Category: Points

  1. Do this now: Register for 6,000 bonus Aeroplan miles on “select” Air Canada flights to Canada. Based on the terms and conditions, it looks like “select” flight mostly means paid non-basic economy flights booked after registration, and for travel through March 31, 2025 at 11:59 PM.

    What happens if your flight is delayed past 11:59 PM on March 31, 2025? I dunno, but I image it wouldn’t be fun to clean up. (Thanks to Vince for sending me the correct promotion end date)
  2. Meijer MPerks has $10 off of the purchase price of $150 or more in Mastercard gift cards through Saturday. A few tips:

    – There are Chase Offers and BankAmeriDeals for Meijer currently floating around
    – You have to clip the coupon in your MPerks account
    – This looks like the kind of deal that you can reclip after buying to repeat
    – Sometimes Meijer gas stands also sell gift cards

    Meijer sells Pathward and Sunrise gift cards.
  3. Delta Stays and Delta Car Rentals have a promotion for MQD earning on hotels and car rentals booked directly through the portal by September 30 for travel by October 31, earning at one mile per dollar spent. A few random thoughts:

    – You can book VRBO bookings through Delta Stays
    – You can list things on VRBO, and sometimes VRBO runs promotions
    – Delta Platinum and Delta Reserve American Express cards have a Stays credit
    – For upcoming travel where status doesn’t matter, you might as well earn MQD
    – Delta Stays is not the same thing as Delta Vacations, don’t confuse them
    – Delta gift cards do not work at Delta Stays

    Always be probing. Am I playing this one, asked no-one? No, because I have Diamond through 2030 thanks to prior shenanigans and as a result MQDs are effectively worthless for me until then.
  4. Delta Vacations has a tiered $75-$250 off of a flight+hotel booking promotion that seems available for all Delta Medallion members using promo code SMMED2024 booked by January.

    Again, remember that Delta Vacations is different than Delta Stays even though they’re technically the same company, so your AmEx credits won’t work here because I guess late-stage capitalism, or something.
  5. Stephen Pepper at GCG has a thoughtful opinion piece on Pepper Rewards. As usual, my strategy with Pepper is to avoid floating more (rewards in this case), than I could stand to lose.

    Side note: John Reeder challenged me once on my position about “floating what I could afford to lose”, and his counter-point is that in advantage play, the Kelly betting method governs your bets (or as an analog, money at risk) in order to maximize potential profit and indirectly minimize the risk of loss. There’s something there for churners; stand-by for a future post on the topic. Or don’t; you do you.

How to deal with chronic messy room? Its atrocious. Details in comments. : r/CleaningTips

AirCanada Aeroplan’s customer service center, but as a bedroom.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you’re viewing this on a platform that doesn’t properly render the math formulas, pivot to the website for this article.

Introduction

When calculating the cash value of points redeemed for a free night at a hotel, a surprising number of blogs ignore the parking fees and resort fees charged by most programs. That disingenuously inflates the value of a hotel point, unless you’re able to talk your way out of a resort fee and you can get to the hotel without a vehicle.

Fees on Award Stays in Major Programs

Let’s interlude with a quick refresher on major programs’ rules about fees on award stays:

  • Hilton: no resort fees on points redemptions, but parking charged
  • Hyatt: no resort fees on points redemptions, parking may be charged depending on elite status
  • Marriott: resort fees and parking charged
  • Choice: resort fees and parking charged
  • Best Western: resort fees and parking charged
  • IHG: resort fees and parking charged

Calculating Cents per Point

Taken at face value, you’ve effectively got a cash co-payment on award redemptions in the form of fees with most major loyalty programs, which reduces the value of your points. The naive formula that you’ll typically see for cpp (cents-per-point) is:

cpp = \frac{rate*100}{points}

But, the total cash value of your stay is the nightly rate plus fees, not just the nightly rate. And as a result, we ought to include resort fees and parking in that valuation. Let’s introduce a MEAB reduced comparative value cv, which is a reduced overall cents per point that takes fees into account for redemptions:

cv_{meab} = \frac{(rate-fees)*100}{points}

Looking at the JW Marriott Austin for a concrete example: For a Saturday night, one-night stay in the cheapest room, the cash price next weekend is $235, plus a $25 destination fee, plus a $54 self-park fee. An award night for the same room on the same weekend is 43,000 Bonvoy points. That means we’re getting a reduced MEAB comparative value (cv) of:

cv_{meab} = \frac{(\$235-\$25-\$54)*100}{43,000} = 0.36

That works out to a whopping reduced comparative value of 0.36 cents per point, which is bad even by Marriott standards. Side note: If you instead booked this Marriott stay via the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal with a Sapphire Reserve, the $25 resort fee would be included in the cash rate and you’d end up paying 17,333 points and $54 for parking, instead of 40,000 Bonvoy points and $79 in fees. Remember this example when you’re looking the Ultimate Rewards 70% transfer bonus to Bonvoy.

So What?

Looking at reduced value comparative calculations lets you compare currencies across different programs in a more genuine and equitable way. The results aren’t always pretty, but they do make Hyatt and Hilton look better than other programs ceteris paribus.

Happy Tuesday friends!

Don’t worry friends, there’s always something more at MEAB.

  1. The American Express Blue Business cards have new no-lifetime language (NLL) links at the usual public address (a prediction I got right for once). Both cards have no annual fee:

    – Blue Business Plus: 50,000 Membership Rewards after $5,000 spend in three months
    – Blue Business Cash: $500 statement credit after $5,000 spend in three months

    You can always find the generic links here. (Thanks to Parts_Unknown-)
  2. There’s an offer for 80,000 United MileagePlus after $3,000 spend via the United website, and another 5,000 bonus miles for adding an authorized user card too.

    88,000 MileagePlus miles is enough for a one-way partner business class award to Europe. (Thanks to Parts_Unknown- and DDG)
  3. Meijer stores have $10 off of $100 or more in Choice or One4All gift cards through Saturday. This one is automatically attached to your account and limit one per account, so scale with multiple MPerks accounts. (Thanks to GCG)
  4. Trigger warning, this is a niche play: Avis has up to 7,000 bonus Miles&More miles for 3+ day car rentals booked by August 31 for rentals through October 31.

    Miles&More miles are the best and often the only, way to get Swiss Airlines First Class award redemptions. What’s the worst way to earn Miles&More miles, asked no-one? Transfer Ultimate Rewards → Hyatt →Lufthansa at a 5:2 ratio!

While we’re on the subject of bad ideas, how about this playground gem?

  1. Chase Ultimate Rewards has a 70% transfer bonus to Marriott Bonvoy through August 14. This is an all-time high, and makes the program relatively competitive with other hotel programs.

    The real play with this one might be backdoor transfers to JAL Mileage Bank or Alaska MileagePlan in 60,000 Bonvoy Point intervals for 25,000 miles in both programs. The math on that one, because America loves math, is 35,294:25,000 or 1.41:1 Ultimate Rewards to airline miles. (Thanks to Mark)
  2. American Express Membership Rewards has a few transfer bonuses through August 31:

    – 20% bonus to Hawaiian HawaiianMiles
    – 30% bonus to British Airways, Aer Lingus, or Iberia Avios

    The best Hawaiian use cases are either (1) first or business mileage upgrades on paid economy tickets or (2) for speculative arbitragers hoping to earn Alaska miles if the Alaska-Hawaiian merger goes through. For Avios, there’s plenty of good redemption options, but also plenty of bad ones so hopefully you have something in mind before you transfer.
  3. Capital One has a 20% transfer bonus to Qantas Frequent Flyer through August 31. The best use cases of this program are international first class on Qantas metal to and from Oceana, a round the world award ticket, or medium hall economy to and from Europe on AA.
  4. The free Cranky Dorkfest 2024 on September 14 has an LAX ramp visit planned and no current capacity limits. This is an avgeek must-attend-at-least-once event, and the ramp visit makes it even better.
  5. AirFrance / KLM FlyingBlue has released August promo awards for travel through the end of January, 2025. Economy flights are 15,000 miles each way, and these cities seem to have greater 50,000 mile business class award availability too. The US and near US cities are Boston, Detroit, Houston, and Toronto.
  6. “Gee, let’s take a trip to beautiful, historic Sacramento” said no-one ever. There’s a reason to visit “The Taco Bell of California” now though: Raley’s, Bel Air, and Nob Hill stores in the area have 20% back in grocery rewards through August 13 with the purchase of high value bulk resale gift cards like Nordstrom which often sells for 90-92% of face value.

    I guess Raley’s is the new Meijer, and Sacramento is the new midwest?

The entertainment district in Sacramento.

  1. Kroger has a 4x fuel points promotion on third-party gift cards and fixed value Visa and Mastercards running through August 6. As usual, Amazon gift cards are excluded because I guess they want to encourage reselling of other, higher rate brands.

    Bulk resale rates are creeping back up to previous highs now that Pepper rewards nerfed its rewards earning structure, right when we were getting used to the new world order.
  2. Today is Bilt’s rent day, and:

    – It’s the second to last time that awards earn double points on up to $10,000 in spend; on October 1 it’ll be limited to $1,000
    – You get a free second guest and some free booze on Virgin Voyage cruises booked through Bilt today

    I suppose we now know more about Richard Kerr’s tweet’s meaning last month, and I guess we also learned that maybe he’s experiencing an off-by-one error.
  3. American Express has new targeted offers for adding employee cards online at the generic links. (If you get offer not available, put the card on a different login and/or periodically refresh the page and it may become available.) Each is for 15,000 Membership Rewards after $4,000 spend, limit five per card:

    – Business Gold (POID K4IY:9869)
    – Business Platinum (POID K4IY:9870)
    – Blue Business Plus (POID K4IY:9867)

    These have all been confirmed to post even with other K4IY offers. There’s language in the offer’s terms and conditions that says you may have bonus points clawed back if you close the primary or employee cards within a year. I’m not aware of that ever being enforced in practice though.

Preview: Bilt’s next devaluation.

If there were a “Churning and Travel Hacking 101” textbook, one of the first chapter titles would be:

The Value of an Unredeemed Point is Zero

Chapter 3 Title from MEAB’s fictitious book, “Churning and Travel Hacking 101”

The reason this book doesn’t exist though is because I’m not sure what else to write about the topic; if you never redeem a point, it never had any monetary value and you probably should have earned cash instead.

Happy Wednesday! #tiniestblogpost

Shining example of a pulitzer class chapter title, for future reference.

  1. Do this now: Register for Hyatt’s promotion for double points at Hyatt Place and Hyatt House hotels through October 15, up to 25,000 total bonus points.
  2. Do this now: Register for targeted American Airlines promotions for bonus miles or loyalty points (EDIT: Fixed link). My singular offer was 5,000 bonus AAdvantage miles after two paid flights in any cabin in August or September.
  3. IHG seems to have devalued its points at most properties, with awards now pricing between 0.45 cents per point and 0.55 cents per point as compared to cash rates, though the bright side (?) is that redemptions seem to top out at 500,000 points per night. I’m still able to find outsized value around major holidays in major cities, but the chicken is pretty far gone from the coop.

    This actually happened a few days ago and I’ve been waiting to hear more experimentation from the community, but coverage has been weak at best; probably due to the Big Point lobby’s tentacles in mainstream media, or something.
  4. Kroger has a 4x fuel points promotion on third party gift cards and fixed value Visa and Mastercards, excluding Amazon. The promotion runs tomorrow only.

    Often single day or single weekend promotions at Kroger have weird coding, so always be probing.
  5. Alaska Airlines released its July Global Escapes promotional cities, which give discounts for travel to or from several cities between October 1 and January 31, 2025 in economy or premium economy only. This month’s promotional cities: Guadalajara, Athens, Muscat, Taipei, Rome, and Delhi.

How the Big Point lobby operates.

  1. Do this now: Check for targeted Q3 spending offers at chase.com/mybonus. Most offers are a variation of:

    – 5x or 7x at gas, grocery stores, or restaurants up to $1,000 spend
    – A bonus 1x or 2x on up to $6,000 or $9,000 in spend
    – Stupid HBO Max offer

    Checking each card in a new incognito tab avoids errors and false negatives. Or, you could develop a bot to check all of your chase cards for you #itsbeendone.
  2. Today is Bilt’s 25-100% transfer bonus to Alaska Airlines MileagePlan, on up to 50,000 transferred miles.
  3. Chase’s Q2 Pay Yourself Back categories have been extended through the end of Q3. Wholesale clubs continues to work well in bulk with golden items, and with Visa and Mastercard gift cards.
  4. Office Depot/OfficeMax has $15 off of $300 or more in Mastercard gift cards through Saturday. For best results, buy even multiples of $300, try for multiple transactions back-to-back, and look for the cashier with dead eyes. (Thanks to GCG)

Sample dead-eyes Office Depot worker.