1. Do this now: Register for 20% back in World of Hyatt points at Homes & Hideaways properties worldwide EDIT: No need to register, you’ll automatically get 20% back for award bookings through March 9, 2025.
  2. H-E-B stores have a promotion for a $20 H-E-B gift card with $100 or more in several gift card brands including bulk friendly like Airbnb, Lowes, and Home Depot through November 28. Scale with multiple H-E-B accounts. (Thanks to DoC)
  3. Kroger.com has 5% off of $100 Visa e-gift cards using promo code TURKEY2024 through Tuesday. The purchase won’t code as grocery but will earn fuel points. (Thanks to GCA)
  4. In case you needed further proof that Southwest hates cheapskates, they’ve launched a paid and award ticket sale for crappy flights:

    – Departing before 8AM
    – Departing after 7PM

    You have to book by tonight, but for travel at least 21 days out so that you’ve got plenty of time to anticipate your upcoming crappy flight, unless your airport is SNA; they continue to exclude it from sales because reasons.
  5. Alaska has a sale for flights to Sydney or Auckland that (in theory) connect in Honolulu, Hi for travel through September 30, 2025. The paid fare sale isn’t amazing, but on the award side I’m seeing:

    – Prices about 17% cheaper than the low level Alaska redemption price
    – The discount applying on non-stop, direct flights too

    There’s decent availability in down-under Summer time.

Happy Thursday! (It’s Thursday right?)

My office calendar explains everything.

  1. American Express Offers has a card linked offer for 20,000 Membership Rewards or $200 after $1,000 spend with AirFrance or KLM through December 31.
  2. The three Chase co-branded Avios credit cards have an increased sign-up bonus of 100,000 Avios after $7,500 spend in six months, and each has a $95 annual fee.

    – AerLingus Avios
    – British Airways Avios
    – Iberia Avios

    It is possible to hold multiple Avios cards, but unfortunately they’re still personal cards. (Thanks to makhav)
  3. VanillaGift.com has 100% off of purchase fees of orders of at least $250 with promo code VGTHANKS24 through November 28.

    These are Incomm gift cards, and they won’t earn credit card points when purchased with American Express.
  4. Rakuten has “unlimited” $40 or 4,000 Membership Rewards points referral bonuses for both the referrer and the referred, provided the referred makes $40 of purchases through the portal within 90 days.

    What could possibly go wrong with unlimited referrals?

Happy Tuesday!

Post-bot, pre-shutdown Rakuten dashboard view.

Gift card fraud has been running rampant at US grocery stores this year. Kroger, BlackHawk, and Pathward have been making changes to make fraud harder recently, and that’s especially escalated in the last several weeks. Updates for gift card buyers:

  • The newest batches of BestBuy and Apple gift cards are now geo-locked to the store they were shipped to (they won’t activate at other stores, and this locking applies to different stores in the same chain in the same city)
  • Older stock bulk gift card brands like HomeDepot, BestBuy, and Apple are slowly being removed from Kroger’s POS terminal software so they can’t be activated
  • Visa gift cards are going away at some stores, replaced by higher fee Mastercards with better tamper proofing
  • New gift card packaging now includes the phrase “This package is the property of BHN until purchased”
  • Kroger has installed new one-way gift card hangers in some stores that only allow removing cards from the hanger, but don’t allow putting them back

I think it’s safe to assume that geo-locking and better gift card inventory management will spread to other gift card brands quickly, and it’s also safe to assume that BlackHawk Network (BHN) is actively working on language and tamper measures to improve their legal position when fraud and theft take place.

Stay safe out there!

The scammers almost got me with this one!

  1. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard card sent new mid-month spend offers that stack with existing offers. We’ve seen:

    – $50 off of $750+ in online spend
    – $70 off of $1,000+ in online spend
    – 200,000 Shop Your Way Rewards points with $750+ in online spend
    – 250,000 Shop Your Way Rewards points with $1,000+ in online spend

    (Thanks to BrandonV, SPX, Y, and Charlie)
  2. The Cardless Qatar cards have both increased sign-up bonuses and increased on-going spend bonuses through the end of the 2024.

    – Infinite: 80,000 Avios after $5,000 spend in 90 days, plus uncapped 6x at restaurants and 2x everywhere else
    – Signature: 60,000 Avios after $3,000 spend in 90 days, plus uncapped 4x at restaurants and 2x everywhere else

    There’s a status play with the Infinite card that’s even better with the increased spending bonuses, and so is the Infinite’s rebate on award taxes and fees after $15,000 spend.
  3. The Wyndham Business Earner credit card gives Diamond status with Wyndham, which can be matched to Caesars Rewards Diamond status. The match for elites that earned status through the card only is going away on January 31, 2025 though, reducing the value of the card and the value of any trademarks paid for based on the process.

    You might want to care because Caesars Diamond gives an annual, free four-night stay at Atlantis provided you gamble for four hours during your stay, but there are smaller benefits like show tickets, no resort fees, and free parking at Caesars properties too.
  4. Citi added an extended warranty benefit to its no-annual fee Mastercards, doubling the warranty for up to 24 months after the factory warranty expires. The Citi warranty exclusions list is smaller than is typical too. (Thanks to Country Boy)
  5. Giftcards.com has $6 off of $100 Visa gift cards with promo code EARLYJOY through November 28. Shopping portals usually don’t combine with promotion codes at giftcards.com, but if something goes wrong, sometimes they do. There’s a Chase offer for 5% back on up to $1,000 spend too.

    These are Pathward gift cards.
  6. Office Depot / OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300 or more in Mastercard gift cards through Saturday. Always buy in even multiples of $300 for best results.

    These are Pathward gift cards.

Watch out, filing a complaint with Caesars may not be successful, I guess?

  1. Do this now: Register for Hyatt’s promotion for 3,000 bonus points per night at Hyatt Vacation Club properties between December 1 and March 30, 2025 with a maximum of 30,000 bonus points.
  2. Kroger has a 4x fuel points promotion on third-party gift cards excluding Amazon, and fixed value Visas and Mastercards through December 3.

    Holiday demand for third party gift cards is soaring, and fuel points demand remains steady.
  3. The Barclays JetBlue Plus Mastercard has an offer for 80,000 TrueBlue points after $1,000 spend and paying the annual fee within the first 90 days in the mobile app. I can’t make this appear on desktop without some trickery, but it appears on the front page of the mobile app even if you’re not signed in. (Thanks to abhirpduttamit)
  4. Staples in-store has fee-free $200 Visa gift cards starting Sunday and running through the following Saturday, limit nine per transaction.
  5. The personal United cards from Chase all have an increased sign-up bonus for those of you light on MileagePlus miles. Yes, the increased bonus even includes the stupidest United card of all, the Quest:

    – Gateway: 30,000 miles after $1,000 in three months, no annual-fee
    – Explorer: 60,000 miles after $3,000 in three months, $95 annual fee is waived
    – Quest: 70,000 miles and 500 PQP after $4,000 in three months, $250 annual fee
    – Club: 90,000 miles after $5,000 spend in three months, $525 annual fee

    Only the Club’s bonus gives enough miles for a one-way long-haul partner redemption from the US to Europe or Asia, which should tell you something about the actual value of these cards especially as compared to an Ink. Each card does get you XN award space access, which is great for domestic economy awards I guess. Each card also earns an extra 5,000 bonus miles for adding an authorized user within the first three months. (Thanks to DDG)
  6. Hy-Vee stores have $10 off of $150 or more in Visa gift cards through Monday. You can repeat this with back-to-back-to-back transactions until either the police are called or they run out of stock.

    These are Pathward gift cards.

More weekend catchup (?) fun.

Introduction

One of my favorite travel tools is seats.aero, a site that shows you inventory for award flight redemption availability across about a dozen mileage programs. It’s got limitations in that data is only available for certain routes, award discounts for elites and card holders aren’t included, data isn’t refreshed for hours or days depending on which searches have been run, and plenty of other small things too. But the tool is perfect for illustrating a concept in churning and travel hacking: By finding your perfect redemption, sometimes you also find someone else’s perfect redemption.

Background

I was looking for space to open on an international First award, and while I generally knew about when award space opened up on the potential routes that I wanted to fly, I wanted to fine-tune the timing with fresh data-points. So, a few weeks before when I thought the route would open:

  • I looked for where inventory was opening up on the routes I might take, using seats.aero and a couple of airline partner’s mileage programs
  • I saw that the routes I wanted usually opened up the morning US time, and usually 3-5 days out
  • I also saw that seats.aero wouldn’t see inventory right away, exactly as expected given how it works

My takeaway was that at five days out, I needed to search for the inventory I wanted every couple of waking hours, but especially in the morning.

The Ouchee

Starting five days out, here’s what happened:

  • T-5: No inventory
  • T-4: No inventory
  • T-3: No inventory

I did have a backup flight booked on British Airways, so there wasn’t a concern about getting home, but it’s British Airways. So late on the evening of T-3, let’s call it approximately T-2.5, I used seats.aero to look at business class availability on major routes from Europe to my preferred US airport to see what my best options were that weren’t British Airways.

Seats.aero showed plenty of cached results for my search, and I began investigating those on different airline websites. While I was exploring, seats.aero was running a real-time search in the background in another browser tab. I kept exploring and saw a notification from seats.aero pop-up, but because I’d just looked for space and it wasn’t there, I assumed the alert was for some other route that I was also monitoring.

Fast-forward a few minutes later to when I looked at the alert. It was for the flight and route that I wanted! So, I confirmed the space with a partner airline’s award search, then started to book it. But, the space vanished before I could complete the booking.

What happened? I’m certain that someone else had a seats.aero alert for the same route that I did, and they got the same alert after my real-time search showed that space had opened. Because I delayed by a few minutes, they got the flight before I did, and they found out about the flight because of me too.

The Band-Aid

I was annoyed at myself for a couple of minutes, but in my research I found that when one route had award availability open up, other routes usually did too. Since I’d only searched for one airport, seats.aero had only refreshed its inventory for that airport. No other alerts for other routes had likely gone out.

I searched my second best airport option, and First space was open there too. I booked that instead and got (mostly) the redemption I wanted.

The Takeaway

When you use a tool like seats.aero, PointsYeah, point.me, or Award Tool, that alerts based on the results it finds, you might trigger alerts for your competition too. When space really matters, consider skipping those tools and use airline award sites directly.

Of course the concept applies to manufactured spend, churning, and other branches of travel-hacking too, the implementation is just slightly different.

Happy hacking!

The magnitude of my ouchee.

I have two favorite old-school niche travel blogs, TravelBloggerBuzz and The Free-quent Flyer. One of the interesting insights from the latter, from way back in 2016, was about manufacturing small transactions with Plastiq. At the time, Plastiq’s transaction fees were percentage based and didn’t have minimums so you could send a very small payment and pay a $0.01 fee for it, a perfect way to manufacture transactions.

Plastiq fixed the small payment nearly zero-fee transaction years ago, but Gideon at The Free-quent Flyer set up scheduled transactions through the year 2026 before the minimums kicked-in and those transactions are still going under the old fee structure.

There’s a lesson here, especially because we just had another niche payment method go away this week: Whenever you can schedule your games to continue into the future, you probably should find a way to do so. If you played your cards right, you may have years of shenanigans ahead of you even after something dies.

Good luck, and remember: I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian cause I care.

Warning: You can go too far with manufacturing transactions, but on the other hand I never saw a Plastiq hat.

  1. US Bank launched the stupidly named Smartly card yesterday and is now accepting applications, and unfortunately applications for the Altitude Reserve have been taken down.

    The Smartly card is a 2-4% everywhere uncapped cash back card, with the cash back amount determined by the assets held in either a Smartly savings or a self-directed investment account. $100,000 average funds over 90 days in either is enough for 4%, and you have to have a Smartly savings account open even if most of the assets are in an investment account to qualify.
  2. Wells Fargo Deals has new travel-related card linked offers:

    – 5% back on British Airways through November 29, up to $45 back
    – 10% back at Renaissance Hotels through November 18, up to $75 back
    – 10% back at Fairfield Inn through December 1, up to $38 back
    – 10% back at Westin through December 1, up to $68 back

    Gamers gonna blah blah blah gift cards at the front desk or blah blah blah blah something else. (Thanks to Mike at Cheapskate Travel)
  3. The Citi Double Cash has $100 off of $300+ in hotels booked through the Citi travel portal by December 6. I don’t think this is targeted, but double check that you see a banner under the search page advertising the credit after selecting your Double Cash card.
  4. Chase has several targeted offers for $400+ in hotel booked through the Chase portal:

    – 20,000 Ultimate Rewards with $500+ spend
    – 10,000 Ultimate Rewards after $400+ spend
    – $100 statement credit after $400+ spend

    Book by January 31, 2025 for stays through August 31, 2025.

Rejected US Bank Smartly Visa card design.