Category: Wisdom

Editors note: Sometimes I can’t help but get academic and nerdy; but stick with me, the results are good. There’s good stuff in the academic community, and we can apply it directly to your travel to make it better. I don’t know of anyone else doing anything like this, so here we are.

Introduction

There’s an interesting statistics thought experiment that comes up in academia called The Monty Hall problem. The gist of the problem is:

  • You have three doors with something behind each door, 2 doors have something lame and 1 has something great
  • You choose a door but don’t yet know the results
  • The game-master tells you that one of the doors you didn’t pick has a lame prize, and shows you which door

Ok, so there are two doors left: The one you picked and the other door. Unless you’re trained in statistics, you probably think you’ve got a 50% chance that your door has the great prize and a 50% chance that the other door has the great prize, because there are only two left. But, the math behind the Monty Hall problem says that your door is 33% likely at that point to have the great prize, and 67% likely to have the lame prize. (See the Wikipedia page for the math behind the result if you’re interested.) In other words, the other choice is now twice as likely to be the best choice, so choose it if you can!

Applying This Result to Flights

We can apply this result to airline delays with some fuzzy mapping: one door is your on-time departure (your original choice, a delayed flight might be un-delayed and is thus still an option), one door is your delayed departure, and the third door is a an alternate flight.

Based on the math behind the Monty Hall problem, if you’re told that your original flight is delayed, then switching to an alternate flight is more likely to get you to your destination without a late arrival; twice as likely all things being equal (which they’re not). If you’ve ever experienced rolling delays on your original flight, you’ve got some intuitive feel that switching to another flight is probably less likely to lead to an arrival delay too.

Making it Real

There’s a problem with that analysis though: It’s highly unlikely that you’ve got an alternative flight to switch to that leaves at the same time as your original flight. So, to make this actionable for real-world scenarios, we’ve got to factor average delay time into our analysis. To do that, I downloaded the last 12 months worth US airline flight on-time data for a deeper-drive.

First, let’s assume that your airline posts a delay of 45 minutes or longer. In the last year, this is what each major carrier’s average arrival delay looked like:

Operating
Airline		 Average Arrival Delay, August 2021-July 2022
(For Departure Delay ≥ 45 Minutes)
AA 2 hours 13 minutes
Alaska 1 hour 36 minutes
Delta 2 hours 1 minute
Frontier 1 hour 51 minutes
JetBlue 2 hours 17 minutes
Spirit 1 hour 49 minutes
SkyWest 2 hours 21 minutes
Southwest 1 hour 23 minutes
United 1 hour 53 minutes

So when your airline posts a delay of at least 45 minutes, if you’ve got an alternate flight that leaves within an hour and a half or so, you should switch to that alternate flight (especially if your flight is operated by SkyWest).

Next, let’s assume your airline posts a delay of 90 minutes. In the last year, you’re looking at an average arrival delay of:

Operating
Airline		 Average Arrival Delay, August 2021-July 2022
(For Departure Delay ≥ 90 Minutes)
AA 3 hours 23 minutes
Alaska 2 hours 35 minutes
Delta 3 hours 19 minute
JetBlue 2 hours 54 minutes
Frontier 2 hours 54 minutes
Spirit 2 hours 49 minutes
SkyWest 3 hours 36 minutes
Southwest 2 hours 19 minutes
United 2 hours 59 minutes

The conclusion from this one: If your departure delay is posted as 90 minutes or later, switch to an alternative if you can get one in the next three hours or so.

Finally, let’s look at the data by major airports instead of by airline, sorted by the total number of delayed flights (these major airports are also the airports most likely have alternative flights):

Airport Average Arrival Delay, August 2021-July 2022
(For Departure Delay ≥ 90 Minutes)
DEN 1 hour 42 minutes
ORD 1 hour 52 minutes
DFW 1 hour 49 minutes
ATL 1 hour 43 minutes
MCO 1 hour 50 minutes
CLT 1 hour 42 minutes
LAS 1 hour 37 minutes
LAX 1 hour 50 minutes
PHX 1 hour 40 minutes

The statistics aren’t very different for other major (top 50) US airports. However delays are much more likely to extend beyond two hours at small airports, where you likely don’t have another option anyway.

And for my last analysis, I looked at the reason for the delay when it was available. In cases where the data is available, the longest delays are caused by (from the biggest contributor to the smallest):

  1. Carrier delays (crew problems, mechanical, etc.)
  2. Late aircraft delays (delayed inbound flight)
  3. Airspace delays (ATC traffic management programs, etc.)
  4. Weather delays

tl;dr

The internet: “Ok poindexter, enough with the nerdy stuff, how about a summary without all the goo?”

MEAB: Sure thing boss, also here’s the data in CSV form in case you want to be a nerd too:

  • If your flight posts a delay of 45 minutes or longer, switch to an alternate if there’s one available in the next two hours
  • If your flight posts a delay of 90 minutes or longer, switch to an alternate if there’s one available in the next two and a half hours
  • If you’re flying out of a major airport, a delay isn’t likely to carry on past two hours
  • If you’re flying out of a small airport, that delay is probably going to be a long one, sorry
  • If the reason for your delay is a carrier or late inbound aircraft issue, the delay is likely to be longer than for weather or other reasons

Happy Tuesday friends!

When United Express inevitably has a delay for something like this, switch flights (trust me, been there).

Introduction

When you start manufactured spending, the biggest limiting factor for scale is usually your lack of knowledge and experience in the field. Once you learn a few techniques and find the right plays, the limiting factor will probably turn into your float; that is, outstanding available cash and credit line balances.

You know you’ve hit float as a limiting factor when you immediately want to use a deposit that shows as “available” in your bank account on Tuesday morning to pay down a balance on your credit card, so that you can go spend and repeat the cycle on Tuesday afternoon. Listen Trigger, I know that in the modern world of Zelle, ACHs, and other electronic money transfers, it sure looks like money is available to pay a credit card the moment the bank tells you it is. The problem though, is that the bank is lying to you.

Cleared Funds

Even though a bank shows your balance as available and lets you send it away with a few clicks, it’s really not fully available because banks are still living in a technology world that’s a decade behind our own at best. Your electronic or money order deposits aren’t actually cleared funds (definitively in the accounts of the receiving bank) when most banks make them available to you. When are they actually cleared funds?

  • ACH, Zelle, and other electronic deposits: Three business days
  • Wires: Up to one business day
  • Cashiers checks and money orders: One business day

There’s an additional rub: there are different cut-off times depending on the bank, how large its assets are, and the type of transaction, but typically it’s safe to assume that if you make a deposit or receive an electronic transfer after 2PM Eastern, you’ve missed the bank’s business day and a deposit after that time is effectively no different than a deposit the next morning.

Kiting and Shutdowns

Kiting is floating money in-and-out before it clears, intentionally knowing that ultimately it won’t clear and running away with the funds before the bank knows what’s happened. Kiting is illegal and if all that happens from actual kiting is a bank shutdown, you’re really lucky. But a manufactured spender paying their credit line the moment deposits are available isn’t kiting because the funds will clear, so what’s the problem?

Easy, when it looks like you’re potentially kiting, a bank’s risk department will take a look at your accounts and almost certainly shut you down. It doesn’t matter if you weren’t actually kiting and your deposits all eventually clear, the bank still sees major movement before money is cleared as a big risk, and when you’ve scaled your manufactured spend that risk eventually becomes untenable and you’ll get the axe, “out of an abundance of caution“.

How does one stay alive? Be aware of the timelines for cleared funds, and don’t move money out of your bank account before funds are cleared, even if the bank shows your balance as available and lets you move money out the same day. Stay alive friends!

Another consequence of kiting.

Introduction

Most credit card shutdowns from any bank can be attributed to one of the following:

Citi’s Special Behavior

Citi is its own kind of special when it comes to shutdown triggers, and we should chat about Citi shutdowns because it seems to be on our collective conscience right now:

Unlike most other banks, Citi hasn’t automated its rules for shutdowns and you can’t get around most of its automation with slow ramp-up and similar gaming. Instead, Citi’s algorithms for everything except spend patterns are largely rigid and exclusively for flagging accounts for human analysis. It’s always up to a human to determine whether or not your account stays alive once you’ve been flagged.

The Impact

Citi’s human analysis means that when you look surface deep you’ll find certain conundrums. My favorite is that some churners report cycling Citi credit lines without any issues, and you’ll find other reports of shutdowns after accidentally cycling credit lines by a few hundred dollars. A similar story comes up with bill pay services like CheckFreePay, and the list goes on.

When you dig a bit deeper with the knowledge that Citi shutdowns are human based, you’ll find that all of these reports are probably true. The real shutdown trigger at Citi is if your transactions look suspicious at a glance when an analyst examines your account. Repeated $200 payments don’t look normal and will probably lead to a shutdown, but four invoice payments to a legitimate business with one-to-two sizable payments in the middle is probably fine even if credit lines are cycled.

Avoiding Shutdowns

Thus, to avoid shutdowns with Citi, you’ve got two options, but only one of them is needed to keep you alive:

  • Don’t get an analyst looking at your account
  • Don’t have a strange looking transaction history

Personally, I shoot for the former always, and the latter to the extent possible. Either way you’ve got options.

Good luck!

Inside view of the server responsible for Citi’s suspicious credit card behavior algorithms.

Churning and manufactured spend opportunities go away all the time; just this month we’ve seen:

That list isn’t comprehensive either, other deals have been lost in July too. Fortunately July has also brought a hand-full of old deals back from the dead, including some hinted at just yesterday, the week before, or a few weeks ago. What’s the lesson here? Deals often don’t stay dead. When it’s time to get out there and probe, spend a bit of time looking for deals that want to attack Brad Pitt. They’re out there, and they’re often very fruitful.

A Walmart employee prepares to attack Brad Pitt.

The greater manufactured spend and churning collective has been slowly twirling toward a land of confusion with American Express application rules, especially related to no-lifetime language (NLL) applications. Let’s clear it all up: Lifetime language and a popup during a new credit card application aren’t the same thing, and they don’t matter in the same ways.

(No-)Lifetime Language

Lifetime language with American Express cards means that the application’s terms and conditions say something like the following, usually in bold, usually as the very first sentence:

“Welcome offer not available to applicants who have or have had this Card or previous versions of [CARD] from American Express”

No-lifetime language (NLL) means there’s no such language in the terms and conditions.

Practically speaking, this language doesn’t actually matter to a churner because unless you need to arbitrate with or sue American Express, the terms and conditions don’t affect whether or not you get a sign-up bonus. What does matter then?

The Popup

If you’re not eligible for a sign-up bonus, American Express will tell you before you submit your final application. You’ll see a popup that says:

“Name, based on [reasons], you are not eligible to receive the welcome offer. We have not yet performed a credit check. Would you still like to proceed?”

If you get that popup, you’re not going to get the bonus whether or not the card has NLL. If you don’t get the popup, you are going to get the bonus whether or not the card has NLL provided you hit the spend requirements.

Why You Should Care

Since lifetime language doesn’t matter unless you want to sue or arbitrate with AmEx, why do we talk about it so much? A couple of reasons:

  • No-lifetime language offers are less likely to give a popup
  • No-lifetime language offers will often let you get multiple accounts for the same card

So, don’t be afraid to lob in an application for a juicy American Express sign-up bonus because you’ve already had the card and it’s not NLL. If you don’t get a popup, the bonus is in the bag.

Pictured: The bonus in the bag.

Introduction

A particular gift card retailer has recently upped its game on flagging accounts with significant past purchase volume, and unfortunately the flag prevents future orders from processing so it’s effectively a ban.

The flag has affected one of my accounts in the last two weeks and I know it’s affected at least a hand-full of readers’ accounts too. If you’re stuck in this situation, you can probably unstick yourself with a little bit of effort. The same technique works for most bans that don’t involve positive ID validation, so consider taking this as a general technique for winning at life.

The Technique

To get around the ban, you need to follow reader Vince’s advice: “Think a bit about how you would correlate accounts if you were a retailer, then break those correlations.” The obvious ones?

Each of those things might reveal a link between two accounts that otherwise aren’t linked. So when you’re banned, change each of them. For IP addresses, unplugging your router and plugging it back in may be all you need, but a VPN works in a pinch. For cookies, switching your browser or clearing all site-data will do the trick, and so on. Of course, it’s possible that there are less obvious correlations too, don’t consider this list to be exhaustive.

Yes, yes, I can already hear some of the questions the last bullet brings: “If I change my address, how will my credit card charge go through?” Easy answer – effectively no retailer actually verifies billing addresses; instead they verify zip code (if they verify anything at all). Does your zip code have another address? I know mine does.

Good luck getting out of those bans!

Winning at life looks different for everybody.

I heard more feedback from yesterday’s last bullet point about the dangers of opening a checking account with American Express than I’ve heard on any single topic in the past, which I guess means Larry won the churning prize? The tone of the feedback was all over the place like a Nine-Inch-Nails jazz fusion concert put on by a collaboration between N’Sync and Taylor Swift, so I think more discussion is in order.

The General Rule

Holding deposit accounts at banks with valuable credit cards typically can’t do you much good, but it can do you plenty of harm. This is especially true at Chase, Citibank, and Capital One, and probably other banks whose first letter starts with a “C” (if correlation equals causation). At these banks, there are dozens of reports of shutdowns on the credit card side of the business after investigations started on the banking side.

Why might banking get involved and look at your account?

  • Lots of transactions
  • A SAR form filled out by an employee
  • An insufficient or returned funds transaction
  • Too many phone calls
  • A deposit from a new source
  • Too many ACH pulls from the account

But, there are less obvious reasons that you can get eyes on your gaming, even if you haven’t made a single transaction in your bank account. These are the insidious ones:

  • Escheat and unclaimed property laws
  • Routine Know Your Customer checks
  • A fraud alert from a credit card charge that triggers an internal system
  • A general audit
  • The results of a periodic soft-credit pull (Chase is especially notorious for this)
  • In response to an inquiry from the IRS, regulator, or law enforcement

Deposit fraud investigators are typically quicker to shutdown and more easily triggered than their credit card counterparts. I believe this is principally because deposit accounts are by-in-large a necessary cost-center at a bank, while credit accounts are largely a profit-center. Of course regulation and federal funds requirements also play into this too.

Exceptions to the Rule

There are times when deposit accounts can still make sense. For example, Bank of America deposit accounts help a churner because:

U.S. Bank deposit accounts can also make sense because:

PenFed deposit accounts can make sense because:

And, you may find that to get a great credit card at a local credit union you may first have to hold a deposit account. In that case though, a shutdown is rarely catastrophic.

ELI5

In case you’d like an ELI5: Holding deposit accounts at popular churning banks is probably bad, but sometimes it can help you churn enough to make the risk worth the rewards.

Pictured: What the sound of N’Sync and Taylor Swift riffing on jazz inspired by NiN looks like.

“United/Delta/Southwest/Alaska/Breeze/Whatever Air cancelled my flight from RNO–LBB, what does the airline owe me?” This question pops up on Flyertalk, reddit, Quora, and other random internet forums all the time, and the responses are often mostly wrong. If a carrier cancels your US domestic flight, you’re entitled to exactly one thing only by US DOT rules:

  • A full refund to your original form of payment

What about a hotel if I’m not rebooked until the next day? What about meals? What about booking me a new ticket on another airline? What if they rebook me on another flight number with the same departure time and the same arrival time as my canceled flight, on the same airline? What if I lost a multi-million dollar deal because I wasn’t there? What if I got divorced because I missed my flight?

Every single one of these questions has the same answer, and it was above: You’re entitled to a full refund to your original form of payment, and absolutely nothing else (this can be advantageous if you’re trying to turn a flight credit into a refund). Of course you may be able to sweet talk an airline customer service representative into plenty of other options but there’s no obligation for them to do anything but refund to your original form of payment.

If you’re ever stuck dealing with this you’ll probably find that quite a few customer service agents either don’t know the DOT rules, or they’ve been trained to never offer a refund and only give one when a customer pushes and knows their rights, so prepare for frustration if a refund is what you’re after.

Of course, cancelled flights on an international itinerary can give you more rights than you’ve got the in US, especially if your itinerary includes a stop in the European Union, so double-check the rules for any countries included in your itinerary too.

Of course plenty of credit cards offer trip interruption insurance provided you paid for the flight with that card (Chase Sapphire cards, American Express Platinum cards, Citi Prestige, etc.). Don’t grab one of these cards just for the insurance though, consider it an ancillary benefit if you already hold one.

Update: Justmeha reminded me that the Citi Prestige card no longer has trip interruption insurance.

Making the most of being stuck in a hotel gym, waiting for a new flight.