Category: Gift Cards

  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?

First, a rhetorical question and micro-rant about travel bloggers: I get that United updating their policies to allow you to buy two drinks at a time could be considered news, and I get that you’ve always got to feed the content monster, but do we really need 16 different articles about it in a single weekend? Is this really what we’re here to do? Don’t answer (remember, rhetorical).

Now, a few items that probably won’t have 16 redundant articles, or if they do they’ll lack a key bit of detail:

  1. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card, an Unsung Hero and the 1987-1988 Larry Bird of credit cards, is sending out new offers for August, September, and October. So far we’ve seen 10% back on Utilities up to $50 or $70 back once per month, but I expect other offers are floating around too. For me, this came both via email and USPS.

    Yes, this will stack with outstanding online spend offers on the card provided you pay your utility online as card not present. (Thanks to Fish and birt via MEAB slack)
  2. Meijer MPerks has 50,000 points with $500 in third party gift card purchases excluding Amazon, limit one per account and you must clip the coupon. This is effectively 10% off of third party gift cards, or more if you can use it all for fuel rewards. (Thanks to GCG, Fish, and RabbMD)

    This deal isn’t quite Memorial Day weekend 2022 when we saw 10% off at the register though, but we’re still approaching the point that traveling to Meijer land could be in the cards (sorry, bad pun).
  3. Office Depot/OfficeMax, also known as the retailer with second stupidest name next to I Love Ugly clothing, has $15 off of $300 or more in Mastercard gift cards through Saturday. As usual:

    – Try for multiple transactions
    – Link your cards to Dosh

    These are Pathward gift cards so have a liquidation plan in place.
  4. Sam’s Club online has $500 airbnb e-gift cards for $459.98, limit two per account. Occasionally you can find airbnb gift cards at 15%-18% off, but only for small, annoying denominations so I consider this a win.

Happy Monday!

MEAB shirt of the day.

  1. American Express has new offers for 20,000 Membership Rewards after $4,000 in spend in six months for new employee cards, limit five per account for Business Golds and Business Platinums at last year’s generic links:

    – Business Gold
    – Business Platinum

    The POID on these is K4IY:9976, and the offer has been alive for several weeks (first discovered by reader Jon via MEAB slack), but just hit mainstream yesterday. It’s also been out long enough that American Express customer service confirmed that the offers are properly attached.
  2. Southwest has an airfare sale for flights to, from, and within California through the end of day today using promo code 29OFF. The sale:

    – $29 fares one-way with requisite asterisks within California
    – 29% off of fares on flights to or from California, also with asterisks

    Travel is valid between August 15 and February 14, 2024 for the continental US, and there’s some availability early next year for Hawaii too. For bonus points, do some schedule research and parlay this sale into Thanksgiving travel.
  3. JetBlue has $25 off of one-way flights and $50 off of round-trip flights using promo code FALLTRAVEL booked by this evening for travel between September 6 and November 15. Of course this one has a few asterisks too, because capitalism.
  4. Yes, earlier this week we reported that Kroger would have a 4x fuel points promotion on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. That wasn’t incorrect, but Kroger is laughing up at us from hell by having an overlapping 4x fuel points promotion on third party gift cards and fixed value Visa and Mastercard gift cards between today and August 8.

    If you’re playing this game with AmExes, just watch out for certain purchases to avoid points clawbacks; remember it’s them, hi, they’re they problem it’s them.

The cable industry learned their asterisk game from the airlines.

We’ve got a doozy today, and I’ll let you guess which one:

  1. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card is sending out new mid-July offers which stack with offers sent previously, like those from last week. These offers focus on online purchases for total spend through August 14. We’ve seen:

    – $30 statement credit after $500 or more
    – $50 statement credit after $750 or more
    – $70 statement credit after $1,000 or more
    – 225,000 Shop Your Way Rewards after $750 or more
    – 7,500 ThankYou Points after $750 or more

    I’ve been goaded into referencing a retired NBA star for the next couple of months of Shop Your Way offers, so let’s call this set of offers the “Mark Eaton all-star center” round. (Thanks to MS Ninja, birt, Brooke, irieriley, and flypiggy)
  2. The United Shopping Portal has a tiered spend bonus with 2,500 miles after $600 spend in the top tier. Call me crazy, but it feels like this one pairs well with the Shop Your Way Rewards card.

    Unfortunately Giftcards.com is still absent and it seems like it’s never coming back, also I guess like Mark Eaton. (Thanks to DoC)
  3. The Alaska Airlines shopping portal and the Rakuten shopping portal both have card linked in-store offers for Gamestop. The offers are (in theory) unlimited use, but you have to re-add them to your account after each purchase.

    Last I checked, Gamestop has quite a few uses other than for buying weird Star Wars merch or used, scratched PS4 games. Always be probing.

Happy Monday!

Pictured: NBA all-star center Mark Eaton’s bird form celebrates the SYWR card’s latest deal.

  1. Staples stores have fee free $200 Mastercard gift cards Sunday through the following Saturday, limit eight per transaction. If you get an experienced cashier at Staples (lol), you can probably talk them in to multiple transactions back to back.

    BravoPay is a relatively bullet-proof but expensive liquidation option for these, just try and keep your daily transaction volume small. Of course other options exist too.
  2. For approximately the last year, we’ve seen reports that Chase Ink Preferred cards can be approved past 5/24 about every month. Well, this month’s report has arrived. I hesitate to write about these because I truly believe nothing is different than it has been all year, but since it keeps coming up, here’s my understanding of the rules:

    – Ink Preferred mailers sent via USPS with a promotion code bypass 5/24 consistently
    – Ink Preferred online applications with offers of 90,000 points or more bypass 5/24 if you’ve got a good relationship with Chase but aren’t above 8/24
    – Ink Preferred in-branch applications bypass 5/24 if you’ve got a good relationship with Chase

    I don’t believe Chase has different rules for different people, unlike American Express.
  3. Mileage rates for AA have dropped significantly at Rocketmiles, but higher rates are still available at AdvantageHotels by Rocketmiles, because corporate America 🙄. AA boosted hotel stays are typically most interesting if you play the Loyalty Points game, and even more so if you currently have elite status and an AAdvantage card because the offers are 5-6x higher. (Thanks to Gary at VFTW)

What an experienced cashier at Staples looks like.

July is apparently a good news and bad news sort of month. For example in the apparently not-a-joke competitive sphere of competition eating Joey Chestnut won a 16th hot dog eating contest on Tuesday, but to win he had to eat 62 hot dogs so there’s that.

In our world we’ve got a bit of bad news too:

But, there’s good news:

  • Rakuten will have 10x back at Dell (and probably Saks) on Monday, so you’ve got time to strategize your American Express credit liquidation
  • The IHG credit card’s sign-up bonus has bumped to 140,000 points and a $100 statement credit at IHG properties after $3,000 spend in three months
  • The Barclays Wyndham Business card has a targeted offer for 5,000 bonus points:

    – 1,000 bonus points per month for any purchase in June, July, and August
    – 2,000 additional points for $3,000 in spend or more over all three months

    Yes, we’re past June, so really this is a 4,000 bonus point offer going forward. Look for an email from [email protected] to see if you’re targeted. (Thanks to Welcome Offer)
  • American Express sign-up bonuses do eventually post

Have a nice weekend!

Another good news / bad news situation.

  1. Meijer stores has a clickable coupon for $10 off of $150 or more in Visa gift cards through Saturday, limit one per MPerks account.

    Meijer stores sell both Metabank Pathward and Sunrise gift cards. I know which one I’d choose for several reasons, but especially out of principle. I’m currently outside of the Meijer footprint though so my choice instead is to stand outside in the cold rain, watching everyone else’s Meijer party inside the warm, comfy house.
  2. There’s a new link for the Barclay AA Aviator card’s 70,000 mile sign-up bonus requiring only a single purchase. For better approval odds, spend a lot on existing Barclays cards and then pay them off. (Thanks to DoC)
  3. There are four new transfer bonuses for July:

    – American Express has a 30% transfer bonus to British Airways Avois through August 31
    – American Express has a 30% transfer bonus to Iberia Avios through August 31
    – Capital One has a 20% transfer bonus to AirFrance/KLM Flying Blue through July 31
    – Chase has a 70% transfer bonus to IHG through July 31
  4. Chase Offers has an easy to game offer for 10% off of Southwest airfare, up to $40 back. The simplest play is to turn this into discount travel funds, but the more lucrative play is to turn this into a statement credit with no effective outstanding charge.
  5. Chase also has targeted offers for spend at gas, grocery, and restaurants on personal credit cards:

    – Hyatt, Southwest, United, Freedom and IHG: 5x up to $1,500 in spend
    – British Airways: 10x up to $1,500 in spend

    Sometimes the Chase website gets confused after a single form submission and incorrectly tells you it can’t find information or you’re not targeted on all subsequent submissions. To avoid that, open a new incognito browser window for each card you check.
  6. The Capital One Shopping portal has a mildly interesting $10 bonus for both the referrer and referred on new shopping portal accounts provided the new account installs the Capital One toolbar and spends $10 through the portal within a month. A few notes:

    – Giftcards.com is on the Capital One Shopping portal
    – Giftcards.com typically has negative cost deals around major holidays
    – In the US, July 4 was a major holiday last time I checked
    – You don’t need to hold a Capital One card to have an account on the portal
    – I recommend creating new Capital One shopping accounts periodically anyway to avoid clawbacks

    Why no, I can’t possibly see how this could go wrong for Capital One, why do you ask?

Pictured: 1. Capital One Shopping portal (road), and 2. manufactured spenders (mud slide)

  1. Do this now: Register for Hyatt promotion for 1,000 bonus points per night up to 10,000 bonus points at Dream Hotels in New York, Nashville, South Beach, and Los Angeles for stays between July 6 and September 15.

    This marks the first time that I’ve ever seen Nashville in the same city lineup as New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. Nice job Nashville marketing team I guesss?
  2. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards card, now a MEAB Unsung Hero for nearly 2 1/2 years, has a new round of targeted promotions, so far seen only via USPS. This round is 15% back as a statement credit on up to $1,200 in spend at gas, grocery, and restaurants each month for the months of July, August, and September. I Expect that more of these offers will go out via email over the weekend. (Thanks to birt)
  3. The Apple Credit Card has a targeted promotion worth $200 per day in cash back through July 25. You get:

    – 10% back promotion on up to $1,000 in spend at Walgreens and Uber (and less interesting stores like Ace, Exxon Mobile, Nike, T-Mobile, and Panera)
    – 10% back on up to $1,000 in spend at other stores

    If you max this promotion you’ll get $200 * 26 days, or $5,200 for the math challenged. Level two players can earn even more on the payment side. (Thanks to DoC)
  4. GC Galore notes that BestBuy online now sells Amazon electronic gift cards which is useful for leveraging card linked offers from Chase, Bank of America, and American Express.

Why visit New York, Miami, or Los Angeles when Nashville has this tourist attraction?