1. Staples has fee free $200 Mastercard gift cards starting Sunday and running through the following Saturday, limit five per transaction.

    These are Metabank Pathward gift cards, so have a liquidation plan in place.
  2. The Barclays Lufthansa Miles & More Mastercard credit card has an 80,000 mile sign-up bonus after $3,000 in spend in 90 days. The card sucks for ongoing spend at 1x and isn’t worth your time unless you want easy access to Swiss Air First Class. For that, you’ll need 182,000 miles each way for the US and Europe and Miles & More status, either via match or direct earn. So, it’s actually quite useful for aspirational travel but otherwise skip it.

    Don’t forget that it’s possible to clown around with Barclays to an extent. (Thanks to DoC)
  3. Barclays has two other increased sign-up bonuses which have more general applicability:

    – JetBlue Plus 75,000 bonus miles after $1,000 spend in 90 days
    – Hawaiian 70,000 bonus miles after $2,000 spend in 90 days

    If you have existing Barclays cards, it’s best to ramp up spending for a few months on them in anticipation of applying for new cards.
  4. The Target Redcard $40 online plus $40 in-store churnable sign-up bonus has died. The new iterations are for $50 off either online or in-store but not both, and churning restrictions have increased to between 60 and 90 days.

    There’s one of the new, $50 promotions going through August 19 for both the credit and the debit card, and there might be utility in a $50 RedCard credit card sign-up bonus.
  5. Do this now: Sign-in to your Marriott account and then check your promotions page for targeted Q3 promotions. We’ve seen:

    – 6,000 bonus points after two stays, 7,500 more points after three, and 9,000 more points after four stays
    – 7,500 bonus points after a single stay and 15,000 more points after a second stay
    – 3,000 bonus points for your fist stay, 2,000 more for your second, and 5,000 more for your third
    – 2,000 bonus points after a single stay that includes a Friday or Saturday night, and 3,000 more points after another

    These are for stays through November 15. (Thanks to SideshowBob233 and DDG)

The spending ramp for easy Barlcays card approvals.

We’re in an extended period of Chase shutdowns that started a week ago, and while we don’t know the complete causes, related factors might be:

  • Heavy use at a manufactured spender fitness club
  • Earning a sign-up bonus at a manufactured spender fitness club or popular rebate site, even with light spending
  • Using Chase Ink card links that bypassed backend business approval logic

If you’re caught up in shutdowns, there are options to squeeze Chase back, not all is lost:

  • Call or write the Chase Executive office and open a case
    This is only likely to be fruitful if you’re shutdown for rewards abuse and don’t have heavy manufactured spend, or if you’re shutdown due to bust-out risk. For body builders, I don’t expect a ton of success here
  • Exercise the arbitration clause in your account agreements
    I’m not an attorney and I’m definitely not your attorney, so don’t take this as legal advice. I imagine that having a manufactured spend friendly attorney on your side couldn’t hurt though
  • Wait seven to ten years and you may find yourself back in
    Yes it’s a long time, but it’s not forever
  • Find new players
    Isolate addresses to avoid any contagion spread through
  • Try and open a Chase Private Client account in branch
    Wait six months to do it, and you’ll need $100,000 or more in assets typically
  • Pivot to other banks for cash, United, and Hyatt
    Bilt is an option. You weren’t using Ultimate Rewards for much else, I assume?

Fortunately there are thousands of banks and credit unions out there that offer credit cards that still want your business. Always be probing!

Squeezing Chase if Chase were a GM car.

  1. Southwest has a new promotion flights booked to and from a couple of cities booked by this evening. Travel is valid for September through February within the Continental US, or for Early next year for Hawaii and international destinations:

    – Chicago MDW and ORD: CHICAGO30
    – Denver and Colorado Springs: COLORADO30

    Brain M sent a reminder that Southwest now flys to Chicago O’Hare in addition to Midway, and at O’Hare they use Terminal 5. That’s interesting because T5 is where most long haul international flights operate so Southwest could be a good option for positioning flights on, let’s say, less modestly appointed airlines. Just watch out for the worst Priority Pass lounge in North America, also in ORD’s T5.
  2. Alaska has an award and paid ticket sale through tomorrow for travel between September 6 and December 13. This one has some serious teeth as far as I can tell, for example, I’m seeing:

    – West coast to and from Hawaii: 7,500 miles
    – West coast to and from Mexico: 7,500 miles
    – West coast to and from Chicago: 7,500 miles
    – Transcontinental flights: 10,000 miles

    Now, if only there were a good way to earn a ton of Alaska miles. Oh wait, there is.
  3. Discover is sending targeted offers via email for extra cash-back on spend through the end of September, which obviously stacks well with Discover IT’s 5% Q3 bonus categories of gas stations and digital wallets. Offers reported:

    – 2% back on up to $2,000 in spend
    – 4% back on up to $2,000 in spend

    (Thanks to MtM)

The best photo ever taken of the Priority Pass lounge in T5. Believe me, they’re doing us all a favor.

The Avianca LifeMiles online search and booking platform seemingly hasn’t been working for several weeks, and you can find complaints about it in just about every nook of the internet that’s remotely adjacent to frequent flyer miles.

There’s an easy workaround though, courtesy of Joe M via MEAB slack: you can still search and book online if you use Firefox on a desktop PC or Mac. Mobile browsers, the Avianca app, Chrome, Edge, Opera, and Safari all fail. Booking over the phone works, but that’s about as painful with Avianca as rowing a boat across the English channel. In other words, we try and avoid such monstrosities when practicle.

Happy booking friends!

Even this rusty pipe’s forum dedicated to the Columbian frequent flyer landscape is whining about LifeMiles bookings.

  1. Office Depot / OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $200 Visa gift cards through Saturday, no to be confused with the Mastercard variant offered last week. For best results:

    – Buy the Everywhere cards for lower fees if you know how to liquidate them
    – Try for multiple transactions back-to-back
    – Link your cards to Dosh, ideally one Dosh account per card.
    – Combine with a Chase Offer for 10% back on up to $80 or $110 in spend
    – Try and scale in non-conventional ways

    For the most part these cards are still limited with PIN transactions on liquidation to $480 per store per six minutes.
  2. Do this now: Link your Uber Travel and Marriott accounts under the Uber app’s Travel tab for 2,000 bonus Bonvoy Points. If you make up to four scheduled rides in Uber between now and September 30, you’ll earn 4,000 bonus points each, plus another 2,000 if you do a total of four.

    What’s that worth? (2,000+4,000*4+2,000 x Bonvoy) ~ $100 and a bonus swift kick in the pants.
  3. The Capital One Spark card has an interesting sign-up bonus, assuming you have a separate miles earning Capital One Card:

    – 2x earning on all spend
    – $150 annual fee
    – $200 statement credit after spending $200,000
    – 120,000 mile sign-up bonus (or $1,200 statement credit) after $30,000 in spend

    If you’ve got your low-cost manufactured spend machine operating smoothly, there’s huge utility in a card like this. (6x for $30,000 in spend, or a blended average of 2.7x for $200,000 in spend)

Player 2 receives part of the Marriott Bonvoy Uber bonus.

An unfortunate side-effect of manufactured spend and churning is that sometimes you’ll have a bank account or credit card shut down. We saw an unusual spike in shutdown reports from Chase starting Wednesday for a group of spenders going bigger than Chase liked (all tied directly to dealings with a private manufactured spend supplement group, so don’t stress that you’re on the chopping block if you don’t know what I’m talking about). The shutdowns weren’t exactly unexpected, but it still sucks for anyone involved.

Let’s talk strategies to protect yourself in case you’re ever staring at the business end of a bank’s shutdown pistol.

Strategy One: Apple Pay

In nearly all bank shutdowns, the first indication of something gone pear-shaped is a notification from Apple Pay that your card was removed from your wallet, and this week’s shutdowns were no different. So an obvious strategy is: add at least one card from each major bank to your Apple Wallet to serve as a shutdown early warning system.

Sorry Android fans, I don’t know of an equivalent early warning on that platform.

Strategy Two: Transfer Points Out

Different banks have different policies for how long you can use or transfer your points after a shutdown (Chase is the most generous here at 30 days, but plenty of other large banks will forfeit your points the day of shutdown). Then, the strategy here is: transfer your points out immediately at the moment your early warning system triggers. And a bonus, secondary strategy: with many banks you can transfer points over the phone with a customer service representative even if the online transfer functionality is disabled.

Strategy Three: The Strike Back

Usually banks are lumbering, decades or centuries old, dysfunctional entities with disparate systems all tied together through an unholy combination of voodoo prayers, Cobol, and Javascript, and as a result when one part of a bank starts a shutdown, other parts of the bank and other computer systems won’t know about it for hours or days. That leads to another strategy: if an early warning system triggers and a card is shutdown, call the bank immediately and close all of your accounts, also known as the strike back.

When you preemptively close all of your accounts, you’re often preventing bank systems from running any business logic on your profile because they’re designed not to operate on closed profiles. So, instead of a system updating a database to mark your social security number as banned, the system moves on and you’ve probably got another shot at being in the bank’s good graces after the dust settles and you open new accounts in the future.

Good luck, and have a nice weekend!

Bank pneumatic tube to ethernet adapters, used as a communication gateway between legacy and modern banking systems.

Yes, there’s an elephant in the room regarding Chase and a shutdown bloodbath in certain circles yesterday. We’ll save commentary for the future though because the dust is still settling, but I will say (1) if you don’t know why it’s happened then you’re almost certainly not affected. (2) If you are affected, I’m sorry, that sucks, but I’d make sure that Chase followed consumer laws about forced account closure and act accordingly if I were you.

  1. We haven’t talked about bank bonuses much lately given the low interest rate paid by checking accounts and the much higher interest rates paid by high yield savings accounts, but Capital One has a bonus that bucks the trend with $350 and minimal capital (lol) requirements:

    – Open a new checking account with code BONUS350 by October 18
    – Send at least two direct deposits of $250 or more in the first 75 days

    The account has no monthly fees and you can transfer money out immediately after your direct deposit posts.
  2. Southwest will open its travel schedule sometime this morning for travel through April 8, 2024. This includes most school’s spring break vacations and fares for popular routes on Southwest are often cheapest when first bookable.

    Level 201 travel hackers can probably figure out how to have a good shot of being impacted by a schedule change between now and April 8 too. (Thanks to the outstanding Brian M via MEAB slack)
  3. The AirFrance/KLM FlyingBlue program has released promo awards for discount award tickets to and from Europe through March 31, 2024. Notable US cities included in the sale:

    – Chicago
    – New York
    – Detroit
    – Washington DC
    – Denver
    – Atlanta
    – Austin
    – Houston
    – Minneapolis

    Promo awards normally list economy award prices but business class tickets are often reduced too. I’ve had great luck with these in the past, but do remember that there’s a 50 Euro fee for cancelations in the program before you go nuts on booking.

Happy Thursday!

Pictured: The Chase shutdown elephant. What, you didn’t think I was being literal?

  1. The Chase Freedom Flex and Freedom Flex Unlimited cards have a new sign-up bonus:

    – $200 (20,000 Ultimate Rewards) after $500 in spend in three months
    – 5x on gas and grocery up to $12,000 in spend in 12 months

    The offers will stack. These cards are churnable if you’re under 5/24. (Thanks to DoC)
  2. Delta’s shopping portal has a rare bonus for 1,000 bonus SkyMiles with $400 or more in purchases through August 10 which works out to an additional 2.5x on your first $400 in spend through the portal.

    Sadly, Giftcards.com remains absent from airline portals.
  3. Southwest will email you a 50% off of a future flight promotional code if you book two one-ways or one round-trip flight by tomorrow night for travel through the end of September, and of travel on those flights too. A few notes about the promotional code:

    – It’s only good for paid fares
    – There are block outs for holiday travel between Thanksgiving-ish and New Years-ish
    – There are more block outs for travel around MLK day, Valentines Day, and randomly March 3

    Because I’m my own kind of special, I investigated what might cause March 3 to be included in the blackouts. The best I can find is it’s exactly one week before Daylight Savings Time which is peak travel for obvious reasons, so hooray I guess? (Thanks to FM)
  4. American Express has a few transfer bonuses for Membership Rewards through August 31. I’ve rated them on a scale of 1-5 because exactly no-one asked me to:

    – 15% transfer bonus to Avianca LifeMiles (3 stars)
    – 25% transfer bonus to Hilton Honors (2 stars)
    – 30% transfer bonus to Iberia Plus Avios (4 stars)
    – 30% transfer bonus to British Airways Avios (3.8 stars)

    You’ve got to login to see the transfer bonuses, or at least I did.
  5. Chase has a transfer bonus for Ultimate Rewards through September 30. I also rated this one on a scale of 1-5 because I couldn’t help myself:

    – 50% transfer bonus to Marriott Bonvoy (1 star)

    Remember, a Bonvoy point is probably worth 0.40-0.65 cents in general unless you’re trying to sell someone a credit card, especially when you factor that you’re going to be paying resort fees and parking for your free award stay. So, is (0.40 to 0.65) * 1.5 cents interesting for you for an Ultimate Rewards point?

Sure, the Marriott Igloo Valley looks like a bargain at 12,000 Bonvoy Points, but you still pay the $200 resort fee.