1. American Express was clearly up too late Sunday night and was loopy from drinking a bottle of Tabasco and eating a jar of pickles on an empty stomach: As first reported by Slickdeals AmEx cards have some amazing and suspicious spending offers on the Membership Rewards family of cards. Reportedly offers have been seen for:
$1,000 back after spending $1,000 up to 3 times
$3,500 back after spending $2,000 up to 3 times
$4,500 back after spending $2,500 up to 3 times
Almost certainly this was meant to be a Membership Rewards points offer and not a cash-back offer, but well into Monday night the offer was still showing as cash-back. Check your cards here, and if you’ve got the offer I do suggest spending on the card on the off-chance that it works, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you end up with just Membership Rewards points as your bonus in the end.
2. A strange SimplyMiles deal has been percolating since Friday night, and honestly I didn’t believe that it was correct and didn’t want to waste your time while you tried to chase a lame unicorn, but I was wrong. What’s the deal? SimplyMiles is giving 6x on all of their outstanding offers for the first three redemptions on your account now through December 27, 2021. (In case you’re not aware, SimplyMiles is a card linked program for Mastercard issued cards that earns AA miles.)
The kicker is that Gary confirmed that that 6x doesn’t mean +6x, it means *6x, so a 40 miles per dollar deal actually means 6*40 miles, or 240 miles per dollar. The best offers on my account:
40 miles per dollar for donating to Conservation International, apparently an unlimited cap
6*40 = 240 miles per dollar with the offer
1,500 miles for a purchase of $45 or more at CVS
6*1,500 = 9,000 miles with the offer
1,500 miles for a purchase of $200 or more at BestBuy
6*1,500 = 9,000 miles with the offer
Those are pretty amazing offers and I did each one the moment the deal was confirmed to be real. Who doesn’t want an AA Web Special economy flight for buying a $50 gift card at CVS anyway?
Good luck out there, and may your day be even wackier than these two deals!
Eat approximately two pounds of these to propel yourself to American Express levels of whackiness.
2. A follow-up from a week ago: my application for the US Bank Business Triple Cash card was approved with a ginormous credit line. How I’m going to play it: Hit the minimum spend to earn $500, lower all of my US Bank credit lines, then apply for three or four more of these before the offer goes away.
3.Rakuten’s card-linked cash back program has added BestBuy, Walmart, Gamestop, and Walgreens cash back at 5%, which blows the Staples 2.5% that we discussed in early December out of the water. Each of these stores sells one or more valuable gift cards, and each of them will let you buy those gift cards with a credit card (like perhaps an Amex that has an 99 employee card for 1.8 million points offer and a +4x offer attached?) Just don’t forget to link your cards to Rakuten and click “Link Offer” in your account.
The last time Rakuten had great partners with their card linked program it all went well for a while until they shut down a few accounts doing major volume in gift card purchases. So, add a kombucha, a banana, and a usb cable to your purchase to mask what you’re doing. At 5% cash-back, you can afford to treat yourself to America’s favorite fruit.
4. I think that Staples has had more weeks with a gift card sale going than weeks without one in 2021. Maybe next year I’ll post only if they’re not running a promo to save everyone time. That said, it isn’t next year yet, so… Staples is having a $200 fee-free sale on Visa gift cards issued by Metabank running through Saturday, limit five per transaction. (Thanks to GC Galore)
Liquidation? Try bill-pay services and try grocery stores that aren’t Kroger or Safeway/Albertsons; also, maybe look at the Western Union agent locator. Remember, the velociraptors in the documentary Jurassic Park found weaknesses in the electric fence that separated them from the money order terminals by probing. Be a velociraptor.
5. American Express has a 20% transfer bonus to Singapore Krisflyer, and Gary pointed out that this stacks with a promotion that Singapore Airlines is running through the end of February for Star Alliance Gold status. I’m calling this out because if you fly United a lot, and I mean a lot, and if you want to redeem a Singapore award for you and P2 (and maybe P3+) in the next couple of months you could get a ton of value because Star Alliance gold status through Singapore will get you into United Clubs when flying United Airlines (and a free checked bag, but if you’re flying United a lot then they’ve already lost your bag so you don’t have one to check, and you didn’t have to pay for them to lose it thanks to your status).
Just do this one on or after January 1 so that you’ve got effectively 25 months of club access (through February 2024).
The victory scene in Jurassic Park when the velociraptors successfully buy a money order.
I book a bunch of trips every month (fun fact: I cancel about 40-50% of them), and as a result I’ve developed a playbook for how to handle flights as departure nears. And by using the playbook I’m able to get around most delays as long as there’s more than a single option for flights. I’m also usually able to do that without waiting in any lines at the airport or gate, and without sitting in the airport watching rolling delays.
To wit: Yesterday my original flight was delayed by a little over two hours because the aircraft was passing through SLC earlier in the day, and SLC had a big winter-storm at the same time. The delay for my flight didn’t post until about 15 minutes before boarding. But, I knew it was going to happen hours prior and I already had a backup plan. I wanted to write up my game-day playbook to give you ideas for doing the same in the future so let’s dive in eh?
About 12 hours before departure:
Check the FAA Delay Map for a quick view on any airports that aren’t operating at, err, peak-efficiency
Click “track inbound flight” repeatedly until I see all the aircraft’s prior flights to its inbound flight, and I also note the time on the ground between flights for each airport the aircraft will stop at (anything less than 45 minutes is almost certainly an airline pipe dream, and you can assume that those legs will be delayed)
Set alerts in the airline’s app or in flightaware for the flight and for the inbound flight
Once I know where the bad airports are and I know all the routes my inbound aircraft is flying before getting to me, I’ll have a good sense for whether or not my flight will be delayed due to weather, congestion, airport closures, or other external factors (of course mechanical issues, dented aircraft, San Francisco fog, or any other number of things could delay the flight too — but those things are harder to predict).
If my flight is going to pass through an airport on the delay map or if it has a bunch of overly optimistic 20 minute turns (I’m looking at you, United Express), I’ll proactively call the airline and ask nicely to switch to an alternative flight with a better chance of going out (side note: I use ITA Matrix with forced carriers to find alternatives that may not appear on the airline’s own site.) At 12 hours out, getting another routing is easier than you probably think it is — often just saying “the plane is flying through Newark in a few hours and Newark has major delays, could I switch?” is enough to get the alternative routing you want.
Check the airline’s status page for my flight and the inbound
Again, I’m at a decision point: if anything looks sketchy, I may want to jump to my own backup booking or rebook on an alternative flight on the same airline. The two hour mark here is key because alternative flights probably haven’t filled up, none of them are likely to be under gate-control, and other non-avgeek passengers on your flight haven’t done anything proactively yet. This is also the point where if you call the airline it’s very easy to switch to another flight by mentioning issues with the inbound aircraft, even if they haven’t posted in the airline’s system. (Side note: New ticketing while a flight is under gate-control is something I don’t wish on my worst enemy, it’s like another layer of hell.)
Boarding time
The first thing to check when boarding time hits is whether or not the aircraft is at the gate. If it’s not, you’re probably going to be delayed and it may be again time to jump to flightaware to see where the aircraft is. (Hopefully it’s not diverted to Lubbock, TX, which has happened to me twice. Thanks United Airlines.)
Most US airlines board 5-10 minutes later than the boarding time printed on the boarding pass or at the podium, but it’s very rare for the airline to start boarding any later than those 10 minutes unless something is going on. If 15 minutes have passed from the posted boarding time and no one is getting on, it’s time to investigate: Is the aircraft door open? Is the gate door open? Is anyone walking around the aircraft? Is luggage being loaded? Is there someone with a maintenance vest wandering around?
If anything looks fishy, it’s time to explore alternatives on the current airline and other airlines, so if/when a delay posts I already know what I want to do and what’s available. If I think the airline is going to have a long hold-time or wait at the lounge/customer service desk, I may dial-in or line-up to get myself in the queue at this point too.
Once on-board
The last thing I do once I’m on-board is cancel any backup flights that I may have booked. Trying to do anything else with your itinerary is basically out of your hands at that point, so, the only thing left to do is to get annoyed when you’re approaching your destination and the flight attendant announces “ladies and gentlemen, we’ve been cleared to land so please […]”. Why should you be annoyed by that? Well, I absolutely, positively guarantee that you haven’t been cleared to land — that happens within 3-5 miles of the airport, or the last two minutes or so of the flight. The more you know.
Happy weekend travel hackers!
This is what came up in image search for “layers of hell”. I can’t say I understand why that happened, but it’s demonstrably correct.
Do this now:Register for Hyatt’s Q1 2022 Bonus Promotion (2,022 bonus points per night for everyone and another 1,000 per stay if you’re a credit card holder and stay in certain cities for stays between January 15 and April 20).
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s jump into todays points:
1. American Express sent me a link for 7,500 SkyMiles for adding an authorized user to personal Delta Platinum card and spending $500 on the user’s card in six months. If you have a Delta Platinum card, try your luck here.
2. Reader Pavel let me know that Turkish airlines is holding a 30% off sale on both business class and economy tickets booked by the end of the year for travel from now through May 15, 2022. This is a great deal, but there are a few gotchas:
Turkish awards can be difficult to book, especially for the first time on a frequent flyer account
The award sale is only valid on Turkish metal, so no United or other Star Alliance flights can be tacked on
3. Reader Pavish shared that his local Sam’s Club is now selling $50-$500 variable Vanilla Visa and Mastercard gift cards. There are reports of the same thing in other locations too, so it could be worth checking your local club. The activation fee on these is low at $4.88, and unlike Metabanks, Vanilla cards work well in almost all liquidation channels. My first question is: Can I use a Walmart or Sam’s Club gift card to purchase these? I honestly don’t know the answer, but it’s worth exploring.
Good luck out there.
Thursday Triple, if Thursday was a water polo player.
1. Delta Air Lines has an award sale running for Delta One (business class) seats between the US and multiple European and northern Africa cities for tickets booked today or tomorrow. So far, it seems that your best results will be secondary SkyTeam European cities (e.x., forget LHR, AMS, and CDG as destinations, but connecting in those cities is great). I’m seeing discounts running January through March, but check April too — Delta’s award sales are usually further reaching than advertised.
Of course, Virgin Atlantic Miles can still be a better deal for many routes, so search both places unless you’re trying to specifically burn through your SkyMiles collection, or because you might want to book with SkyMiles for the sake of earning status in 2022. No judgement for MQM and MQD seekers, I get you.
1. There’s a coupon for $10 cash-back off of a $25 purchase at Walgreens in Google Pay. Clip it, link your credit cards to Google Pay in the mobile app, then go to Walgreens and use your linked card. Technically you can buy anything $25 or more to trigger the deal, but the provably correct choices are: (a) $25 worth of Peanut M&Ms, or (b) a $25 Steam gift card for resale. (thanks to DoC)
2. Reportedly, American Express is sending postal mailers for Business Platinum cards in the mail with a sign-up bonus of 190,000 Membership Rewards points. I haven’t heard of anyone receiving these mailers first-hand yet, but I have to assume that one of you has one or will get one shortly. Keep your eyes out!
3. The Citi Custom Cash card has had an in-branch $300 bonus after spending $1,000 for several months, but you can now get that online at Credit Karma of all places. This card is a souped up Chase Freedom or DiscoverIT card, you get 5x on up to $500 spend per month in whichever category you spend those most money on rather than worrying about rotating categories.
I have a Custom Cash card that I converted from an AT&T Access (less) card with a huge credit line. Too bad I can’t reallocate that credit line to another Citi card that I want to spend more than $500 / month on. It’s pure, unadulterated, wasted Citi credit capacity today.
4.Alaska Airlines has a buy-one-get-one (BOGO) plus taxes and fees (PTAF) sale running for bookings made today on travel between January 5th and March 9th using promo code STARBUCKS. It almost didn’t make the cut for this post because:
It ends right before Spring Break
It excludes travel on:
Mondays, Fridays, and Sundays on some routes
Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays on some routes
Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays on the other routes
Sundays through Saturdays on dates between February 18 and February 28
Confused? I think they’re trying to make the BOGO-PTAF deal a BOGO-PTAF-PITA deal.
The “L” in “L Walker” stood for “less” in my case.
Hopefully you got in on the Target 10% back on gift cards over the weekend. So far spot rates on Target cards have held surprisingly well during this iteration. I didn’t want to spend a bunch of time at a Target so I maxed out my Discover 5% cash back and left — I probably should have tried harder. Anyway, here are a few things to look at for Monday:
1. US Bank sent me a mailer for a $500 sign-up bonus after spending $4,500 in 150 days on their Triple Cash Rewards no-annual fee business credit card, and it turns out the offer is publicly available without a mailer code (affiliate-free link as always). It’s a great sign-up bonus for a card that won’t show up on your credit report and won’t charge an annual-fee, and the card earns 3% at office supply stores and gas stations (limit $200 per transaction on gas); if you’re locked out of Chase Ink cads or past your office supply 5x capacity it could be a nice card to keep in your wallet, otherwise it’s basically a sock drawer card after the sign-up bonus. A few things to note:
US Bank combines hard pulls in a single day, so apply for multiple cards at once
Historically you can get multiple business cards in the same day with multiple EINs
US Bank Visa cards work in many unexpected places where other credit cards don’t, always probe with them
I would have tested getting multiple cards in the same day with different EINs, but on my first attempt the application went pending, so I didn’t think that applying for more was going to help anything. I currently have three US Bank credit cards with ridiculously large credit lines in my portfolio so maybe I should have done something about that first.
2.Meijer is running a promotion for a $10 Meijer gift card free with every $100 Apple gift card purchase, but you do have to clip the coupon on each of your Meijer accounts first. Assuming you were going to buy groceries anyway, this is a profitable deal with current Apple $100 gift card resale rates hovering at around 91%.
Thanks to everyone for your questions and comments over the week, it seems like you’ve had a ton of recent successes and I’m always glad to hear about them (and of course I appreciate hearing about the “less optimal” situations too).
There are a few deals to ride into the weekend:
1. It turns out that in addition to the existing methods for extending the expiration of FlyingBlue miles there’s a new way: Have miles that expire in the middle of a pandemic and then wait. FlyingBlue announced yesterday that any miles expiring before December 31, 2022 are now extended through that date.
2. In August, Chase had a preregistration open for the Aeroplan credit card and offered 10,000 if you joined the pre-registration list. Now, Chase is sending links for signing-up for the new credit card and claiming those 10,000 points. Check your inbox (mine hadn’t arrived as of this writing or I’d see if there was a link I could share).
MEAB mini-review of the Aeroplan card? The sign-up bonus will be hard to use effectively, but 3x uncapped at grocery is great. That said, my Citi Premier also gives uncapped 3x at grocery and lets me transfer to Avianca Lifemiles or Turkish Airlines for the same general award availability as Aeroplan with competitive or better flight prices. So, hard pass. I’d rather just churn a few Inks.
3. Now that the “4-for-us” promotion has ended, American Express has refreshed its referral bonus offers and there are reports of seeing referral bonuses of up to 50,000 Membership Rewards points.
4. Remember the Rakuten in-store card-linked program? Well, Staples is ready to make that one exciting: They’re having another fee-free $200 Mastercard gift card sale (limit 5) which should stack nicely with 2.5% cash back. If you’re going to scale this deal, I’d throw in a few pens and a bag of candy or something to try and avoid drawing Rakuten’s anger.
5. The BestBuy gift card market has been steadily improving since Cyber Monday, I’m seeing spot prices at or above 97% again, and bulk card inventories at aggregators and buyers are slowly shrinking.
6. Lowe’s has its promotion for a free $10 Lowe’s gift card when purchasing a $200 Visa gift card running through Wednesday, December 8. This can be rather lucrative if you have a good liquidation channel for the Visas, and the $10 gift card should sell for $8.00 – $8.50. Hint: Buy the “Everywhere” variety of cards for lower fees and better liquidation options. I’ll be out running this one. (Thanks to DoC)
Update: Reader Avi reminded me to mention that your cards should all be linked to JetBlue’s TrueBlue Shopping to earn 3x at Lowes, and this does work when buying gift cards.
7.Target is back with 10% off of gift cards, up to $500 per card for Saturday and Sunday. It took until February for the market to recover from this sale last year, but I think it’ll recover more quickly this round. To scale the deal go in-store with multiple Target circle accounts, but keep it to no more than $1,500 total per credit card. Spot prices are currently at 90-92%.
