Welcome to this week’s Monday Musings. As a reminder, Monday Musings is a weekly series where I rattle off a few thoughts I have that mostly relate to points/miles, travel and I might highlight other posts/news/nuggets I found interesting from the past week. For those that are football fans and read Peter King’s MMQB, think of this as similar to his “A Few Things I Think I Think” section.

1. You know the recent $15 off $35 offer Amex Offer at Walmart.com? Well, I got it on 7 cards between my wife & I and since I don’t shop at Walmart, I tried to buy e-gift cards to resell. However, Walmart is cancelling every e-gift card offer after initially letting it go through.

After this happened twice, I called up to complain and was told “if you never placed an order online with Walmart.com before with that specific card, you cannot buy e-gift cards”. This is apparently done to combat fraud. Umm, what a load of crap! I think this is Walmart intentionally doing this in response to the Amex Offer deal to prevent people from gaming it with gift cards and reselling them. Remember, this happened with the Sam’s Club Amex Offer which was $20 off a $20 purchase offer and people had issues buying gift cards. Shame on Walmart for these garbage tactics. I should be able to buy physical gift cards and hopefully I can complete this offer that way. 

2. Apparently there is one hotel chain that can run a successful status match and that hotel chain is Hilton. I got this glorious email on Saturday.

I matched my IHG Platinum status (which isn’t even top tier and I didn’t even have a stay this year) and got my Hilton account upgraded from Gold to Diamond. The real benefit for me is now I can cancel the Citi Hilton Reserve credit card and save the $95 annual fee. Hey Hyatt, this is how you run a status match program!

3. I have been getting more and more involved in reselling both with merchandise (heavily based on electronics) and gift cards. I’ve been meaning to come up with a good tracking system to know my total profits and I saw this timely post from Miles Per Day. Great idea to use Google Forms to feed a spreadsheet and I plan on using something  similar after seeing this post – Thanks Vinh for the idea!

4. Today is the last day to transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards to Amtrak. I don’t use Amtrak enough to make it worthwhile for me but I would read this post by Frequent Miler who does a great job breaking down whether you should make the transfer or not. Remember the Amtrak Rewards Program is changing on January 24th so if you have any intention of booking a sleeper room, do it before then!

5. Lastly, I updated my post about the refer a friend bonus on the Amex Hilton Surpass to mention there is now an 80,000 point offer on the card and under no circumstance, should anyone try the refer a friend for this card.

Update: 3x eBay Bonus bucks today and tomorrow. Check your emails or eBay account!