the landing page on the Ultimate Rewards portal for Ink Preferred cards. The offer is 50,000 bonus points for each $50,000 in spend up to $250,000. You can find the terms here. If you can MS in advertising or shipping categories, you’ll end up at 4x with this offer. (Thanks to Danny)

3. The Chase Sapphire Preferred 100,000 Ultimate Rewards points offer with first year’s annual fee waived and a $50 credit at grocery stores is still alive in-branch. My business banker said that they haven’t heard that it’ll be pulled yet, so it could stick around for at least a couple of more weeks. I still prefer the churnable Chase Ink cards to the Sapphire Preferred for almost everyone though.

Ok, but where are Chase’s Tuesday Tacos? Here, duh.

A post is brewing about the new American Express Business Platinum changes. Stay tuned, and in the mean time:

1. Staples has fee free $200 Visa gift cards through Saturday, limit five per transaction. It looks to me like this is just continuing last week’s promo for another week. They’re Metabank/BHN cards, so have a liquidation play in mind. Side note: I’m shocked at how many of these there have been this year; don’t expect it to last.

Remember to link your cards with Payce, sometimes it’ll pay 5% on Staples gift card purchases even though it’s not supposed to and definitely don’t contact support if it doesn’t work.

2. Office Depot/OfficeMax has 25% back in rewards on Happy gift cards, up to $25 total back. Buy one of these for $100 to max it out. Happy cards that swap to Home Depot or Gamestop are your best bang for the buck. (Thanks to GC Galore)

3. Do this now: Register for 1,000 AA Miles when you stay at a Hyatt in Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York City, Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, or Washington, D.C. between November 1 of this year and January 31, 2022.

If you really wanted to game this promo, you could hop back-and-forth between different Hyatt hotels over the course of your travel and get 1,000 miles per night, effectively. Is that worth it? Sounds like a lot of work to me.

Painting a wall with a q-tip seems is mathematically the same amount of work required to hop back-and-forth between hotels for a week.

I have several friends traveling on Southwest over the next week and a half. Two things: 1) they’re going to miss their first class upgrades, and 2), there’s a decent shot that their flight will be cancelled last minute.

If I had Southwest tickets booked over the next week or so, I’d seriously consider finding another way to travel because Southwest’s current operational meltdown could easily derail your trip and leave you stuck for days without an alternate Southwest flight, and Southwest won’t rebook you on another airline so don’t consider that to be your backup plan.

There are ways to find inexpensive award tickets on the major US carriers for very close travel as a backup or replacement (you can get most bank points into one or more of these currencies with a 1:1 transfer ratio):

In almost all cases, using one of the above currencies will be cheaper for travel starting in the next couple of weeks than using the airline’s mileage program directly, but definitely check and choose the cheapest option. They’re all likely to be better than playing Russian-roulette with your Southwest flight though.

Remember, if you get stuck and you paid for your airfare with a premium card (Chase Sapphire Preferred/Reserve, American Express Platinum, Citi Prestige), you’ll likely be covered for hotel and meal expenses while you wait to get home. None of these cards will cover alternate airfare though, so don’t fall into that common trap and expect to be reimbursed for booking a new ticket home.

It’s going to be a cluster-hug over the next week or two out there, good luck!

Lizzy Air Lines currently has a better completion ratio on flights than Southwest. Unfortunately, no major bank rewards program partners with Lizzy’s Juice Box Miles™ program.

Do this now: Book any speculative AA and Hyatt awards today for any potential travel in the next year.

Why? Both Hyatt and AA are expected to make major award price changes over the next few days.

1. Hyatt is going to introduce peak and off-peak pricing for hotel award bookings sometime in mid-October for stays in March 2022 and beyond, and last I checked October 14 probably counts as sometime in mid-October. The new chart can be found here. I’d book absolutely every hotel stay with Hyatt that you may possibly take next year, assuming your point balances allow it. If the price goes up you’ll be locked in at the old rate, and if it goes down you can get the lower price and the difference in points back, so the downsides are minimal.

2. AA is going to devalue AAdvantage mileage awards really soon, according to twitter personality JonNYC who has inside sources and is almost always correct. As a result, I’d book any business/first class international awards that you may possibly take in the next 330 days right now. If the trip or timing doesn’t work, you can always cancel the trip and redeposit the miles with no fee under current AA policies, but if you end up taking the trip you’ll be locked in at the current prices.

Remember when Citi added AA as a temporary transfer partner for ThankYou Points in July? It brings me absolutely no pleasure to report this, but the prediction that AA would devalue soon as a result of this partnership seems to be correct. I’d say that the US dollar would be good hedge against AA devaluation, but that seems to be undergoing a major devaluation of its own. I guess it’s time to hedge with pumpkin futures, just remember to sell them before Halloween.

A shriveled-up, moldy, carved pumpkin
AA miles are currently on-track to mimic pumpkins in mid-November.

I got a few questions about cashing out Membership Rewards on the heels of yesterday’s post, so now is as good a time as any to talk about the current ways to cash out Those points. Some are above board and some are, shall we say, a titch less so. First, the obviously allowed and supported options:

  • With the American Express Schwab Platinum card, you can cash-out at 1.1 cents per point
  • With the Morgan Stanley Platinum card, you can cash out account for 1.0 cents per point
  • With the Miles Earn and Burn Unsung Hero no annual fee Morgan Stanley card, you can also cash out for 1.0 cents per point
  • Without any special card, you can always redeem directly for a statement credit at 0.6 cents per point using Pay with Points. This is a terrible deal, though, don’t do it

And now, the travel hacker ways:

  • Book refundable travel through American Express Travel and pay with Membership Rewards, then cancel the itinerary and it will be refunded as a statement credit at 1.00 cents per point (Hint: with the Business Platinum’s 35% rebate and a long time, like crossing over the boundary of a year, sometimes you can do better but you may end up angering AmEx)
  • A variation on the above: Book a ticket with American Express Travel and pay with Membership Rewards, but don’t buy a refundable ticket; instead by a ticket that can be canceled to an airline’s wallet or as an e-credit/travel voucher and use that credit sometime in the future for airfare that you’d normally pay for with cash (generally non basic-economy tickets fall into this category in the COVID-era travel world, but be sure to double check with your airline of choice). For rules on airline travel vouchers and wallets, see this post at Milenomics

Finally, the ways that are almost certain to get you in trouble eventually (Let me reiterate — these are bad ideas and will almost certainly cause you problems or catch up to you, don’t do them without understanding how risky they could be):

  • Sell travel to your friends and family, then book the itineraries with them using your Membership Rewards
  • Sell your Membership Rewards to a points broker, you’ll earn 1.3 to 1.5 cents per point

Happy hacking!

I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I’m starting to feel like I was scammed when I sold Jimmy 8,000 Membership Rewards and got this.

1. Staples has $200 fee free Mastercards up to five per transaction this week, and this time it’s for real — they pinky-promised and said no take-backs, so I think we’re good. The promotion runs between yesterday and Saturday. Note: There are recent reports that Payce has paid 5% on gift card purchases at Staples, though it can be spotty and it’s definitely not supposed to work that way so don’t write Payce support if it didn’t track for you.

These cards are Metabanks and they’re becoming more difficult to directly cash out, but it’s still possible. Some of the low hanging fruit is at regional grocery stores, but from home options also exist.

2. Office Depot / OfficeMax has $15 off of $300 in Visa gift cards back through Saturday. Remember to link your cards with Dosh for extra cash back, which will make this deal about a $14 money maker each time with the everywhere cards which, despite their name, do not work everywhere that Visa is taken (they do work in many places which matter for us though).

3. Meijer Mperks is has a current offer for $5 off of a future purchase when buying $50 in gift cards, up to 10 times per Mperks account between now and October 23. In case you’re not mathematically inclined, a single $500 gift card will earn you $50, or 10% back.

This one excludes some Visas and Mastercards, but you can buy BestBuy, Home Depot, or Apple gift cards which all have a high resale rate.

4. The personal JetBlue card has an offer for Mosaic status lasting until the end of 2022 after spending $15,000 (Svetlana wrote in to correct the spend, I had incorrectly written $10,000 before). If you fly JetBlue a lot, Mosaic status may be worth getting. If you’re flying it only two or three times a year, then this isn’t worth your time — the real benefit to Mosaic is free “upgrades” to Even More Space and I guess a mini-bottle of awful wine.

If JetBlue Mosaic status got you wine from Valais, we’d be in a totally different ballgame and spending $10,000 for status might be worth it. Alas, it doesn’t. Enjoy your swill wine and blue corn chips instead, cause that’s what you’ll get.

Background

On Monday I was scheduled to fly home on a short-hop Delta flight paid for with 5,000 SkyMiles. As I’m sure you can figure out from the post’s title, that didn’t really go as planned. The short story is that my aircraft had big dent in the airframe from the inbound flight to the airport. Delta posted an initial delay of an hour right when we were getting ready to board.

If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s dealing with IROPS when traveling. If there’s another thing I’m good at, it’s making the best steel cut oats based breakfast bowl that you’ve ever had, but why would you care about that? Let’s stay on topic people!

I have a cardinal rule when it comes to flight delays:

If the delay posted is an hour or longer, you need to have a backup option in place.

The moment the delay was announced, and I mean that very moment, I speed-walked to the SkyClub to avoid any lines at the gate, and simultaneously I made a call to Delta Reservations in case they’d come back more quickly than the SkyClub (spoiler alert: they didn’t). When I got to the SkyClub, I scanned my boarding pass and asked immediately to be “protected on the next flight” to my destination. The agent was able to do that in about 15 seconds.

Flight Protection

What is flight protection? It’s when an airline holds a seat for you on another flight without giving up your seat on your original flight. Then you’ve got the option to take either flight, whichever departs first. With most airlines, you can select a seat on both flights and you’ll be on the upgrade list for both flights too if you’re eligible.

All you have to do to get protected on the next flight is to know how to ask. And asking is as simple as “My current flight is delayed. Would you please protect me on the next flight to XXX?”

Caveat: Some airlines will cancel any remaining flights on your itinerary if you miss a flight (I’m looking at you United, the only airline that’s screwed me multiple times with this), so after I scan my boarding pass on whichever flight departs first, I double check to make sure that the other flight drops out of my itinerary in the airline’s mobile app. If it doesn’t, then I ask the gate agent or another employee to take it off of the itinerary so the rest of my flights don’t auto-cancel.

My Conclusion

As you’d probably guess, a dented airframe is more than an hour long fix. Delta ended up flying in another plane and crew to operate the flight, and it departed 6 hours and 5 minutes past the original schedule which is frankly pretty good for an event like this at a non-hub. I was already home and on my couch by the time that original flight departed though — I got there via the protected flight.

Bonus: Delta proactively gave me 7,500 SkyMiles for the delayed flight without me contacting them, making that ticket a 1.5x SkyMiles earner. If only I could replicate that at scale.

It’ll prolly buff out, right?

Today, let’s start with a bit of followup and then jump into a few points to keep your eyes on.

On Monday we talked about how Chase might be blocking PayPal Key+Freedom transactions for certain MS channels. Plenty of data points have come in since then, and there’s also been a material change in a particular MS channel too. As of now, it seems that PayPal is actually the culprit for blocking transactions and it’s very targeted and specific. Louses!

Onto the normal post:

1. Login to American Express, then check this link for an authorized user offer for American Express Business Platinum cards. This offer is for 20,000 points when adding an employee card and spending $4,000, up to five times. This is different than the 1.9 Million point offer for 99 users that you can get from calling in; and because it’s a different offer you can be taking advantage of both (though remember you’re limited to 99 employee cards total).

Remember, employee cards don’t need a date of birth or SSN when creating them, they come already activated, and they stay that way for 60 days without providing additional information. (Thanks to Parts_Unknown for the link)

2. Simon Volume has a gift card promotion code GO50SEP21 for half of of fees through October 8. These are great for boosting balances on your Citi cards, especially the Double Cash.

3. If you hold any variety of the American Express Bonvoy card, register this link for a targeted 10x spend on PayPal purchases up to 50,000 points for $5,000 in spend. I was targeted, and believe it or not I will be taking advantage of this because 50,000 points is good for a night or two at an airport hotel when I need a place to stay while transiting.

I hear your head snapping: “Wait, MEAB? You have a Marriott Bonvoy Amex?”

Yes, I famously hate Marriott and yes, I do have the card. It’s the weird $95 annual fee personal card that was converted from the Starwood SPG card when Marriott bought Starwood, and is currently only available by converting another higher annual-fee Marriott. I’ve kept this card despite my hatred of Marriott because:

  • I’ve gotten a 60,000 Bonvoy points retention offer on the card each year that I’ve had it
  • It’s currently giving me $10 in dining credits every month, easily cashed out at Amazon Meals on Fluz
  • It gives me a 35,000 point annual free night certificate every year

If they would stop giving me retention offers on the card I’d get rid of it — but, here we are. AmEx is feeding me exactly what I hate and I apparently keep asking for more.

The American Express Bonvoy $95 annual fee card if it were a meal.