Category: Gift Cards

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.

Thankfully it’s time to sail into the weekend with a few positive notes after a strange week:

1. Two new no-lifetime language (NLL) links for the American Express Business Gold have surfaced, if you’ve had the card before it’s worth checking to see if you’re targeted. The limit on American Express charge cards is currently 10 or 11 per person, depending on the person. Why depending on the person? #noidea

These offers are for 90,000 Membership Rewards after spending $10,000 in three months. The secondary play here is to watch for an upgrade offer to the Business Platinum for another 100,000 or more Membership Rewards, which could come as early as one statement after opening. (Thanks to tehflip499)

2. Are you a Hyatt person? Me too, but generally Hilton is a good program for churners and big redemptions as well, especially because churning American Express cards is as easy as pie (because apparently pie is easy). It’s almost certainly worth your while to learn a bit about it.

To that end, American Express has increased offers on its Hilton cards:

  • 70,000 points on its no annual fee card (think of this as about 30,000 Hyatt points)
  • 130,000 points on its $95 annual fee Surpass card, which is great for manufactured spend (think of this as about 60,000 Hyatt points and a bonus free night certificate for spend)

As with item (1), the secondary play here is to watch for an upgrade offer to a Hilton Aspire card, but those are rarer than Business Platinum upgrades, and they may require calling in or chatting to discover that there’s an offer on your account.

3. Sigh, Staples has a fee-free Mastercard gift card sale starting on Sunday and running through Saturday, February 12. As usual, the limit is five per customer, but in practice that really means five per transaction. Always try and run at least two transactions back-to-back to minimize the time you have to spend at a store that focuses on selling recycled printer toner to the elderly and repeatedly tries to turn the office supply retail space into a monopoly.

4. The gift card resale market has gone pear-shaped in the last several days with BestBuy resale rates dipping to below 93% and Kroger fuel points spot prices jumping to above $19.50 per 1,000 points. As usual if the rates you’re seeing aren’t at least $19.00 per 1,000 fuel points, look for another use or another buyer. Don’t settle for less.

Have a nice weekend friends!

Staples’ high quality aftermarket toner strikes again.

Foreward: I apologize in advance for what’s coming. It kind of just happened in the first paragraph and then, well, you’ll see shortly.

1. Delta Platinum and Diamond medallions should make sure they’ve selected their Choice Benefits for the 2021 medallion year by the end of the day. (Confusingly, 2021 medallion year Choice Benefits are for status earned in 2020.) Tonight at midnight these choices turn into a pumpkin.

2. Check the dashboard of your American Express Green and Gold personal cards for an upgrade offer of 75,000 Membership Rewards after spending $6,000 in six months and +5x points for up to $15,000 in spend at supermarkets, gas stations, and restaurants. In case you do math like a pumpkin, that means 1x+5x, or 6x. (Thanks to bewhoaleavemealone)

3. Kroger.com has $10 off of $150 in Visa and Mastercard gift cards using code JAN2022 now through Wednesday. Unlike the physical US Bank cards that Kroger sells in store, these are Metabanks and are processed by Blackhawk Network, so liquidation is a bit tougher; you may have to resort to buying pumpkins for resale.

4. Kroger stores are running a 4x fuel points sale on gift cards starting Wednesday and running through February 8. Bulk gift card resale markets still look like a rotting pumpkin though, so while normally a 4x fuel points sale like this would depress the market value of Kroger fuel points, I don’t expect that to happen this time.

potato
Be glad these aren’t pumpkins.

Over the weekend there was a 4x fuel points promotion for Kroger stores which usually causes BestBuy volume to crank up to an 11, but that didn’t happen this time. Sure, there was some BestBuy buying capacity to go around in select circles, but only at roughly 15% capacity of what would normally be available. What happened? Two things:

First, January is always really slow for gift card reselling and this year it’s even slower than normal, likely due to supply chain issues that mean retailers aren’t holding major sales.

Second, BestBuy stopped giving refunds on lost and destroyed packages to accounts of suspected resellers starting sometime around Christmas. With approximately three percent of packages lost, this means that less-crafty BestBuy resellers need to factor another loss into their cost of goods sold.

With somewhere around a third to a half of those resellers not yet figuring out how to work around the reseller flag, BestBuy rates were reduced by about 1.5%. Yay efficient market, but boo for gift card resellers.

Of course I have no idea how the BestBuy gift card market will actually look in the future, but based on watching BestBuy’s growing disdain toward resellers, I think the outlook for 2022 BestBuy gift card resale rates isn’t as rosy as it looked in 2021. Go ahead BestBuy, prove me wrong. I dare you.

BestBuy’s Kitty Sanchez to resellers: “Say goodbye to these, Michael”

This is absolutely the slowest time of the year for gift card reselling, and 2022 has started out even slower than normal. Kroger is doing its best to change that with a Friday through Sunday 4x fuel points sale, but even that isn’t going to revive the market with meaningful volume given the backlog that aggregators currently have. Here’s what I’m seeing out there, and it’s a bleak January:

Tier 1 Cards

Resale rates (without fuel points) are weak and capacity to buy is currently small:

  • BestBuy: 95.5%
  • Home Depot: 93.5%
  • Apple: 93.5%
  • Nike: 93%
  • Lowe’s: 91%

If you’re really good at fuel points and can use them for yourself, they’re worth $35 per 1,000 which will easily make up for any loss you have when reselling Tier 1 cards. If you’re less good at them, their value is closer to the $15-18 range which can still make these deals worthwhile, provided you find a gift card buyer with capacity of course.

Tier 2 Cards

Tier 2 cards cards like Adidas, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Gap just aren’t moving right now but I expect that to change by the end of the month. That said, even when these cards start moving it typically only make sense to buy when there a good deal on them, and those deals are likely to be non-existent other than perhaps for MLK weekend, so don’t get your hopes up for any volume.

Tier 3 Cards

Lower tier cards like Domino’s and Bath and Body Works are also at a stand-still, but unlike the tier above, I don’t really expect them to start moving until February and I’m not expecting any major deals on them until then either. So if you got some of these over the holidays, it may be best to order what Domino’s calls a “pizza”, but the rest of the world calls “cheap cheese, red paste, and grease bread”.

How MEAB is Playing It

I’ll be using Kroger’s 4x fuel points sale to offset the loss in selling Tier 1 cards this weekend, but it’s not going to be any sizable volume. Instead I’m focusing on non-gift card reselling techniques to keep the my spend up, and I suggest you do the same.

Good luck out there!

Special thanks to Travel With a Point for noting a grammar error in the original version of this post.

Pizza purchased with your holiday gift card: a bargain rip-off at twice half the price!

I noticed it’s busy out this week, anyone know why? Anyway:

1. You may remember that Chase gave a year of DashPass to cardholders starting in January 2021, and for many of you that year is almost up. You can get another year as long as you do the following before January 1, 2022:

  • Deactivate your DashPass membership
  • Remove all your Chase cards from DoorDash (I had to do this from the website, I couldn’t figure out how in the app)
  • Wait one day
  • Add a new (different from the one you used in January) Chase card to DoorDash

(Thanks to Viper3773)

2. A helpful tip courtesy of discussion at Flyertalk, and it’s definitely applicable to some of the fares I’ve already booked — in today’s pandemic-era airline environment:

  • Almost all fares are changeable with no fee
  • Almost all fares can be cancelled and held as expiring travel vouchers
  • Paying for a First Class upgrade with cash or miles has gotten more expensive

So, if you’re considering paying for a seat up front with a ticket you’ve already booked, check the original cost of the ticket paired with the cost of an upgrade and compare that to the cost of a new ticket booked directly into First Class. If it’s cheaper to book directly (right now it usually is), cancel your existing ticket, take the voucher, then use the funds to book into a proper First Class fare.

3. VanillaGift.com has fee-free e-gift cards through this evening with code EGIFT2021. I’m praying to the holiday gods that this one sticks around post expiration exactly the way that FLASH2021 didn’t, though being e-gift cards makes these slightly less useful so my prayer voice is more of a whisper.

4. SoFi is giving $20 for checking your interest rate on a personal loan, and it only requires a soft-credit pull. It took me about 60 seconds to run through the motions, but a SoFi rep called my voicemail twice afterword so keep that in mind. By the way, this deal barely made the cut I’m still trying to figure out exactly where that line is ($20 for one minute is above the line, but the phone calls almost pulled it below).

Happy holidays to you and your families!

Pictured: American Airlines’ First Class “holiday ham cake”, which thanks to this post, you can get for even less.

I’m sure you’ve already figured this out, but travel hacking slows down this time of year because reasons. As a result, we have just a single item for today:

Giftcards.com has 5% off of virtual Visa Gift Cards through the end of the year with promo code VV5T216. The maximum face value is $250, and the promo code only works for up to $750 total in purchases. Buying $750 in cards will cost $730.35, and should earn cash back or miles when purchased through a portal. A few notes:

  • These are Metabank gift cards, have a liquidation (cash-out) plan in-mind
  • If your order gets cancelled, your email address is probably burned — just create a new account with a new email
  • These will earn rewards on American Express cards

Because this is the only item today, let’s talk liquidation (cashing-out gift cards). There are a few options that aren’t exactly secrets but aren’t well published either; most of them involve a fee of some sort, and the loan options carry a risk of default that you can largely mitigate but not eliminate. They are:

  • Bravo (works with MetaBank)
  • Money orders (needs a physical GC unless you’re really crafty, sometimes works with MetaBank)
  • Kiva (works with MetaBank)
  • Plastiq (doesn’t usually work with MetaBank)
  • Kickfurther (works with MetaBank)
  • Melio (doesn’t work with MetaBank)
  • Local utilities (often they accept debit cards, and often they’re required to refund any overpayments by local law)
  • Amazon in a pinch (works with MetaBank)

Of course there are other options too, but they’re more closely guarded. You can find them with some digging. Check bill payment services, fintech companies, and payment processors.

Waiting for deals this week is like waiting for coffee at Dutch Bros on a day that ends in ‘y’.

There’s a triple for today, but first let’s talk some blog meta: A week from Friday it’s time for the MEAB annual Travel Hacking as told by GIFs post, and frankly that post is a ton of fun but also a bunch of work. The biggest part of the work is deciding which travel hacking events or changes for the year were significant, and while I’ve come up with a dozen or two, I could use your help. Drop me a line and let me know from your perspective which events in 2021 should be addressed. Thanks in advance!

Back to our regular programming:

1. Delta is having an award sale to Cancun and Los Cabos from various US Cities. Sale prices depend on the city, but range between 11,000 miles round trip and 22,000 miles round trip. Use Delta’s flexible calendar search for the quickest results. (Thanks to DDG)

2. In a move that surprised absolutely positively no-one, Office Depot/OfficeMax has $15 back on $300 or more in Visa gift cards running through Saturday evening (or likely Friday evening, because, you know, reasons). To maximize the deal:

  • Buy the “Everywhere” variety of gift cards for lower fees, but make sure you have a way to liquidate (Bravo is still a higher fee way)
  • Link your card to Dosh
  • Link your card to Rakuten’s in-store offer for 5x cash back at Office Depot/OfficeMax and activate the offer
  • Check your Chase offers or Bank of America offers for $10 or more in cash back at Office Depot/OfficeMax
  • Try and get at least two and perhaps more transactions through back-to-back with the cashier

A caveat on the Rakuten card-linked program: Every time you use an offer you have to go back to the site and activate it again.

3. Stockpile has increased their fee-free gift card purchase when using a credit card to $1,000 per-transaction. According to DoC, the annual gift card limit has moved from $1,000 to $2,000, but I don’t think either of those limits were or are true. I was able to get more even before the change. For best success though:

  • Get a new IP address every couple of transactions
  • Use a new email address every couple of transactions
  • Use private mode in your browser
  • Use a credit card like the Chase Freedom Unlimited, Citi Double Cash, or American Express Blue Business Preffered that earns 2x on these transactions (or the US Bank Altitude Reserve for true hackers). Update: Chaim from HelpMeBuildCredit wrote in to remind me that Stockpile doesn’t take American Express

Apropos of nothing, I’d like to share this here because no-one else would understand. This morning, my P2 said to me: “You’re the worst to shop for. All I can come up with is to buy you $1,000 in BestBuy gift cards and let you turn those into points or something.” 😂

A machine that shreds BestBuy plastic gift-cards and turns them into showers of points. (Patent pending)