Category: Uncategorized

Let’s start with a PSA and a disclaimer, but in reverse order: I don’t work in marketing and I have no formal training in marketing, so smart money would ignore anything I have to say about the subject. With that out of the way, dear marketers: If you want to make a splash, maybe don’t wait until the second half of the first week in colloquial summer to launch a campaign.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about some new marketing campaigns.

  1. IHG has a targeted summer promotion for double elite night credits, maximum five, through July 31. Registration is required.
  2. The American Express Delta cards have new sign-up bonuses:

    – Gold (via dummy booking): 60,000 miles + $500 credit after $3,000 spend in six months and a single Delta purchase
    – Gold: 90,000 SkyMiles after $5,000 spend in six months
    – Platinum: 100,000 SkyMiles after $6,000 spend in six months
    – Reserve: 125,000 SkyMiles after $9,000 spend in six months
    – Business Gold: 90,000 SkyMiles after $6,000 spend in six months
    – Business Platinum: 100,000 SkyMiles after $8,000 spend in six months
    – Business Reserve: 125,000 SkyMiles after $15,000 spend in six months

    These are all available via referral, except for the dummy booking version. If you’re going for one where a referral is available, use a friend’s link and make their day.
  3. The Chase Marriott Bonvoy Boundless Visa has a heightened sign-up bonus of 125,000 points and a free-night certificate worth up to 50,000 points after $3,000 spend in three months.
  4. The Rakuten portal has a $90 or 9,000 point offer for new Chase Freedom Unlimited applications, which have their own $200 or 20,000 point bonus after $500 spend in three months.

    On the subject of marketing, exactly who at Chase / Rakuten thought a guy either inhaling or exhaling a big line of smoke was exactly what the public needed to entice them to sign up for a Freedom Unlimited?
  5. The American Express Delta cards have added new benefits:

    – Gold, Platinum, and Reserve cards, both personal and business, get a second free checked bag
    – Personal Gold cards get a (lame) $10 monthly statement credit on rideshare

    One of these is objectively nice, and one seems nice but is really just more work for you.
  6. Frontier has a contest for a free Go-Wild pass and a $100 TaskRabbit promo code. Someone’s going to win these, and it might as well be one of you.

    With the previous marketing disclaimer still in full force, Frontier did a good job of making you look twice at their promo, good show. (Thanks to David)

Have a nice weekend friends!

Actually, maybe some promotions are better launched in the second half of the first week of summer. (Thanks to Lea)

  1. Do this now: Check Hyatt for new Q2 targeted promotions for:

    – 3x points on two night or longer stays
    – 2,000-10,000 bonus points per night up to five nights
    – A rock

    I got the last one.
  2. American Express Offers has a new targeted offer for Hilton card holders for +4.5x on any spend totaling at least $2,000 through August 21, limit 27,000 additional bonus points.
  3. The Wells Fargo Choice Privileges Mastercard has a 60,000 point sign-up bonus after $1,000 spend in three months. The card carries no annual fee and 3x at gas, grocery, home improvement, and phone services.

    This Choice program usually leads to a lot of questions, so let me address the common ones: yes, no, no, the Ascend Collection and/or Scandinavia. What are the common questions? That’s an exercise left for the reader.
  4. Staples stores have fee-free $200 Mastercard gift cards in-store through Saturday, limit nine per transaction.

    These are Pathward / BlackHawk Network gift cards, and anecdotally the death of the floosies has pushed competition for these up. Also, yes these can still be liquidated in lots of ways, always be probing.
  5. FrostieWaffles reminds us that today, or maybe tomorrow, is the last day to apply for Bank of America credit cards with Preferred Rewards boosts at lower tiers than the tiers required after. Yes it’s complex, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s too late to worry about it.

Happy fake Monday friends!

From /r/moldyinteresting: Frosty waffles aren’t always from frosting.

  1. The Marriott Bonvoy Business American Express card has an increased sign-up bonus of 150,000 points and a $125 statement credit after $8,000 spend in three months.

    The $125 should cover resort fees on two nights at the Knoxville Alcoa Airport Marriott Courtyard if nothing else.
  2. United and JetBlue now have basic reciprocal elite benefit sharing, which is especially useful if you’re banned by either Chase or Barclays but still want free checked bags, free access to better seats, and early boarding.
  3. The American Airlines eShopping portal has a promotion for 2,000 bonus miles with $800+ spend through May 21.
  4. Chase Sapphire and Freedom cards earn an additional 10x on purchases with Paze checkout on up to $1,500 spend monthly through the end of the year. The list of Paze merchants is relatively small, but does include heavy hitters like United Airlines and Newegg.
  5. SAS EuroBonus has 25% off of both economy and business class award redemption costs for travel booked by Sunday and flown by September 30.
  6. Kroger has a coupon for a $10 Kroger eGift card with the purchase of two $100 Visas or Mastercards.

    Q: Isn’t $10 below the line here for cards with $6+ activation fees?
    A: Erm, absolutely normally. But how many Kroger accounts do you have and how much are you already there?

Have a nice weekend, and don’t mourn the floosies too much, they’ve been on life support for a long time!

The Paze effect.

  1. Air Canada Aeroplan will devalue in June. The churnosphere is largely blaming this on rising oil prices which I think is a contributing factor, but I believe a bigger factor is United exerting pressure on its partners for price parity, one such datapoint is here. The changes:

    – Atlantic business redemptions rising 5,000 – 10,000 miles on average
    – Atlantic first redemptions rising 10,000 miles
    – Pacific business redemptions rising 2,500 – 10,000 miles on average
    – Pacific first redemptions rising 10,000 miles

    Some of the edge cases have prices going down, and some have higher than 10,000 mile increases too.
  2. Avianca LifeMiles also devalued over the weekend:

    – Some partner business redemptions rising 15%
    – Some partner economy redemptions rising 21%

    Again, this honestly reeks of United.
  3. The generic Blue Business Plus and Blue Business Cash links currently have no-lifetime language (NLL) targeted offers:

    – Blue Business Plus: 75,000 Membership Rewards after $6,000 spend in four months
    – Blue Business Cash. $750 after $6,000 spend in four months

    Both cards have no annual fee, and these offers are not available via referrals.
  4. Hyatt’s May 20th category changes have been announced, and their point devaluation is happening on the same date. I hope it goes without saying, but book speculative stays now.
  5. Stop & Shop, Giant, and Martins have 10x points on Lowes cards through Thursday. Giant Food stores on the other hand are only earning 6x because the corporate overlords hate Maryland, I can only assume because one of the corporate executives has a shellfish allergy.
  6. Staples stores have fee-free $200 Mastercard gift cards through Saturday, limit nine per transaction.

    These are Pathward / BlackHawk Network gift cards.
  7. The Delta SkyMiles shopping portal has a promotion for 500 bonus miles with $100+ in purchases at giftcards.com, or I guess if you’re basic any other store on the portal works too.

Happy Monday!

Souvenir button available at Giant Food regional corporate headquarters.

  1. SAS Eurobonus has an award sale for 30% off of award redemptions booked by Sunday and flown by the end of May on SAS metal. This promotion includes business class too. Rove is currently the best way to get Eurobonus miles. (Thanks to FM)
  2. Wells Fargo added Wyndham as a 1:2 transfer partner for its Autograph and Autograph Journey cardholders, making it a close second best for hotel transfer partners behind Chase.

    Wyndham points redemptions are worth somewhere between 0.7 and 1.0 cents per point, so two of them for one Wells Fargo point is a great option. Or if you prefer TPG valuations, two Wyndham points should be worth about the same as a barrel of oil.
  3. Incomm:

    – VanillaGift.com: Fee-free Visas with promo code VGMOM26
    – MasterCardGiftCard.com: Fee-free Mastercards with promo code MOM26
    – TheGiftCardShop.com: Regular price gift cards with promo code YOURMOM26

  4. AA has a sweepstakes for 100,000 AA miles with 100 winners, registration required. As long as someone’s going to win, it might as well be one of you guys. (Sorry Toby victims though.)

  5. American Express Offers has new travel related card-linked offers for:

    – Norwegian Cruise Lines: $200 off of $1,000+ through June 30
    – Preferred Hotels & Resorts $100 off of $500+ through July 8
    – Omni Hotels: $100 off of $500+ through July 13
    – Hilton Hotels: $40 off of $200+ through August 15

    Some of these are easier to cash out than others, but games exist everywhere.
  6. The Citi ThankYou Mastercard sent new targeted mid-month offers for:

    – $50 off of $750+ in online purchases
    – $75 off of $1,000+ in online purchases

    These will stack with online home improvement purchases.
  7. Spirit Airlines insider sources are saying liquidation is imminent. Now’s the time to book backup flights for any bookings you’ve got, and probably be glad you didn’t apply for the Spirit debit card launched earlier this week.

    I never found a direct Spirit Airlines liquidation bet on Kalshi or Polymarket, but I did find this gem which would indirectly let you bet on Spirit liquidation.

Have a nice weekend friends!

This was just foreshadowing service, it had nothing to do with fares 🙈.

I’m an optimizer; frankly, I think most of us are or we wouldn’t be doing this on a day to day basis so I guess misery loves company, right? We’re all rather adept at optimizing credit card category spend multipliers, payment windows, new application timing, and new account bonuses.

Optimizations aren’t perfect though and it’s easy to get stuck in local minima. I regularly see newbies and experienced churners alike make an optimization mistake with their time: spending minutes or even hours chasing a deal that’s not worth very much. An extremely successful salesman once gave me some simple advice:

It takes about the same amount of time to do a small deal as it does to do a big deal.

The obvious lesson is to spend your time on bigger things instead of on smaller things. An alternative way to think about this is to consider the minimum you need to make for different manufactured spend and travel hacking opportunities, and don’t bother with the ones that don’t have a big enough return on time. To that end, I’d suggest having a mental set minimums, much like pilots have a set of weather minimums. In case you’re a visual learner, here’s a sample table that you can fill in for “fun”. For extra “fun”, compare with your neighbor:

ActivityMinimum Profit Needed ($)
Leaving home for in-person manufactured spend
Manufacturing spend at home (something quick)
Manufacturing spend at home (something less quick)
Calling customer service for a retention offer
Tracking a card linked offer over couple of months
Social engineering a customer service rep
Trying to find a spot in Costco’s parking lot

Happy Wednesday!

There’s a spot right there, see?

Over the weekend, an enterprising churner posted a quick demonstration about how under Bilt 2.0v2, you can earn more points with less spend. I don’t know why the post was deleted, but my theory is that after Bilt’s marketing team shifted into turbo-overdrive on bad press starting on Friday (to wit, they got the New York Times article about their launch debacle to dial-back its rhetoric and lean more Bilt friendly, removing “The most complicated rewards system we’ve seen” from the article’s title amongst other things), they shifted their sites to Reddit mods and worked hard on this Reddit /r/CreditCards article. Of course, maybe it’s for an entirely different reason, who knows?

The point of this article isn’t really about Bilt’s somewhat successful censorship though. Instead, my goal is to rehash how their 2.0v2 program can be beneficial for card holders, especially so for cardholders that have flexible leases with, for example, their P2 landlord. Earning under 2.0v2 “Option 1” for rent payments has four tiers, two of which are useful for us:

  • 1x points earned when your card spend is 75%+ of your monthly rent
  • 1.25x points earned when your card spend is 100%+ of your monthly rent

Cool I guess. But let’s say that you spend $5,000 monthly on your Bilt credit card before switching to other cards for the rest of your spend. Let’s also say you’re an expert negotiator with your P2 landlord. Under 2.0v2 Option 1, you can earn more points than with a higher rent. Let’s compare a negotiated rent of $5,000 and a negotiated rent of $5,500. Your $5,000 in monthly Bilt card spend would earn:

  • $5,000 * 1.25 = 6,250 points
  • $5,500 * 1.00 = 5,500 points

The punchline: You can earn more with a smaller rent. In fact, to optimize this completely, your monthly rent should be exactly your monthly spend / 1.25.

Good luck deleting this one, Mr. Kerr.

Happy Tuesday!

Next up: The Bilt 2.0v3 Rewards program.

  1. Airline shopping portals have new winter bonuses:

    – AA: 1,000 bonus miles with $500+ through January 22
    – Alaska: 1,200 bonus miles with $300+ through January 23
    – United: 1,000 bonus miles with $300+ through January 26

    Watch for Southwest to show up to the party late, much like their flights and premium travel focus.
  2. Safeway, Albertsons, Vons, and other Just4U stores have 10x points on Zillions gift cards through Saturday, and on Saturday we’ll get Safeway math where 10x+4x = 12x too.

    Some of these cards convert to Amazon and Home Depot cards, but converting them is, shall we say, sometimes extremely painful in much the same way that the J4U Alaska back door has been painful.
  3. Office Depot / OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300+ in Mastercard gift cards through Saturday. These stack too, so buying $600 or $1,200 is better than buying $300 or $900.

    These are Pathward gift cards.
  4. The Bank of America AirFrance / KLM FlyingBlue card is making changes:

    – Adding 3x dining
    – Switching from Mastercard to Visa
    – Adding an additional 140 XP with $25,000 spend annually

    You can hold multiples of this card which is even more interesting than it used to be.
  5. In a move that affects me and only approximately three other churners, the US Bank FlexPerks American Express card is being “upgraded” to an Altitude Go card in February. This sucks because:

    – Points won’t be worth 1.5 cents each for travel with the Altitude Go
    – The Altitude Go isn’t a third party American Express

    FlexPerks was the best program that no one ever talked about, but it’s from another era and effectively a thing of the past, much like Southwest.
  6. Bilt Rewards heard you loud and clear, and released a Friday message with plenty of additional drama to help ease the concerns of its fans. The summary:

    They’re making the program “simpler” by adding another option with its own complexity, in addition to the existing complexity. Now, just wait until they react to learning that you can earn more by spending less with the new program. (Thanks to Chris and TeddyH)

Happy Monday, may it be unlike Bilt’s!

Pictured: The Bilt 2.1 fix to the Bilt 2.0 rollout.