Category: Gift Cards

  1. Kroger has a 4x fuel points promotion on all third party gift-cards running through April 19. The consequences of another 4x sale on the ailing bulk (BestBuy, Nike, Home Depot, Apple, Amazon, etc) gift card markets are:

    – Resale rates, already low, are likely to fall by 0.5% or 1.0% over the next two weeks
    – Fuel points demand is likely to saturate for points expiring in May
    – Fuel points resale rates will likely fall by a dollar or two
    – Capacity from major bulk buyers will be completely filled for the month

    Let’s look on the bright-side: I could be wrong.

  2. American Express Personal Platinum cards are now refunding up to $20 per month for Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+ streaming services. Just make sure you’ve registered for the Entertainment coupon (or whatever AmEx is calling it now) before switching your billing over or before subscribing.
  3. SimplyMiles has an offer for 465 AA miles at Uber and Uber Eats up to three times with a purchase of at least $20. I’d normally want to combine this with the monthly American Express Uber coupon (or whatever AmEx is calling it now), but SimplyMiles only works with Mastercards. I guess that means I’ll pair it with the Citi merchant offer, which coincidentally is also valid for three uses. Why would I care about 465 miles? First, because it’s 465*3, but really it’s because they’re elite qualifying and I’ve fallen into the AA loyalty points trap apparently (Thanks to reader Dave)
  4. It seems like Star-Alliance was jealous of last week’s $49 offer for unlimited domestic AA and Alaska lounge access and they bullied ANA into running a similar program: Status match to Star Alliance Gold for access to United Clubs when flying United or any other Star Alliance airlines, even domestically, even in coach. This status match costs $0 and lasts through March 2023, so it’s [DIVIDE_BY_ZERO]x better than the oneworld version. On the other hand, you’ll be probably be flying United after using the lounge so there’s that. (Thanks to Loyalty Lobby)

United Club’s famous “baked bean stuffed chocolate donut surprise”.

It was a busy weekend in the travel hacking space:

  1. We saw transfer bonuses all over the place:

    – Membership Rewards 40% transfer bonus to AerLingus Avios
    – Membership Rewards 40% transfer bonus to British Airways Avios
    – Membership Rewards 25% transfer bonus to Marriott Bonvoy (don’t do it)
    – Ultimate Rewards 25% transfer bonus to AirFrance/KLM FlyingBlue
    – LifeMiles 25% transfer bonus from Citi ThankYou Points

    Remember that Avios can be transferred between different partners, including the newly added Qatar Airways which has sweet spots for premium cabin travel to the middle east and south pacific.

  2. There’s an American Express offer for $100 back on $300 (or $350) of spend at Delta Airlines. Don’t forget that you can turn this into a travel credit by booking a non-basic economy fare, waiting until after midnight the day after booking, and then canceling.
  3. The Target RedCard debit and credit card offer for $40 off of $40 online and another $40 off of $40 in store is back through April 16. These are churnable as long as you wait at least a week between closing an old account and opening a new one. Even though a $80 sign-up bonus for a credit card is relatively small, there’s a lot of value to be had with that card.
  4. Costco is selling $500 Alaska Airlines gift cards for $400 in store. With the partnership with AA, you can book certain American Airlines flights marketed by Alaska with this gift card too.
  5. Multiple reports of being approved for a sixth credit card with American Express have been trickling in since Christmas, and as recently as Friday public data-points have surfaced too. It seems that the old five credit card limit is being phased out, or at least the number of people stuck at five is shrinking.

    My own data-point: I opened a sixth credit card in December, then closed a different credit card a couple of weeks ago. Two days later, I applied for a new sixth credit card and was approved (Thanks to C F Frost for giving me guidance on timing with those card changes).

Happy Monday!

With a 25% transfer bonus, you too can cash-out your Membership Rewards at 0.45 cents per point for a hotel room and free breakfast (Platinum elites and higher only) at the Marriott Courtyard in Lubbock, TX. Yum?

Q1 is nearly complete, so now we can ditch our New Year’s resolutions about not eating cookies and instead focus on the increasing deal flow:

  1. United and Clear have teamed up to offer 15,000 United MileagePlus miles for a new Clear account. Of course you should pair this with your American Express Platinum Clear credits, and by going through United’s link you can get a membership for you and a family member for a total of $179, equal to the value of the Platinum credit; effectively liquidating the credit for 15,000 miles.

    If you already have Clear and still have an AmEx with an unused credit, just sign up for a new Clear account with a new email address to take advantage of the offer. (Thanks to Gabe)

  2. Thursday’s Visible deal has a few updates and has gotten quite a bit better:

    – There’s now an offer that also includes a pair of Airpods which resell for around $125
    – As of this writing, the $200 Mastercard and Airpods offers stack with each other
    – Chase and Bank of America rewards both have an offer for $25 back at Visible

    When you stack all of these together you’re looking at $100 or less for the 2022 iPhone SE. (Thanks to MattD, Diana, and Austin via MEAB slack and email)

  3. Meijer MPerks has two great offers running to take us into Q2:

    – Buy $50 in third party gift cards through April 2 and get a $5 grocery credit deposited into your MPerks account up to 10 times. Or try a little less and get $50 back on a $500 gift card in a single transaction.
    – Get $10 off of $150 or more in Visa gift cards through Saturday. Meijer carries both Sunrise and Metabank gift cards, I’d go for the former if I have a choice. This one requires that you clip a digital coupon.

    As usual, scale this with multiple MPerks accounts.

  4. Staples is running a fee free promotion for $200 Mastercard gift cards through Saturday, limit 5. These are Metabank gift cards so have a liquidation plan in place. As always, try to run multiple transactions back-to-back to minimize your MS buying time.
We can even hack the definition of a cookie to stretch MPerks grocery redemptions. Who says it needs to be sweet?
  1. You’ve probably heard that Chase Pay Yourself Back (PYB) has been extended through June 30. What you probably haven’t heard, or at least it’s received less attention:

    – Office Supply stores have been added to Ink Cash and Ink Preferred for PYB
    – AirBNB bookings have a limit of three cancelations per year which limits PYB, but all you need for a new AirBNB account is a new email address so there’s that

  2. Bank of America is sending targeted elite qualifying miles offers to Alaska Airlines personal and business cardholders. (I didn’t get one despite holding six Alaska cards). The offer is for 1,000 elite qualifying miles for $5,000 in spend. You can find Alaska tiers and benefits here, and without earning another elite mile in any way, you can reach:

    – MVP with $100,000 in spend
    – MVP Gold with $200,000 in spend
    – MVP Gold 75k with $375,000 in spend
    – MVP Gold 100k with $500,000 in spend

    If you don’t fly Alaska a lot, this probably isn’t worth your time. If you want oneworld status, an AA credit card will get you there with quite a bit less spend and you don’t need to be targeted.

  3. PSA: Brex is closing dormant accounts. I personally use it for 8x on rideshare. I like to churn these accounts too (which requires churning real businesses, which is actually not hard in most states) so if they close one out, I’ll just open another one (or let’s be honest, I’ll probably just open another one anyway).
  4. Friday’s deal for $750 in gift cards for $730.35 and hopefully some extra cash-back or miles through a shopping portal is back at GiftCards.com with new promo codes: SPRINGSALE, SPRINGVISA, and SPRING. The catch? They’re Metabank gift cards so have a liquidation plan.

Happy Monday!

A few simple mods and this churner for making butter turns into a churner for making companies.

Let’s slide into the weekend with an abnormally wordy post:

  1. There’s a new no-lifetime language (NLL) link for the no-annual fee American Express Blue Business Plus credit card with a bonus of 30,000 Membership Rewards after spending $5,000 in three months and another 10,000 Membership Rewards for adding an employee card and spending another $1,000 on that card in three months. To see if you’re targeted, login to your American Express account and then click this link. (Thanks to Parts_Unknown)

    This card is basically an American Express Membership Rewards earning version of the Citi Double Cash card with a cap of $50,000 in spend per year at 2x. Starting in December and running through February, the card was amazing because you could get up to 1.98 million Membership Rewards for adding 99 employee cards. Unfortunately now the offer is only for 20,000 points after spending $2,000 on an employee card with a limit of five employees.

    Side note: The 99 card offer is still alive in various forms on co-branded American Express business cards (Marriott, Hilton, Delta). I’m guessing they’ll die in the next week or two, so call American Express and ask if there are any offers for adding employee cards to your account sooner rather than later.

  2. The American Express Personal Gold card has a new 90,000 Membership Rewards after spending $4,000 in three months, and 20% back at restaurants (or with transactions that look like restaurants), up to $250 back. Try your luck at this link, and if it doesn’t work the first, time, try incognito, using a referral, or by searching for the card through a search engine. It may also work via a referral link, but I’ve yet to see an example. (Thanks to DoC)

    As I’ve said before, I can never have too many Personal Gold cards (4x on grocery on up to $25,000 in spend can be knocked out in a day or two), and while the monthly Uber Eats and GrubHub/ShakeShack/Cheesecake Factory aren’t worth face-value, they do provide additional incentives to hold it.

  3. Giftcards.com has 5% back on Virtual Visa gift cards with promo code SPRINGVIP. I believe the maximum purchase is three $250 cards, which brings your total cost to $730.35 for $750 worth of virtual Visas. They’re Metabank cards so have a liquidation plan.

    Make sure you go through a portal, it tracked for me. At the time of this writing, AA is at 3x and is offering 1,000 additional bonus miles for spending $300.

The long slide into the weekend, paid for with giftcards.com Visas at a 5% discount.

It’s the second time this week for a grab bag of topics post. Hooray I guess?

  1. Do this now: Register for Wyndham’s current promotion, which gives you 2x on two night stays, 3x on three night stays, and so on up to 5x on five night stays.

    There is great value in Wyndham outside of the US (and a few properties in the US), and excellent value with Vacasa rentals booked with Wyndham points. As a reminder, Citi ThankYou Points transfer to Wyndham directly at a one-to-one ratio.

  2. If you have a Citizen’s bank account, check your email for a targeted offer of $150 back after two $500 direct deposits. As usual, use a business account that supports setting a memo field and set the memo to “Payroll” if you want to emulate a direct deposit. (Thanks to AbjectRaise)
  3. Kroger started a 4x fuel points on third party gift cards promotion yesterday and is running it through Tuesday, March 22. Fortunately, we’re past the beginning of the year lull in gift card reselling and spot-rates on major bulk gift card brands have crept up to make this a break-even deal or better, not including credit card rewards.
  4. You’ve got until Monday to apply for the $3,500 Capital One Spark offer (no link, you apply through any Capital One business relationship manager), or for the 100,000 point Capital One VentureX card. Believe it or not the first of those is much easier to get than the second.

    When I applied for the $3,500 Spark offer, the business relationship said to me: “We’re not like Citi, we don’t care if you spend, pay, spend, pay, spend, pay. We want you to spend as much as possible, then you make money and we make money.” I wouldn’t take that as gospel, but it’s definitely an interesting data point.

    Thanks to Allen and nutella via Slack for the reminders.

  5. Southwest has been rolling out schedule changes for June the last couple of weeks which means their schedule changes for July are likely to start next week. If you have a trip you want to book in July, you can pull the following stunt to try and get it for cheap:

    – Find the cheapest fare between your city pairs +- 2 weeks of your date of travel
    – Book the cheapest fare, and watch next week for a schedule change
    – Switch to the flight you actually want for no additional charge

    For a better shot at making this work, look for flight times that don’t exist in May or June but are still on the schedule for July.

Have a nice Thursday!

A Capital One business relationship manager coaches us on credit line cycling before going to jail.

Let’s ketchup catchup on a few deals from the weekend (err, and yesterday):

1. Office Depot/OfficeMax has $15 back on $300 or more in Visa gift cards until Saturday, which makes your net cost $398.90 for $400 in gift cards or $394.90 for $400 gift cards if you buy the “Everywhere” variety. To maximize:

  • Link each of your cards to Dosh for an extra $10 back, but watch out for shutdowns for repeated gift card transactions
  • Try and run multiple transactions back-to-back with the same cashier

Thanks to reader Jim for the tip.

2. US Bank has a $400 sign-up bonus for opening a personal checking account and adding $5,000 in “direct deposits” in the first 60 days through March 28. Taking the bonus could be even more useful because having a checking account with a balance of at least $1,500 is a good way to get approved for lots of US Bank credit cards at once.

3. Another offer for 20,000 Membership Rewards for adding an authorized user to an American Express Platinum card and spending $2,000 within six months has surfaced. To see if you’re targeted, login to American Express and then check this link.

4. In addition to the increased Delta American Express card offers last week, another has surfaced for the Gold card and it’s interesting because the sign-up bonus is:

  • A $400 statement credit
  • 50,000 SkyMiles
  • A waived first-year annual fee

To get the offer, you’ll need to make a dummy airfare booking at delta.com and you’ll see it on the checkout page. To make things annoying though, sometimes the offer shows as a $300 statement credit and other times a $400 statement credit, so you may need to try different browsers or routes to find the $400 offer. Also, don’t actually buy the ticket. As Sam says, “it never pays to play it straight”.

Are we kaughtchup caught-up now?

Crimes against humanity in pasta form.

1. Hyatt announced their category changes and they’re not pretty for many flagship properties. Take a look here, and book before March 22 to lock in the current rates.

2. Office Depot/OfficeMax has $15 off of $300 in Mastercard gift cards. It’s not as nice as the Visa deal because the “Everywhere” cards don’t exist with Mastercards as far as I know, but still a useful sale. As usual:

  • Try to repeat the deal with multiple transactions in a single trip
  • Link your cards to Dosh for an extra $10 back
  • For advanced readers, have each card linked to a different Dosh burner account

3. Do this now: Register for Radisson’s newest promotion that gives a 30,000 point bonus for every three nights stayed through April 30, 2022, up to 90,000 total bonus points. I’m surprised to say it, but Radisson has been ahead of the pack on Hotel promotions recently. Let’s hope they keep it up.

4. Frequent Miler points out that the Nearside debit card has a sign-up bonus of $40 after depositing $200 in the bank account, and you get a normal $50 when using a referral link. The card is interesting because it’s a 2.2% cash back debit card in 2022 without a hard pull on your credit report. Of course it can be quite lucrative with the right plays, so if cash-back is your bag you may want to take a look.

5. The Point debit card was great in 2021 for quite a few reasons (including $10,000 per month in free credit card loads), and it’s been decidedly meh in 2022. The annual fee also used to be $49, but now it’s higher at $99 and the spending offers have been lamer than they used to be, which could be a function of Q1 2022 being slow, or it could be that the company has dialed back its budget.

Nonetheless, for “this week only” (lol), the card has a $100 sign-up bonus when using a referral link and another $100 for the referrer. I’d suggest getting one for your P2 if you already have one for a net $100 win. Just like with Nearside, there’s no hard pull on your credit.

Point was able to lose half their money without even touching crypto.