Point & Center: Free Points, Free Miles, New Discover it Miles Credit Card & More

Happy Saturday everyone, I hope you are enjoying warmer weather than I am in New York. Here is a quick recap of some of the deals and offers from the past week.

1) 500 Air Berlin Miles – It feels like free Air Berlin miles comes around every few months or so. This time the offer is for 500 free miles for linking your Air Berlin topbonus number to Heinemann & Me which is apparently a German duty free store chain. You might need to first register for a Heinemann & Me account which is free.

AirBerlin

In the event you are not an Air Berlin topbonus member, you can first register for an account here and earn 500 free miles for joining. Then you can complete the offer above for an additional 500 miles.

2) New Discover it Miles Credit Card – Discover launched a new credit card, Discover it Miles, that sounds basic at first as it offer 1.5x  on all spending for no annual fee which isn’t that exciting, considering there are 2% cashback cards with no annual fee out there. However, instead of a traditional signup bonus,  Discover is offering double the points for the first year so this is really a 3% cashback card for the first year with no annual fee and the additional travel perk of $30 towards in-flight wifi via Gogo annually.

Discover

I personally prefer to collect airline miles or hotel points over cashback since I use my miles for international, premium travel and cashback is really only suitable for cheap, domestic travel. I’m passing on this card but Doctor of Credit had the best review I saw on the card and I agree with his conclusion. On a side note, kinda lame of Discover to name this card it Miles when it doesn’t even earn miles…

3) Delta Checked Baggage Guarantee – In a move that rivals Alaska Airlines, Delta is now offering customers a 20 minute guarantee on the delivery of their checked baggage or else customers are entitled to 2,500 SkyMiles. Delta claims checked baggage will be available within 20 minutes from the time the plane pulls into the gate. If not, Delta customers can go online and fill out a form to claim their 2,500 SkyMiles. This promotion is only valid through March 31st and is for domestic flights only. It appears Delta is giving this a test run and if successful, it wouldn’t shock me to see this rolled out on a more permanent basis going forward.

4) Refer a Friend Offer for Chase Sapphire Preferred – I’ve wrote about this offer before but Chase has recently reintroduced the refer a friend offer on the Chase Sapphire Preferred in which existing cardholders can refer others and earn 5,000 bonus points for doing so (the applicant will receive the standard 40,000 point offer currently). Not all cardholders are eligible however, including myself. You can check your eligibility here and if you keep getting an error message, then you are not able to refer others. I have no idea how Chase chooses who can participate in this offer but it can’t hurt to call or secure message them asking to be enrolled.

5) Free 300 La Quinta Points – Not a huge offer but I’ve seen various free point offers over the years for La Quinta so you might already have a small point balance there. You can earn 300 points for watching this quick video here or if you are lazy, you can just register at this page here without watching the video.

I didn’t include the promotion for the free 1,000 Hilton HHonors points for changing your password since that promotion is not yet valid contrary to what other bloggers posted. Once that promotion is confirmed to be working, I will post a separate entry about it.

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Point & Center: 1,000-1,500 Free Miles, Check Your Rewards Earned & Bonus Delta Miles & More…

Point & Center is a new feature that seemed to be pretty popular last week. I plan to make this at least a weekly post briefly highlighting some news and offers in the points & miles world.

 A quick run-down of some of the news & offers out there:

1) 1,000-1,500 Free Air Berlin Miles – Rental car company Sixt is offering 1,000 free Air Berlin miles for registering with Sixt here. Brush up on your German or use Google Chrome to translate the page for you. Note you must first create an Air Berlin account here (if you do not have one) in order to have the miles deposited in your account and they are currently offering 500 miles just for signing up and giving them your email address! Remember Air Berlin is a transfer partner of Starwood so you accumulate additional Air Berlin miles via SPG.

2) Check the Rewards Earned on your Credit Card! –  After I broke the news on the easier way to track rewards on the Chase Freedom card, I went through all the dining & travels transactions on my Chase Sapphire card (ya, I’m a little obsessive) to make sure I earned the appropriate 2x bonus and I found a charge that was not awarded the extra bonus points. Yes, it was only $3 bucks so not a big deal but it was for a coffee at Gregory’s Coffee so it should have counted. If this happens, I recommend securing messaging Chase to look into it and fixing it. Basically, the principle here is always check your transactions because if this was a $1,000 dollar charge, the extra 1,000 points start adding up quickly.

I want my extra 3.24 points please!

I want my extra 3.24 points please!

3) Up to 5,000 Bonus Delta Skymiles per Flight! – Most of the time promotions like these are targeted but this is open to anyone and I think its actually quite a good offer for a leisure traveler. If you travel to the Caribbean, Latin America or Mexico from September 2 through December 11, you will earn an extra 2,500 to 10,000 miles per roundtrip flight with no limit!  And that’s on top of the miles you would already earn from flying. You must register before purchasing the tickets and all tickets must be purchased by September 30th. Even if you are not sure you will be flying Delta on these routes during that time, register just in case here.

Mexico in Economy is the Sweet Spot

Mexico in Economy is the Sweet Spot

4) New TSA Policy – Lastly, the TSA recently announced that on flights back to the US from abroad, they might require you to prove your cell phone or laptop can be turned on as the fear is terrorists might have figured out a way to “hollow” out a phone or laptop and turn it into an explosive device. The easy solution is to always carry a charger on you in your carry-on luggage but a real question to me is – what do you do if your phone or laptop actually breaks on vacation and can’t be powered on? This is obviously unlikely but still a concern to me at least.