Author: matt

  1. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card, the 1990s Hakeem Olajuwon of credit cards and a MEAB Unsung Hero, has a few new targeted offers for online spend through September 14 via email. We’ve seen:

    – $40 statement credit with $600 spend
    – $80 statement credit with $800 spend
    – 7,000 ThankYou Points with $600 spend
    – 200,000 Shop Your Way Rewards with $600 spend

    This offer will stack with the current offers for utilities too, provided you can pay your utility bill online. (Thanks to Mike, Santosh, and Jacob)
  2. Promotional Southwest Companion Passes from Southwest’s April offer are now active for bookings through September 30, and are working on both paid and award bookings. (Thanks to sctrader)
  3. Costco has $500 Alaska Airlines e-gift cards on sale for $449.99, limit 10 per member. These can be loaded to your Alaska wallet too which makes it easy to track, but wallet funds do quasi-expire. (Generally Alaska will renew soon expiring wallet funds after asking nicely on Twitter X, a great tip courtesy of Sam at Milenomics)

    UPDATE: Mike sent a correction about Alaska wallet fund expiration; funds added directly with a credit, debit, or gift card don’t expire.
  4. Safeway and Albertsons family stores have unlimited 5x Just4U points earning on Uber gift cards $50 or greater through August 28. These can be a back-door way to earn Alaska miles too. (Thanks to GCG)

Happy Wednesday!

If Olajuwon is the Shop Your Way Card, churners are the referee, I guess?

Southwest announced that they’ll implement same day standby for all passengers by the end of the month, joining Delta, American, and United. [Insert rah-rah puff embellishments here about how shockingly great this for mothers, business owners, toddlers, dead presidents, African swallows, firefighters, and walruses here. Readers will eat that up, right?]

With that out of the way, let’s talk about how I use this flexibility more often than I care to admit.

The Problem

Sometimes I need to book a flight within the next day and prices for both award travel and paid fares are at a premium for desirable flight times.

The Solution

I book a cheaper flight that I’d take if I had to on the airline that has the desirable flight time, but then do a same day standby for the more expensive flight that I actually want.

Tips For Success

  • Some airlines let you see how many seats are available and the depth of the standby list on flights departing in the next day, which means you can make an educated guess about your chances of success both before and after you book. Using this technique I’ve got roughly a 90% success rate.
  • If you have elite status on a legacy airline or you bought a Wanna Get Away Plus fare on Southwest, you’ve also probably got the option to do a same-day confirmed change to the flight you want at no additional charge directly in app, no standby needed. This works better on United or Southwest than other airlines in general due to their more generous same day change policies, but there are hacks with Delta and American too.
  • If you’re departing from a major airport, you can double or triple your chances for success by booking refundable award fares and staggering your stand by flights across multiple carriers, canceling the rest after the earliest one works out.

Good luck!

Using same day standby, this walrus made it back to the Canadian tundra long before it melted while waiting for its original itinerary.

Three out of the four items for today are weird, but I’ll let you decide which.

  1. Meijer has a promotion for 10,000 MPerks points with a $100 Happy or Choice gift card purchase through Saturday, limit 10,000 points per account.

    Convert these to BestBuy or Home Depot for the best return, and scale with multiple MPerks accounts.
  2. Wyndham has a transfer bonus to United MileagePlus for a single transaction through the end of the month. Assuming you’re normally earning at 8x with the Wyndham Business Rewards card, the conversion gives you an effective earn rate of 3.2x MileagePlus miles per dollar which is actually great. The tiers:

    – 6,000 Wyndham to 2,400 MileagePlus
    – 16,000 Wyndham to 6,400 MileagePlus
    – 30,000 Wyndham to 12,000 MileagePlus
    – 60,000 Wyndham to 24,000 MileagePlus (May be targeted, thanks to pluckyhere)

    Of course there’s a big asterisk here: you can only do this once and the promotion caps out at 12,000 24,000 MileagePlus miles. For the math challenged, that means $3,750 $7,500 in spend at a gas station with the Wyndham Business Card. (Thanks to FM)
  3. According to DoC, Capital One is sending targeted email offers for referring a new business to a Capital One credit card with a hefty $1,500 bonus up to three times for the referrer on top of the usual sign-up bonus for the referred.

    I’ve yet to independently confirm this bonus in the wild, but it’s big enough that I decided to deviate from my norm and call attention to it anyway. (It’s “scruples be damned” Monday, right?)
  4. Southwest has a sweepstakes for “learning about the benefits of Rapid Rewards Credit Cards”. It’s a memory match two card game, and you can enter once per day through the end of the month. The top prize is 25,000 Rapid Rewards points for the top of the leaderboard.

    I wouldn’t normally write about this because most of you will end up with nothing, but now that we’re living in a new world order let’s talk gaming to sharpen your skills for the future: To win, train some AI on a throw away Rapid Rewards account then let it rip on your actual account daily. It’s the new normal and almost certainly what the winners are going to do unless the game is vulnerable to a JSON/XHR attack. (Thanks to Brian M)

Have a nice Monday friends!

There are exactly three weird things in this picture too.

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

    These are Metabank Pathward gift cards, so have a liquidation plan in place.
  2. The Barclays Lufthansa Miles & More Mastercard credit card has an 80,000 mile sign-up bonus after $3,000 in spend in 90 days. The card sucks for ongoing spend at 1x and isn’t worth your time unless you want easy access to Swiss Air First Class. For that, you’ll need 182,000 miles each way for the US and Europe and Miles & More status, either via match or direct earn. So, it’s actually quite useful for aspirational travel but otherwise skip it.

    Don’t forget that it’s possible to clown around with Barclays to an extent. (Thanks to DoC)
  3. Barclays has two other increased sign-up bonuses which have more general applicability:

    – JetBlue Plus 75,000 bonus miles after $1,000 spend in 90 days
    – Hawaiian 70,000 bonus miles after $2,000 spend in 90 days

    If you have existing Barclays cards, it’s best to ramp up spending for a few months on them in anticipation of applying for new cards.
  4. The Target Redcard $40 online plus $40 in-store churnable sign-up bonus has died. The new iterations are for $50 off either online or in-store but not both, and churning restrictions have increased to between 60 and 90 days.

    There’s one of the new, $50 promotions going through August 19 for both the credit and the debit card, and there might be utility in a $50 RedCard credit card sign-up bonus.
  5. Do this now: Sign-in to your Marriott account and then check your promotions page for targeted Q3 promotions. We’ve seen:

    – 6,000 bonus points after two stays, 7,500 more points after three, and 9,000 more points after four stays
    – 7,500 bonus points after a single stay and 15,000 more points after a second stay
    – 3,000 bonus points for your fist stay, 2,000 more for your second, and 5,000 more for your third
    – 2,000 bonus points after a single stay that includes a Friday or Saturday night, and 3,000 more points after another

    These are for stays through November 15. (Thanks to SideshowBob233 and DDG)

The spending ramp for easy Barlcays card approvals.

We’re in an extended period of Chase shutdowns that started a week ago, and while we don’t know the complete causes, related factors might be:

  • Heavy use at a manufactured spender fitness club
  • Earning a sign-up bonus at a manufactured spender fitness club or popular rebate site, even with light spending
  • Using Chase Ink card links that bypassed backend business approval logic

If you’re caught up in shutdowns, there are options to squeeze Chase back, not all is lost:

  • Call or write the Chase Executive office and open a case
    This is only likely to be fruitful if you’re shutdown for rewards abuse and don’t have heavy manufactured spend, or if you’re shutdown due to bust-out risk. For body builders, I don’t expect a ton of success here
  • Exercise the arbitration clause in your account agreements
    I’m not an attorney and I’m definitely not your attorney, so don’t take this as legal advice. I imagine that having a manufactured spend friendly attorney on your side couldn’t hurt though
  • Wait seven to ten years and you may find yourself back in
    Yes it’s a long time, but it’s not forever
  • Find new players
    Isolate addresses to avoid any contagion spread through
  • Try and open a Chase Private Client account in branch
    Wait six months to do it, and you’ll need $100,000 or more in assets typically
  • Pivot to other banks for cash, United, and Hyatt
    Bilt is an option. You weren’t using Ultimate Rewards for much else, I assume?

Fortunately there are thousands of banks and credit unions out there that offer credit cards that still want your business. Always be probing!

Squeezing Chase if Chase were a GM car.

  1. Southwest has a new promotion flights booked to and from a couple of cities booked by this evening. Travel is valid for September through February within the Continental US, or for Early next year for Hawaii and international destinations:

    – Chicago MDW and ORD: CHICAGO30
    – Denver and Colorado Springs: COLORADO30

    Brain M sent a reminder that Southwest now flys to Chicago O’Hare in addition to Midway, and at O’Hare they use Terminal 5. That’s interesting because T5 is where most long haul international flights operate so Southwest could be a good option for positioning flights on, let’s say, less modestly appointed airlines. Just watch out for the worst Priority Pass lounge in North America, also in ORD’s T5.
  2. Alaska has an award and paid ticket sale through tomorrow for travel between September 6 and December 13. This one has some serious teeth as far as I can tell, for example, I’m seeing:

    – West coast to and from Hawaii: 7,500 miles
    – West coast to and from Mexico: 7,500 miles
    – West coast to and from Chicago: 7,500 miles
    – Transcontinental flights: 10,000 miles

    Now, if only there were a good way to earn a ton of Alaska miles. Oh wait, there is.
  3. Discover is sending targeted offers via email for extra cash-back on spend through the end of September, which obviously stacks well with Discover IT’s 5% Q3 bonus categories of gas stations and digital wallets. Offers reported:

    – 2% back on up to $2,000 in spend
    – 4% back on up to $2,000 in spend

    (Thanks to MtM)

The best photo ever taken of the Priority Pass lounge in T5. Believe me, they’re doing us all a favor.

The Avianca LifeMiles online search and booking platform seemingly hasn’t been working for several weeks, and you can find complaints about it in just about every nook of the internet that’s remotely adjacent to frequent flyer miles.

There’s an easy workaround though, courtesy of Joe M via MEAB slack: you can still search and book online if you use Firefox on a desktop PC or Mac. Mobile browsers, the Avianca app, Chrome, Edge, Opera, and Safari all fail. Booking over the phone works, but that’s about as painful with Avianca as rowing a boat across the English channel. In other words, we try and avoid such monstrosities when practicle.

Happy booking friends!

Even this rusty pipe’s forum dedicated to the Columbian frequent flyer landscape is whining about LifeMiles bookings.

  1. Office Depot / OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $200 Visa gift cards through Saturday, no to be confused with the Mastercard variant offered last week. For best results:

    – Buy the Everywhere cards for lower fees if you know how to liquidate them
    – Try for multiple transactions back-to-back
    – Link your cards to Dosh, ideally one Dosh account per card.
    – Combine with a Chase Offer for 10% back on up to $80 or $110 in spend
    – Try and scale in non-conventional ways

    For the most part these cards are still limited with PIN transactions on liquidation to $480 per store per six minutes.
  2. Do this now: Link your Uber Travel and Marriott accounts under the Uber app’s Travel tab for 2,000 bonus Bonvoy Points. If you make up to four scheduled rides in Uber between now and September 30, you’ll earn 4,000 bonus points each, plus another 2,000 if you do a total of four.

    What’s that worth? (2,000+4,000*4+2,000 x Bonvoy) ~ $100 and a bonus swift kick in the pants.
  3. The Capital One Spark card has an interesting sign-up bonus, assuming you have a separate miles earning Capital One Card:

    – 2x earning on all spend
    – $150 annual fee
    – $200 statement credit after spending $200,000
    – 120,000 mile sign-up bonus (or $1,200 statement credit) after $30,000 in spend

    If you’ve got your low-cost manufactured spend machine operating smoothly, there’s huge utility in a card like this. (6x for $30,000 in spend, or a blended average of 2.7x for $200,000 in spend)

Player 2 receives part of the Marriott Bonvoy Uber bonus.