When you’re traveling internationally, carrying a debit card that doesn’t charge foreign transaction fees or currency conversion fees, and that offers reimbursements on ATM operator fees is the second chapter of travel hacking 101. I conducted a non-scientific poll to see which card travel hackers prefer, and tallied the results from 10 probably made up respondents:
8/10: Charles Schwab debit
1/10: Random credit union debit card
1/10: MEAB always spills too much or never enough
If you run a survey of popular travel blogs, you’ll find the same general distribution. The Schwab debit card is generally considered the gold standard, but regularly you’ll find stories about the card being fraud locked while you’re trying to use it. Those fraud locks require a call to Schwab to iron out, and while they’re quick, the friction is real.
There’s a better way though: Enable Schwab SMS account alerts, and rather than getting a fraud lock, you’ll get an SMS alert when an ATM transaction happens and you’ll be able to respond and clear the alert when Schwab suspects fraud. To enable:
Enable SMS and/or Push-notifications at Profile → Alert Settings. Just don’t confuse this with Profile → Alerts which is different somehow, duh.
Happy Wednesday!
Kermit demonstrates a different hangover recovery technique.
The major airline shopping portals have a big holiday bonus promotion before black Friday, all of which are more lucrative than typical:
– AA: 4,000 extra AAdvantage miles with $1,600+ through November 17 – Alaska: 1,500 extra MileagePlan miles with $650+ through November 18 – Delta: 2,000 extra SkyMiles with $1000+ through November 18 – Southwest: 4,000 extra Rapid Rewards with $1,000+ through November 24 – United: 5,000 extra MileagePlus miles with $1,200+ through November 22
– 150,000 Shop Your Way points with $1,500 spend through December 31 – 10% statement credit with $350-$400 spend in utilities each month through January (total $120) – $125 statement credit $600 spend in utilities, each month through January (total $375)
My offer was stolen out of my glove by rabid baseball fans this month, or at least I assume that’s what happened. (Thanks to GoBolts, SPX, BrandonV, IAD_Flyer, and birt)
I suppose an American with status in Air Canada could match too with a sleight of hand, and for the right use case Platinum is absolutely worth $499 CAD. I mean, what could that possibly be in US dollars? $20? $25? Yes I could look it up, but [insert excuse here].
I’m also seeing limited availability promotional business class awards from Seattle and Denver, the only two cities I bothered to check, for 50,000 FlyingBlue miles each direction.
– 30,000 Membership Rewards with $2,000 at ANA – $100 statement credit after $500+ with Delta – $250 statement credit after $1,000+ with Delta – $75 statement credit after $300+ at US and Europe Destination by Hyatt properties
The easiest hotel play is to buy a gift card at the front desk. For airlines, it’s figuring out how to refund to a travel bank or travel wallet for future use. Gamers may find more lucrative options too.
Happy Monday!
More outsized value: Multi-country soda arbitrage.
Last week we had a brief interlude about how an unredeemed point is worth nothing. It’s definitely true, but there’s a corollary for travel hackers:
Outsized Value Requires a Baseline Stash of Points
Chapter 6 Title from MEAB’s fictitious book, “Churning, Travel Hacking, and Selected Croissant Recipes”
Most bank points can be converted to cash for around 1 to 1.5 cents each, and most airline points have a baseline value in the same ballpark too. With that metric it’s easy to say that a credit card sign-up bonus of 90,000 points is worth somewhere around $900 to $1,450.
When you get a stash of points, it’s almost never a bad idea to cash out, invest that cash or use it in your velocity roll, and start earning a new stash. Then the value of your cashed out points grows with other investments.
You can take cashing out too far though. What if, for example, you’re in Germany on vacation and looking to fly home in the nose of a 747-800 in Lufthansa First? You could buy a ticket for over $10,000, or if you’re lucky you can grab a First Class award ticket for about 90,000 points with Avianca Lifemiles; but only if you haven’t cashed out all of your points. That redemption is rather outsized at more than 10 cents per point in replacement cost value, obviously more than the 1 to 1.5 cents value on a cashing-out basis.
It’s easy to see a strategy emerge: Keep a baseline of points big enough to meet your short term travel needs, and cash out the rest. What does short term mean? That depends on how quickly you earn points I suppose.
Happy Thursday!
A sample recipe from “Churning, Travel Hacking, and Selected Croissant Recipes”.
Major US and European airlines will usually tinker with published schedules until about two months prior to departure, and most also let you switch to another flight or get a free refund when the schedule changes or a flight is cancelled. That leads to a game, especially when you can cancel tickets for little to no penalty if your game doesn’t work:
When you’re booking travel far out and your preferred date and time costs too much, book a flight that will likely have a schedule change so that you can switch to the expensive, ideal flight instead.
The Mechanics
How do you know which flights are most likely to have a schedule change? Look at both current flights and historical flights on a site like FlightRadar24 or FlightAware to see what an airline usually flies, then look for flights in the future with different schedules. Alternatively, take a look at what they’re selling in the near future and extrapolate.
For example, let’s say you want to fly from Salt Lake City, UT to Boise, ID on a Sunday. Currently, scheduled non-stop flights on Delta for Sundays in July leave at:
8:06 AM
11:00 AM
3:45 PM
10:50 PM
In Spring of 2025, the schedule looks almost the same:
8:45 AM
11:00 AM
3:35 PM
5:54 PM
11:00 PM
But, the schedule has a smoking gun – that 5:54 PM flight doesn’t currently exist, and it probably won’t exist by the time Spring 2025 rolls around (#RemindMeOfThisPostIn2025). When that flight is inevitably cancelled, you’ll be able to switch to another day, a different flight on the same day, or if you’ve really got rizz, perhaps even switch to a different airport.
What Could go Wrong?
There are of course caveats:
Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results
Holidays mess up schedules
Football games and major concerts lead to one-off flights
Lubbock only has once daily frequencies
The best news is that you can probably play this game with three or four airlines at minimum, so you’ve got multiple shots at getting your way.
Good luck and happy Wednesday!
Honorary travel hacking shirt awarded only to those that can turn an SLC-BOI schedule change into an LAX-HNL flight.
Very few companies have a monolithic technology stack. That means you’ll often find different behavior with:
Mobile apps versus a website
Older terminal hardware versus newer hardware
Android apps versus iOS apps
Version 1.0 versus version 1.1
Ok cool. How about a few specific examples?
FlyingBlue will show different pricing and availability on AirFrance’s site than KLM’s
Turkish Airlines fails to ticket some itineraries on desktop, but they’re easily bookable in the app
Older Walmart terminals behave differently than newer terminals
Some Kroger registers auto-drain cards, others won’t
Old school bill payment platforms charge different fees based on what you use to start a payment
Ok, cool again. Now why should you care?
Different technologies get different results, which leads to conflicting data points. Not all conflicts are easily explained by different technology stacks, but a surprising number are
Fees, funding methods, and functionality often differ. Can’t get that payment to go through on the desktop? Maybe hit up the mobile app. Mobile app doesn’t work? How about the prior version?
Let’s say you’re trying to get home to Los Angeles from Munich in a premium cabin, and the cheapest award flight:
MUC-FRA-LAX: 155,000 United MileagePlus miles
One of the simplest easy ways to access much more business and first class international award inventory and save miles in the process is to book a positioning flight, where you fly to another airport on one ticket and then start your award travel itinerary. For example, you might find:
MUC-AMS: 4,500 Virgin Atlantic points
AMS-LAX: 60,000 FlyingBlue points
At the surface level, 60,000+4,500 points for the second itinerary is much less than 155,000 miles for the first itinerary. But as you dig deeper, the second one has its own set of issues that might mean the savings isn’t worth it because you’re on two separate itineraries, which means:
You’re on your own if you misconnect
You can’t check your bags all the way from Munich to LAX
Schedule changes on one airline might torpedo your whole trip
There’s probably not opportunity to route around weather events
Any of those things could mean you lose out on that 60,000 point redemption, and you’ll end up trying to find a last minute ticket to LAX that costs quite a bit more.
The wisdom? Sometimes it’s cheaper to spend 155,000 points than it is to spend 64,500 points, but sometimes it’s not.
First, let’s look look at the 90th and 95th percentile for arrival delays by marketing carrier (or, in other words, how many minutes past scheduled arrival captures 90% or 95% of all carrier arrivals)? Note that this includes regional jets operated by partner airlines like SkyWest, Endeavor, and United Express.
Marketing Carrier
90th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
95th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
American Airlines
51
83
Alaska Airlines
31
53
JetBlue
83
138
Delta
31
63
Frontier
73
120
Hawaiian
34
54
Spirit
66
113
United
43
85
Southwest
36
62
2023 Arrival statistics by marketing carrier.
I’m most surprised by JetBlue here, given that to have a 95% chance of arriving in time for your connection, you need to pad your connection time by nearly 2 hours and 20 minutes. On the other hand, I wrote this on a JetBlue flight that was delayed by about 3 ½ hours, so I guess confirmed? Well played JetBlue.
Operating Carrier Arrival Stats
Now, let’s look at the same thing for major airlines flying mainline aircraft, excluding any regional jets, since often we’re able to avoid regional jets for positioning flights or connections and historically they don’t perform as well:
Marketing Carrier
90th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
95th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
AA
51
97
Alaska
31
55
JetBlue
83
138
Delta
31
66
Frontier
73
120
Hawaiian
34
54
Spirit
66
113
United
43
85
Southwest
36
62
2023 Arrival statistics by operating carrier, major airlines.
Note that AA’s operation has worse (!) performance when its regional partner airlines are excluded from the statistics and we only consider mainline flights. I had to go triple check this data because wow, that sucks AA.
What about data for the regionals only, when they’re operating on behalf of one of the majors?
Marketing Carrier
90th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
95th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
Endeavor
27
63
CommuteAir
36
82
GoJet
40
80
Envoy
32
62
PSA
32
70
SkyWest
32
70
Piedmont
25
62
Horizon
22
45
Mesa
68
129
Republic
23
53
Air Wisconsin
61
114
2023 Arrival statistics by operating carrier, regional airlines operating for another carrier.
My mental model for regional jet carriers is usually: avoid GoJet and Mesa, SkyWest is most likely to get you there. The data proves that’s only somewhat correct for 2023 though.
Major Hub Arrival Statistics
Ok, but what about a given hub? We all know that some function better than others, so let’s look at arrival delays at the top 15 airports by total number of commercial flights, plus one bonus airport.
Airport
90th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
95th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
ATL
33
71
DEN
44
86
ORD
41
86
DFW
46
94
CLT
38
83
LAX
39
74
LAS
50
85
SEA
27
53
PHX
37
70
LGA
43
85
MCO
63
109
IAH
44
92
EWR
48
93
DCA
36
73
BOS
56
102
SFO
47
84
JFK
56
107
LBB
44
81
2023 Arrival statistics by airport, ordered by total number of air carrier flights in 2023.
So I guess avoid positioning flights to Orlando, Boston, or JFK if you can help it.
Also for fun, these are the worst airports for delays:
Airport
90th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
95th Percentile Arrival Delay (minutes)
PVU
87
160
PSE
93
152
BQN
86
137
SFB
73
130
TTN
83
129
2023 Arrival statistics by airport, ordered by biggest 95th percentile arrival delays.
We can dissect this data in a million different ways, but we know winter storms make things worse and summer thunderstorms don’t help either. So let’s look at when you’re most likely to be delayed, by month.
So, build extra time in for positioning flights in June and July.
What about breaking this down by day of the week?
The takeaway here is probably that the day of week doesn’t matter much, unless it’s Tuesday.
Conclusion
If you’re interested in seeing the raw CSV data (which ended up in an SQL database), let me know, I’m happy to share. Otherwise, good luck on those award flights!
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)
