Let’s talk possibilities:

[Q]: Is it possible to manufacture $100 spend per day?
[A]: Yes

[Q]: $1,000?
[A]: Yes

[Q]: $10,000?
[A]: Yes

[Q]: $100,000?
[A]: Yes

Does this continue forever? No, but the ceiling is high. Always be probing.

Is it possible that this is OJ?

  1. Chase “green star” offers have returned with targeted increased sign-up bonuses for Ink cards:

    – Ink Business Premier: 150,000 Ultimate Rewards after $15,000 spend in three months
    – Ink Business Unlimited: $1,200 after $6,000 spend in three months

    To see the offers, click the hamburger menu (≡) in app or online, then click “Just for you”.
  2. Check your email for a targeted offer from Bilt for 1,000 bonus points on any charge at AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Comcast, Xfinit®, Spectrum, Spotify, Netflix, and Hulu using your Bilt Mastercard.

    The bonus caps out at 5,000 points, or *checks notes and runs a massive program on a super-computer* five merchants. (Thanks to DDG)
  3. Do this now (if you hold an AA credit card): Register for +1 miles and +1 Loyalty Points for AA charges made in the month of November.

    Can you game this? I don’t know, but I like your odds on this one.
  4. Safeway, Albertsons, Vons, and other Just4U stores have a coupon for 10x points on various gift cards, and even though they’re not explictly named, all of the Choose Your Card variety are currently earning the bonus.

    The best option that I know of is to convert to Lowes which has a resale rate of approximately 90%.

The MEAB supercomputer.

  1. Office Depot/OfficeMax stores have $15 off of $300 or more in Mastercard gift cards through Saturday. To maximize:

    – Link your cards to Dosh
    – Cash-out your American Express Business Gold credits for October
    – See what happens when you try and scale a transaction
    – Try for multiple transactions back-to-back

    These are Pathward gift cards so have a liquidation plan in place.
  2. Giant PA stores, (maybe) Stop & Shop, and (maybe) Martins stores have 10x rewards points on Lowes gift cards and 5x on GreenDot debit cards starting Friday. There’s definitely a Lowes gift card resale liquidation channel that supports high volume. For GreenDots, the landscape is tougher.
  3. The American Express Hilton Surpass and Aspire cards were retooled last week, on the whole they’re slightly worse but still a good value. To make up for it I guess, American Express increased the sign-up bonuses for both cards to the highest we’ve seen:

    – Hilton Aspire: 180,000 Hilton Honors points after $6,000 spend in six months
    – Hilton Surpass: 170,000 Hilton Honors points after $3,000 spend in three monts

    The bonus is also available via referrals with most referrers getting 20,000 Hilton points, so go that route if you’re in two-player mode or if you’ve got a friend who can generate a link for you.

Happy Monday!

Taco Bell statistically has the fastest, uh, food to go with your Monday Quickies.. The bad news is this is the food.

Sometimes regular posts
start to feel repetitive
so we “go haiku”

  1. Capital One Shopping has targeted increased cash-back for Giftcards.com of up to 12%. MEAB’s haiku review:

    Twelve percent beats fees
    you won’t earn Loyalty Points
    cashing out is key

    Note that you’ll probably have a different cash back offer for the mobile app, the desktop, and a targeted email, so check all three.
  2. American Express Offers has $150 back on $1,000 or more in airfare at Air Canada for flights originating in the US and ticketed with US Dollars booked by December 31. Now, let’s haiku:

    AmEx offers abound
    breaking correlation helps
    never play it straight

    You can game it, but just don’t game it in Canadian currency. (Thanks to TeddyH)
  3. A quick recap of Delta’s “devaluation rebiggening”:

    – You need slightly fewer MQDs to attain status, but still more than before
    – If you have a Delta Platinum or Reserve card, you get an annual $2,500 MQD credit
    – Million Milers bump up in lifetime status levels
    – You can spend rolled-over MQMs on status extensions, 100,000 MQD per year
    – Better exchange rates on existing MQMs in 2024

    But MEAB, can you let us know how you feel in the form of a haiku?

    Changes beat stick in eye
    SkyMiles are still the worst miles
    too little, too late
  4. American Express has retooled the Hilton Aspire and Surpass cards with:

    – Bigger annual fees (+$100 on Aspire and +$65 on Surpass)
    – Bigger Hilton credits ($200 x 2 at resorts on Aspire, $50 x 4 on Surpass)
    – Loss of Priority Pass
    – $200 annual airline incidental credits switch to $50 quarterly airfare credits

    “Haiku me”, I hear you say:

    Aspire was O.P.,
    was future Unsung Hero,
    now I’m not so sure
  5. Kroger online has $10 off of $150 or more in Visa and Mastercards with promo code OCT2023 through October 25. Let’s jump to the chase:

    U.S. Bank issued,
    won’t code as grocery so
    useful for fuel points

Have a nice weekend friends!

Can someone please rewrite this banger as a haiku, or do I have to do everything myself?

American Airlines AAdvantage reward email confirmations have a super-annoying quirk: AA never sends you an email showing both the number of miles redeemed and the record locator in the same message. Instead you’ll get two separate emails:

  • One with the subject “Your recent AAdvantage Award Redemption” (shows miles used)
  • One with the subject “Your trip confirmation (XXX – XXX)” (shows record locator)

If you’re only booking one or two awards per day, it’s easy enough to suss out which redemption email corresponds which which trip confirmation, but it’s still annoying. If you book multiple awards a day it can be really hard to figure out which goes with which, especially months after booking when your email is buried behind thousands of other messages. I can only assume AA does this because their UX team decided that Windows 3.11 was the epitome of user friendliness.

Dave via MEAB slack shared that you can get an email with both the record locator and milage in the same email though, just put the award on hold, then pay for it immediately:

The award hold email lists both the record locator and award cost in a single place.

Have a nice Thursday, and check back tomorrow for all the hot takes on Delta’s devaluation rollback. (Would that properly be called a devaluation de-biggening? I’m gonna say yes, duh.)

A dialog box that says "Are you sure that you don't want to invert the unselected widgets?" with possible responses "Yes, No, Cancel"

AA’s ideal user experience model.

  1. Chase Offers has an offer for 15% back at most Hyatt property brands for up to $323 in spend through the end of the month. It even works at the Hyatt Place Lubbock, sorry.
  2. Do this now: Register for 5x bonus miles up to 50,000 miles total on flights to and from London LHR, Amsterdam AMS, or Paris CDG airports. It’s a great offer of sort, but United found away to “put the Lubbock” into this offer as it is wont to do:

    – Only valid for economy flights
    – Not valid for basic economy
    – Not valid for travel on non-United operated flights

    Travel must complete by December 13. (Thanks to FM)
  3. DoC notes that as of Monday, Chase business bankers have increased bonuses available to targeted clients:

    – Ink Premier: 150,000 Ultimate Rewards after $10,000 spend in three months
    – Ink Business Unlimited: $1,200 cash back after $6,000 spend in three months

    Note that in two player mode with a 40,000 Ultimate Rewards bonus, you can still do better on the Ink Business Unlimited from home. Also, note that I haven’t been able to independently confirm that these offers exist, even in Lubbock.
  4. Southwest has a deep-discount fare sale for flights departing before 8:00 AM or after 7:00 PM local time for travel between November 7 and March 6 booked by tomorrow night. They’ve Lubbocked it up a bit too:

    – Several blackout days around the holidays
    – Not valid for flights on Fridays and Sundays, the two busiest travel days

    It’s worth re-pricing any existing reservations assuming you like to depart when the Sun’s not up.

United will include this shirt in its next MileagePlay promotion, obviously.

You’ve probably figured out by now that I typically do two types of posts: First a deal and shenanigan recap post, and second, a philosophy and wisdom type of post. Sometimes it can be a bit slow for the first type when there’s not much is going on, but that’s definitely not the case today though. Buckle up!

  1. Do this now: Check for a targeted 5,000 – 7,000 Ultimate Rewards bonus for booking a hotel and flight of over $105 through the Ultimate Rewards travel portal. In theory this is limited to Ultimate Rewards earning or transferrable cards. (Thanks to DansDeals)
  2. Southwest has retooled its elite status program to be more generous, following in JetBlue’s footsteps, and running squarely against Delta’s footsteps (Side note, with airlines is footsteps the wrong analogy? Maybe it should be skid marks, contrails, jetways, speed-tape, or gremlins?) The changes:

    – You can book with a combination of cash and points
    – Credit card Tier Qualifying Points (TQP) bonus spend requirements are cut in half
    – A-List Preferred status members will get two free drunks drinks per flight segment starting November 6
    – Segment requirements for A-List and A-List Preferred statuses have dropped to 20, and 40, respectively)

    They still haven’t brought back the lounge seats though. (Thanks to Southwest king-pin Brian M)
  3. The Citi AA Advantage Business Select card has a 75,000 mile sign-up bonus for $6,000 spend in six months, and the annual fee is waived for the first year. This is effectively the best deal we’ve ever seen for this card, and it’s been years since we’ve heard from Toby.

    Note that there’s also a $100 targeted referral bonus from Citi. (Thanks to DDG)
  4. Citi ThankYou Points has a 25% transfer bonus to Avianca LifeMiles through November 4. A few sweet spots:

    – US to and from Africa in economy
    – United short haul US economy and business class
    – Mispriced awards to and from Europe from multiple Eastern US cities

    There are other great values in this program too, always be probing.
  5. American Express has new card linked offers:

    – $15 off of $150 at Home Depot (they sell gift cards)
    – 5x on Amazon purchases
    – $40 off of $200 or more with Frontier Airlines
    – $75 off of $300 or more with Delta Air Lines
    – $150 off of $750 or more at Four Seasons resorts
    – $150 off of $750 or more at Hiltons in Mexico

    Gamers gonna game. (Thanks to Rich)
  6. Citi has added “Leading Hotels of the World” as a transfer partner for ThankYou Points. The transfer ratio is 1:5 but redemptions require a relatively low number of points, so for back-of-the-envelope math just assume that you’re going to get 1.6 cents per ThankYou point.

    You can find a list of properties here.

Have a nice Tuesday friends!

Today’s post as a Disney attraction. Just like the Disney version, you end up in hell.

  1. Do this now: Register for IHG’s Q4 promotion for 2,000 bonus points every two nights through the end of the year.
  2. The Citi Shop Your Way Rewards Mastercard, the SLS of credit cards and an original Unsung Hero, seemingly has made the 15th of every month its online spend targeted offer day. And given that [checks notes] the 15th was yesterday, we have new offers for cumulative online spend through November 14:

    – 250,000 Shop Your Way Rewards points on $800
    – 200,000 Shop Your Way Rewards points on $800
    – $80 statement credit on $800
    – $50 statement credit on $750
    – $30 statement credit $400

    These offers stack with existing offers. Also, fun fact: This card used to be the Sears credit card and I’m eternally jealous of anyone that has one that still carries Sears branding. Instead, I just have to be happy with having the second most ridiculously branded card, Buick. (Thanks to Gasongasoff, David 99, birt, and Brandon)
  3. Meijer has a promotion for 50,000 Meijer points with $500 spend, limit one per account. Amazon gift cards are excluded, but other popular bulk brands like BestBuy, Home Depot, and Apple aren’t.

    Gift card resale rates for most of these brands is currently hovering around 93%.
  4. Chase has a 25% transfer bonus from Ultimate Rewards to AirFrace/KLM FlyingBlue miles through November 30. Sweet spots:

    – Delta domestic short haul in economy
    – US to and from Europe in business class
    – Europe short haul in any class
    – Promo awards

    You can also book international first class on China Eastern, but that puts you closer to the cockpit where there’s still a decent chance that you’ll smell cigarette smoke cause China Eastern., but it’s less prevalent than pre-COVID. (Thanks to DoC)
  5. Safeway’s Just4U rewards program lets Alaska residents redeem for Alaska Airlines miles under the right conditions, and through tomorrow those redemptions are at triple their regular redemption rate.

Happy Monday!

Just like the Citi Sears card, the Sears branded rocket is the best branded rocket. It’s science.