Category: Uncategorized

  1. Southwest will be opening their schedule this morning for travel through June 4, 2025. That travel window probably will include some aircraft with premium seats and probably will have aircraft with at least some reserved seating too, but so far we know nothing about either. (Thanks to Brian M)
  2. American Express Offers has a few new offers:

    – $140 off of $350+ at most North American Marriotts through November 23
    – 4x or 10x Bonvoy points at grocery stores, up to 7,500 bonus points
    – $75 off of $275+ at Radisson and Choice Ascend properties through November 30

    (Thanks to DoC)
  3. One of my favorite old promotions dates back to when you could buy Sears gift cards through a portal for 10x-25x, then use those gift cards to purchase merchandise for another 10x-25x, netting a total of 20x-50x for things that were marked up only 5-10%.

    This ain’t that, but Giftcards.com has a smaller scale version through September 27:

    – Start at a shopping portal
    – Buy Giftcards.com gift cards, limit 2x$100 for 10% off with promo code GCC10
    – Go back to a shopping portal
    – Use the Giftcards.com gift cards to buy other gift cards (except Visa/MC)

    Most giftcards.com promotion limits are per transaction, not per account; this one is more finicky in that it comes and goes throughout the day.
  4. Alaska has a fare sale for flights booked by tomorrow night for travel between October 5 and March 5, 2025. I’m seeing great pricing, specifically:

    – Transcons for 7,500 miles each way
    – Hawaii for 7,500 miles each way
    – Short-haul for 4,000 miles each way

    There’s some weird medium-haul pricing at 20,000 miles though, so not everything is peachy-keen or even flam-flam strawberry jam.
  5. Southwest has 30% off of flights booked by tomorrow night for travel between October 24 and January 31, 2025 with promo code FRIENDS. Holiday blackouts apply as you’d probably expect.

Bruceville Indiana is always peachy-keen, even though it’s not serviced by any major airline.

  1. Check for targeted spend bonus offers on your Chase cards, but only if $15 off of $100-$150 in spend on utilities, insurance and other less useful categories is worth your time.

    Side note: I can’t decide if this deal is above the line or below the line for this site. $15 is below, but n*$15 may not be, so I’m choosing metaphorical violence today I guess. #sorrynotsorry
  2. Kroger has a 4x fuel points promotion on Happy, Choice, One4All, and sportsbook gift cards through September 24.
  3. The best way to cash out Shop Your Way Rewards points, at least since Sears effectively disappeared from the planet, is Visa gift cards. Those cash-outs are 5% off through September.

    Side note: Again, violence I guess.
  4. Chase Offers and BankAmeriDeals have spending offers for 10% back, up to $57 each, at various Marriott Brands:

    – Townplace Suites
    – Renaissance Hotels
    – Sheraton Hotels
    – Aloft Hotels

    As usual, the least sus way to game these is to buy gift cards at the front desk. What’s the most sus way? Look, I’m not choosing that much violent. (Thanks to DDG)
  5. US Bank has updated its regular business checking sign-up bonus for new accounts with promo code Q3AFL24 or Q3BUS24, depending on your state. The bonus:

    – $300 with a $5,000 deposit
    – $800 with a $30,000 deposit

    If you deposit the money on day 29 and withdraw on day 61, then you’ve only got the money tied up for 32 days and are still eligible for the bonus. You can’t have had an existing US Bank Business checking account in the last 12 months.

Apparently, today’s motto.

  1. Do this now: Try and register for Hyatt’s targeted promotion for 5,000 bonus points for each 5 nights stayed in the next 90 days, up to 45,000 total bonus points.
  2. Do this now: Register for Marriott’s fall promotions:

    – 2,000 bonus points per 2+ night paid stay (+2,000 if it’s an MGM property)
    – 2,000 bonus points per 2+ night paid stay for Marriott credit card holders

    These stack, but honestly 4,000 bonus Marriott points is probably worth $20 at best so don’t go nuts.
  3. Office Depot / OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300 or more in Visa gift cards through Saturday. For best results:

    – Buy in even multiples of $300
    – Link your cards to Dosh
    – Remember that the variable loads work too

    Just don’t be like me last week and try and load $500 on a $200 card. The register will take it, but I promise nothing good happens.
  4. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard, the most sung of Unsung Heroes, has released new beginning of month offers, each is slightly complex because #extra. Each is good monthly for September, October, and November, and each will stack with other offers as applicable. We’ve seen:

    – $60 statement credit for a purchase $450+, good twice per month
    – $60 statement credit after six $75+ purchases
    – $50 statement credit for a purchase $375+, good twice per month

    I’ll be knocking this out with two $1,000 purchases at a grocery store to combine with outher outstanding credits. (Thanks to Brooke and birt)
  5. Rakuten has 15% back or 15x Membership Rewards on purchases at Dell, likely ending today. Use a friends referral if you don’t already have a Rakuten account, or use George at TBB’s otherwise.
  6. Avelo has $50 off of round-trip fares booked by Tuesday, for travel between September 17 and February 11, 2025 using promo code LABORDAY.

Pictured: The source of my instructions to load $500 onto a $15-200 variable load card.
(Thanks to IAD_Flyer for the picture)

EDITOR’S NOTE: I flubbed the math in yesterday’s post. My only excuse is that I was using a cyrillic Soviet-era LED driven calculator and forgot to carry the Д when performing the Ж. I’ve updated the math and promise to learn Cyrillic before trying this again.

  1. The Chase Hyatt Business Card has a new heightened, tiered sign-up bonus matching the previous best offer:

    – 60,000 World of Hyatt points after $5,000 spend in three months
    – 15,000 World of Hyatt points after another $12,000 spend in six months

    This one runs through September 26, and almost certainly won’t bypass 5/24. (Thanks to Parts_Unknown-)
  2. Qatar Avios has devalued award redemption rates on AA and Alaska short and medium haul flights. The lowlights:

    – Economy prices went up between 23% and 58%
    – Business prices went up between 35% and 63%

    This is of course the same kind of trash that you find in a junkyard after a tornado; but also we should expect that different carriers’ Avois point values are going to converge on one another eventually so it’s predictable trash. In the mean time, DansDeals has a great chart on the cheapest currencies for booking AA flights post Qatar’s devaluation.
  3. Kroger has a 4x fuel points promotion on third party gift cards and fixed value Visa and Mastercard gift cards in-store tomorrow through Sunday. Amazon gift cards remain excluded and will only earn 2x points.

Happy Thursday!

The calculator used for yesterday’s post.

Introduction

After Delta was Crowdstruck, which caused massive delays and cancelations that continued for days, an AA flyer was overheard saying “at least I’m flying American and not Delta”. In case it’s not immediately evident, this phrase is more rare than finding Earth rocks on the moon’s surface or than John Hodgeman throwing socks at an audience.

Self-Insurance

Could you have predicted this outage and pivoted away from Delta early? Probably not this one in particular, but in general it’s safe to assume that a US airline will meltdown at least a couple of times a year and if you fly a lot, you’ve got a reasonable chance of getting caught up in a meltdown.

We’re lucky though, because travel hackers are uniquely positioned to insure themselves against events by realizing:

  • Most non-basic economy award bookings are easily refundable

To insure yourself against meltdowns, book a backup flight on another airline at least a few hours after the flight you really want to take, then refund it when your original flight looks like it’s going to work out. If there’s a meltdown, refund your original flight and take the backup.

It’s really that easy, but of course there are a few failure modes, specifically:

  • Sometimes points bookings have a cancelation fee
  • Sometimes you have to pay a few extra points for your backup to be cancelable for free
  • You might forget to cancel your backup or original flight

If you’ve got a lot of points though and can set a reminder in your phone, none of those probably matter that much.

Conclusion

Booking a backup award ticket on another carrier before a meltdown saves you after the meltdown.

Happy Monday!

What’s the backup plan when your pizza joint has a “vendor technology issue” and your pizza shows up with Kiwi though?

  1. Office Depot/OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300 or more in Visa gift cards through Saturday. For best results:

    – Even multiples of $300 typically have the best percentage discount
    – Link your credit cards to Dosh
    – Try for multiple transactions, back-to-back
    – There are different versions of cards with different activation fees

    These are Pathward gift cards.
  2. Do this now: Register for 2x points on Marriott Homes & Villas stays booked by July 26 for three night or longer stays through the end of 2024.
  3. Two Incomm gift card sites have fee-free gift cards through the end of July:

    – TheGiftCardShop fee-free Visas with promo code 100GIFT
    – MasterCardGiftCard: fee-free Mastercards with promo code SUMMER2024 or 100MCGIFT

    These are Vanilla/Incomm gift cards. Liquidation of the e-gift card variants has become rather cumbersome, and the physical card versions are only slightly better. Each store has a $10,000 per rolling 24 hour limit.
  4. Chase Offers has new Marriott offers for spend through August 15. The good news? Each brand has its own offer. The bad news? Each brand has its own offer. The offers:

    – 10% at Sheraton on $100+, up to $57 back
    – 10% back at Fairfield on $100+, up to $38 back
    – 10% back at TownPlace on $100+, up to $57 back
    – 10% back at Westin on $100+, up to $57 back
    – 10% back on Autograph Collection on $100+, up to $62 back
    – 10% back at SpringHill Suites on $100+, up to $43 back
    – 10% back at AC Hotels, up to $57 back

    All of these are more-or-less gameable, and the most above-board way to game them is to pick up a gift card at the front desk. If you go that route though, call ahead and make sure they have gift cards in stock.

Marriott CEO reacts to bookings growth at seven of its brands, but not sure why growth stops after August 15.

  1. Citi ThankYou Points has a transfer bonus to Cathay Pacific Asia Miles through July 20. Asia Miles are useful for several reasons, generally the biggest of which is early access to oneworld partner award space.
  2. The Chase Ink Preferred card has an online offer for 120,000 Ultimate Rewards after $8,000 spend in three months.

    Despite conventional wisdom, you can get multiple Ink Preferred cards in a year. My preferred cadence is quarterly. (Thanks to kevzho)
  3. Enterprise Car Rental has a status match for just about any airline, hotel, or rental car loyalty program, with status lasting through the end of February 2026. Enterprise status is unique compared to most rental car programs in that it offers confirmed upgrades at booking to elites.
  4. Giftcards.com is showing 2x or 3x on most airline portals as of this writing. This is especially useful for two reasons: (1) It’s a good way to hit shopping portal bonuses, and (2) it’s a good way to hit AA Executive Platinum status.

    These are Pathward gift cards.

Happy Tuesday friends!

A churner shows off his Enterprise elite status.

Bank account and brokerage bonuses have been a staple of the churning diet since before churning was called churning. In the era of ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy), sign-up bonuses of $200-$300 for moving $25,000 in funds to a bank for 90 days used to be no-brainer deals because if you had the cash uninvested anyway, you were earning an average of 0.10% interest in a savings account. Since America loves math, we can show in a simplified calculation that your nominal opportunity cost was barely enough for a Starbucks latte:

Opportunity Cost in ZIRP era (Savings): $6.15
$25,000 * 0.10% * 90 days / 365 days ≈ $2.46 (Why 365? Since APR, is, err per A)

Fast forward to our post-ZIRP dystopian present in which you can easily earn 5.00% or more in an FDIC insured account, and that bank bonus on a checking account that pays effectively zero has a very different opportunity cost

Opportunity Cost in the Facebook Meta Threads era (Savings): $308.20
$25,000 * 5.00% * 90 days / 365 days ≈ $308.20

What’s my point here? Obviously run the numbers before diving into a new bank account. But, you can also memorize a quick statistic for whether or not a bank account bonus is worth your time: You should earn somewhere around $50 for each 30 days that you tie up $10,000, or a high-yield savings account beats it.

Note: I know that the “but actually” people out there are going to point out that you’d earn a few cents more at most bank accounts because of compounding and monthly payouts, and that 5% of $10,000 for 30 days is more like $41 dollars. Let’s just say “you’re not wrong” and leave it at that.

A churner dresses up as a number, preparing to run.