Several shopping portals have Father’s Day spend promotions, most of which are new:
– Alaska MileagePlan: 500 bonus miles after $200+ spend through June 14 – United MileagePlus: 1,000 bonus miles after $400+ spend through June 16 – AA AAdvantage: 500 bonus miles after $200+ spend through June 17 – Southwest Rapid Rewards: 1,000 bonus miles after $100+ spend through June 18
You can hit them all with giftcards.com, but be careful with back-to-back orders for the same product type because they’ll require a urine sample for order verification, then deny you anyway; instead space them out by 24 hours.
Southwest has two promotions:
– Discounted fares on some flights booked by Wednesday for travel between August 6 and December 18 using promo code BDAY, but on the mobile app only. In my searches, discounted fares were found on most days, but often only on early morning or late night flights – A daily sweepstakes through Sunday for bonus miles, it’s probably barely worth your time because there are about 129,000 total winners over the week so the probability of winning is measurable without too many decimal points
Side note: Southwest is going to try and make noise on major blogs for the entire week; if you’re looking for a drinking game, throw one back each time you find a Southwest article with more than 1,000 words that doesn’t really manage to say anything new.
Happy Tuesday!
A portion of the Giftcards.com fraud team’s checklist.
– Logging in to US Bank – Clicking on your credit card from the dashboard – Clicking “Go to rewards & benefits” – Clicking “Rewards center”, which may be hidden behind “…” – Click “Shop now” for the portal or “See my cash-back deals” for card linked offers
You can also try this link, but it’s very ymmv. Also because it’s US Bank and the computer is a mainframe operated by a drinking bird, the card linked offers may lead to a blank page especially for Altitude Reserve cards.
These deals all conspired to award 12x points plus $15 in groceries with a purchase $75 or more in PlayStation Store gift cards, because the weekend promotion is over the same deal will now will earn 10x points + $15 in groceries. PlayStation cards should fetch at least 81% in resale value for bulk buyers, so if your buyer is paying less, look for another one.
Why is this on MEAB, a site whose mission silently includes never talking about discount groceries or electronics? Well: (1) manufactured spend, (2) this is a backdoor to buying Alaska miles.
US Bank’s rewards portal technical operator in action.
Very few companies have a monolithic technology stack. That means you’ll often find different behavior with:
Mobile apps versus a website
Older terminal hardware versus newer hardware
Android apps versus iOS apps
Version 1.0 versus version 1.1
Ok cool. How about a few specific examples?
FlyingBlue will show different pricing and availability on AirFrance’s site than KLM’s
Turkish Airlines fails to ticket some itineraries on desktop, but they’re easily bookable in the app
Older Walmart terminals behave differently than newer terminals
Some Kroger registers auto-drain cards, others won’t
Old school bill payment platforms charge different fees based on what you use to start a payment
Ok, cool again. Now why should you care?
Different technologies get different results, which leads to conflicting data points. Not all conflicts are easily explained by different technology stacks, but a surprising number are
Fees, funding methods, and functionality often differ. Can’t get that payment to go through on the desktop? Maybe hit up the mobile app. Mobile app doesn’t work? How about the prior version?
Kroger in store has a 4x fuel points on third party gift cards and fixed value Visa and Mastercards promotion starting today and running until Tuesday, June 18. Fuel points demand remains high, and will likely push higher and higher until the end of September.
Pepper Rewards is still expected to grind its promotional rates to a halt before the end of this promotion, which means gift card resale rates will likely go up before June 18 because economics 101.
Two Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards credit cards have increased sign-up bonuses:
– Plus: 85,000 Rapid Rewards after $3,000 spend – Priority: 85,000 Rapid Rewards after $3,000 spend
I purposefully didn’t link to either because the same offer is available via referral, so use a P2 or a friend’s referral and make someone’s day with 20,000 extra Rapid Rewards points.
Chase Offers and BankAmeriDeals have a new offer for 10% back on Alaska Airlines airfare of $50 or more booked by June 12, max $45 cash back.
The most above board way to game this is to book a non-basic economy airfare, wait 24 hours, and refund it to your Alaska wallet, but gamers gonna game.
– Boston – Washington DC – Houston – New York (JFK) – Phoenix – Seattle
I’m also seeing sporadic availability for business class redemptions to Europe at 50,000 miles from Phoenix and Seattle, the two cities on the list that I checked.
LifeMiles still has great sweet spots for Business Class flights from the US to Europe for certain city pairs, and for general weirdness on most routings. One of my personal favorites is to throw an economy flight that I’m not planning on taking onto the end of a business class ticket to reduce the cost of the redemption.
Why bring it up? If you think you might want it, either wait until this is available via referral which will likely be in the next week, or wait until the next time 100,000 mile rolls around unless you have a specific need for this card (like for XN availability). Don’t jump yet just because lots of bloggers are talking about it.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you missed Saturday’s social engineering guest post by dawnzerly because my mailer chose the wrong post to send, you can find and read it here. Ok, I guess even if you didn’t miss it you can still find and read it there.
E*Trade, the Taco Bell of brokerages, has a tiered brokerage bonus of up to $5,000 that can be satisfied by ACATS of an existing brokerage account without selling existing stock. You need to open a new E*Trade brokerage account and ACATS transfer or fund within 60 days, then hold it there for another 60, and use promo code REWARD24 when opening the account. Be sure to close existing E*TRADE accounts first for a bigger bonus.
You’ve got to hold the funds at E*Trade for six months, but then you can ACATS back out to your preferred broker. (Thanks to DoC)
I bring it up here because you can only get the offer five times per business card, and if you’ve you’ve had another five cards that already bonused with this POID or with any POID that starts with K4IY like this one from March, you won’t get this bonus.
While we’re on the topic of American Express employee cards, phone-in offers for adding up to 99 employee cards are still available on both co-brand cards and Membership Rewards earning cards. Most of them are some form of:
– Spend $1,000 get 5,000 points – Spend $2,000 get 5,000 points – Spend $2,000 get $50 statement credit
These still work for up to 99 employees per account, and are a nice power-up if you’re spending to hit status on Delta, Marriott, or Hilton cards anyway. What’s the catch? You have to pick up the phone and make a call, sorry.
EDITORS NOTE: In 2024, I’ve introduced Guest Post Saturdays. Today’s guest post is from the omnipresent dawnzerly from ShareTraveler.com.
Introduction
When I first got involved in travel hacking I thought it was a hobby primarily of information. You have to find the best opportunities (research information), and keep track of what you’re doing (track information). Over the years I’ve learned there’s a lot more to it. One skill I’ve come to realize is important for success in this hobby is social networking and social engineering. (Subtitle for this post might be: “Don’t be an asshole.”)
Social Networking for Information
We’re all out there trying to find the next great exploit. The thing that’s going to generate big spend for a $0 fee. The fintech that’s paying 50% cashback on debit (there is one, but it’s a scam). The trick to generate big NLL SUBs. Trying to find these things is time consuming. But you don’t have to fly solo on all this research. Build up a trusted network of people with whom you can share knowledge and information.
How do you find this network? You cultivate relationships. A lot of this info sharing happens in smaller private groups. And to get into these groups you need to meet people.
There are a lot of ways to find travel hackers. Online you can join public discussion groups (WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, various forums, etc.). In person I’m a fan of local groups. It’s easier to trust people you meet in person. Lots of networking and information sharing happens at local and national meetups.
Once you join some groups you need to build yourself a good reputation. For starters, when you have questions in any written forum, try searching through the history before asking. No one wants to spoon feed you answers that you could have easily found for yourself. And find ways to contribute. Maybe you don’t have any big tricks to share (yet), but when you notice people mention the need for a spreadsheet to keep track of something you could volunteer to create and maintain that spreadsheet. Rule of thumb: Don’t be an asshole, be helpful.
Social Engineering for Smoother Transactions
Some people can walk into a Safeway and be best friends with the manager in 5 minutes. Resellers make friends with store staff so they get texted a heads up about useful closeout sales. Gift card liquidators bring coffee to their local post office employees.
Social engineering might be the wrong term, because most of the time we’re not being manipulative. (Though knowing when to deploy your young child to throw a strategically distracting tantrum could be considered manipulation.) Cultivating these good relationships makes the in-store MSing so much easier. And I’d argue it’s also much more pleasant to operate this way.
I’ll admit this one is hard for me. I feel awkward. But I know from experience that chatting up the staff while MSing, and even explaining what I’m doing, can make the transactions go smoothly. At the very least, don’t be an asshole, be nice.
A pretend doctor social engineers his way into a stack of money orders at Walmart.
