Category: Gift Cards

  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. Office Depot / OfficeMax has $15 back on $300 or more Visa Metabank gift cards through Saturday, and this version of the deal is probably even more hackable unlike the Mastercard variant last week. To maximize:

    – Link your cards to Dosh (which now has a reduced its minimum cash out balance to $25)
    – Try for multiple transactions, back to back
    – Buy the Everywhere variety of cards, as long as its not the Movies, Golf, or Fuel variety for easier in-person liquidation

    Note: There was a report that the Everywhere cards weren’t working as part of the promotion yesterday, so double check before you finish checkout.

  2. If you’re a T-Mobile customer, login to your account and then check this link to see if you’ve been targeted to add another phone line to your account for no additional monthly service fee, though there is a one-time $35 activation fee.

    Holding a free additional phone number long-term has plenty of lasting value for at many services.

  3. Marriott has been sending physical mailers for double qualifying elite nights or a bonus 10 elite nights after one stay through March 31. Apparently the mailers direct you to this link, so if elite status at Marriott is interesting you can check directly to see if you’re targeted. (Thanks to DDG)
  4. Delta now allows Platinum and Diamond elites to apply regional and global upgrade certificates online during booking, but only for new bookings.

The now obsolete process of trying to get a Delta agent to correctly apply a RUC to a booking.

  1. Giftcards.com has a promotional code for 10% off of Visa e-gift cards using promo code VISAHOLIDAY or HOLIDAYVISA, limit $20 off per order. Remember to go through a shopping portal, and apropos of nothing, giftcards.com has an order limit of $2,000 per rolling 48 hours for electronic gift cards. UPDATE: Thanks for MaryBeth for the updated code.
  2. US Bank announced a new partnership with Amazon for paying with Flexperks points (notably when enrolling, you can choose to turn payment with points off by default, which is a nice enhancement from similar integrations with other banks). It’s interesting because:

    – This will probably be another source of “Get 40% off when using at least one [bank reward currency] deals”, so I’d preemptively link a US Bank card to prepare.
    – The redemption value is 1 cent per point, which is higher than Chase or AmEx at Amazon

  3. The Daily Churn’s most recent episode talks about ways to open a Morgan Stanley account for the hackable Morgan Stanley American Express Platinum card now that the Access Investing route has died. The episode outlines multiple ways do to it, but the simplest way is:

    – Open a Premium Savings Account with $25,000, which earns 3.25% APY, or $812.50 per year
    – Apply for the card after a couple of days

  4. BankAmeriDeals and Chase Offers both have a card linked offer for 15% back at IHG Hotels, up to $69 total cash back. Typically breaking the correlation isn’t necessary for non-AmEx offers. (Thanks to DoC)
  5. AA has elite status changes coming for 2023. For travel hackers, the big news is:

    – Shopping portal bonus boosts after different loyalty points thresholds
    – The removal of the need for 30 AA segments flown for choice awards

    Yes, I manufactured AA status in 2022 and I will continue to do so in 2023.

Pictured: The noise I sifted through to figure out exactly what AA is up to.

  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. Do this now: Register for Hilton’s Q1 promo for 1,000 bonus points per stay and double points on all spend associated with a folio including room fees for stays through April 30, 2023.
  2. Staples has a fee free $200 Visa gift card promotion running Sunday through the following Saturday, limit eight per transaction. These are Metabanks so have a liquidation plan before you load up; there are plays out there, both online and in person.
  3. Apparently Turkish Airline’s promotion for 30% off of economy and business class awards for travel through May 2023 excluding U.S. Cities isn’t actually excluding U.S. Cities because programming is hard, so book quickly if you have any United or other Star Alliance travel planned before it’s fixed. UPDATE: DDG provides an example of SEA-FCO pricing at 30% off, but CitizenKane notes via MEAB slack that there’s a separate promo for SEA and maybe there’s no actual bug here. (Thanks to DDG)
  4. Reader Mark wrote in to let me know that Bitmo, which is continuing it’s slow death spiral via rocket launch into the ocean, is issuing gift cards for redeemed points if you email support and wait for a few weeks for them to come through. I’d still stay away from their new company HungryFriend (in this instance I think they’re the hungry friend).
  5. American Express has a 30% transfer bonus from Membership Rewards to Virgin Atlantic miles through December 29. Award sweet spots:

    – Business class on Delta to Europe
    – Business class and first class to Japan on ANA

    Unfortunately there’s no current transfer bonus to Virgin Galactic, but if there were maybe Bitmo would have had a better shot.

Have a nice weekend!

The rocket Bitmo used to launch its company to the moon; spoiler alert, it missed.

  1. MyGiftCardsPlus has 10% back on Delta Gift cards for up to $1,000 in spend. (Thanks to GCG)
  2. American Express has heightened referral bonuses of 30,000 Membership Rewards or $300 for the referrer when the referred is approved for a new card. I’m seeing increased offers on about 1/4 of my cards. (Thanks to DoC)
  3. Southwest has a holiday sale for 25% off of travel on December 24, 25, and 31, and January 1 using promo code HOLIDAY25 booked by this evening. The code worked for one of my bookings but fares had gone up, so 25% off of a much bigger number was still a bigger number than my original cost.
  4. Do this now: Register for Best Western’s stupid promotion for ni * 2,000 bonus points for each stay for ni ∈ {1, 2, 3, 4}. The promotions is good for stays through February 25.

    If you have the unfortunate pleasure of four Best Western stays in the next couple of months:

    – I’m sorry, at least you don’t have bedbugs right?
    – You’ll get an invitation for promotion for double points for the rest of 2023
    – For real, you don’t have bedbugs, right?

Happy Wednesday!

Alec Baldwin helps us with Best Western math, but still doesn’t have a solution for bed bugs.

  1. Lowe’s is running an in-store promotion for a bonus $10 Lowe’s egift card with each $150 Visa gift card purchase through Wednesday. Current resale rates for $10 Lowe’s gift cards are somewhere around 86%, which means the deal is profitable even without credit card rewards. To maximize:

    – Link your cards to JetBlue’s TrueBlue Shopping for an extra 3x
    – Don’t redeem more than three egift cards per email address
    – Buy the Everywhere variety of cards for lower fees, and generally easier liquidation

    Reader Jim generally likes to remind me that not all of the Everywhere cards are easier to liquidate, in particular stay away from Movies Everywhere and Golf Everywhere unless you have a niche play.

  2. Chase has new targeted spending offers for many cards for spend through February 28, 2023. You’ll need to register first (the links were shamelessly stolen from Doctor of Credit, but reformatted):

    – Ink: 15,000 bonus points after $15,000 in spend
    – Ink: 5,000 bonus points after $5,000 in spend
    – Hyatt: 5,000 bonus points after $5,000 in spend
    – United: 5,000 bonus points after $5,000 in spend
    – Southwest: 5,000 bonus points after $5,000 in spend
    – IHG: 5,000 bonus points after $5,000 in spend

    It’s worth checking chase.com/mybonus for other cards too, especially Freedoms and Sapphires.

  3. Do this now (if you have a Chase Hyatt card): Register for Hyatt’s promotion for 1,000 bonus points for every two-night or longer stay at a Hyatt Place or Hyatt House through March 5. (Thanks to FM)

    Side note: Congrats for those of you status running at Category 1 Hyatt Places, and condolences for those of you actually staying at Category 1 Hyatt Places.

  4. Staples has fee-free $200 Mastercard gift cards from Sunday through the following Saturday, limit eight per transaction. They’re Metabanks, so have a liquidation plan in place.
  5. Check for a few interesting card linked offers, all of which are hackable:

    – 15% back at Sheraton up to $33 back (Chase / Bank of America)
    – $40 back on $200 or more at Dell (American Express)
    – $50 or $60 back at Delta, perhaps to or from a specific destination, ymmv (American Express)

    Breaking the correlation is typically necessary with American Express offer hacks, but not with the others.

  6. Because the Capital One Shopping portal hasn’t changed enough, new language has been added for giftcards.com purchases noting that there’s a $2,000 per purchase limit on rewards, which makes the Capital One Shopping portal consistent in terminology with other portals. To celebrate the new language (I guess), there’s a targeted 10% back on giftcards.com either through email, the mobile app, or desktop site, just make sure you’re signed in to see if you’re targeted.

I regret to inform you that the Lubbock Staples is now closed, so their weekend frenzy is cancelled. Apparently Lubbock does have a weekly Mugshot Monday so residents have something else to look forward to instead, I guess.

  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.