January 31, 2015

Quick Deal: Free Shutterfly Hard Cover 8×8 Photo Book & 250 JetBlue TrueBlue Points

If you are a member of JetBlue’s frequent flyer program, you may have gotten an email from JetBlue offering you a free 8×8 hard cover photo book, 50 free prints and 250 JetBlue TrueBlue points for signup for Shutterfly and purchasing the “free” photo book. You must signup via the link below by February 1st and this is for new Shutterfly accounts only (hint: use a different email address if you already have an account).

Offer Landing Page

Here is a direct link to the offer.

The “free” photobook will cost actually cost you $7.99 in shipping fees but considering the normal price of a Shutterfly 8×8 hard cover photo book at $29.99 (currently on sale for $22.49) this is actually quite a good deal. The 250 JetBlue points are icing on the cake to me but not worth doing solely for the points. This could be a nice way to print out some memories from your travels and earn some extra points on top of it.

January 31, 2015

Today is the Last Day for the 40% American Express Bonus Transfer to British Airways

A quick reminder that TODAY is the last day you can transfer American Express Membership Rewards points to British Airways and receive a 40% bonus on the transfer. As I mentioned when I first posted about this promotion, this is historically one of the highest transfer bonuses in recent memory so I am personally taking advantage of it. One new element to consider before you make the transfer is the recent British Airways Avios Devaluation which was announced this week but doesn’t take effect until April 28th.

Last call for 40% Transfer Bonus

There have been many opinions and thoughts on the devaluation (there is a good summary of the various opinions here by Miles to Memories) that range from bloggers calling this awful and suggesting to not transfer Amex points over to British Airways while others called this a “good thing”. Here are my real quick thoughts on the devaluation:

The majority of the “sweet spot” rewards stayed intact. You can still fly short non-stop flights for 4,500 to 12,500 Avios in economy one way. This is unchanged and this is how the majority of people from the US redeem Avios for flights on American or US Airways.
If you want to fly business or first class, the amount of Avios has gone up if the flight is over 2,000 miles. This is the only bad news to me but it is really not that big of a deal. For example, JFK-LAX in business class now will cost 37,5000 Avios instead of 25,000 Avios. The simple solution is to book with American Airline miles at 25,000 AA miles instead of 37,5000 Avios. Done. The same goes for JFK-Vancouver on Cathay Pacific which is the only award I’ve ever booked with Avios that would now increase.
A lot of bloggers are crying about losing Boston to Dublin on Aer Lingus for 25,000 Avios one way in business class which will now cost 37,500 Avios. My thoughts? Unless you live in Boston, why do you care? You’d still have to pay or use extra miles to get to Boston and frankly unless you have a need to continuously go to Ireland, how many times would you have taken advantage of that flight at 25,000 Avios each way?
Some of the devaluation has to deal with earning less miles when you fly paid tickets with British Airways. Since I don’t pay for any British Airways ticket, this has no impact to me.
There is now peak vs off peak pricing. All partner awards default as peak and as mentioned, the economy rates didn’t go up. The peak/off peak only matters if you fly on British Airways metal and I won’t due to their crazy fuel surcharges.
Lastly, the changes don’t take affect until April 28th, so plenty of time to book trips under the old award chart if you would be affected by the changes.

New British Airways Award Chart

In short, these changes to the British Airways program will not change my focus on how I redeem Avios. I use them for short haul flights on American/US Airways to domestic destinations, Canada or the Caribbean. For example, NY to Antigua (or most of the Caribbean) will still be 20,000 Avios roundtrip. It is still 9,000 Avios roundtrip to Canada or other spots within 650 mile radius of JFK/LGA. All of these prices are still less than what other programs charge so I’m actually thankful British Airways didn’t mess with these award redemptions.

January 26, 2015

PointsCentric’s Kinda Sorta One Year Anniversary! A Thank You to My Readers

So technically, today is my one year anniversary as a blogger as my first post was published on 1/26/14 about a way to get 100 Free Hyatt points. Safe to say that was not my best post but as I alluded to in the title, I didn’t start consistently posting until March 2014 as I had only a total of 6 posts in January and February 2014 so maybe March should be the “real” anniversary date? That seems to be time when I started getting “real” readers instead of just my supportive wife (who deserves a lot of credit for putting up with me while I spent many late nights working on this blog).

The initial logo and color scheme. Added some color to it since then.

Anyway, I am writing this as a thank you to my readers who give me the motivation to keep blogging. I’d also like to thank anyone has linked to me, shared my blog with others or given me feedback (both positive and negative) about the blog. If no one was reading my blog, I wouldn’t have the motivation to continue. A lot of people don’t realize this but blogging is a huge time commitment and a ton of work, even more than I initially estimated (and I used to blog about Boston College sports with my college buddies at AroundTheRes so I’m not a first time blogger). Not only does it take a fair amount of time to type up a post, there is a lot of background work from doing research, learning WordPress, talking to others, thinking of post ideas, finding photos etc. all of which sometimes takes hours to do. So for those interested in blogging, even if it isn’t points/miles related, be prepared to make a serious time commitment.

I remember back in March when I started posting more regularly, how thrilled I would be if I got some views on a new post. In fact, I find it kind of cool that starting in March 2014 even though I didn’t always have a new post up everyday, I had some traffic each day as an unknown, unheard of blogger in a competitive space. Seriously, even if my traffic was only 5 views that day, it gave me hope that as I got bigger and better, more people would find my blog useful. While my blog is still super, super, super small compared to others in this space, each month traffic is increasing and days that had only hundreds of hits are now turning into thousands.

I think my blog has improved the travel hacking community as I have posted and discovered some great deals many people were able to take advantage (2 Free Rental Days, New Hack for 75k Amex Business Gold, Two Browser Trick with Alaska Airlines etc.) in addition to posting about the latest promotions or credit card offers. Additionally, my consulting and award booking services have taken off and it is actually truly satisfying to help people achieve their travel goals when some of them didn’t think it was possible until they discovered just how valuable points & miles can be.

In closing, thanks for reading PointsCentric. I look forward to having another year of great content and helping others realize just how plain awesome points and miles are.

– Ralph

January 24, 2015

It’s Back: 30,000 American AAdvantage Miles for Opening up a Citibank Checking Account

I’ve seen this offer come and go with some regularity but I just got an email with the latest code for this offer which is valid through March 31, 2015. If you are a Citi AAdvantage cardmember you can earn 30,000 American Airlines AAdvantage miles for opening a Citigold account and meeting the debit card & bill pay requirements, which are very reasonable. Here is the offer below:

In order to signup, you must use code DWBXLFT7VF. The terms and conditions state you must be a Citi AAdvantage cardmember and receive the email directly – I think as long as you are a Citi AAdvantage cardmember, you will be eligible for the offer. Per Citibank, here are the requirements:

1. Open a new checking account in an eligible account package by 3/31/2015.

2. Within 60 days after account opening, complete both of the following qualifying activities:
• Spend $750 on purchases using your Citibank® Debit Card AND

• One qualifying bill payment from the new checking account for 2 consecutive calendar months

3. The miles will be posted within 90 days from the statement close date of the month that all the qualifying activity is met. This will be important (read below).

In the past I’ve seen offers for earning AA miles in other types of Citibank checking accounts but this promotion is only for Citigold accounts. Here is a snapshot of the requirements and fees of the Citigold account.

Additionally, here is a summary of the various accounts on Citibank’s website.

Citibank states the miles should be awarded within 90 days of the month the qualifying activity posts so at minimum it will take 2 months (since you need 2 months of bill pay) plus up to 3 additional months though it could definitely happen sooner. My thinking is the AA miles are worth $450 to me so even if I have to pay 5 monthly fees of $30, I still net $300 on this offer. And I would be willing to bet the miles get posted in month 3 or 4 instead, so I could potentially only pay $90-$120 in fees instead of $150 (secure message them asking them to post the miles for you once you meet the requirements of the offer). All of this analysis is of course assuming you cannot get the fee waived with a $50,000 deposit – if you can get it waived, this offer is a no brainer to me. (Edit: Per ThePointsTraveler in the comments, Citibank actually waives the fee for the first 2 months automatically, making this an even better deal!)

Once the miles post, I would call Citi and ask to downgrade to the account in which I could safely meet the requirement to get any fees waived. There is nothing in the fine print that states how long an account has to be open so I interpret this that once the miles post, they will not be taken back if I downgrade or even close the account. If I can’t downgrade the account, I would simply close it once I see the miles post.

If you are not interested in AAdvantage miles, there is also a similar offer for 40,000 Thank You Rewards points. While I prefer the AA miles over Thank You Rewards points, Doctor of Credit has a good writeup of that offer here and that offer might make more sense for some of you.

For those wondering about Citibank issuing a 1099 for the value of the miles, I thought Citibank stopped issuing them in 2013 so this shouldn’t be an issue. Maybe others in the comments can verify their experience.

January 23, 2015

Award Trip Breakdown: MLK Weekend in Aruba and an Escape from the NY Winter!

For the long Martin Luther King weekend, my wife and I joined a few friends and jetted down to Aruba to escape the New York winter for a weekend. Thanks to an amazingly cheap airfare and some hotel points, we were able to escape to the Caribbean for only $300 a person. Normally a trip this time of year, in the height of winter around a holiday weekend, can easily cost a few thousand dollars if you were paying for flights and hotels. Here is how we did it for only $300 a person.

Airfare:

While I like to use miles instead of paying for my flights, sometimes when the airfare is cheap enough, it doesn’t make sense redeem valuable frequent flyer miles for airfare. Back in April, US Airways had a sale on fares to the Caribbean that included travel dates for early 2015 for around $300 roundtrip. The best part was long weekend trips around MLK and Presidents Day Weekend were included! For that time of year, those flights should easily cost $500-$600 (or more) from the East Coast. A roundtrip flight to the Caribbean generally requires 35,000 miles so I would have been getting only around about $.008 cents a mile in value which isn’t even the basic a penny per mile so for this trip, buying the airfare made much more sense. On top of that, it was unlikely to even find award availability over a holiday weekend to a peak destination like this.

After only a few minutes of searching different islands and flight times, we settled on a great itinerary to Aruba that left Saturday and came back on Tuesday. I quickly posted the findings on this blog and my personal Facebook/Twitter accounts and lucky enough, we got some friends to join us a long weekend of fun in the sun.

To take advantage of these limited time fares or even mistake fares by an airline, I recommend following The Flight Deal or following the Mileage Run forum on Flyertalk. Additionally, follow me on Twitter as I tend to post quick tweets on some great fares I see that I may not have time to blog about.

Hotel:

There seems to be two major sections of hotels in Aruba (the low rise and high rise) along the west coast of Aruba, north of the airport. This area of the island has the better beaches in Aruba, including the world famous Eagle Beach. With most major hotel chains present in the Palm Beach area (except for Hilton), you can easily use hotel points to stay in Aruba.

View from our room at the Holiday Inn

Our first choice was to stay at the Radisson Aruba due to my wife and I having a balance of over 500,000 Club Carlson points and the ability to get one award night free due to having the Club Carlson credit card. Unfortunately, when I tried to book this hotel, they were completely sold out and this was back in April! I even called the hotel to confirm what I saw online and it was confirmed you could not book any room, either points or cash – kind of crazy for 9 months in advance! I never followed up but I wonder if any rooms ever opened up right before the cancellation period.

Plan B was the Hyatt Regency Aruba but unfortunately this didn’t make sense for all our friends who were going with us and as such, we didn’t book it. We are in the midst of planning a trip to Costa Rica to stay at the Andaz Peninsula Papagayo Resort so we didn’t want our friends to burn their Hyatt points since there were many other point options in Aruba but not as many in Costa Rica.

Eventually, we settled on the Holiday Inn Aruba which is only a few hotels down from the Radisson and Hyatt along the same stretch of beach. While a step down in the luxury compared to the Radisson and Hyatt, we cared more location and just wanted a clean, functional hotel for our stay so the Holiday Inn fit our needs perfectly for this trip. In fact, the Holiday Inn had been recently renovated so I was pleasantly surprised by our stay (review to follow in a future post). The cost was only 25,000 IHG points a night and there were no resort fees. In fact, when we checked out on Tuesday, our checkout bill came to only $92 for three days of drinks and one lunch we had by the pool. For the value, I would certainly return here in the future for a long weekend.

I’ll cover some of the dining option we took advantage of and the activities we did when I do a trip report but we had an awesome weekend in Aruba as it was 85 degrees and sunny the whole trip. I heard it rained/snowed back home when we were gone which makes me even happier we decided to go away for the weekend. I commented on Twitter I think Aruba is my new favorite Caribbean island and I would love to return one day in the near future.

Totally empty beach we found by the natural pool

PointsCentric

Points & Miles Travel Consulting

Month: January 2015