Category: Quick Hits

Let’s start today with a friendly warning: If you see headlines about thousands or millions of PayPal account shutdowns, don’t stress, you almost certainly weren’t involved and don’t need to follow the click-bait. The shutdowns were focused on accounts that generated thousands or tens of thousands of referral bonuses using bot-farms.

Here are a few things that are worth focusing on:

1. Hot on the heals of yesterday’s devaluation, we have, err, another devaluation. This time it’s ANA, which doubled its fuel surcharges for award tickets.

The ANA fuel surcharge is actually tied to the price of oil which turns out to be a novel concept in the airline world, and with oil prices jumping, the surcharge had a corresponding jump. So in addition to setting award alerts with ExpertFlyer, now apparently we should set crude oil price alerts with Yahoo finance.

2. American Express has a new targeted link for a 30,000 Membership Rewards bonus when turning on Pay Over Time. As always, consider shutting off Pay Over time on all of your charge cards to be targeted in the future. (Thanks to Matthew via DoC)

3. Check for a targeted spend offer on your Chase United cards at this link. This offer is very Citi Shop Your Way-esque in its detail: You earn 250 bonus miles for making three purchases over $50 each per month, for February, March, and April, and another 750 miles if you make all three months. (Thanks to DDG)

4. The offer for 70,000 SkyMiles, $200 statement credit, and first year’s annual fee waived for both the personal and business American Express Delta Gold cards is back. To trigger it, make a dummy booking for a cash domestic ticket in incognito mode and you’ll see it on the payment page. (Thanks to geauxcali)

Four fingers for the Thursday Quad.

After a legion of deals earlier in the week we’re off to a slow Thursday, but there are a couple of items worth looking at:

1. A new no-lifetime language (NLL) offer for the American Express Blue Business Cash has surfaced. This offer has a $500 sign-up bonus after spending $15,000 in the first 12 months which is quite a long time to knock out spend. The card is a 2% cash-back card for up to $50,000 in spend per year, which is a big shrug for me. Personally I prefer the Blue Business Plus card which earns Membership Rewards instead. (Thanks to SagittaandiEstVita on reddit)

2. I missed this in December but there’s a Best Western 50% back on hotel stays through February 6. Normally I consider Best Western hotels to be a slight step up from Econolodge hotels, in that I don’t expect a fire to break out during the course of a normal stay. That said, there’s value to be had in Best Western Premier and Signature hotels in high cost markets. The Lazy Traveller has a great writeup on more sweet-spots in the program too. If you have dangling Best Western points that you never think about (this very much describes me), now is a great time to burn them.

PS: Notice how I didn’t write about the Citi DoubleCash changes? That’s because there’s effectively no real difference so don’t waste your time reading long articles about it.

Happy Thursday!

A typical weekday at a Best Western. As advertised, it’s not on fire.

A few quick hits for today:

1. Sign up for a free baby registry through Babylist via the AA shopping portal and earn 1,000 bonus miles. Of course you should do this for everyone in your family with an AAdvantage account too. The whole process took me about a minute and the miles posted the next day.

2. If you have an American Express offer on a business card for $75 back at Verizon after spending $75, sign up for a new Verizon Prepaid line via the AA shopping portal for 6,200 AA miles at a minimal cost.

The “Unlimited” bring your own device prepaid plan with Mobile Hotspot came out to just about $78 for me when taxes were included, so the net cost is about $3, and I got a notification from AmEx about redeeming my offer a few hours after the purchase. I’ll cancel the plan in about 15 days after the miles have posted. (In case you want a treatise on this deal, see Frequent Miler)

Bonus: I got a new phone number that I can port somewhere else as part of another deal, probably for an iPhone SE because, well, trust me when I say that you can never have enough Apple Wallets around.

3. There is a new targeted no lifetime language (NLL) business gold card offer at this link courtesy of the venerable @nutella. The bonus is 90,000 Membership Rewards after $10,000 in spend and another 10,000 Membership Rewards for adding an employee card and spending $1,000 on that card. As usual, if you get a blank page after logging in and clicking on the link, you’re not eligible.

4. Register at this link for a 8,000 Choice points after two stays by March 12. Yes, Econolodge is one of Choice’s brands and even if the nights were free I wouldn’t stay at an Econolodge twice for 8,000 points. I could however find myself staying at a hotel in the Choice Ascend collection now that Citi ThankYou Points transfer to Choice at 1:2.

A typical weekday at Econolodge.

What started out as a slow weekend turned into a landslide:

1. In September there was a backdoor way to turn an American Express Clear credit into $100 in United TravelBank credit through a promotion for a new Clear account. The offer is now back, and it’s still a way to turn a Clear statement credit into a quick TravelBank hundo. The caveats:

  • The $100 TravelBank credit expires after six months
  • You have to fly United or United Express to pay for airfare with TravelBank funds
  • TravelBank funds can’t be used to pay for therapy or liquor, even on a United flight

Last time you didn’t actually need to complete enrollment at an airport for the $100 credit to show up in your account, likely it’ll be no different this time.

2. Check your Chase Offers for 10% or 15% back up to $37 for charges at a Hyatt property from now through Valentine’s day.

3. The demise of the Citi Premier 80,000 points bonus has been greatly overstated. You can still find it at this link, and don’t forget that you can get this bonus multiple times as long as you space your applications out by more than 8 days and you hit the bonus spending threshold after all of your applications are in.

4. Since around Christmas time reports have surfaced that the American Express Blue Business Plus card has been eligible for the 1.9 Million Membership Rewards offer for adding employee cards (20,000 points per employee card that meets the minimum threshold spend, up to 99 employees). To see if you’re eligible, you’ll have to call American Express and ask if there are any offers for adding employees to your card.

The Blue Business Plus variant of this offer is better than the Business Platinum variant though, because the threshold for earning 20,000 bonus Membership Rewards is $2,000 in spend versus the $4,000 spend requirement on the Business Platinum. If you maximize this deal it becomes a 12x everywhere offer for up to $50,000 in spend and 11x everywhere for the remaining $49,000 in spend, wowza.

5. The Free-quent Flyer has an excellent post on how to match your Hyatt status to MGM Resorts MLife gold status, and the instructions clock in at seven words. I admire the brevity.

Pictured: The weekend news dump.

1. Check your Chase personal credit cards at this link for a Q1 spending bonus. Offers have been seen on both co-branded cards and Ultimate Rewards earning personal cards, but none have been reported on the business side. Some examples:

  • 5x at Amazon, Grocery, and Restaurants up to $1,500 in spend
  • 5% cash back on at grocery stores up to $200 in spend
  • $50 back after 15 purchases each month, up to three months
  • 5% cash back at gyms up to $50 cash back

If you get an error message or a blank page, going incognito in your browser will usually fix it.

2. The best way to cash out Dell credits on American Express Business Platinum cards for most of us has been to buy Xbox gift cards for resale, and for essentially all of last year you could get 10% off of one gift card (per purchase) using the promotion code XBOX10 which made your effective cash-out rate even better. That code finally died, but a new one surfaced: GAME10

Note that when Dell starts cancelling your orders (they will eventually no matter what you buy), there are workarounds. Perhaps the simplest and also most annoying is to call the sales office at (877) 717-3355 and place an order over the phone.

3. Delta Air Lines has:

  • Extended existing travel credits and upgrade certificates through Dec 31, 2023
  • Made current tickets and newly booked tickets in 2022 valid through the end of 2024

Delta travel credits are particularly useful for cashing out American Express Platinum airline incidentals, so this is a nice change. (Book a ticket that costs a little less than your travel credit dollar amount + $200 and AmEx will see it as an incidental)

Dell’s order verification team for Xbox gift cards.

Because American Express is still on its New Year’s bender, it’s given us a couple of tidbits related to the crazy offer for up to 1.9 million Membership Rewards points that surfaced in fall 2021 for Business Platinum cards. (Refresher: $4,000 spend on an employee card gives 20,000 bonus points, and you can have up to 99 employee cards per Business Platinum card):

1. According to multiple AmEx call center representatives, the offer on Business Platinum cards is scheduled to be available through late April. Of course that could change at any time so don’t treat it that as your reason to procrastinate.

2. An anonymous friend let me know that there’s a similarly structured offer on his Delta Gold Business card offer for 5,000 SkyMiles for $1,000 in spend, per employee card. Chris let me know that an identical offer was present on his Delta Reserve Business card too, effectively making both of these deals 6x SkyMiles up to $99,000 in spend.

As we learned in the 2021 recap, this offer doesn’t show up online and you have to call and ask about it to enroll, because reasons. So, if you have Delta business cards or any other American Express business cards, when you’ve got a moment give the number on the back of your card a call and say “Are there any offers for adding employees to this card?”

I’m still not sure who’s actually running the show over at AmEx, but wow guys, keep it coming.

American Express’s CEO barking clucking out orders for new card member promotions.

1. People that know me well know that I like to mentally explore bad ideas even if I wouldn’t do them, and this item definitely falls into that category. So I don’t recommend you do this, but if you have both a Chase Sapphire Reserve and a Chase Freedom Visa you can come out ahead with $600 in travel credits on the $550 annual fee every year. To do so:

  • Spend your Sapphire Reserve $300 travel credit
  • Downgrade your Sapphire Reserve to a Freedom Visa for a prorated annual fee refund
  • Upgrade your other Freedom Visa to a Sapphire Reserve, pay a prorated annual fee
  • Spend your new Sapphire Reserve $300 travel credit

I think that there’s a distinct possibility that shenanigans like this will get you axed by Chase and I wouldn’t do it, but it’s worth illustrating because the same thing will probably work at other banks with other products that you care a lot less about, and learning the trick could come in handy in the future. (Thanks to discussion over at reddit for pushing me in the right direction)

2. Reader Mark passed along a 2022 version of the American Express Pay Over Time offer for 20,000 points, make sure you check all of your charge cards for eligibility. Additionally, make sure you’ve disabled Pay Over Time on your charge cards at this link to have a shot at being targeted in the future if you weren’t on this round.

As with most (but not all) American Express bonuses, plan on holding the card for 12 months if you take a Pay Over Time bonus offer.

American Express and Chase are like two peas in a pod hotdogs in a bun.

It’s great to vibe with the flow after the slow week between Christmas and New Years. Here are five interesting things that came up over the weekend:

1. Seth from wandr.me and the Dots, Lines, and Destinations podcast has released a tool that I’ll be using a lot: Where the Widebodies Are. This tool lets you search through airline schedules for where widebody (two-aisle) aircraft are flying domestically. I prefer widebody aircraft because:

  • They often have lie-flat business class seats and quite a few of them for upgrades
  • They often have large premium economy cabins (like domestic first class seats)
  • Typically the outsides of the aircraft are two seats wide in economy, so no middle seats
  • They’re smoother than lighter single-aisle aircraft

2. I’ve had multiple readers tell me that they can’t get PayPal Key, and the old tricks for getting it on your account stopped working over the summer. Fortunately, there’s a new trick for getting PPK:

(Thanks to Agile.Travel for pointing me to this post at reddit)

3. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard (a MEAB Unsung Hero) has a targeted great offer to ring in the new year: 15% back on gas, grocery, and restaurants each month for January, February, and March. The minimum spend each month to trigger the offer is $500, and the maximum spend for 15% back is $600. Over three months, that’s $270 back in statement credits. Talk about a nice hit for a no-annual fee card.

Look for the targeted link in your inbox, the subject for mine was “Matthew, your new offer is here. But only for a limited time.  Activate now.“

4. Stockpile is still allowing fee-free purchases of up to $1,000 in stock gift cards per day per email address with a credit card, but the annual limit (per email/IP/cookie) is $2,000 .

5. The Target RedCard $80 back ($40 online and $40 in-store) for opening a new RedCard debit or RedCard credit card deal is back through January 15. Both cards definitely have their uses, and notably can be churned. Just make sure you wait at least three business days between closing and reopening to avoid any speed bumps. You can read more about why this is useful with Target Redcard Hacks.

Running with the cool kids was never more purple.