Category: Airlines

  1. Giftcards.com’s promo code HOLIDAYVISA continues to work for $10 back on on $100 or more in virtual Visa gift cards, limit $2,000 per 48 hours. When properly executed this deal gets nearly 10% off, credit card points, and a portal spend rebate too, which makes it easy to eat the costs expensive liquidation options and still come out way ahead.

    When improperly executed like the last purchase I made, you forget to enter the code and then connect your palm to your face. (It’s not currently advertised, but VISAHOLIDAY and XMASVISA codes may also work too. Just make sure to enter them in the promo code box.)

  2. Staples has fee free Visa gift cards on sale Sunday through the following Saturday limit five per transaction. There’s a catch this time though: this sale is only for $100 cards and not the usual $200s, so #bonvoyed. Personally I’d focus on the Office Depot/OfficeMax sale that ends tomorrow instead, because although the net cost of acquisition is the same, processing time and in-store time is effectively doubled for $100 cards for the same total spend. (Thanks to GC Galore)
  3. Most airlines have a no change-fee waiver across half or more of the United States in place thanks to yet another bomb cyclone storm. If you’re traveling in the next 24 to 48 hours, you may want to take advantage of the waivers and see if you can switch to a better itinerary so you’re not connecting on a redeye flight to meet Danny in Lubbock, TX on your layover.
  4. Don’t forget that for some reason I can’t place my finger on, Monday December 26 is a federal banking holiday, so ACHs, wires, and credit card payments won’t clear until Tuesday.

Have a nice holiday weekend, and safe travels! I hope you end up somewhere sunny like I will (travel demigods willing).

The probable reason for the federal banking holiday on Monday.

  1. Simon has a few new Simon discounted purchase-fee codes available:

    – DEC22FLASH35 for 35% off of Visas and Mastercards through December 14
    – DEC22FESTIVE50 for 50% off of Abstract Red or Abstract Emerald Visa gift cards through December 25
    – WRAP22UP for 50% off of Holiday Design Visa gift cards through December 31

    Different Simon codes (obviously) work on different types of gift cards, and for an added level of complexity, some work only on business volume accounts, and some work only on consumer volume accounts.

  2. Best Western has a promotion for a $50 bonus gift card with each $200 gift card purchased, limit five. The $50 bonus card expires on May 31, so it’s only useful for travel in the near future, at least to the extent that Best Western is useful for travel in general. (Thanks to DoC)
  3. Kroger.com has 5% off of the total cost of Visa and Mastercard gift cards through Friday with promo code HOLIDAYS22. These are fulfilled by Metabank, but are actually issued by US Bank. You’ll earn fuel points on the purchase too. (Thanks to Alex Z for making sure I got this right)
  4. Southwest open their booking window tomorrow for travel through August 14, 2023, which makes this one of your best opportunities to book placeholder summer air travel that may involve Southwest, especially if you check for price drops during future fare sales or in the weeks leading up to travel.
  5. A follow-ups from yesterday’s post: The Office Depot/Office Max $15 back on $300 or more in Mastercard gift cards deal still works as advertised, but the extra trick that worked on recent promotions for Visa gift cards isn’t working on this one.
  6. Meijer has a digital coupon for a $15 Meijer gift card with $100 or more in Happy, Choice, or One4All gift card purchases. Some of these can be converted to Home Depot and Best Buy gift cards for a nice profit. Be sure to scale with multiple Meijer accounts.

Pictured: Where the Office Depot/OfficeMax extra trick seems to have gone.

  1. There’s a short window to book Emirates economy and business class awards with Aeroplan miles at a lower than normal rate and with no fuel surcharges. In a few weeks they’ll be publishing an Emirates specific award chart with higher cost, and some unspecified time after that the cost will get even higher, so now is a decent time to lock in any awards. (Thanks to VFTW)
  2. JetBlue is revamping its frequent flyer plan for 2023 and adding new status tiers. There’s a lot of “blah blah blah” in here, but there’s also a nugget for gamers: top tier status will include six Mint upgrade certificates and four Blade helicopter airport transfers in New York, and you can earn top tier status completely with manufactured spend on a co-branded JetBlue card, much like with AA and with Delta. To compare:

    – Delta Diamond: $250,000 co-branded credit card spend and earning 125,000 MQM (gaming is possible with AmEx shanigans)
    – AA Executive Platinum: $200,000 co-branded credit card spend (gaming is very possible with portals and SimplyMiles)
    – JetBlue Mosaic 4: $250,000 co-branded credit card spend

  3. British Airways has added a way to pay more Avios and less cash for surcharges with the poorly named “Reward Flight Saver” tier for award redemptions. Travel hackers should note that this is probably a bad deal on flights leaving the UK, but may be a decent deal on flights to the UK which have higher surcharges.

Yesterday’s JetBlue press release.

  1. Meijer has $10 off of $150 or more in Mastercard gift cards through Saturday. You have to clip a digital coupon, and you may need multiple MPerks accounts to scale. If you’re even remotely near a Meijer it’s probably worth your time to work this one into your rotation.
  2. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are their own kind of special for a manufactured spender. There’s a lot going on but it’s hard to find anything useful in the normal channels because deals are lost in the noise of vacuum cleaner sales, PS5 snipe hunting, letters from your local shop letting you know that they’ve slashed prices by upwards of 3%, and by the extreme desire to search your inbox for “is:unread” followed by a mass delete. For today only, slickdeals is probably the best place to keep a focused eye (normally they’re too slow to pay much attention to for our kind of deals), specifically with one of the following links:

    – General Cyber Monday deals
    – Visa gift cards
    – Mastercard gift cards
    – Airline sales
    – Stephen’s Black Friday Gift Card deals (Ok, so this isn’t slickdeals but it is just as good)

    One thing to watch out for is that slickdeals runs its own shopping portal and the rates typically aren’t as good as you can find elsewhere, always check cashbackmonitor.com.

  3. Giftcards.com has multiple new codes for 5% off of Virtual Visas through Thursday: BFVIP, BFVISA5, CMVISA5, and BFVISA. You can get $2,000 in virtual cards every 48 hours per Giftcards.com account, and remember to go through a portal too. In case you’re on the fence. The break-even point not including portal bonuses and credit card rewards is 2.74%, so it’s easy to make this work in your favor.
  4. The American Express Business Platinum card’s public offer is now occasionally 170,000 Membership Rewards with $15,000 in spend. As usual with the AmEx random number generator, if you don’t see the offer then try:

    – Incognito
    – Mobile versus desktop
    – A different browser
    – Search for “American Express Business Platinum” with several search engines and click the first non-sponsored link
    – A VPN to another part of the US

    This offer does have lifetime language, but we all know the popup is more important than the language, right? (Thanks to DoC)

  5. Check the following airline promo pages for Cyber Monday sales and rebook existing travel when it makes sense:

    – United Airlines flight promos
    – Delta Air Lines flight promos
    – Southwest Airlines cyber monday promos
    – Alaska Airlines cyber monday sale
    – American Airlines travel deals

    I’ll update the above links as it makes sense throughout the day.

  6. Check the Fluz mobile app for upcoming parties and RVSP or join any interesting ones. For our purposes, the most interesting is probably 30% off today for Uber Eats gift cards, which of course work for Uber rides.

MEAB’s coping mechanism between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

  1. Check your Chase Offers and Bank Of America Deals for 15% back at US Hyatt properties through December 10, up to $37.95 back.
  2. Do this now: Register for an Enterprise Car Rental elite status extension through February 2024 with any car rented in 2022 (even cars rented earlier in the year before registration). You’ll also get double points through January 21, 2023.
  3. Office Depot/OfficeMax has $100 gift cards on sale for $95.95 after activation fee, limit two per account. These are Metabanks and won’t get special office supply coding when buying online because they’re fulfilled by GiftCardMall. As a no extra fee bonus though, you get to solve some annoying cartoon captchas during redemption.
  4. Wyndham’s shopping portal is offering triple points through December 29. According to the language on the site, the 3x is already baked in to the displayed rate, so don’t expect to earn more than you see. (Thanks to FM)
  5. Staples has physical $25 Uber gift cards for sale at a 20% discount and it seems that no-one is enforcing any quantity limits during purchase so go nuts.
  6. American Express has a 15% transfer bonus to Avianca LifeMiles running through December 7 in addition to last week’s 25% transfer bonus to FlyingBlue. Sweet spots with the program generally involved geographically challenged routing rules, but their award chart is in general good for many redemptions.
  7. Xbox gift cards are back in stock at Dell, so liquidate second half 2022 American Express Business Platinum while you can. To avoid burning a Dell account, keep the number of transactions involving a gift card to five per year per account.
  8. Seats.aero, a community driven mainstay for close-in Star Alliance award alerts, now searches AA award space too. (Thanks to levelniner)

GiftCardMall’s devious captcha system. At least we can eliminate the pineapple I guess?

Note: If you’re an email subscriber, you may have missed yesterday’s post because the plugin I’m using and daylight savings time changes don’t go well together. I believe it’s working properly now though.

Today’s items include a strange gem or two:

  1. Two US carriers are running fare sales, and it’s worth checking existing travel to see if you can get a partial refund:

    – Alaska to and from ski resort cities, book by Friday
    – Southwest on Tuesday and Wednesday flights, book by tomorrow evening

    The Alaska sale gets you free skiing at a few ski resorts too by showing your boarding pass. Of course in a world of refundable fares, someone didn’t think too hard about how gamers gonna game.

  2. Qatar Avios has a transfer bonus from Citi ThankYou Points and several other programs. This one is oddly tiered:

    – 20% bonus for transfers of 29,999 ThankYou Points or less
    – 30% bonus for transfers of 30,000 ThankYou Points or more

    Qatar Avios are great for business class to and from Europe, but for other cases you can transfer them to Iberia, Aer Lingus, or British Airways Avios at avios.com for other sweet spots.

  3. There’s a $100 sign-up bonus for opening a Q.ai brokerage account and funding with $100. Reportedly bonuses will post within a day typically, but take screenshots of the offer during sign-up in case they don’t. (Thanks to DoC)
  4. Office Depot has $15 off of $300 or more in Mastercard gift card purchases through Saturday. Remember, these are Metabanks, and Visa and Mastercard aren’t the same. (Thanks to ChurningTatum)

Another strange gem.

Introduction

One key skill for travel-hacking, churning, and manufactured spend is to understand the nuance of terms and conditions to find an opening that you can plow right through. For airline travel hacking in particular, when you’re maximizing things like: mileage earning, elite qualification, same day changes, checked bags, upgrade certificates, and fuel dumps, you need to understand the three types of carrier associated with your ticket because they all play into the maximization game in a different way.

Carrier Types

The three types:

  • Marketing carrier: The airline marketed as flying the route (the carrier named on your boarding pass)
  • Operating carrier: The airline actually flying the route (the name of the carrier on the airframe registration and safety cards)
  • Ticketing carrier: The airline issuing a ticket (the carrier that issued the ticket, determined by the first three numbers of your ticket)

Examples

It’s possible to have a ticket where all three of these are the same, and it’s possible to have a ticket where all three are different. A few examples:

Making it Real

A few hints about how this can be useful:

  • Travel banks might only work on one or two carriers, but flight credits work on others
  • You may earn many more miles or status dollars by booking the a flight with a different marketing or ticketing carrier than operating carrier
  • Lounge access can be tied to ticketing carrier or marketing carrier
  • Airfare surcharge rules can be tied to the country in which a ticketing carrier or operating carrier is based

Happy hacking!

Pictured: The three types of taco in a proper hard-shell taco meal.

  1. Somehow I missed posting the giant Public brokerage sign-up bonus that works even for existing account holders and runs through December 31. You have to transfer non-retirement account equities, and a cash deposit won’t work. The bonus tiers:

    – $150 bonus for $5,000 transferred
    – $500 bonus for $25,000 transferred
    – $2,000 bonus for $100,000 transferred
    – $5,000 bonus for $500,000 transferred
    – $10,000 bonus for $1,000,000 transferred

    You have to keep the equities or the proceeds from their sale at Public for six months or you risk a bonus clawback. I’m conflicted about what to do with this one because public doesn’t support options, margins, forex, mutual funds, or bonds. (Thanks to Mark S for noting the lack of a post)

  2. Redditor professor_doom shares a great tip for making the airbnb booking process sane: Do all of your searches from airbnb.com.au to see a total booking price including cleaning fees, service fees, and resort fees from the main page.
  3. There’s a Chase Offers and BankAmeriDeals offer for 10% back up to $47.50, or 15% back up to $67.50 back with Alaska Airlines. You can game these without even playing the break the correlation to game or being a Jedi. (Thanks to DoC)
  4. A few updates on the yesterday’s Chase Sapphire Reserve 80,000 Ultimate Rewards vs Ink Preferred 100,000 Ultimate Rewards hot-take based on your feedback:

    – If you have access to a targeted 80,000 Chase Sapphire Preferred bonus and are below 5/24, the heightened Reserve bonus is probably above the line for a Modified Double Dip

    – If you’re 3/24 or below and haven’t had a Sapphire bonus in the last 48 months, yes, it could make sense to get both this card and an Ink Preferred. Follow-up question though: Are you missing out on other bonuses by being that low, could you be doing more?

    – The Reserve has a $4,000 spend requirement, while the Ink Preferred has a $15,000 spend requirement. If you don’t have easy access to $15,000 in spend, the Reserve is an easier win. Follow-up question: Can you get access to more spend?

Forget “Three For Thursday”, bring on “Quadsday”. Actually never mind, I didn’t think that one through.