Category: Airlines

This weekend will probably be a great weekend for portal bonuses so check the rates at Dell and at Saks to help offset the pain of liquidating American Express coupons credits.

With that out of the way, there are a few items to note:

1. Yesterday’s Chase Southwest Visa offer for 30,000 Rapid Rewards points and a Companion Pass through February, 2023 is now available as a public link, no need to find someone with a targeted referral.

2. Reader Dean let me know that Capital One waved the annual fee on his Spark Business credit card after calling and asking. So as always, don’t forget to give card companies a call and say something like “I’m considering closing this card, but before I make a decision on what to do, I was wondering if there were any spend bonuses or retention offers?”

Just make sure you watch out for Citi being Citi when you try retention offers with them.

3. On the subject of retention offers, word on the street is that Chase has recently started offering them on more cards than just the Sapphire line. I for one applaud Chase becoming more like American Express (in this regard).

4. I’ve talked to a few of you that have already done the US Bank $4,000 special, and a few more that are still in the planning phases. If the latter category describes you, consider adding a US Bank Cash+ card into the mix because the card has no-annual fee and now has 5% back on flights, cars, or hotels booked with the US Bank travel portal, up to $2,000 in spend per quarter.

Good luck out there!

As reader and Southwest pilot Ryan tells me, every seat on Southwest is first class. I’m not sure if he had these in mind though.

I’m sure you’ve seen it elsewhere but in case you haven’t, Frontier is buying Spirit. What color do you get when you mix Frontier green with Spirit yellow? I can’t imagine it’ll be pretty. Anyway, here are a few items for your Tuesday radar:

1. PSA: US Bank Visa and MasterCard gift cards have all had their PINs reset by US Bank, presumably due to rampant fraud. Plan on calling or registering the cards online to set a PIN before using them. These cards are versatile but holding them has always been like holding a live grenade; fraudsters are good at draining them after you buy. Hopefully this move helps. (Thanks to Put-Grouchy)

2. Simon Mall has 75% off of gift card fees (including the $1,000 denominations) using code 22HAPPY75. These are Metabanks so make sure you have a liquidation plan.

3. There’s a 20% transfer bonus from American Express Membership Rewards to Hawaiian airlines. Sweet-spots:

  • Coach awards between Hawaiian Islands (7,500 points one-way)
  • Virgin Atlantic Business Class/Upper Class to Europe 125,000 (points round-trip)
  • East coast to Hawaii in Business Class (40,000 points one-way)

Now, by show of hands how many of you still have Hawaiian miles left over from when their portal worked for all purchases at Amazon? Keep that in mind before deciding to transfer miles; they’re not worth anything if you never redeem them.

4. Check for an American Express offer for $100 off of $300 at Delta. For tips on turning this into a longer term airfare credit, see this post, the same techniques will apply.

Spirit yellow mixed with Frontier green, which coincidentally also demonstrates how I feel when I “get to” fly one of those airlines.

Let’s start today with a friendly warning: If you see headlines about thousands or millions of PayPal account shutdowns, don’t stress, you almost certainly weren’t involved and don’t need to follow the click-bait. The shutdowns were focused on accounts that generated thousands or tens of thousands of referral bonuses using bot-farms.

Here are a few things that are worth focusing on:

1. Hot on the heals of yesterday’s devaluation, we have, err, another devaluation. This time it’s ANA, which doubled its fuel surcharges for award tickets.

The ANA fuel surcharge is actually tied to the price of oil which turns out to be a novel concept in the airline world, and with oil prices jumping, the surcharge had a corresponding jump. So in addition to setting award alerts with ExpertFlyer, now apparently we should set crude oil price alerts with Yahoo finance.

2. American Express has a new targeted link for a 30,000 Membership Rewards bonus when turning on Pay Over Time. As always, consider shutting off Pay Over time on all of your charge cards to be targeted in the future. (Thanks to Matthew via DoC)

3. Check for a targeted spend offer on your Chase United cards at this link. This offer is very Citi Shop Your Way-esque in its detail: You earn 250 bonus miles for making three purchases over $50 each per month, for February, March, and April, and another 750 miles if you make all three months. (Thanks to DDG)

4. The offer for 70,000 SkyMiles, $200 statement credit, and first year’s annual fee waived for both the personal and business American Express Delta Gold cards is back. To trigger it, make a dummy booking for a cash domestic ticket in incognito mode and you’ll see it on the payment page. (Thanks to geauxcali)

Four fingers for the Thursday Quad.

Introduction

Incidental credits (not to be confused with generic travel credits which are much easier to liquidate) show up on the PenFed Pathfinder Visa, the American Express Platinum family, BoA Premium Rewards, the Hilton Aspire, and UnionBank Rewards cards. Now that we’re in the middle of January, we’ve had enough time in 2022 to figure out what’s working with turning airline incidental credits into airfare instead of using them as intended, so here’s the 4-1-1 (cool kids still say that, right?).

If you want to be low maintenance, United gives by far the easiest option with its TravelBank wallet, which so far works for all card issuers. There’s bad news with TravelBank though: you’ll be flying United, which means it’s automatically worth somewhere around 90 cents on the dollar.

The Deets

  • United: Buy TravelBank credit directly. It expires in five years and can be used to pay for United flights; if you get an error during checkout at TravelBank, add your card to your United profile as a saved payment then try again [more info]
  • Delta: Buy airfare and pay partially with a gift card or travel credit, pay for the remainder with your card (don’t go over the incidental credit amount though). Alternatively if you have a co-branded American Express Delta card, pay partially with miles and the remainder will be credited [more info]
  • Alaska: Buy a seat upgrade after booking or buy a flight less than $100, then refund to your wallet after 24 hours [more info]
  • Southwest: Buy a flight less than $100, or book an international flight with taxes under $100 per ticket, then refund to a travel credit [more info]
  • American: Buy cheap airfare, then change it to a flight that you really want that costs more and pay with your credit card (don’t go over the credit amount though). If you want to gamble, you’ve got roughly even odds that award taxes and fees will count [more info]
  • JetBlue: Buy a flight less than $137 then cancel the flight after 24 hours and refund to your JetBlue wallet [more info]

Other Options

Of course you could use these incidental credits as intended if you’re basic, like for checked bag fees or pets flying with you [more info, but boring].

Why are United travel bank credits worth 90% on the dollar? Allow me to reference my favorite graph about United’s domestic fleet.

I heard from quite a few of you this week and I appreciated your insightful questions and discussion. Thanks to all of you.

Now let’s sail into the weekend with a few items:

1. We’re far enough into 2021 to have good data-points on what’s working with American Express airline incidental credits and you can expect a writeup on that next week, but after a few positive reports we’ve gotten new reports yesterday that United TravelBank errors when you manually enter your credit card information.

It might seem like that avenue stopped working, but it didn’t. You can still purchase those United “incidentals” as long as you pay with a credit card that was saved to your MileagePlus profile.

2. You can get Star Alliance Gold status through February of 2024 by combining a promotion that started in April of last year with Singapore’s newly announced “loyalty measures”, and no, I didn’t make that term up. To do so, you’ll need to transfer 250,000 Chase, Capital One, Citi, or American Express points to Singapore (watch out for expiration of those miles after three years though).

This is very useful if you fly United domestically regularly because it gives you access to United Clubs while you have a same-day United flight, so you can drink yourself numb on cheap whiskey to reduce the pain of travel on your upcoming ERJ-145 or CRJ-200 United flight.

3. We had a nice three weeks without thinking about those pesky $200 MetaBank gift cards, right? Well, party’s over man. Staples is having a fee-free sale starting on Sunday running through the following Saturday for $200 Visa gift cards, limit five per transaction. To maximize:

  • Use a card that bonuses at office supply stores (duh)
  • Try for multiple transactions back-to-back, five per transaction

Unfortunately the Rakuten in-store card linked program for cash back at Staples is no longer around.

4. Related to the above? Maybe a little. The final payment date for Q4 2021 estimated taxes is Tuesday, and there are three major payment processors that accept debit cards. The IRS limit is technically two payments per quarter, but in practice they accept two payments per processor for each quarter at a cost somewhere around $2.50 each for using a Metabank debit card (EDIT: Thanks to Gary at VFTW for the correction on IRS limits):

Overpaying the IRS and getting it back as a refund was a nice manufactured spend technique in the before times, but now due to staffing shortages and tax code changes realize that refunds are now taking six months or more (though you do earn a 3.2% interest rate from the IRS while waiting for your refund).

Happy weekend!

The United ERJ-145 makes this cabin feel spacious and luxurious, but you won’t be focused on comfort after drinking the United Club’s “premium” Dewar’s Scotch.

1. Check your Chase personal credit cards at this link for a Q1 spending bonus. Offers have been seen on both co-branded cards and Ultimate Rewards earning personal cards, but none have been reported on the business side. Some examples:

  • 5x at Amazon, Grocery, and Restaurants up to $1,500 in spend
  • 5% cash back on at grocery stores up to $200 in spend
  • $50 back after 15 purchases each month, up to three months
  • 5% cash back at gyms up to $50 cash back

If you get an error message or a blank page, going incognito in your browser will usually fix it.

2. The best way to cash out Dell credits on American Express Business Platinum cards for most of us has been to buy Xbox gift cards for resale, and for essentially all of last year you could get 10% off of one gift card (per purchase) using the promotion code XBOX10 which made your effective cash-out rate even better. That code finally died, but a new one surfaced: GAME10

Note that when Dell starts cancelling your orders (they will eventually no matter what you buy), there are workarounds. Perhaps the simplest and also most annoying is to call the sales office at (877) 717-3355 and place an order over the phone.

3. Delta Air Lines has:

  • Extended existing travel credits and upgrade certificates through Dec 31, 2023
  • Made current tickets and newly booked tickets in 2022 valid through the end of 2024

Delta travel credits are particularly useful for cashing out American Express Platinum airline incidentals, so this is a nice change. (Book a ticket that costs a little less than your travel credit dollar amount + $200 and AmEx will see it as an incidental)

Dell’s order verification team for Xbox gift cards.

It’s great to vibe with the flow after the slow week between Christmas and New Years. Here are five interesting things that came up over the weekend:

1. Seth from wandr.me and the Dots, Lines, and Destinations podcast has released a tool that I’ll be using a lot: Where the Widebodies Are. This tool lets you search through airline schedules for where widebody (two-aisle) aircraft are flying domestically. I prefer widebody aircraft because:

  • They often have lie-flat business class seats and quite a few of them for upgrades
  • They often have large premium economy cabins (like domestic first class seats)
  • Typically the outsides of the aircraft are two seats wide in economy, so no middle seats
  • They’re smoother than lighter single-aisle aircraft

2. I’ve had multiple readers tell me that they can’t get PayPal Key, and the old tricks for getting it on your account stopped working over the summer. Fortunately, there’s a new trick for getting PPK:

(Thanks to Agile.Travel for pointing me to this post at reddit)

3. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard (a MEAB Unsung Hero) has a targeted great offer to ring in the new year: 15% back on gas, grocery, and restaurants each month for January, February, and March. The minimum spend each month to trigger the offer is $500, and the maximum spend for 15% back is $600. Over three months, that’s $270 back in statement credits. Talk about a nice hit for a no-annual fee card.

Look for the targeted link in your inbox, the subject for mine was “Matthew, your new offer is here. But only for a limited time.  Activate now.“

4. Stockpile is still allowing fee-free purchases of up to $1,000 in stock gift cards per day per email address with a credit card, but the annual limit (per email/IP/cookie) is $2,000 .

5. The Target RedCard $80 back ($40 online and $40 in-store) for opening a new RedCard debit or RedCard credit card deal is back through January 15. Both cards definitely have their uses, and notably can be churned. Just make sure you wait at least three business days between closing and reopening to avoid any speed bumps. You can read more about why this is useful with Target Redcard Hacks.

Running with the cool kids was never more purple.

Introduction

In what has become an annual MEAB tradition for an unbelievable streak of two years in a row (if you include this year), it’s time for another installment of Travel Hacking as Told by GIFs. The 2020 version was, naturally, a rousing success. Time for another one of those, or something.

Let’s Go!

Virgin Atlantic Devalues its Award Charts and Expects us to Book Anyway

Partner flights on Delta tripled in price in many cases. You know that you’ve gone way too far when Delta SkyMiles award prices to Europe are cheaper than yours.

PayPal Key Blocks AmEx on January 4

Remember how merchant coding didn’t pass properly to AmEx via PayPal and everything was a “global restaurant” when you bought with PPK? I do. sniff

Citi Pay-By-Phone Accepts New Cards

When the new year ticked over, a new year’s worth of expiration dates started to sail through, and we celebrate.

American Express Master Value Injection 2.0

Personal Platinums get $30 at PayPal. Co-brand business cards got $10-$20 off of wireless services. Co-brand personal cards get $10-$25 off of dining. It all resets every month! Also, business Platinums get +4x in four categories. We’re happy at first…

American Express with Master Value Injection Redux

By March, we realize we’re working for American Express to cash out a dozen small monthly credits, and it feels like we’re getting nowhere fast while we try and twirl through our credits.

Bank of America Launches a Spirit Airlines Co-Brand Card

Someone really thinks we’ll go for this? Also, 40,000 miles is stingy, even for Spirit.

Fluz Launches power.fluz.app

If you know, you know.

Breeze Airways Takes Flight

We have a new US based air carrier and we got to see its inaugural takeoff roll.

Citi Launches the Custom Cash Card

It’s a no-annual fee card that earns 5x per month on $500 spend in whatever category you spent the most on. Bad? Not at all. Amazing? Not really, but we’ll take it. Unfortunately for me I got a $20,000 credit line on a card that will never see more than $500 in monthly spend.

Visible Sends Us Giant Piles of Mastercard Gift Cards

The Ting to Visible+Rakuten deal landed some over 30 $100 gift cards in their inbox. Now if I just knew where my Creedence was.

The American Express “Three for All” Deal Dies

American Express gave us a bonus three points per dollar, uncapped, for referring someone (like P2) to a new card. Obviously this was abused and became a goldmine.

The American Express “4 for Us” Deal Surfaces

Maybe the “4 for us deal” isn’t quite as lucrative as “3 for all” for heavy hitters, but it’s a great consolation prize to close out 2021. I got one for me and one for P2, but wish I had tried even harder.

American Airline’s SimplyMiles Roller Coaster

We’re all going to get 240 miles per dollar. No wait, we’re not. No, it’s going to post! Then it posts! Then it unposts! Then it posts! Then it unposts!

The Dust Settles and 240 Miles Per Dollar Actually Shows Up

Former US Airways management proves that it can still make a deal that puts other deals to shame, even though they can’t make a sandwich.

Fee-Free MS with Point Dies

You could load cash onto the Point debit card with a credit card using Apple Pay, fee-free, up to $12,500 per month, and then spend the money and earn another 1% on top. It even worked with American Express.

We watch the Marriott Program go from Bad to Worse

After years of devaluation, Marriott gave us something different another devaluation.

Getting Creative with Rental Cars During Carmageddon

Bob at the local mechanics shop will let you rent a fixer-upper for only $150 per day, unlimited miles. What a steal!

Running to Meijer for the Sale of the Year

Meijer announced that they were giving 10% off of third party gift cards for two days, and MSers ran to the Midwest for a feeding frenzy.

Flight Attendants Get Trained on Unruly Passenger Handling

Smh, smh, welcome to flying in 2021.

Debauchery With Reddit Mods and Chase Links

Links were allegedly stolen from source code, reddit /r/churning mods had massive infighting, links were released to the public to hide serious abusers in a crowd, inevitably a bunch of shutdowns occur, and one of the perpetrators walks away unscathed. This could honestly be an HBO mini-series.

Flight Attendants on British Airways Celebrate the Reopening of US Borders

BA1 marked the return of leisure travel to the United States, or at least that was the plan before Virgin Atlantic stole the crown. Fortunately, Miles Earn and Burn has obtained exclusive footage from the safety briefing so we can all take part in the early celebration.

Virgin Atlantic and British Airways Orchestrate Simultaneous Takeoff

After the safety briefings, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic organized a coordinated takeoff at London Heathrow. Later VS decided that it didn’t want a synchronized landing, it wanted to win; so, yay teamwork?

American Express Shuts Down Some Cardholders

It’s always the ball you don’t see coming, right? American Express shut down accounts for cardholders that had opened one or more business cards with the help of a particular employee, and without regard to literally anything else. Imagine opening a single Business Platinum card in 2018 and then having this happen in 2021…

American Express Reinstates Shutdown Cardholders

It turns out that if you’re persistent and if you ask enough times, you’ve got a great shot of AmEx reinstating your accounts. Just make sure you wear your Sunday best.

Screenshotting Offer Terms and Conditions

Sometimes we need to have a picture of what we’re offered to keep a company honest. I prefer using a phone or computer’s built-in tool, but if you’re part of any Slack or WhatsApp groups, you’ll know that not everyone feels the same way.

Your Friend Asks You What It’s Like to Fly Eleven Hours in Coach

Uh, we literally have no idea. If it’s not a lie flat, then we haven’t done it. We might look rugged and experienced, but honestly we haven’t been past row 16 or so on a widebody aircraft since, I don’t know, ever.

GoBank Discontinues Its Card

When notice came in mid-August that GoBank was shutting down in favor of Go2Bank, MSers swiped repeatedly at Walmart to offload gift cards (including Metabank) while they still could.

Brex Gives us Hundreds of Thousands of Points for Very Little Effort

It took me under five minutes on the phone to link PayPal to Brex for 100,000 points. And then there was the 110,000 point sign-up bonus in early February. Oh, and you could do it multiple times with multiple business. In my state, you can register a business for only $70, so there’s that too. (It’s not quite as good, but you can keep the party going in 2022 with the TravelBank 75,000 points after spending $1,000 offer.)

BestBuy Disables Auto-Checkout Bots During Black Friday

BestBuy knows that auto-checkout bots exist, and has countermeasures to disable them. Why does it turn them on for only a week or two a year? I have no idea.

American Express’s Secret 1,900,000 Membership Rewards Offer

Employees that shared your name but with roman numerals were never more exciting! This deal is still scheduled to run well into 2022 on many business cards by the way; you just have to call and ask, because I guess you’re just supposed to know that AmEx has phone only offers and to check periodically?

BravoPay Tries to Fix the 2% Liquidation Loophole

I literally think every day about how badly BravoPay’s programmers built the app and how they tried several times to repair it but kept failing. “It’ll buff out, right?”

Airline Customer Service Teams Try and Keep-up

Apropos of nothing, do you remember how the CARES act was supposed to keep everyone employed at airlines? Anyway, I’m sure that worked out well and nine-hour hold times are how it’s always been, right?.

Pre-check and Clear Make Us Complacent About Timing

Leaving your house 26 minutes before your airline’s schedule departure is prolly fine right?

Getting excited for the Capital One Venture X Card

… and then getting denied.

Staples Runs Another $200 Fee Free Gift Card Sale

It only comes around for two to three weeks a month, so the excitement is hard to summon.

The GivingAssistant Portal Falls Apart

A few probers out there knew that GivingAssistant was really good at awarding cash back even when other portals wouldn’t, like buying Apple Products on BestBuy.com. Did our experimenting cause it to fall apart?

Miles Earn and Burn Celebrates a One Year Anniversary

You may have figured out by now that I’m not big on ceremony for the sake of ceremony, so you probably won’t be surprised to learn that I spared you all from another “WE JUST TURNED ONE YEARS YOUNG!!” blog post. But, the anniversary technically did occur.

The Worst Credit Card Takes a New Tact

I don’t yet have a formal Unsung Villains series to match the Unsung Heroes series, but if and when I do the Mastercard Black Card card will be at the top of the villains list. The thing is, they know that their card is bad so their marketing department has to stretch. Recently they’ve started advertising that their card is heavier than the competition. Wow, you mean my wallet can get even thicker?!? Sold!

Thank You!

I don’t say it enough, but I appreciate everyone’s support over 2021. Thanks for your emails, your Telegram messages, your Slack and Discord groups, and your Patreon memberships. I’m really here because of you.

Until next year, friends!