– 80,000 LifeMiles after $4,500 spend in 90 days – 40,000 LifeMiles after $25,000 spend in 365 days
Cardless has a one card per person lifetime limit, so consider whether cards like the Qatar Privilege Club may better fit your style. The Avianca card’s best features are that: it’s a third party American Express, and that it includes a Lifemiles+ lite membership which gives award redemption rebates and a cheap upgrade to Lifemiles+ basic membership for free award cancellations.
Do this now: Check your email inbox for a targeted $50 Marriott Bonvoy bonus gift card, but also note that it expires on December 21. A good search query is probably: “in:anywhere subject:Enjoy a gift from Marriott Bonvoy to celebrate your upcoming stay”.
Happy Monday!
Once per lifetime Cardless credit card unboxing photo, presumably.
Sometimes travel hackers get stuck with a ticket that’s got a cancellation fee (I’m looking at you and your stupid $75 award ticket redeposit fee FlyingBlue) or a ticket that simply isn’t cancellable for any fee even if you’re Steve Buscemi (actually, especially if you’re Steve Buscemi). You’ve got two choices if your plans change and you’re not going to take one of those flights:
Pay the fee to cancel if you can, or just eat the ticket cost if you can’t
Play the odds and hope that you don’t need to do either of the above
Playing the odds means waiting for the airline to offer free changes or refunds due to one of:
When one of those things happens you won’t be taking off for Lubbock, but instead you’re headed to refund-town (but you’ve probably got to request the refund from the airline, and in some cases before departure). The odds aren’t great though; at best the chances of this working are somewhere between 1/6 and 1/10, unless you own a pregnant turtle.
The Gotchas
There are a few ways this can malfunction:
You forget to cancel before the cancellation window expires after the game didn’t work, which matters especially with programs like Virgin Atlantic that require you to cancel before the check-in window opens
You don’t request a refund in a timely manner from the airline
The airline disagrees about what a significant delay is (but 2+ hours is usually sufficient)
Personally I put a reminder in my phone for an hour before the flight or cancellation window, whichever comes first, to figure out whether the stunt is going to work and to pay the cancellation fee if I can and it didn’t.
Good luck!
AA’s new Flagship First catering meal concept: “playing chicken with an airline”. They’ll end up cutting the ketchup at launch for cost savings though.
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.
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.
Gift card fraudhas beenrunning 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.
– $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
– 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
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.
– 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)
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.
