MEABNOTE: I’ll be going on a blogging vacation at the end of the year and there won’t be any daily posts between December 15 and December 31, at least none from me. We may have guest posts during that period, but that depends on you sending me some. On January 1(ish), we’ll celebrate with the 2025 version of Travel Hacking as Told by GIFs.
– Business Reserve: 125,000 SkyMiles after $10,000 spend in six months – Business Platinum: 110,000 SkyMiles after $6,000 spend in six months – Business Gold: 90,000 SkyMiles after $4,000 spend in six months, annual fee waived – Reserve: 100,000 SkyMiles after $6,000 spend in six months – Platinum: 100,000 SkyMiles after $5,000 spend in six months – Gold: 85,000 SkyMiles after $4,000 spend in six months, annual fee waived
The Business Gold card with its waived annual fee is a current sweet spot in the American Express portfolio. If you can get these via referral and games, that’s likely still a better option though. (Thanks to achzeet44)
– Signature: 20,000 Avios after one purchase and 45,000 additional after $3,500 in 90 days – Infinite: 25,000 Avios after one purchase and 75,000 Avios + 150 QPoints after $6,000 spend in 90 days
Both have 6x earning at dining through February 4, but beware of behaving like a floosie on Cardless cards if you value your relationship with the bank.
These are Pathward / BlackHawk Network gift cards.
Stop & Shop, Giant, and Martins have 3x point earning on Mastercard gift cards through Thursday, limit $2,000 per loyalty account (or limit $1,500 for Giant Food because it’s still a running joke at the parent company).
Stores carry either or both Pathward / BlackHawk Network gift cards and Sutton / Incomm gift cards.
– It gives unlimited cash out at 1 cent per point (TBD on the E*Trade integration) – It gives a free authorized user Platinum card with its own lounge access – Historically it’s been semi-churnable
According to the T&Cs, eligible accounts include an individual E*Trade brokerage or bank account.
This card is available via referrals, but there’s restrictive referral language so the referrer may not get their referral bonus. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try though, T&Cs don’t always match reality.
The Synchrony Virgin Red Mastercard has a sign-up bonus of 60,000 miles and a $200 statement credit after $4,000 spend in three months. The bonus is available on the checkout page during a booking, whether or not you actually check out and pay . The card’s $99 annual fee is not waived the first year.
There was at one point a 75,000 point bonus, but 60,000 miles and $200 is better because you can transfer just about every currency to Virgin Atlantic, often with a transfer bonus. The card has other intrinsic value. (Thanks to DoC)
You can combine this with Sapphire Reserve’s $500 Shops at Chase credit too which makes it even more compelling. There are decent options for resale if you’re just looking to cash out for a high value too.
With current exchange rates, that’s about a 17.2x earn rate for US Dollar bookings. Of course, comparison shop with whatever quasi-public Hertz codes you have. I did some price shopping and the portal’s upcharge is reasonable for my travel, so I’ve switched a few upcoming bookings. (Thanks to FFB)
A table of status match tiers can be found on their terms page, and has favorites like AA Platinum Pro and United Premier Platinum matching to FlyingBlue Platinum. (Thanks to FFB)
Wells Fargo Premier technically requires $250,000 held at Wells Fargo in either a bank or a brokerage account, but paying $35 a month (obviously for only one month before you downgrade) gets you the status too.
Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) on financial products say plenty of things, and sometimes banks have even implemented enforcement of portions of their T&Cs through software and merchant controls to make sure you’re compliant. But sometimes T&Cs say things that aren’t necessarily enforced, like, I dunno, American Express’s recent update to its T&Cs for Business Platinum quarterly $50 Hilton credits:
Effective January 31, 2026, Hilton gift card purchases will no longer be considered an eligible purchase, and you will not receive the statement credit for any Hilton gift card purchases.
This change was targeting gift cards purchased at hiltongiftcards.com and it’s likely that purchases there will indeed not earn a quarterly credit. But I’m also certain that there are plenty of ways around it too, like buying a gift card in person at the gift shop, a Hilton restaurant, the front desk, or depositing to your room and later asking for a refund in the form of a gift card. Just because the T&Cs say you won’t receive a credit, doesn’t mean you won’t receive a credit. Always be probing!
Normally I suggest that you register for any hotel promotion available because travel plans are fluid and churners often end up in hotels or places they didn’t expect to be in just a few days earlier. This one has narrow enough utility and a short enough timeframe that it probably bucks the advice.
Happy Tuesday!
An avocado with roughly the same utility as the Accor promotion.
Endorphins hit differently when you get a big sign-up bonus, make a great redemption, or get a great deal. Each of these can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars, and everyone likes to see a hockey-stick chart on their points balance right?
Sometimes though, you can “find churning money or points” by dealing with the sludge of churning. In just the last couple of months, I’ve had to:
Figure out how to get my Flexperks points back after an airline cancelled booking
Get refunded for stolen in shipping items for reselling
Find every hidden unsubscribe from the Motley Fool (after kicking myself for going for the portal bonus again)
Work with giftcards.com for e-gift cards that showed the CVV as “Error retrieving CVV”
Bug Alaska for missing travel credits
None of those things are fun, none of them give me the same endorphin hit of an initial churn. They’re all worth real, sizable money though. And if I didn’t do them, I’d negate plenty of the endorphin-laden kind of churning. So, the lesson:
Earning $1,000 from housekeeping is as good as $1,000 from a bank bonus. Also taxes something something.
– MEAB
Have a nice weekend friends!
Sometimes the hockey stick goes in the wrong direction.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m on an annual blogging vacation for the last two weeks of the year. To make sure you still have content, some of the smartest members of the community have stepped up with guest posts in my absence. Special thanks to James, the host of the Churn and Burn podcast, who candidly shares his story on the dark side of credit card churning for writing this post. I’ll see you on January 1!
Some of you may remember that almost one year ago, I wrote a guest post with a simple plea: stop inflating the value of your points and start considering more carefully how you value said points and what they cost you to make. Today’s post is a followup to that one. But instead of looking at C.P.P. (cents per point), I’m going to ask you to look at a different, yet closely related metric: R.O.I. The true R.O.I. of spend can be absolutely incalculable. Yet still, it’s worth doing.
In the Summer of 2023, I decided to make a push for Delta Diamond status after I realized that a certain card which was “Reserved” for me could be used to “Reserve” a lot of lucrative offers which were asking me to spend in increments of $1000 for a grand total of 5,000 Skymiles each. Mind you, this was “back in the day” before Delta nuked their loyalty program. Actually, I really need to thank Delta for that, because it ended up being one of the best things that’s happened to me in my recent award travel memory, but more on that later…
Real ones know that Delta Diamond used to cost less than the average Venezuelan starter home…Although said “home” might have been a prerequisite.
Yes, as a Skymiles account holder with a pathetic 3,000 MQDs to my name, I knew the only way I’d make Delta Diamond was by knocking out the mammoth $250,000 MQD waiver requirement for credit card spend. For all of this spend, I accrued the following:
1,675,000 SkyMiles
4 Regional Upgrades
4 Global Upgrades (x2?!)
Oh, and the Diamond status. That too.
I managed to parlay these upgrades into the following:
2 Roundtrip Transcon tickets on the A350 for only 48,000 SkyMiles
2 Roundtrip Delta One tickets to Rome for only 84,000 SkyMiles each.
2 More roundtrip Delta One Tickets to Rome thanks to a banking error in my favor (thank you Delta IT) for only 92,000 SkyMiles each.
For your own convenience, I’ve already done the math for us. The $250,000 in spend was done in a very lazy manner. You might say that I’d be called a floozy for doing so. In point of fact, I incurred a loss of $7,500 in order to complete this spend. So, what kind of ROI did my spend get me, if I value the above accrued items at fair market price?
1,675,000 SkyMiles = $19,262 per my own personal valuation
4 Regional Upgrades (RUCs) = $3,000ish in savings
8 Global Upgrades (GUCs) = $24,000 in savings
A total of 6 measly first class Diamond Upgrades and obligatory premium economy = ????
You’re probably thinking that my valuations for the upgrades are insane. And of course, they are. A more appropriate valuation would be for me to decide how many SkyMiles I would have paid for those upgrades over economy and then applying that value. So let’s go ahead and assign a value of $1,400 and $8,400 to the RUCs and GUCs respectfully. I’ll conservatively value the complimentary upgrades at a very round $2,000 figure. Feel free to play mad libs with my math and fill in your own break point numbers. After all, it’s not my blog. I don’t make the rules! That gives us a grand whopping total of $31,062 in value after $7,500 in loss. It’s a very, very respectable ROI, and I hope you can hear the sound of my shoulder dislocating as I reach around to pat myself on the back. *Please clap*
But, as they say: “It ain’t over till it’s over.” That brings us to the Fall season of 2023, when Delta announced (probably because of me) that they were gutting the SkyMiles program like a suckling pig at the Calala Island bonfire.
Delta would later roll back several of these devaluations, but not before our friends at B6 (JetBlue) decided to lower an olive branch to all of us Delta Elite members who were jilted by our abusive partner and now found ourselves craving an illicit affair with our spouse’s trashier, broke neighbor. And what better place to have that affair than at the Motel (B6)? The offer: “Be the first of 30,000 to open up a JetBlue Card in the next 30 days, and we’ll give free Mosaic 4 status for all of you dirty Delta Diamonds out there.” At the time, this offer was largely ignored. I am only aware of a couple of close friends besides myself who took B6 up on it. What was promised seemed too good to be true, and maybe that’s why so many people didn’t bother. For my infidelity against Delta, I was given a heaping treasure haul consisting of:
6 “Move to Mint” vouchers
4 Blade Helicopter Transfers in the NYC area
Unlimited non-mint upgrades on B6
These were all awarded to me fairly quickly after a successful match, and I used them to great effect:
3 one way Mint upgrades from JFK-EDI
2 Mint upgrades from PHX to JFK
4 Helicopter rides from JFK to Manhattan
5 B6 flights in the past year where myself and “P2” were treated to “front of plane” upgrades for free.
Perhaps the best part of all this is that I had already stashed around 100,000 B6 miles from a previous card signup offer, and the 2nd B6 credit card offer required of me for the status match accrued an extra 80,000 miles. All of this was utilized in order to book flights that I would later shower with Move to Mint certs. (As a brief aside, JetBlue knew they goofed with this campaign, because very quickly after this status match, the Move to Mint certificates were severely devalued. I very fortunately booked most of mine prior to that. Guess I’m just cool like that.) Calculating the value of all this is hard. Would I have paid out of pocket for all of those helicopter rides? Unlikely. So again, I’m going to apply the same math as before, and value these items at the price that I would have paid for them myself:
3 one way Mint upgrades from JFK-EDI ($3,000)
2 Mint upgrades from PHX to JFK ($900)
4 Helicopter rides from JFK to Manhattan ($440)
5 B6 flights in the past year where myself and “P2” were treated to “front of plane” upgrades for free. ($900)
It’s an additional $5,240 in value. Bringing our total valuation to $36,302. If we again consider our initial “investment” of $7,500” then we achieved a total ROI of 384%.
Enjoying my B6 Chopper ride over NY, which I apparently valued @ roughly $110? Who knew Bond was such a cheapskate?
At this point, if you’re still with me after watching me blow smoke up my own tailpipe for several paragraphs, I’ll finally quit burying the lede. There’s a few takeaways to be had, here:
Many times, one person’s devaluation is another person’s play of the year.
The true R.O.I. of a play is what you value it at, not the valuation of some person who doesn’t live in the same hub as you or frequent the same hotel chains.
You should, frequently and ruthlessly, reassess the R.O.I. of various “investments” you are making and ask yourself if there are more lucrative R.O.I. plays to be made elsewhere.
$250,000 of spend might sound like an astronomical amount for some of you reading. But I assure you that for others, it’s just another Tuesday. Something to think on.
As MEAB says: “Always be probing.” You never know when a play will quickly open a new door into a different play.
People will often scoff at you for spending on cards that most people wouldn’t take a second glance at. Trust your own compass. Every dog (of a card) has its day.
The “noise” generated by a less lucrative play can often be used to arbitrage or “feed” another play. Sometimes you need to find yourself rolling in some cash before you can wade through the muck.
