My made up sources last week said that Delta wasn’t going to have a bonus, so clearly I shouldn’t trust those sources ever again. In other news, AA hasn’t released a bonus, and my sources are silent on whether they will.
– 25% bonus to AirFrance/KLM FlyingBlue – 20% bonus to Wyndham Hotels
The Wyndham one is slightly more special given its rare appearance and the programs (decreasing) gameability, especially if you’re Barclays banned and can’t get the Wyndham Business Earner as a result.
Side note, do you know why I’m not in marketing? The real reason is I don’t enjoy it, but the fun reason is I’d refuse to release a promo like this without the promo code being HAWAIIFIVE0, on principle.
Incidentally, they’re calling this one “Get the fall rolling”, which again, I’m not in marketing, but an airline talking about making things fall feels like, uhh, a choice.
SIPC insurance limits are $500,000 per account in case you have reservations about the longevity of a brokerage that chooses to turn the noun “bull” into a verb, seemingly on purpose. (Thanks to DoC)
After the “Get the fall rolling” sale, JetBlue prepares its next sale: “New England on fire”
Chase Offers and BankAmeriDeals have a new offer for 10% back on Alaska Airlines airfare of $50 or more booked by June 12, max $45 cash back.
The most above board way to game this is to book a non-basic economy airfare, wait 24 hours, and refund it to your Alaska wallet, but gamers gonna game.
– Boston – Washington DC – Houston – New York (JFK) – Phoenix – Seattle
I’m also seeing sporadic availability for business class redemptions to Europe at 50,000 miles from Phoenix and Seattle, the two cities on the list that I checked.
LifeMiles still has great sweet spots for Business Class flights from the US to Europe for certain city pairs, and for general weirdness on most routings. One of my personal favorites is to throw an economy flight that I’m not planning on taking onto the end of a business class ticket to reduce the cost of the redemption.
Why bring it up? If you think you might want it, either wait until this is available via referral which will likely be in the next week, or wait until the next time 100,000 mile rolls around unless you have a specific need for this card (like for XN availability). Don’t jump yet just because lots of bloggers are talking about it.
Avianca has a quirky award chart with plenty of hacks, but my favorite easy hack is to tack an economy flight on to the end of a one way itinerary to make the whole thing price lower. (Thanks to TheSultan1)
Note that if you have to cancel one of these tickets because reasons, Virgin Atlantic can be hard to deal with and may require multiple phone calls to chase it down. (Thanks to TeddyH)
Kroger stores have a 4x fuel points promotion running tomorrow through April 2 on third party gift cards. If you use this as an opportunity for AmEx manufactured spend, find a way to separate your purchases from even dollar amounts, especially those around $500, $1,000, etc. (Thanks to Will)
Sometimes there’s a news story that sends travel bloggers to the word vomit factory to write pages and pages when there’s really just one thing to say, and this week’s factory tour is courtesy of American Express and that they’re now offering a free, limited-partner Point.me search for cardholders by visiting amex.point.me. And yes, I’m writing about it too so I’m no better, welcome to the word vomit factory my friends!
Anyway, there are a few reasons you probably shouldn’t care much about this new development, and I say this as a paid Point.me user with full access (not just a normie with specific access to Membership Rewards transfer partners):
Point.me is really slow and inflexible, and the AmEx version has poor coverage
PointsYeah is a free alternative that’s more flexible and much, much faster
Seats.aero will cache award results for quick lookup and is a great compliment to PointsYeah
Of course, there’s always more to the story, so let’s visit caveat city:
American Express’s point.me version has no coverage beyond Membership Rewards partners
PointsYeah has better coverage than the AmEx point.me
Point.me with a paid subscription has the best coverage, notably including Aeroplan and Southwest
Neither Point.me nor PointsYeah will show you Delta 15% off award discounts
Neither Point.me, Seats.aero, nor PointsYeah will show United XN expanded access and discounts
None of the tools will show you cheaper FlyingBlue awards found by searching different partners
PointsYeah easily lets you filter for things like maximum fuel surcharge or maximum trip duration
Award alerts in PointsYeah and Seats.aero are top notch
Award alerts in point.me are, uhh, non-existent
So yes, we have another tool to use courtesy of AmEx, but also it’s like having a Fisher Price hammer when you’re building a cabinet.
Happy Tuesday!
American Express tools to help with award searches: present and future.
On Wednesday, MEAB briefly hinted about American Express shutdowns. The total number of shutdowns was small, there’s plenty we still don’t know, the dust still hasn’t settled, and we don’t know if it’s done. Even so, we do know a few things that are easily summarized as:
– Some shutdowns involved a particular type of spend gaming – Some shutdowns involved a few rather heavy hitters that weren’t doing that gaming
Most of the rampant speculation on public facing sites that I’ve seen is either partially or totally refuted by the datapoints that we do have, so I guess, just don’t believe everything you read on the internet, even if you believe you have 99 reasons to do so.
The Bank of America AirFrance KLM FlyingBlue Mastercard has a heightened sign-up bonus of 70,000 bonus points, $100 statement credit, and 100 XP after $3,000 spend in 90 days. The offer is presented during the checkout flow when you make a dummy booking on the US AirFrance or KLM website, and the $89 annual fee is not waived for the first year. (Thanks to Don)
– Connecting to a VPN in Dallas or Denver – Trying incognito mode – Searching for “American Express Business Platinum” in various search engines – Waiting for a 190,000 points offer to expire and automatically reload
American Express has new, heightened bonuses available via the Random Number Generator™ (which can be played by trying different browsers, going incognito, using a mobile device, hitting the landing page through a search engine, or by tossing cheese up into the air between each keystroke). The offers:
There are variations of these offers available via referral with slightly higher spend requirements of $10,000 in three months too, and are those are much better for the referrer. (Thanks to robdajewels)
Do this now:Register for Wyndham’s new promo, 7,500 bonus points for two nights stayed through May 13. You can earn the bonus up to a whopping two times, for a total of *checks supercomputer* 15,000 bonus points. (Thanks to FM)
For better or worse, this is inevitable as the paid price of tickets increases with inflation and with spend based mileage earning, so eventually the mileage program will necessarily bow to inflation too. You can plan for that though.
The main benefits of FlyingBlue Gold are lounge access on international SkyTeam airline tickets like Delta, and for free checked bags on the same airlines. You no longer get access to book La Premier awards with Gold status though, so the value is marginal at best.
Sports books provide a good outlet for manufactured spend volume in states that allow it, but it comes with a big set of gotchas too. Typical plays involve mainline arbitrage across multiple sites and playing through all funds at least once. (Thanks to GCG)
MEAB running super-computer simulations for maximizing point earning.
