Yesterday’s Change

Yesterday, AirFrance and KLM’s FlyingBlue program devalued its low level awards (again). Long haul prices on KLM or AirFrance:

  • Economy: 25,000 miles each way, up from 20,000 miles
  • Premium economy: 40,000 miles each way, up from 35,000 miles
  • Business: 60,000 miles each way, up from 50,000 miles
  • La Premiere: 165,000 miles each way, up from 150,000 miles

Partner award prices went up somewhat too. The change was intentional, and in theory will also bring increased award availability on first party metal.

Devaluations Will Happen

Unfortunately, devaluations will continue over time in all programs because:

  • Inflation in consumer prices means more points earned for buying the same things with a credit card
  • Inflation in hotel and airfare prices means more points are awarded for revenue bookings
  • For airlines, CASM inflates over time, and providing an award seat costs more over time
  • For hotels, CPOR inflates over time, so providing free nights costs more over time
  • Decreasing the value of issued points lowers liabilities on a company’s balance sheet

The only way devaluations won’t happen is with regulation, but (a) that’s unlikely to come, and (b) would just cause a different type of devaluation, such as no award space released.

Protecting Yourself

To effectively shield yourself from devaluations to the extent that such a thing is possible:

  • Book awards as early as possible: Points on average are worth more now than they will be in the future, so lock in current pricing when you can
  • Book speculative awards with spare points: As long as a program offers free cancelations, you can lock in current pricing and cancel if the trip won’t work out (or if a lower price comes along)
  • Don’t save more points than you can reasonably burn in the next n months: Saving points that will decrease in value probably isn’t fiscally sound, just like eating a tub of lard probably isn’t nutritionally sound. Ok, but what value should you use for n? It’s hard to say, but I think the half-life of devaluations is around 24 months with some medium variance
  • (A corollary to the prior item) Cash out excess points, especially those you can’t burn in the next n months: Cashed out points turn into cash, which: earns interest, can be invested, and can be used to buy more miles if you cashed out too many. It turns out, money is fungible

Good luck out there!

Next time on Tuesday Wisdom: Elmo’s airplane explains RASM.

EDITOR’S NOTE: No, it wasn’t anything to do with daylight savings time, it was the AM/PM thing with yesterday’s post. You can find it here if you never saw it once fixed. Actually, you can find it there whether or not you saw it once fixed.

  1. The Chase Hyatt cards have increased bonuses through March 6:

    – Personal: 35,000 points with $3,000 spend in three months plus 2x points on unbounded spend for six months, up to $15,000 spend
    – Business: 60,000 points after $5,000 spend in three months, and a Category 1-4 free night certificate after $15,000 spend in six months

    Both of these have some utility, but the business one is a clear winner if you can make use of a Category 1-4. I can always make use of them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not annoying.
  2. On Wednesday we discussed Choice Hotel devalued redemptions, and apparently that was an oopsie on Choice’s part, much like when Bilt accidentally sent shutdown letters to many of its cardholders that weren’t shut down.

    Prices were supposed to revert to normal yesterday, but some European and Asian properties have redemptions with half the regular points needed, so I guess we discovered the mythical loyalty program de-devaluation and ended up better than we were before. This is probably an accident to though, which (accidentally) seems to be Choice’s 2025 modus operandi.
  3. Giant Food, Stop & Shop, and Giant/Martins stores have 2x points on Vanilla Visa gift cards through Thursday, limit $1,500 – $2,000 per account depending on the chain. (Thanks to RabbMD)
  4. Wells Fargo has a $2,500 bonus for opening or upgrading to a Premier Checking account and bringing $250,000 in new assets within 45 days through February 25. Investment accounts and IRAs count, so you can ACATS transfer funds from another brokerage into a Wells Fargo investment account without a taxable event.

    Coincidentally, $250,000 in linked accounts is what you need to avoid monthly service fees too. (Thanks to DoC)

Have a nice weekend, and watch for tomorrow’s guest post!

Even Choice Hotel plumbers accidentally did their work.

  1. Do this now: Check for spending bonuses on your Chase Ultimate Rewards earning cards. I’d check each card in a new private browser tab to avoid error messages after one or two cards. We’ve seen:

    – 10,000 points on $400+ or $500+ in flights, rental cards, cruises, or activities
    – 20,000 points on $500+ in hotels

    These require booking through the Chase portal.
  2. Alaska has a fare sale on flights booked today for travel between January 28 and March 19:

    – Short haul: 4,000 miles
    – West coast to and from Hawaii: 7,500 miles
    – Long haul: 10,000 miles

    I usually call these the best sales that no-one talks about, but for some reason people are talking about it this time. Success! 🎉 (Thanks to FM)
  3. Breeze also has sale for 40% off of base fares on flights booked by tomorrow night for travel between January 14 and September 2 with promo code LOCKIN.

    It’s been awhile since we’ve played Breeze route bingo, but we can fix that today. Today’s Breeze bingo route is: Scranton-Fort Meyers! Congrats to today’s bingo winners.
  4. American Express offers has an offer for $100 off of $500+ or $200 off of $1,000+ in Delta Airlines airfare through March 31. Gamers gonna game, and the easiest of all of the games is to book a non-basic economy flight, wait 24 hours, then refund to a travel credit for future use. More complex games may yield better results.
  5. Korean Air first class award space is now available and has been since at least January 3 for the first time since 2020, and I missed it when talking about airline mergers on Monday. First class awards are 80,000 SkyPass miles each way from the US to Asia, so this could be the reason you need to transfer miles from Marriott Bonvoy to Asiana in anticipation of Asiana Club miles converting to Korean SkyPass miles this Summer.

January 2025 Breeze Airways Bingo prize: This paper airplane

There are a couple of interesting airline mergers that were approved in late 2024:

Both are potentially even more interesting than watching a stampede of turtles overrun a Wendy’s drive through.

Lufthansa and ITA

Lufthansa has already said that ITA’s Volare frequent flyer program will be merged into Miles & More, and elite status will transfer too. I expect that by Q3 the frequent flyer programs will integrate, though that’s not set in stone. When the integration happens it means:

  • If you status match to ITA, it’ll probably turn into foreign Star Alliance status (UPDATE: The status match seems dead)
  • ITA Volare miles will probably turn into Miles & More miles

Foreign Star Alliance Gold status will get you access to the United Club when flying United domestically, free-checked bags, priority boarding, and a few lesser benefits.

ITA Volare is an interesting program because partner earning is based on class of service and mileage flown, not on ticket price. That means with really cheap Delta or Aeromexico tickets, you can mileage run way your way into Lufthansa Miles & More miles which can be used to redeem for Swiss Air First Class; the trad mileage run, it turns out, isn’t dead yet.

Korean and Asiana

Asiana never really recovered from COVID-era cutbacks, and its reputation was already suffering after the crash of Asiana 214 even before COVID. Facing Asiana’s bankruptcy, the Korean government approved a merger and EU regulators did in November too, leading to the deal closing last month. You’ve heard what this means before in another song:

  • If you have elite status Asiana, it’ll probably turn into foreign SkyTeam status this year
  • Asiana Club miles will likely be absorbed into the Korean SkyPass mileage program this year

Asiana doesn’t status match, so if you don’t already have status there I can’t help you much. But, turning Asiana Club miles into Korean SkyPass miles is really interesting, because:

  • Korean SkyPass doesn’t have major bank or hotel transfer partners
  • Marriott Bonvoy can transfer to Asiana Club miles at a 3:1 ratio (or even better in increments of 60,000 Bonvoy points)
  • Korean SkyPass members can standby for mileage upgrades to International First
  • Korean’s Business class award chart is extremely reasonable for off-peak awards

Keep your eyes open for Bonvoy transfer bonuses, there’s opportunity here in 2025.

Happy Monday friends!

Next time: McGold status arbitrage for fun and profit.

Introduction

It’s time for MEAB’s annual New Year tradition! Before we jump in to the regular short-form blog posts that litter the ground like glitter in a stadium after a Taylor Swift concert: A recap of travel hacking and manufactured spend in the last year with the most sophisticated, Shakespearean, high-brow form of story telling known to the modern world (checks notes, furrows brow): Animated GIFs.

Previous versions of the New Years special:

The GIFening

Is it “GIF” with a hard G like “girl”, or with a soft G like “jiffy”? Obviously there’s a right answer, anyhoodles, let’s dive in with the intensity of the Spirit airlines stock price dive in November.


We started out January 2024 wishing for a Technotronic inspired aircraft livery at KLM, which frankly set the stage for 2024 in so many ways; 2024 was poised to be the best year yet, and Technotronic was bound to break the top 40 again.


Reality came fast and dashed our dreams though, with American Express telling us in January that 40 products would be retooled in the coming year, and that Technotronic hadn’t done anything new for over 15 years.


United raised the cost of Lufthansa First and ANA First redemptions, the latter doubling in price. That’s ok though, we can just fly business class, right?


Then we tried flying Lufthansa Business Class, and well, uh, this P2 says it best.



Spirit Airlines executives react to the blocked merger, get ready to get back to work.


Southwest had its own crisis when Elliott Management became a majority shareholder and demanded major changes and new fees at Southwest. Probably in the name of altruism?


In the credit card space, the shrewd Goldman Sachs reacted to its massive Apple Card losses.


Based on language in the Terms and Conditions, it looked like the American Express Business Platinum $400 annual Dell credits would be going away at the end of 2024.


Then, we, uhhh, “celebrate” that they’re coming back in 2025.


On the other hand, churning Business Platinums and getting 99 employee cards with sign-up bonuses kept going all through 2024, marking more than three consecutive years of the employee sign-up bonus game.


American Express dropped a December surprise with the addition of $50 quarterly credits at Hilton properties on the Business Platinum card. It doesn’t move the needle, but hey, it doesn’t hurt.


Synapse collapses, leaving Yotta and Juno accounts in limbo and ultimately costing consumers than $85 Million in lost deposits.


In the first days after the Synapse collapse, community “experts” come out of the woodwork to tell us that no one is going to lose money based on solid evidence and “something something FDIC”.


Meanwhile, Bilt accidentally sent shutdown notices to many of its card holders, even though they weren’t shutdown.



Chase opened new Sapphire Lounges which are some of the best lounges in the US, but then blew the goodwill by removing its Priority Pass restaurant benefit.


The biggest Buyer’s Group spenders spent 24 hours straight, awake in front of the computer on Black Friday.


Travel hackers made their first transfer of Membership Rewards to Alaska MileagePlan via the Hawaiian airlines integration.


American Express sees massive restaurant spend after floosies learn to cycle millions while dining out, decides to take action.


The American Express Gold card gets a $50,000 annual dining 4x spend capacity, and AmEx executives rejoice.


They also instituted a one million Membership Rewards cash-out annual cap at 1.1 cents per point on the Schwab Platinum card, and they called us names while doing it.


SideshowBob233 (pictured in costume) reacts to churners on his flight that have Chase deposit accounts.


Mesa executives wait for sufficient time to pass between a bad MEAB post and their impending launch.


MEAB (pictured on the right side) at a travel hacking conference meets other bloggers.


A churner finds a way out of pop-up jail.


And after getting out of pop-up jail, the churner realizes it may be repeatable.


MEAB does another math post (or two), tries to show off.


We rode high on cash-back debits in early 2024.


A few of those plays died, but we found workarounds, we just needed to think outside the box.


Kudos raced with shopping portals for payouts.


Virgin Atlantic became relevant with the introduction of the Virgin Credit card and its perks, some payment fun, and the introduction of dynamic pricing.


Critics review MEAB.


SAS announces a promotion to earn a million miles for flying on 15 different SkyTeam partners in Q4, travel hackers react.


SAS realizes people are taking their promotion seriously, and races to build its SkyTeam integration with quirky airlines.


Readers try and follow the hints in MEAB wisdom posts.


Botting several key deals made the money flow.


Tallying Carl’s 2024 earnings, prolly.


MEAB’s P2 flies Lufthansa First class for the first time.


Pepper Saga Part I:
Getting unlimited 10% off of Walmart, BestBuy, and Sam’s Club cards (Q1-Q2).


Pepper Saga Part II:
Unlimited 10% stops working, but new, daily targeted promotions start working after a hiccup or two.


Pepper Saga Part III:
Gift card resale rates fall in slow motion due to oversupply.


Pepper Saga Part IV:
A pitch deck for new investors claiming a total addressable market of $6 trillion, approximately 23% of the US GDP.


Pepper Saga Part V:
The company gives unlimited 20% off of Amazon and Walmart gift cards for a day and is probably nearly out of money.


Pepper Saga Part VI:
A Q1 2025 preview (Probably)


Pepper Saga Part VII:
(space left intentionally blank)


“Seat 21A? I didn’t know first class went back this far.”

“Oh no.”


[4 and 1/2 hours later after touchdown in seat 21A]


2024 finally redeems itself when Technotronic rewrote “Pump Up the Jam” for Bob’s Burgers in late 2024, proving to us that Belgium’s flagship band still has a chance at a KLM livery.

Happy 2025 friends!

The Stunt

Sometimes travel hackers get stuck with a ticket that’s got a cancellation fee (I’m looking at you and your stupid $75 award ticket redeposit fee FlyingBlue) or a ticket that simply isn’t cancellable for any fee even if you’re Steve Buscemi (actually, especially if you’re Steve Buscemi). You’ve got two choices if your plans change and you’re not going to take one of those flights:

  • Pay the fee to cancel if you can, or just eat the ticket cost if you can’t
  • Play the odds and hope that you don’t need to do either of the above

Playing the odds means waiting for the airline to offer free changes or refunds due to one of:

When one of those things happens you won’t be taking off for Lubbock, but instead you’re headed to refund-town (but you’ve probably got to request the refund from the airline, and in some cases before departure). The odds aren’t great though; at best the chances of this working are somewhere between 1/6 and 1/10, unless you own a pregnant turtle.

The Gotchas

There are a few ways this can malfunction:

  • You forget to cancel before the cancellation window expires after the game didn’t work, which matters especially with programs like Virgin Atlantic that require you to cancel before the check-in window opens
  • You don’t request a refund in a timely manner from the airline
  • The airline disagrees about what a significant delay is (but 2+ hours is usually sufficient)

Personally I put a reminder in my phone for an hour before the flight or cancellation window, whichever comes first, to figure out whether the stunt is going to work and to pay the cancellation fee if I can and it didn’t.

Good luck!

AA’s new Flagship First catering meal concept: “playing chicken with an airline”. They’ll end up cutting the ketchup at launch for cost savings though.

Introduction

One of my favorite travel tools is seats.aero, a site that shows you inventory for award flight redemption availability across about a dozen mileage programs. It’s got limitations in that data is only available for certain routes, award discounts for elites and card holders aren’t included, data isn’t refreshed for hours or days depending on which searches have been run, and plenty of other small things too. But the tool is perfect for illustrating a concept in churning and travel hacking: By finding your perfect redemption, sometimes you also find someone else’s perfect redemption.

Background

I was looking for space to open on an international First award, and while I generally knew about when award space opened up on the potential routes that I wanted to fly, I wanted to fine-tune the timing with fresh data-points. So, a few weeks before when I thought the route would open:

  • I looked for where inventory was opening up on the routes I might take, using seats.aero and a couple of airline partner’s mileage programs
  • I saw that the routes I wanted usually opened up the morning US time, and usually 3-5 days out
  • I also saw that seats.aero wouldn’t see inventory right away, exactly as expected given how it works

My takeaway was that at five days out, I needed to search for the inventory I wanted every couple of waking hours, but especially in the morning.

The Ouchee

Starting five days out, here’s what happened:

  • T-5: No inventory
  • T-4: No inventory
  • T-3: No inventory

I did have a backup flight booked on British Airways, so there wasn’t a concern about getting home, but it’s British Airways. So late on the evening of T-3, let’s call it approximately T-2.5, I used seats.aero to look at business class availability on major routes from Europe to my preferred US airport to see what my best options were that weren’t British Airways.

Seats.aero showed plenty of cached results for my search, and I began investigating those on different airline websites. While I was exploring, seats.aero was running a real-time search in the background in another browser tab. I kept exploring and saw a notification from seats.aero pop-up, but because I’d just looked for space and it wasn’t there, I assumed the alert was for some other route that I was also monitoring.

Fast-forward a few minutes later to when I looked at the alert. It was for the flight and route that I wanted! So, I confirmed the space with a partner airline’s award search, then started to book it. But, the space vanished before I could complete the booking.

What happened? I’m certain that someone else had a seats.aero alert for the same route that I did, and they got the same alert after my real-time search showed that space had opened. Because I delayed by a few minutes, they got the flight before I did, and they found out about the flight because of me too.

The Band-Aid

I was annoyed at myself for a couple of minutes, but in my research I found that when one route had award availability open up, other routes usually did too. Since I’d only searched for one airport, seats.aero had only refreshed its inventory for that airport. No other alerts for other routes had likely gone out.

I searched my second best airport option, and First space was open there too. I booked that instead and got (mostly) the redemption I wanted.

The Takeaway

When you use a tool like seats.aero, PointsYeah, point.me, or Award Tool, that alerts based on the results it finds, you might trigger alerts for your competition too. When space really matters, consider skipping those tools and use airline award sites directly.

Of course the concept applies to manufactured spend, churning, and other branches of travel-hacking too, the implementation is just slightly different.

Happy hacking!

The magnitude of my ouchee.

Introduction

When snow starts falling, rental car discussion boards light up with questions like: “how do I guarantee I’ll get a four wheel drive car?”; “how do I make sure I’ll get an SUV?”; or “Help, Hertz filed a lawsuit for wrongful charges of car theft“. Yes, that last one isn’t a question, but unfortunately is real. Anyway, before we dive in to the travel-hacking side of those questions, let’s remember a few rental car basics:

  • Most car reservations are refundable
  • Most car reservations don’t have a no-show fee
  • Many car reservations don’t require a credit-card to hold
  • You can hold multiple car reservations, even at the same company

We can take throw each of the above into a blender and come up with a couple of strategies for getting a the car class you want, hopefully without paying extra.

The Strategy

The mechanics:

  1. Book cancelable reservations across several major companies
  2. Book the car class that you really want directly for 30 minutes after your original reservation
  3. Cancel the other reservations when you’ve got the car you want

When you show up at your destination, look in the company’s app or on the car lot for the type of car you want, and grab the one that has the best option. If you have multiple reservations with multiple companies, you’ll generally find something good. Assuming the best option doesn’t exist though, you can always fall back on the reservation booked in step 2. In practice, you probably won’t have to fall back often though.

Good luck friends!

Sneak preview of a future “Will it Blend?” episode: Hertz Lawsuit Papers.