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February 23, 2016

Here is The Points Guy Reddit AMA With The Tough Questions Answered!

Undoubtedly our hobby has gotten a lot more mainstream attention in the past year or so and yesterday there was another major public event as The Points Guy did a Ask Me Anything on Reddit. Here is a graphical summary of how it went:

Dumpster-Fire

Yes, it was that bad. Take a look at some of the top questions that were upvoted – Reddit users aren’t stupid. And I’m not the only one who thought this wasn’t a good look for Mr. Kelly – Saverocity and Personal Finance Digest had similar thoughts and I encourage you to read their recaps.

Bankrate Question CSP Question PRG Question

Since The Points Guy gave terrible (and not complete) answers on some questions while not answering some of the tougher ones, I figured I would! As a disclaimer, TPG didn’t actually say the following but that’s only because Bankrate wouldn’t let him. All of the following are actual questions from the AMA with honest answers courtesy of yours truly.

Q. I had heard that your site has been acquired by Bankrate, a company that sells credit cards. How much of the content is directed by them to sell credit cards, rather than help your readers travel?

A. All of it! I mean have you seen a post without a credit card link? How else can I afford to fly in private jets?

Q. Bankrate owns your website? That sounds like a tremendous conflict of interest.

A. Well no. You see I don’t accept free travel or trips so I can give honest reviews on those items. But somehow I have this ability to give honest reviews on credit cards even though I’m heavily (read: million$) compensated from them. It’s a tough job but someone has to do it. P.S. This is why I can’t mention useful things my readers should know such as Chase’s 5/24 rule and the upcoming changes. 

Q. Do you encourage your readers to churn credit card to avoid annual fees, or do you not, because it conflicts with the people paying your bills?

A. I used to talk about churning cards 3-4 years ago but now that I’ve sold out pitch credit cards all day, my bosses at Chase, American Express, Barclaycard, Bank of America (especially these guys), Citibank and US Bank wouldn’t like my talking about that.

Q. How many times have you pumped up a shit card just because you were getting a commission? Edit: Founderscard comes to mind.

A. Did I ever tell you why I love my overpriced FoundersCard? I only need a few of my newbie readers to signup, and mine is free! You can’t beat free!

Q. Do you push the CSP card so often because that’s the one you get the highest commission on?

A. Well, its not quite the highest but it is up there! I mean with double points on travel and dining, the card basically sells it self And covers my next overpriced massage at the Ritz, all thanks to you newbie reader.

Ok the following weren’t part of the AMA but should have been asked anyway.

Q. I always wondered how is it that your readers write their own success stories with your affiliate link already embedded?

A. 

Uhhhhh.....

Uhhhhh…..

Q. Is it true you really named your dog Miles?

A. Yes, Bankrate wouldn’t let me name it JP Morgan Chase.

I hope everyone got a good laugh out of this – I know this brightened my Tuesday morning.

P.S. The Points Guy does appear to have a sense of humor. Damn arrows by bowtie FTW.

TPG Funny

 

January 1, 2016

PointsCentric: 2015 Year in Review

Apparently this is the new thing to do as I’ve seen several esteemed (and not so esteemed) bloggers going over how 2015 went so I wanted to join in the fun with some stats about this blog in 2015. Looking through the stats was actually quite interesting and I’m hoping I can use that information to write about content readers care about most. This post will talk about just about the blog – I will cover my favorite trips, flights, hotels etc. in my next post.

Background:

2015 was my second full year of blogging as a points/miles blogger as this blog started early in January 2014 but I’ve been blogging since 2011 (I used to blog about Boston College sports at AroundTheRes.com with several other BC alums). I’m happy to say readership increased significantly in 2015 as both page views and unique visitors increased by over 200% even though I posted less in 2015! I think a lot of that is due to a lack of readership in early 2014 as traffic was quite low for a while until I got linked to by several bloggers and MMS featured me in one of his interviews. In 2015, PointsCentric saw just shy of 100,000 visitors.

PC stats

In terms of revenue, the way this blog makes money is from clients who signup for my consulting or award booking services. There are no ads or credit card affiliate links on this site so I am not forced to write about credit card offers and plug my affiliate links relentlessly. I do have some referral links, such as Uber, Amazon etc but those honestly have such little impact to the blog’s bottom-line. Thankfully new clients signups were mostly consistent year over year as new clients signups in 2015 decreased by only 4 as compared to 2014. Revenues generated from clients are still enough to keep me actively engaged in blogging and help keep this blog going.

Top 5 Most Popular Posts in 2015:

#1. My Experience with the Citibank Citigold 30k American Airlines Offer & Funding My Account with a Credit Card > 7,700 Pageviews

This was posted in Feb. 2015 and I believe I was one of the first bloggers to discuss this offer in great detail. It also helped several other blogs linked to this post.

#2. Positive Update on the 30,000 American Airlines Miles Offer for Opening a Citigold Account  > 7,600 Pageviews

The followup was posted in May 2015 and I showed that everything worked out as intended with this offer.

#3. The Alaska Airlines 25k Offer with $100 Statement Credit is Still Alive! > 5,600 Pageviews

This was posted in May 2015 and I figured out an alternative way to generate this offer. Bank of America has been killing any links to this offer pretty quickly but this method still works (I tested it this morning 1/1/16) to get this better offer on the Alaska Airlines credit card.

#4. American Express Business Gold Rewards Signup Bonus Increased to 75,000 Points! > 5,100 Pageviews

This was posted in Nov. 2014 and is the only 2014 post to make this list. I was figured out that using incognito mode/private browsing and/or trying the offer on mobile device would generate a better offer than normal on certain Amex cards. In this case, I found a 75k Amex Business Gold offer. Using incognito and/or mobile devices still generates a better offer on certain cards now (most recent example for me is the 25k Everyday offer)

#5. The Two Browser Trick is Back with the Bank of America Alaska Airlines Credit Card > 4,600 Pageviews

This was posted in Jan. 2015 but the most recent comments on that post seem indicate this isn’t working anymore. However for a large part of 2015 this worked and was an easy way to double up on any BofA offer.

Random Stats:

2014 Total Posts: 154 Posts
2015 Total Posts: 125 Posts

Most Popular Day: May 19, 2015 (Published Positive Update on the 30,000 American Airlines Miles Offer for Opening a Citigold Account)

Least Popular Post of 2015: Today is the Last Day to Book Awards Using US Airways Dividend Miles < 100 Pageviews

Top 5 Countries That Visited PointsCentric:

  1. United States
  2. Canada
  3. United Kingdom
  4. France
  5. Australia

Top 5 Referrers to PointsCentric (thank you to everyone who has ever linked to me!):

  1. Google
  2. View From the Wing
  3. Million Mile Secrets
  4. Doctor of Credit
  5. MileNerd

Dollars Made From Credit Card Signups and Ad Revenue: $0

July 1, 2015

Changing an Award Ticket with No Easy Solution – What You Would Do in This Case?

I’ve been wanting to try out the Andaz Peninsula Papagayo in Costa Rica for a while now and after convincing some of our friends to join us, I proceeded to book award flights and the hotel for 5 nights for a trip next month. I booked all of this several months ago and it was pretty straightforward. The hotel booking was easy – I found points + cash availability and redeemed a diamond suite upgrade for the first 4 nights. For the last night, I used my annual free night from the Hyatt credit card (this is probably one of the best uses for the annual free night since this hotel is a Category 4).

For the flights,  JetBlue and United offered the only non-stop flights from the NY area so I naturally looked there first. I decided to use 24,900 TrueBlue points per person for the roundtrip flight which is quite a deal when compared to other airlines such as United which charges 35,000 miles. Flights are generally expensive to Liberia since it is such a small airport so I was quite happy with this award redemption….until now.

Andaz Papgayo

Andaz Papgayo

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we need to come back Sunday instead of Monday and thus, I need to change my return flight. Unfortunately, we just found this out and with only a month to go to the trip, there are no great options for switching my flight without a hefty cost in miles and/or cash. I’m curious to what others would do in this scenario based on the options below so I’m turning the tables on my readers and asking what YOU would do in this scenario.

Here is what I think all my available options are – feel free to suggest others in the comments if I overlooked something!

1) Change JetBlue flight from Monday to Sunday – This would be the easiest option as I’d switch to my ideal flight home just a day earlier. Except JetBlue wants to charge me $150 per passenger to make this change + the incremental amount of points which is 14,300 points person. The total cost in this case is $300 + 28,600 TrueBlue points (really American Express Membership Rewards points as I don’t have enough TrueBlue points).

Interestingly an agent at JetBlue quoted me a price 27,200 points for the flight when I inquired about switching. She claimed the price below was web only pricing so I’ve factored the incremental points above based on this higher figure since I can’t make the change online. 

JetBlue option

2) Pay Cash – In short, this isn’t a realistic option. The cheapest one way flight home, while ideal due to being non-stop, is $431. For my wife and I that’s $862 on a pair of one-way flights. Ouch. While I could use Chase UR or Citi TY points to book this, I’d much prefer to save those points and redeem them by transferring to airline or hotel partners.

CashOptions

3) Delta Options – If I am going to say one positive thing about Delta’s program it’s that they will sell you almost any flight on miles for the right price. Here are my options which shows Delta has all the flights in economy at Level 5…that is if they actually had an award chart.

DeltaOptions

4) American Options – In a word, absurd and that’s being nice. Take a look at the screenshot below and guess which Sunday I need to return. Yup, 65k miles one way. For economy. No thank you.

AAOption

5) United and/or Copa Options – United unsurprisingly has no saver availability on their nonstop flight to Newark (or any flights operated solely by United) and since I don’t have the United Explorer credit card, I can’t even access standard awards in economy on any flight. I could use a standard award though for 70,000 miles one way for business class for that non-stop Newark flight. That at least beats the American option above since it is in business class right?

UnitedOption

An interesting option is with Copa & United though I really don’t want to land at 5:25am in the morning and have both of us head straight to work. Especially after a 9 hour layover (and I have no desire for a quick trip into Panama at this time). The upside here is I could spend less miles than in other options above and fly business class.

CopaOption

6) Try to get home from San Jose, Costa Rica – I also looked into award availability from the San Jose airport (SJO) which is a 4 hour drive from the Andaz. I really don’t want to do this drive or hire someone for it but if I found saver level availability from SJO, I would at least consider this option. Alas, I couldn’t find any saver availability and cash prices are roughly the same (except for some strange Spirit flight that leaves at 1am). 

Out of all those options, I think I’m leaning towards the JetBlue switching option as that seems to be the only semi-reasonable choice. While it undoubtedly sucks to pay more for this one-way flight home than I initially did for whole award and I also have to pony up for a change fee of $300, I don’t see a better way. If I really wanted the least cash outlay, I can look at the Delta or Copa options though at the expense of many more miles. For now, I think I’ll wait to see what (if anything) opens up as a saver level award on any airline is probably the ideal goal. 

What would you do in this case?

June 20, 2015

Hawaiian Airlines Follows Up with a Nice Mahalo

A few weeks ago I posted about our experience assisting in a medical emergency on our flight home on Hawaiian Airlines Flight 50 HNL-JFK. It was a popular post and it was interesting to see what others thought of the situation. While I was surprised with the all the medical equipment onboard, many of you told me this was all standard so I definitely learned a few new things out of this whole experience.

MedicalEmergency

As mentioned in that post, one of the flight attendants asked for our contact information and we filled out the form above. I forgot about giving them my contact info so I was surprised again last week when I saw a big box on my doorstep that came from Hawaii. My wife asked me if I ordered anything from Hawaii and I didn’t – I had no idea who or what this was. It turns out Hawaiian Airlines sent us a little gift as a way to say mahalo.

HA

HA2 HA1

This was a nice and welcoming surprise from Hawaiian Airlines. I don’t feel we were owed anything from the airline but I think acts like this reflect the true spirit of the airline. Hawaiian is know for their in-flight service (especially compared to US legacy carriers) and it seems to emanate through all levels of the airline.

Thank you Hawaiian for the delicious cookies!