Kroger in store has a 4x fuel points on third party gift cards and fixed value Visa and Mastercards promotion starting today and running until Tuesday, June 18. Fuel points demand remains high, and will likely push higher and higher until the end of September.
Pepper Rewards is still expected to grind its promotional rates to a halt before the end of this promotion, which means gift card resale rates will likely go up before June 18 because economics 101.
Two Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards credit cards have increased sign-up bonuses:
– Plus: 85,000 Rapid Rewards after $3,000 spend – Priority: 85,000 Rapid Rewards after $3,000 spend
I purposefully didn’t link to either because the same offer is available via referral, so use a P2 or a friend’s referral and make someone’s day with 20,000 extra Rapid Rewards points.
Chase Offers and BankAmeriDeals have a new offer for 10% back on Alaska Airlines airfare of $50 or more booked by June 12, max $45 cash back.
The most above board way to game this is to book a non-basic economy airfare, wait 24 hours, and refund it to your Alaska wallet, but gamers gonna game.
– Boston – Washington DC – Houston – New York (JFK) – Phoenix – Seattle
I’m also seeing sporadic availability for business class redemptions to Europe at 50,000 miles from Phoenix and Seattle, the two cities on the list that I checked.
LifeMiles still has great sweet spots for Business Class flights from the US to Europe for certain city pairs, and for general weirdness on most routings. One of my personal favorites is to throw an economy flight that I’m not planning on taking onto the end of a business class ticket to reduce the cost of the redemption.
Why bring it up? If you think you might want it, either wait until this is available via referral which will likely be in the next week, or wait until the next time 100,000 mile rolls around unless you have a specific need for this card (like for XN availability). Don’t jump yet just because lots of bloggers are talking about it.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you missed Saturday’s social engineering guest post by dawnzerly because my mailer chose the wrong post to send, you can find and read it here. Ok, I guess even if you didn’t miss it you can still find and read it there.
E*Trade, the Taco Bell of brokerages, has a tiered brokerage bonus of up to $5,000 that can be satisfied by ACATS of an existing brokerage account without selling existing stock. You need to open a new E*Trade brokerage account and ACATS transfer or fund within 60 days, then hold it there for another 60, and use promo code REWARD24 when opening the account. Be sure to close existing E*TRADE accounts first for a bigger bonus.
You’ve got to hold the funds at E*Trade for six months, but then you can ACATS back out to your preferred broker. (Thanks to DoC)
I bring it up here because you can only get the offer five times per business card, and if you’ve you’ve had another five cards that already bonused with this POID or with any POID that starts with K4IY like this one from March, you won’t get this bonus.
While we’re on the topic of American Express employee cards, phone-in offers for adding up to 99 employee cards are still available on both co-brand cards and Membership Rewards earning cards. Most of them are some form of:
– Spend $1,000 get 5,000 points – Spend $2,000 get 5,000 points – Spend $2,000 get $50 statement credit
These still work for up to 99 employees per account, and are a nice power-up if you’re spending to hit status on Delta, Marriott, or Hilton cards anyway. What’s the catch? You have to pick up the phone and make a call, sorry.
EDITORS NOTE: In 2024, I’ve introduced Guest Post Saturdays. Today’s guest post is from the omnipresent dawnzerly from ShareTraveler.com.
Introduction
When I first got involved in travel hacking I thought it was a hobby primarily of information. You have to find the best opportunities (research information), and keep track of what you’re doing (track information). Over the years I’ve learned there’s a lot more to it. One skill I’ve come to realize is important for success in this hobby is social networking and social engineering. (Subtitle for this post might be: “Don’t be an asshole.”)
Social Networking for Information
We’re all out there trying to find the next great exploit. The thing that’s going to generate big spend for a $0 fee. The fintech that’s paying 50% cashback on debit (there is one, but it’s a scam). The trick to generate big NLL SUBs. Trying to find these things is time consuming. But you don’t have to fly solo on all this research. Build up a trusted network of people with whom you can share knowledge and information.
How do you find this network? You cultivate relationships. A lot of this info sharing happens in smaller private groups. And to get into these groups you need to meet people.
There are a lot of ways to find travel hackers. Online you can join public discussion groups (WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, various forums, etc.). In person I’m a fan of local groups. It’s easier to trust people you meet in person. Lots of networking and information sharing happens at local and national meetups.
Once you join some groups you need to build yourself a good reputation. For starters, when you have questions in any written forum, try searching through the history before asking. No one wants to spoon feed you answers that you could have easily found for yourself. And find ways to contribute. Maybe you don’t have any big tricks to share (yet), but when you notice people mention the need for a spreadsheet to keep track of something you could volunteer to create and maintain that spreadsheet. Rule of thumb: Don’t be an asshole, be helpful.
Social Engineering for Smoother Transactions
Some people can walk into a Safeway and be best friends with the manager in 5 minutes. Resellers make friends with store staff so they get texted a heads up about useful closeout sales. Gift card liquidators bring coffee to their local post office employees.
Social engineering might be the wrong term, because most of the time we’re not being manipulative. (Though knowing when to deploy your young child to throw a strategically distracting tantrum could be considered manipulation.) Cultivating these good relationships makes the in-store MSing so much easier. And I’d argue it’s also much more pleasant to operate this way.
I’ll admit this one is hard for me. I feel awkward. But I know from experience that chatting up the staff while MSing, and even explaining what I’m doing, can make the transactions go smoothly. At the very least, don’t be an asshole, be nice.
A pretend doctor social engineers his way into a stack of money orders at Walmart.
One of the common questions I got routinely when American Express had a referral bonus for 10x on up to $25,000 in dining spend was: How risky is maxing out 10x multiple times? My answer was typically something like “I don’t have any special insight into American Express’s RAT and fraud teams, but my guess is the risk is relatively very low”. What gave me the confidence to say that? Two things:
Unchecked bravado and unsubstantiated sense of self worth
Knowing who was paying
Without trying to go into boring accounting stuff at big companies (or exciting accounting stuff if you’re the approximately 20% of churners who made a career in accounting): not all expenses are created equal. Roughly speaking, you can classify most expenses in two-ways:
American Express’s RAT and fraud teams are trying to combat variable cost spikes caused by card-member usage patterns, and causing those spikes is usually what gets you in trouble. On the other hand, promotions like 10x on dining for up to $25,000 in spend is a marketing promotion with a (presumably) fixed / maximum budget attached to the marketing department. RAT and fraud teams, for better or worse, just aren’t looking at what happens to marketing’s fixed cost budget. Ergo, low risk.
We’re always playing a game with imperfect knowledge about the other side’s motivations and desires, but thinking about who’s paying for a particular play is a good proxy for risk in a game filled with imperfect knowledge.
Kroger’s online gift card store seems to have changed its gift card supplier to Pathward. Up until a couple of weeks ago you could buy both physical and virtual Mastercards and Visas issued by US Bank at Kroger’s online store, and as of at least yesterday, they sell only Pathward virtual Visas. The fee is $5.95 per card and they still earn fuel points.
I didn’t expect May to end with a #bonvoyed from Kroger, but here we are.
Holding Chase deposit accounts has a complex relationship with churning:
Given the first bullet point, new churners may be interested in a $750 business checking bonus with Chase that requires funding $30,000 within 30 days, holding for another 60, and completing five transactions (five back-to-back Amazon debit card loads will do). The $30,000 deposit will help with card approvals too, just be sure to close the account before you dive in too deep.
– Hilton Aspire (NLL, new): 175,000 points after $6,000 spend in six months – Hilton Surpass NLL: 130,000 points + Free Night Certificate after $3,000 spend in six months – Hilton Honors NLL: 70,000 points + Free Night Certificate after $2,000 spend in six months
Remember that contrary to churning wisdom, AmEx NLL links don’t govern whether or not you’re going to get a bonus. Instead, the pop-up does. NLL links are special though because they’re less likely to give a pop-up. Also note that sometimes you can get around a pop-up with trickery, but only sometimes.
– Transcon flights pricing at 9k miles – Short-haul to Mexico pricing at 4.5k miles – Hawaii flights pricing at 9k miles
There’s lots of space available August through October, and some availability in November before Thanksgiving.
American Express has targeted offers for opening new business checking accounts through July 31. Both require the funds to be deposited within 30 days and held for another 60. You also need five eligible transactions, which for me means five scheduled ACHs of $1.00:
There are two common fallacies that many churners share: (1) Raisin day doesn’t exist, and (2) there’s no way to get this bonus multiple times. (Thanks to DoC)
Opinions lie somewhere on a spectrum in daily life for just about any subject. For example, you’ll find people that tell you the best Mexican food restaurant is Taco Bell, and you’ll of course find plenty of other people with the (correct) opposite opinion. EDITOR’S NOTE: I tried to link to sources for the opposite opinion, but there were so many that it literally broke the internet so I had to revert the links.
In churning, a divisive range of opinions formed about how much sharing is good; all the way from “any sharing will kill any deal” to “everything should be shared so everyone can benefit” and everything in-between. I’ve seen counter examples to sharing absolutism on both ends and I think both viewpoints are wrong. A few examples:
“Any sharing will kill any deal”: Obviously this isn’t true. Buying money orders at Walmart has been around since the early 2010s, and buyer’s groups have been around even longer. Both are alive and well despite massive publicity and volume
There’s a goldilocks zone with most subjective opinions where too much of something is bad, too little of the same thing is bad, but some is just right. What sharing size is right for churning? That depends on the audience’s size, composition, and the topic at hand. If you think I’m not in the goldilocks zone with this blog’s content, please let me know because I’m certain I can always improve.
Tying this back to where we started: While in general the goldilocks zone is somewhere in the middle, sometimes the absolutists on one side are correct: Taco Bell isn’t the best Mexican restaurant (don’t say you never learned valuable life lessons at MEAB).
