Category: Shenanigans

  1. American Express Membership Rewards has a 30% transfer bonus to Virgin Atlantic through the end of May. These are best for:

    – Delta One to and from Europe in business
    – Necker Island trips
    – Air New Zealand business to and from the US

    They have decent availability on their own metal for premium cabin space too, but fuel surcharges are high so it’s usually a more useful mental model to think about those as roughly the same price as a coach ticket plus some miles for business class redemptions.
  2. Express (unrelated to the American version; also both a clothing store and a former a medium tier gift card on the resale markets) has filed for bankruptcy. It’s time to think seriously about what to do with inventory you’re holding, and to reinforce that holding inventory carries risk. (Thanks to GCG)
  3. Virgin Australia flights are now bookable with Qatar Avios at attractive rates, especially for short and medium haul economy.
  4. Kent Brockman famously said that democracy doesn’t work, and reddit added a datapoint to that debate after I declared that US Bank is the most ghetto bank. According to the popular vote, the most ghetto banks in decreasing order are:

    – Citi
    – Bank of America
    – Barclays

    US Bank didn’t even make the top three. Why is Citi less ghetto than US Bank? Because pay by phone friends, pay by phone.

US Bank’s corporate landscaping signage presents additional evidence.

In January’s earnings call, American Express said they’d be refreshing 40 products in the coming year, and we’ve already seen some of that with the Delta and Hilton co-brand cards, each of which has new, coupon-book like credits. With new credits come new games:

Monthly Resy Credits

Delta’s Platinum and Reserve co-branded cards now have a have monthly Resy dining credit. In case you don’t want to actually eat at one of those restaurants this month just to save $10-$20, there are options:

  • Buying anything at a Resy restaurant will trigger the credit, whether it’s a gift card, tee-shirt, or stuffed animal
  • Many Resy restaurants are also on Toast, and Toast sells reloadable gift cards online which usually trigger the credit (Anecdotally there’s roughly a 3/4 success rate for whether this works for any random restaurant, but once you find that restaurant, it works consistently)

SideShowBob233 subliminally let me know that there’s a burger themed bath robe sold at some restaurants, so I guess you could look for that too.

Quarterly Hilton Credits

The Hilton Aspire Resort credit has always been slightly gameable, but only slightly. The Hilton Surpass and Hilton Business cards’ new quarterly credits are more gameable though: All the Aspire methods continue to work, but so does buying physical Hilton gift cards online. Note though that Hilton will silent cancel your orders if you do a bunch back-to-back, so treat it like a marathon, not a sprint.

Happy Wednesday!

SideShowBob233 also subliminally let me know about this bath robe, so I guess you’ve got options.

  1. Do this now: Register for your personalized United MilePlay offer. I got 7,400 bonus redeemable miles with a $650+ premium fare flight booked and flown by June 7.
  2. The Citi AA Business card has an elevated 75,000 mile sign-up bonus after $5,000 spend a single purchase, and the $99 annual fee is waived the first year. Note: I tried to strip off any tracking parameters from the offer, but it wouldn’t load when they’re stripped off. As usual, I’m not here to sell you credit cards and I won’t earn anything if you use this link.

    If you thread the needle through the terms and conditions and the sign-up bonus sticks around long enough, you can get it twice in just over three months, keeping in mind that business card approvals at Citi require 91 days between applications.
  3. Office Depot / OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300 or more in Visa gift cards through Saturday. For best bang:

    – Even multiples of $300 typically offer bigger per card discounts
    – Try for multiple transactions back to back
    – Link your cards to Dosh
    – Don’t forget the American Express Business Gold $20 monthly credit
    – Look for lower fee Visas (currently, new cards are rolling out with a $7.95 activation fee)

    These are Pathward gift cards, so have a liquidation plan in place.
  4. You can make six credit card payments with your tax return or extension due today, which is a low friction way for manufactured spend provided you can float the money in case of any potential IRS holds. You get two payments each with PayUSATax [1.82%], Pay1040 [1.87%], and ACI Payments [1.98%]. The same game works with quarterly estimated taxes to scale this throughout the year.

    Usual disclaimer: I’m not a tax professional or an accountant, and you shouldn’t listen to my advice about anything, ever.
  5. Southwest has a promotion for 25% off base fares with promo code SAVE25NOW booked by this evening. There are blackout dates, and not all flights on non-blackout dates are included, but isn’t that what Wanna Get Away+ fares are for?

MEAB vibes.

Introduction

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease” plays a big part in the soft-skills needed to unlock huge velocity in manufactured spend, but it can also blind us. Today, I’d like to offer a corollary:

You tend to forget about the quiet wheels.

– Some lunatic who goes by MEAB. How do you even pronounce that?

The Squeaky Ones

Monday, Tuesday, and yesterday brought waves of PayPal shutdowns in the community, and just about every forum loosely related to manufactured spend is talking about it. We’re seeing shutdowns of:

  • Main accounts with big volume
  • Secondary accounts that share targets with shutdown main accounts
  • Secondary accounts that share names with shutdown main accounts
  • Newly created secondary accounts with even moderate volume

If you were affected, that sucks and I’m sorry. But on the flip side, what use is PayPal in 2024 for things other than manufactured spend anyway? I mean really, literally what use is it? Yes they own Venmo, but a PayPal shutdown doesn’t equal a Venmo shutdown.

The Not Squeaky Ones

There are plenty of users that aren’t shut down with PayPal yet, but that’s hard to see because they’re not jumping up and down in chat rooms and forums saying “I’m not shutdown, what do I do next?” because there’s no urgency. So, we end up hearing from a much larger proportion of squeaky wheels than silent ones.

We could leave it there, but a logical question then becomes:

What are the non-squeaky wheels doing, and what lessons can we learn from them about not being shutdown? There are a lot of answers to that question, and they probably hover around volume, dodging the ban hammer, the types of targets they choose, how often they use those targets, and the volume sent to those targets.

Bonus: Repercussions

One of my P2’s favorite manufactured spend jokes is to call the app that shouldn’t be named the floosie app (she calls all of its users floosies too, naturally). I know nothing about the current financial state of our collective floosie overlords, but I do know that mass PayPal shutdowns kill a popular liquidation channel for its users, and that means that they’re going to see a big drop-off in daily volume and probably daily profit in their ledger. Will it matter? I have no idea, but I’d suggest that now’s a good time to evaluate your risk profile for your floosie shenanigans.

Double Bonus: Brian M Brings us Back to Reality

Brian M, possibly the most cited contributor here, let me know that Southwest is opening its schedule for travel between October 3 and November 2 this morning. Booking early is a statistically better than average way to get the lowest fare possible on popular travel days with Southwest, though of course ymmv.

Next up: What about donut wheels?

NOTE: I’ll be going on a blogging vacation between December 18 and 31, during which there may or may not be any posts. But, we’ll ring in the new year on January 1, 2024 with the 2023 version of Travel Hacking as Told by GIFs though, so no need to be up in arms. What’s this “may”, you ask? I’m soliciting for guest posts and I’ll use those during the regularly scheduled newsletter. They should be non-sponsored, non-promotional, non-political, and at least travel hacking or churning adjacent. Please reach out to me if you’re interested, it’ll be the third easiest gig you’ve ever gotten!

  1. Giftcards.com has 10% off of $100 Mastercard gift cards with promo code MERRYMC10 or MERRYMC, limit three per order. As usual, try and go through a portal but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t track when you use the code. Fun fact: You’re also limited to $2,000 in e-gift cards per 48 rolling hours, even though the terms and conditions suggest the limit is only 24 hours.

    It’s a good thing you can create new email addresses though, amirite?
  2. Rakuten has a card linked offer for 2.5x Membership Rewards or 2.5% cash back on in store purchases through December 31 at Safeway and Albertsons stores. Gift cards are excluded from the promotion, but a little obscuration goes a long way.

    You’ve got to re-add this offer an hour after using it each time.
  3. Yesterday we talked about a couple of AmEx offers for spending $300 on Delta gift cards, and later in the day Delta launched a promotion for a free $20 Starbucks gift card with a $300 Delta gift card. So, obviously stack those. (Thanks to GCG)
  4. Bilt is sending targeted email to some cardholders for 1,000 bonus points per retailer for using your card for a single purchase at AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint (???), Comcast, Spectrum, Netflix, Hulu, and Xfinity, limit 5,000 total bonus points. Look for the subject: “Earn 5K bonus points this month”.

Your fourth easiest gig.

There’s a lot going on today, remember to focus on the bigger stuff and ignore the smaller stuff:

  1. H-E-B grocery stores have a $20 H-E-B gift card with the purchase of a $100 gift card in several travel related and bulk resale brands through tomorrow night, limit one per account. Your best options for resale is Home Depot, and Airbnb for travel.

    It may be worth a quick trip if you’re not already in H-E-B land if you’re confident in your ability to scale. It is possible to mint thousands of dollars quickly. (Thanks to GCG)
  2. Alaska has a paid and award ticket sale through Wednesday night. I’m seeing transcontinental flights, Hawaiian flights, and some international flights pricing at 7,500 miles each way in economy, short haul flights are showing at 4,000 miles each way in economy.

    The sale is for travel booked 21 days in advance for travel through March 9, and there are a few blackout dates in late February.
  3. The IHG mobile app has 20% off of paid hotel stays booked by tomorrow night for nights through April 30, 2024, and 15% off of points and cash stays for nights in January and February 2024.
  4. Amazon has holiday weekend shopping promotions for using a single bank point:

    – American Express 40% or 50% off
    – Chase Ultimate Reward 50% off
    – Discover 50% off
    – US Bank 50% off

    Of course you should combine these with buyers groups or gift card reselling activity when possible. If you’re not targeted for one of them, remove those cards from your profile, add them back, then wait a day and check again.
  5. Citi ThankYou Points are redeemable toward Apple e-gift cards today only with a 25% bonus (or 20% discount per Citi because they’re bad at marketing). The resale rate for Apple gift cards is well above a 20% discount making this a nice way to cash out ThankYou Points at above regular rates.
  6. Giftcards.com has 6% off of $100 Visa e-gift cards through tomorrow night with promo codes CYBER6, CYBERVISA, or VISACYBER, limit three per purchase. The limit makes it hard to get to $2,000 per rolling 48 hours but if you’re looking for cancels this is a low cost way to get there.

    These may be worth your time for American Express cards in particular, but only if you have a low cost liquidation channel, since portals are no longer tracking when a promo code is used. (Thanks to TeddyH)

The internet standard measurement of a banana for scale really isn’t big enough on cyber Monday. Instead, use comically oversized carrot for scale to filter through the madness.

  1. Staples has fee free $200 Visa gift cards in store through Saturday, limit eight per transaction. This stacks nicely with the American Express Business Gold $20 monthly office supply credit.

    These are Pathward gift cards, so have a liquidation plan in place. If your liquidation plan includes major nationwide retailers, there’s a $480 per six minute per store velocity limit.
  2. There’s a, umm let’s say “targeted”, Bank of America promotion for 5% off of ebay purchases of up to $1,000 with promo code TAKE5BOFA through December 31. The coupon has a limit of 10 uses, and presumably the limit is per ebay account. Notably you don’t need to use a Bank of America credit card to be eligible.

    The promo code isn’t working with the most obvious plays like gold bars, but you’re enterprising people right? Sometimes it makes sense to be on both sides of a transaction, just calculate the spread first. This may stack with portal cash back too. (Thanks to DAMU)
  3. It’s been just three days since we discussed the time value of points and how devaluations are one of several factors that erode the future value of loyalty currencies. Southwest decided that Veterans Day was the perfect time to illustrate the principle, announcing that points would be worth 4% less starting on January 1, 2024.

    As usual, head-on bookings with the Chase Sapphire Reserve continue to be more valuable for redemption than transferring points to Southwest and booking that way (1.5 cents plus mileage earning vs about 1.35 cents and no mileage earning), that is unless the risk premium for free cancelations and redeposits on points bookings and not dealing with flight credits is worth more than 0.15 cents per point to you.
  4. Meijer MPerks has 15,000 in points back on Choice, Happy, and One4All gift cards of $100 or more, limit one per MPerks account. Fortunately for Meijer, it’s not possible for a single person to have multiple email accounts, and therefore multiple MPerks accounts. (Thanks to GCG)
  5. There’s a targeted American Express offer for $175 back on $1,000 or more in cumulative spend with Cathay Pacific by December 31. It’s an interesting choice on AmEx’s part to make this one cumulative, almost inviting gamers to game. (Thanks to TeddyH)

Happy Monday!

An NFT sold on ebay showing the relative value Ultimate Rewards Southwest bookings compared to Rapid Rewards bookings. Limit one NFT per MPerks account.

The Past

In recent history, American Express had interesting Q4 referral bonuses released in October that stacked with regular year-round referral bonuses:

  • 2020: +3x on all purchases, uncapped
  • 2021: +4x on all purchases on $25,000 in spend
  • 2022: +4x on transit and travel on $20,000 in spend

There’s a definite trend and it’s clearly headed in the wrong direction. Which brings us to now: The current October 2023 Q4 referral bonus is +0x on all spend, uncapped.

That is, American Express seems to have decided it was too generous on the last versions and hasn’t yet released a Q4 promo for referrals, and probably won’t at this point.

The New Hotness

Rather than a referral bonus, American Express’s October 2023 surprise is a new set of offers for adding employee cards by phone to a primary business account. We’ve seen two variants, and both variants have been seen on the Blue Business Plus, the Business Green, the Business Gold, and the Business Platinum:

  • 7,000 Membership Rewards on $4,000 spend in six months per employee card
  • 15,000 Membership Rewards on $4,000 spend in six months per employee card

Each of these is good for up to 99 employee cards, which if maximized turns into 1.485 million Membership Rewards in addition to the base rewards earned for $396,000 in spend.

It’s likely that the Plum card has the offer too, but the Venn diagram intersection of churners and Plum cards is about the same as the Venn diagram of satisfied customers and the Baymont Wyndham in Lubbock: virtually non-existent.

Happy Monday friends!

Say what you will, but at least the Baymont Wyndham offers a choice of room scent.