Thanks to everyone for your questions and comments over the week, it seems like you’ve had a ton of recent successes and I’m always glad to hear about them (and of course I appreciate hearing about the “less optimal” situations too).

There are a few deals to ride into the weekend:

1. It turns out that in addition to the existing methods for extending the expiration of FlyingBlue miles there’s a new way: Have miles that expire in the middle of a pandemic and then wait. FlyingBlue announced yesterday that any miles expiring before December 31, 2022 are now extended through that date.

2. In August, Chase had a preregistration open for the Aeroplan credit card and offered 10,000 if you joined the pre-registration list. Now, Chase is sending links for signing-up for the new credit card and claiming those 10,000 points. Check your inbox (mine hadn’t arrived as of this writing or I’d see if there was a link I could share).

MEAB mini-review of the Aeroplan card? The sign-up bonus will be hard to use effectively, but 3x uncapped at grocery is great. That said, my Citi Premier also gives uncapped 3x at grocery and lets me transfer to Avianca Lifemiles or Turkish Airlines for the same general award availability as Aeroplan with competitive or better flight prices. So, hard pass. I’d rather just churn a few Inks.

3. Now that the “4-for-us” promotion has ended, American Express has refreshed its referral bonus offers and there are reports of seeing referral bonuses of up to 50,000 Membership Rewards points.

4. Remember the Rakuten in-store card-linked program? Well, Staples is ready to make that one exciting: They’re having another fee-free $200 Mastercard gift card sale (limit 5) which should stack nicely with 2.5% cash back. If you’re going to scale this deal, I’d throw in a few pens and a bag of candy or something to try and avoid drawing Rakuten’s anger.

5. The BestBuy gift card market has been steadily improving since Cyber Monday, I’m seeing spot prices at or above 97% again, and bulk card inventories at aggregators and buyers are slowly shrinking.

6. Lowe’s has its promotion for a free $10 Lowe’s gift card when purchasing a $200 Visa gift card running through Wednesday, December 8. This can be rather lucrative if you have a good liquidation channel for the Visas, and the $10 gift card should sell for $8.00 – $8.50. Hint: Buy the “Everywhere” variety of cards for lower fees and better liquidation options. I’ll be out running this one. (Thanks to DoC)

Update: Reader Avi reminded me to mention that your cards should all be linked to JetBlue’s TrueBlue Shopping to earn 3x at Lowes, and this does work when buying gift cards.

7. Target is back with 10% off of gift cards, up to $500 per card for Saturday and Sunday. It took until February for the market to recover from this sale last year, but I think it’ll recover more quickly this round. To scale the deal go in-store with multiple Target circle accounts, but keep it to no more than $1,500 total per credit card. Spot prices are currently at 90-92%.

Happy weekend!

An example of a “less optimal” situation.

1. American Express’s 10 charge card limit and 5 credit card limit both seem to have changed. Justin O shared that he was approved for a 6th charge card late Tuesday night, and after his data-point many others followed confirming that the limits aren’t currently being enforced or have changed. I lobbed in an application for the Blue Business Plus credit card using a referral link from P2’s account and was instantly approved which puts me at 11 charge cards and 6 credit cards.

Maybe American Express was trying to copy Chase’s loosening of its 5/24 rules? Either way I’m happy.

2. PenFed is sending holiday spending bonus offers via email. My offer was for $50 back on $500 spend on my PenFed card. Other offers include $15 back on three contactless purchases, a $15 streaming credit, and $20 back on $20 or more in wireless spend.

3. Hertz is letting current President’s Circle members gift President’s Circle status to anyone else before December 15, with the status valid through June 30, 2022. You can gift status at this link.

4. American Express has new transfer bonuses for December:

  • 30% to Virgin Atlantic FlyingClub
    • Use for ANA round-trip business class (90,000 miles) or first class (110,000 miles) awards to Japan
    • Use for Delta one-way Business class non-stop awards to or from Europe (50,000 – 65,000 miles)
  • 20% to Singapore KrisFlyer
    • Use for economy Alaska flights to or from Hawaii (12,000 – 17,500 miles)
    • Use for business class Star Alliance flights to the middle east (76,500 miles)

5. Vinh has some great advice and it’s worth repeating his conclusion: “The lesson learned is if you see a new VGC on the rack, go test it out.”

Happy Thursday!

Leaked image of American Express’s new card approval standards.

Introduction

On Monday of last week I was bright-eyed for a blow-out Black Friday weekend for manufactured spend, and unfortunately that was a bit of misplaced optimism on my part. Big box retailers faced with supply chain issues didn’t want to discount things that are going to take months to restock and thus didn’t have a major incentive to discount hot items.

Are you ready for Miles Earn and Burn “Economics 1010”? I’m not sure I’m ready to deliver it, but here we go anyway — let’s discuss this weekend’s macro economic picture to start us off, and then we’ll look at the effects on our game.

Macro

The major causes for this year’s lackluster MS opportunities seem to be:

Impact on Us

Ok, so what happened that’s directly related to us?

  • BestBuy gift cards
    • Bulk BestBuy gift card buyers stocked up on their gift card reserves in the week leading up to the sale in anticipation of the weekend’s deals
    • BestBuy effectively blocked buying bots for their few hot items from Thursday – Monday (but then seems to have ceased those measures yesterday); this meant it was much harder to spend existing gift card supply
    • The bulk gift card resale market became saturated, so much so that one aggregator reportedly had a backlog of $7M in gift cards over the weekend
    • Spot rates for $500 BestBuy gift cards dropped to 96% or lower, and most regular gift card buyers stopped buying
  • Other bulk gift cards
    • The BestBuy gift card debacle pushed serial MSers into Apple, Marshalls, Nike, and Home Depot gift cards
    • Buyer capacity for Apple, Marshalls, Nike, and Home Depot dried up with a new glut of supply normally spent on BestBuy
  • Non-bulk gift cards
    • Second tier gift cards (Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, Gap, etc) had great deal flow with many above-cost opportunities
    • Third tier gift cards (Subway, Red Robin, Dominos, etc) had great deal flow too with many at-cost deals
  • Buyer’s groups
    • The deal flow across second tier retailers was lower than a typical Black Friday weekend, though higher than a typical week
    • Big-ticket item deals (> $400 or so) were more scarce than years past
  • Resale groups
    • Many hot items were unavailable for purchase due to supply issues
    • Big-ticket item deals (> $400 or so) were more scarce over the weekend than even a typical week in 2021
  • Kroger rewards
    • Kroger’s 4x promotion hit a road-block on Sunday continuing into late Monday: 4x rewards weren’t posting
      (incidentally, I believe that this happened because Kroger is trying to fix a loophole in its rewards program to improve profitability, and it seemed to work only to a small extent)
    • Without grocery rewards at a boosted, bulk gift card purchases at Kroger ground to a screeching halt
  • Travel sales
    • There weren’t any major sales from the US carriers beyond what comes every month or two throughout the year. Frankly, it’s a sad state of affairs when the best deal was $50 off of a one-way flight with JetBlue
    • Marriott had 25% off of certain hotel points redemptions, but the list of asterisks associated with that deal was longer than the number of hotels participating (or at least close)

In summary, the weekend was the lamest Black Friday weekend in recent memory.

How I Fared

I still had a great weekend despite everything — that’s because opportunities that I’ve developed over the year continue to work, and even though the weekend wasn’t as great as past iterations there were still plenty of deals to keep me busy. In the end, I hit approximately $60,000 in manufactured spend over the course of about seven hours of focus scattered over a few days, with the rest of the time being spent with my loved ones. I consider that to be a huge success.

I hope you hit your MS goals, or at least struck a nice-balance between MS and time with those you care about. Happy MSing going into the holiday season! There’s still plenty of opportunity.

A BestBuy sales associate helps the mob of Black Friday weekend customers customer.

Cyber Monday fared better than Black Friday for MS opportunities, and it looks like it’s going to continue into today and possibly tomorrow. Stay on top of reselling group messages!

In the mean time:

1. There’s a new PayPal offer for $50 back on $250 in spend at BestBuy when you check-out with PayPal. As usual, I’d recommend buying a BestBuy gift card for liquidation but with a special caveat: BestBuy will ban rewards accounts when a gift card purchased under that account is later used for a purchase flagged as a reseller. To protect yourself, don’t login to your BestBuy account and checkout as a guest if you’re going to buy a gift card for resale. UPDATE: The deal is now $25 back, not $50. Thanks to @BlueCat

2. Alaska Airlines has a good Cyber Monday sale for Tuesday and Delta does too. JetBlue has their own version, and they’re offering $50 off of one-way trips so you may want to replace existing round-trip bookings with two one-ways. Southwest didn’t want to be left out so they’ve got one too, but theirs runs through Thursday. (I don’t think the “Monday” in Cyber Monday means what the airlines think it means.)

With Southwest in particular, it’s a good time to book your Spring Break travel because they’ll likely change the schedule anyway and let you switch to any other flight ± 2 weeks from the original booking when that happens.

3. Office Depot/OfficeMax has $15 off of $300 or more in Mastercard gift card purchases between now and Saturday. Don’t forget to link your cards to Dosh for an extra $10 cash-back.

4. The web framework behind my favorite travel tool, ITA Matrix, is deprecated and going to have to be yanked by Google one day soon. Fortunately for all of us, a dedicated team of Google travel hackers are building a replacement with a modern web framework and they’re making good progress. You can find it here:

ITA Matrix Beta

At this point it’s less buggy than the primary interface for some of my searches, though others just spin. I’d consider it a rapidly improving work in progress. Now we just need book with matrix to be updated too.

An image of a November calendar with 35 days.
The calendar used by airlines for Cyber Monday.

It was a strange Black Friday weekend in 2021– we saw shakeups in the BestBuy resale market, Kroger shopping rewards market, and a lack of major deals from big-box retailers; hopefully everything clears up for Cyber Monday, but I’m not holding my breath. I’ll recap everything in a day or two after all the dust settles, but in the mean time here are a few things to look at:

1. If you have an American Express Hilton card, check here for a targeted free night certificate after $8,000 in spend by February 28, 2022. I even got this offer on my fee-free Hilton card.

2. There’s a new no-lifetime language (NLL) offer for the American Business Express Gold card. The sign-up bonus is 90,000 points after spending $10,000 in three months. Unfortunately the offer isn’t available for me, but that’s unsurprising since I currently have eleven American Express charge cards and the limit is typically ten. I also have five American Express credit cards and haven’t been able to bust through that limit. (Thanks to tehflip449, and thanks to BlueCat for pointing out that this one is a Business Gold card)

Side note: I’ve been debating internally about whether the Personal Gold is another candidate for an Unsung Hero card. It’s certainly my favorite American Express charge card and I’d keep 15 of them if I could, but isn’t exactly unsung. Story developing

3.The Point debit card has a new variation on its Streak offers, and it’s even more annoying than it’s been in the past. This one requires $200 in total spend and that you use the card at least once a day for seven days before December 24, after which you’ll get $30 back. Still worth it? Yes, provided that you’ve got automation. I bought a $200 gift card for resale at Whole Foods to take advantage of the 10x bonus and then I set up debbit to make a $1.xx charge at Amazon for the next six days. There’s a debbit sample configuration for another Point Streak deal here.

As usual, make sure you use a referral if you sign up for Point because the referral bonus of $100 is better than the publicly available offer. Reader Mark was the first to let me know that the referrer’s bonus is now also $100 and no longer one fifth of a crappy suitcase.

4. Check this link for 30% back on up to $50 at Amazon for using at least one Membership Rewards point during checkout. Thanks to reader Dean for the link.

5. Meijer has $10 off in $150 or more of Mastercard gift cards with a limit of one per MPerks account. This is a decent deal if you’re already near a Meijer, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for this (unlike their Homerun deal).

6. You can cash out your Citi ThankYou Points at 1.125 cents per point today only by buying Apple gift cards at a 20% discount with ThankYou points and selling at 90% (or more) of face value. (Thanks to nutella)

Happy Monday!

Everything on sale for Black Friday at BestBuy.

Your email inbox, WhatsApp, Slack, and Telegram are about to kersplode over the next three days. (If that’s not true yet and you want to take advantage of tens of thousands in manufactured spend, see Monday’s post.) There’s going to be so much going on that it’ll be impossible to follow everything, so let’s talk weekend ground rules today.

To start, what’s your time worth? I know it’s variable at any given point, but what about this weekend, the Super Bowl of manufactured spend? For me it’s at least $400 or 40,000 points per hour for manual things (versus what I’ve automated away). Given that, I have a cutoff for whether or not I focus on a deal as it rushes through my phone — is the deal going to pay out at $400 per hour? If not, something else will. Move on.

Examples:

Deal Time
(Value)		 Do it?
Buying an e-gift card for resale
(e.g., Kroger online offers 20% off of Groupon)		 1 minute
($6)		 Yes, if I get at least $200 in spend
Buying a Happy gift card to swap to something else for resale 5 minutes
($30)		 No, move on, swapping the gift card and the accounting takes too long
Buying a console for resale
(e.g., Gamestop has a PS5 in sock)		 30 minutes
($200)		 Yes, if I can make at least $200
Going to a store to buy gift cards for resale
(e.g., $115 in Target GC for $100)		 30 minutes or more
($200)		 Yes, but only if I can do twenty of them back-to-back at self check-out
Buying money orders with gift cards 20 minutes
($120)		 No, everything is super-busy right now and you can do this the rest of the year
Buying something for a buyer’s group 10 minutes
($60)		 Only if it’s a high ticket item for big credit card spend or pays a decent commission
Using FinTechs for bill payment and other shenanigans 5 minutes
($30)		 Only if I’m getting four figure spend or higher

I’m sure on December 28th I’ll revisit this table and laugh, and by February 4th I’ll revisit it and cry while I remember how good it used to be and with the knowledge that I’m valuing my February time at roughly the same as a Taco Bell cheerios-infused enchiritaco. (Ok, I made menu item that up, but 50/50 it actually exists knowing Taco Bell.)

For the second ground rule: Your time is precious, and it’s ok to walk away from everything and spend time with your friends/family. That time can absolutely be worth more than $400 per hour.

Happy long weekend!

The Taco Bell meal in question.

1. Apparently several Chase credit cards are being approved regardless of 5/24 status (all links are affiliate-free). Reported cards that are currently ignoring 5/24:

I’m currently on a half-hearted mission to drop below 5/24 (which is a year away best case), but man I’m tempted to make that drop below 5/24 even longer with a Southwest Premier card and its 100,000 Rapid Rewards points bonus. Story developing. (DPs: 1, 2, 3, DoC)

2. The Point debit card is giving 10x at Whole Foods and 10x at Costco through Sunday, up to $500 spend each. Obviously both stores sell gift cards, so there’s that. As usual with this super-weird debit card, use a referral if you sign-up because the referral bonus of $100 is bigger than the regular, publicly available bonus.

3. United has targeted more people with this round of MilePlay, and this time I actually got an offer. Check yours at this link. Mine was “book two trips of at least $300 each and get a bonus 2,700 miles” — strong pass, I like flying on CRJ-200s a whole lot less than I like 2,700 miles, and I’d honestly pay $300 to not fly on a United CRJ-200. Hopefully your offer is quite a bit better.

4. There’s a great $500 bonus offer at the Tastyworks online brokerage after transferring $10,000 in and ostensibly waiting 90 days. Early reports suggested that the bonus posts in one to three days, and I can confirm the same for me (two business days, surprise!) If ten minutes of time is worth $500 for you, I’d suggest you jump on it while it’s still around.

5. Stockpile’s Thanksgiving surprise is that they’re allowing gift card purchases with a credit card, fee-free. If you run into limits, I bet you can find more email addresses and/or IP addresses, right? I knew you could.

It’s too bad this isn’t like black Friday from two years ago, when you could buy $10,000 per day in gift cards fee free, and the maximum value was $5,000 and not $500.

Thanksgiving Surprise from Nana. Yummy, I guess?

Foreward

A couple of days ago I had a conversation with a family member that went something like this:

  • MEAB (in jest): Do you want to write a guest post for my blog?
  • Family member: What kind of blog is it?
  • MEAB: A travel hacking blog.
  • Family member: Ok.
  • MEAB (falls to the ground, floored): ….

Well, my family member came through without any further prompting, and it’s oddly appropriate for today, the busiest travel day of the year. Please enjoy and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow:

Top Things to NEVER Say in an Airport

  1. I have a bomb in my bag.
  2. I don’t have a bomb in my bag.
  3. I will not say whether or not I have a bomb in my bag.
  4. Please check my bag to see if it has a bomb in it.
  5. Bomb
  6. I was the one who shot and killed John F. Kennedy.
  7. There is a fire in the theatre, run! (loudly)
  8. My life insurance is banking on me dying on this plane.
  9. My enemies are banking on me dying on this plane.
  10. Please arrest me.
  11. Please don’t arrest me for what you find in my bag.
  12. I am being watched and followed the entire time I am here.
  13. I will refuse to answer all questions you ask me.
  14. I am here for revenge.
  15. I am not mentally fit to be flying an airplane.
  16. Many of my friends consider my political views particularly extreme.
  17. I am aware about my past wrongdoing where I accidentally alluded to there being a bomb in my bag.
  18. How far will this flight take me from the White House?
  19. Will this plane fly over the Pentagon?
  20. You will help me get out of this place.
  21. Do those detectors look for bombs?
The luxury of Thanksgiving 2021 travel.