Valuations are notoriously hard and opinionated, but I’d suggest that you drop your own Hilton valuation by at least 25-30% unless you have your own private unicorn. Personally, I’m treating them as worth 0.3 cents each.
It’s worth checking existing travel plans that were booked after May 27 because you’ll be operating under the same fare and checked bags scheme. For travel plans booked before, ymmv.
Stop & Shop, Giant Foods, and Martins stores have 8x points on both Amazon and Zift Zillions gift cards through Thursday, limit $2,000 spend per account.
Have a nice Wednesday!
New perk: This Hilton Garden Inn’s 30% award rate increase comes with complimentary fire (included with resort fee)
– If your application wasn’t wildly different than the 4506-C numbers, you’ll be fine – This appears to be a bug in Citi’s IT systems, not a crusade to out churners – Going for a double dip with these links increases the likelihood of 4506-C requests – The form is available your message center if you’ve enabled paperless statements – Both online and in-branch approvals are affected
For a non-mainstream take on the risk versus reward of using the heightened offer links, see Chasing Cetaceans, my favorite new churning blog.
American Express quagmire elevator games are dead and have been for a few weeks. Based on other system updates, I don’t think they’re coming back either.
If you don’t know what this means, it doesn’t affect you. #crypticmeab
The Barclays Hawaiian Mastercard and the Bank of Hawaii Mastercard both have increased sign-up offers:
– Barclays: 80,000 HawaiianMiles after $2,500 spend in three months, use random numbers for promo code – Bank of Hawaii: 50,000+30,000 Hawaiian Miles after $2,000 in 90 days and $5,000 in 180 days, respectively
These miles will become Alaska Atmos miles at the end of the month, and presumably you won’t be able to get either card after that point. You don’t seem to be able to get both versions of this card any more.
– 1 round trip: 5,000 bonus points – 2 round trips: 5,000 additional bonus points – 3 round trips: 5,000 additional bonus points – 4 round trips: a Companion Pass valid between January 6, 2026 and March 6, 2026
There are also various targeted status shortcut promotions available, check your promotions at the bottom of your My Account page.
Some airline shopping portals have sweepstakes for winning lots of miles and cash, and you can register to enter by logging in at one of the sweepstakes pages (churners have occasionally won these in prior years):
Chase has new targeted offers for both its Freedom cards and United cards, you can check your eligibility at chase.com/mybonus, ideally in a new incognito window for each card. Offers include 3x-5x earning at gas, EV charging, and groceries on up to $1,500 spend through November 30, a fixed bonus on 20 purchases monthly for three months, and 10,000-15,000 bonus points on $3,000-$4,000 spend.
The American Express Delta cards have heightened sign-up bonuses, coming back a short three days after the targeted NLL versions expired. The Gold and Reserve offers beat the last round’s bonuses, while the Platinum cards are each slightly lower. Spend requirements were tweaked slightly too:
– Personal Gold: 80,000 SkyMiles after $3,000 spend in six months, annual-fee waived – Personal Platinum: 90,000 SkyMiles after $4,000 spend in six months – Personal Reserve: 125,000 SkyMiles after $6,000 spend in six months – Business Gold: 90,000 SkyMiles after $6,000 spend in six months, annual-fee waived – Business Platinum: 100,000 SkyMiles after $8,000 spend in six months – Business Reserve: 125,000 SkyMiles after $15,000 spend in six months
– $500 with $5,000 in deposits held for 60 days (effectively a 60% APR when annualized) – $1,000 with $30,000 in deposits held for 60 days (effectively a 20% APR when annualized)
Both require 10 transactions, but $1 ACHs back and forth will do. These bonuses are churnable every 180 days. (Thanks to DDG)
– 140,000 points after $4,000 spend in three months – 60,000 points after $9,000 spend in six months
This card’s annual free-night certificate is for nights up to 40,000 points. The offer is available via referral, so use another player’s or another churner’s referral instead of the public link.
Southwest will have free-WiFi onboard starting on October 24. This sounds great, other than that they’ll still have their legacy inflight internet system which was already really slow when < 10% of the plane was using it. So, I guess each passenger will get to relive the 2,400 baud internet speeds of the early 1990s?
How many miles should you hold in a loyalty account before you start liquidating them or choosing to earn something else instead? My hand-wavey answer is: Hold as many as you’ll redeem between now and the next devaluation. Of course, we don’t really know when the next devaluation will happen, but we can look into the last 10 years to try and find patterns on a program specific level.
Why Programs Devalue
Before we do that, let’s remind ourselves why devaluations happen:
Inflation happens, and mileage earning is tied to prices
Airline CASM increases over time
Hotel CPOR increases over time
Devaluing a currency helps a balance sheet
Devaluations suck, but they’re entirely predictable over time. If we take as a given that programs will devalue, the next logical question is “how often?”
The Frequency
I collected data for frequent flyer program devaluations from the year 2015 until now for the major five US airlines. For this dataset, I only considered redemption devaluations; I excluded elite program changes, the removal of free-stop overs, and similar perks that aren’t directly tied to the mileage redemption rate. Some of these devaluations were only for specific types of redemptions (for example, partner awards to Europe), but that didn’t matter for this study. If redemptions devalued in some way, they were included here.
Now, let’s go airline by airline, sorted by frequency of devaluation:
Ok, now what’s the expectation value for a devaluation in each program, just taking the number of devaluations divided by the time period (10 years)?
Airline
Devaluation Time (Expectation Value)
Standard Deviation
Delta
1.00 years
0.42 years
United
1.67 years
1.05 years
Southwest
2.00 years
0.88 years
Alaska
2.00 years
1.11 years
AA
3.33 years
1.82 years (sqrt(3/10))
What do I do with that?
Alright, how do you make this data actionable? Well let’s go back to my hand-wavey metric for when you should stop holding miles in a particular program: Hold as many as you’ll redeem between now and the next devaluation.
That means that I wouldn’t hold more Delta SkyMiles than I’m likely to redeem in the next 1.00 years, or at least the next 1.00 years after October 2023 (😬 Spoiler alert: It seems likely that we’re going to see another Delta devaluation soon.) It’s also yet another argument about why you should be holding flexible currencies that transfer multiple places and can be cashed out directly.
– American Express: 25% to Hilton Honors, making the ratio 10:25 through September 23 – Capital One: 30% to Virgin Red, making the ratio 10:13 though October 1
Both have some value for the right redemptions, neither is outstanding for a ZOMGWTFBBQ transfer.
– Business Green: 15,000 Membership Rewards after $4,000 spend in six months – Blue Business Plus: 15,000 Membership Rewards after $4,000 spend in six months
Remember, there are phone-in offers with higher limits that don’t necessarily match the online offers. Both the online and phone-in offers are targeted per primary account.
American Express also has a targeted offer for adding an authorized user to the personal Gold card:
– Gold: 10,000 Membership Rewards after $2,000 spend in six months
These will show up on the authorized user’s credit report if American Express can figure out who they are, and it’s also limited to one per primary account.
The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card sent out beginning of month offers via snail mail and email over the last week. Each offer is valid once a month for September, October, and November, and some have bonuses for getting all three months’ bonuses:
– $25 monthly credit on $750 monthly, and a bonus $50 for hitting all three – $40 monthly credit with five $75+ transactions monthly – $50 monthly credit on $1,500 monthly, and a bonus $50 for hitting all three
Yes, these stack with both of last month’s offers. No, this card isn’t available for new applications any more, sorry. (Thanks to birt, Jared, and K)
American Express has new online for adding new employee cards, limit five per primary card:
– Reduced earning on tickets booked in September (LATAM) or September – December (Singapore) for travel through December 31 through any channel – No new Singapore award bookings starting on October 1, ditto with LATAM – No points earning unless tickets are booked directly via Alaska starting in 2026 for Singapore – No points earning regardless of booking channel on LATAM starting October 1
This was bound to happen when Alaska joined oneworld, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting.
Amazon and gas fuel cards are excluded from 4x earning, but still earn 2x. Gift card resale rates are at a relative maxima, and fuel points prices aren’t bad now either.
RobinHood, which really needs a separate stand alone post that basically says: “literally don’t do anything funding related with them even if it seems fun. Yes I know it seems ok, but it’s really not and they’ll liquidate your positions forcefully”, has two transfer bonuses for Gold members that are uncapped in theory:
– Regular brokerage: 2% bonus for incoming funds through September 15 – IRA: 2% (or 3% with margin) bonus for incoming funds through September 15
Both require that you hold your stocks or funds at RobinHood for 5 years. I did the math guys: If you bring $100 Billion in funds, this is a $2 Billion money maker. (Thanks to DoC)
Should you care? If you think of Virgin Miles as being effectively a buy a coach ticket (award fees) and upgrade to business class with miles proposition (mileage rate) and live in a gateway city, it’s often a great option. For those of you that live in Lubbock or balk at paying more than ~$50 in award fees, it’s probably best to move along to the next thing. Also, coach redemptions are ok I guess.
Have a nice Thursday!
Average travel hacker sentiment for Virgin Red, but as a person.
The Bank of America Atmos Ascent Visa business has a new inflight sourced sign up bonus of 85,000 Atmos miles after $5,000 spend in three months, which is 5,000 miles more than the current public link. The personal card’s similar bonus is still available:
Both require a flight attendant code (not to be confused with the flight attendant code), or most any six digit random number that starts with 10. (Thanks to Remster32)
Alaska has a 15% off of a flight promotional code after signing up for text alerts by texting FLY to 252752 by the end of the day. The code will be delivered tomorrow, and doesn’t work for first class tickets but does work on Hawaiian flights.
