March 2, 2016

JetBlue 25% Off Award Flight Promotion: 7,700 Points for a Roundtrip to the Caribbean!

It has been a while but JetBlue is having an award sale once again on flights with 25% off most award flights. It is actually a solid promotion as I’ve found roundtrip flights to the Caribbean for as low as 7,700 points!

For this promotion, the travel period is almost two months long from 4/26 to 6/16, there are no restrictions on destinations and only Sundays & dates around Memorial Day are excluded. Flights must be booked by 3/4 to lock in the 25% off. Flights won’t be discounted less than 3,500 points and while I normally don’t advocate transferring American Express Membership Rewards points over to JetBlue, it might make sense in this case to top off your account for a discounted award flight.
I spent a few minutes poplin around for deals and as mentioned above I see some great flights available from NY to the Caribbean for as low as 7,700 points roundtrip for non-stop flights! I also see 7,000 points flights on to many US destinations. These amounts are literally less than half of any roundtrip Avios award flight as those start at 15,000 Avios now.

I think there are some great deals to be had with this promotion – share your findings in the comments!

March 1, 2016

Why You Need to Follow Me on Twitter

Yesterday was a great day for travel related deals, including some awesome mistakes fares. Here are some of the big deals from yesterday, some of which lasted only a few hours.

$238-$343 roundtrip flights to many cities in Europe on TAP Portugal
$379 roundtrip flights to Australia
29% off Virgin America flights + $50 off with recent Amex Offer for Virgin America

Unfortunately, if you read this blog and only this blog yesterday, you didn’t see any of these deals (I’m a bad blogger for it, I know). However, I did post about all of these deals on Twitter (or at least retweeted them). See below.

Quite simply with my day job, I don’t have the time or ability to create even a quick post about many of the deals that come up and literally last only hours. If I wait till I get home to post, the deal will most likely be dead. However, I do try my best to post these on Twitter as it can take literally one second to retweet a deal (with a link to get more info) as opposed to typing up the same information. You can even have a text sent to you with my tweets – here is a handy guide on how to set that up.

So in short – follow me @PointsCentric as I tend to post more deals (especially short lived deals such as error fares) on there as a lot of them do not make it on the blog.

February 28, 2016

Do This Today: Hyatt Suite Upgrades (for 2017!), SPG Bookings and More

There are several promotions or other noteworthy items that are expiring or changing on March 1st so I put together a quick to do list as you are hopefully enjoying your Sunday.

1) Use your expiring Hyatt Diamond Suite Upgrades (especially for March 2017 stays) – I don’t need to rehash the changes in full about the Diamond Suite Upgrades – in short, Hyatt is changing the policy that you can’t use them for stays after they expire. However, they are letting you book any remaining suite upgrades (the ones that expire tomorrow 2/29) for stays after they expire. My advice is to first use these expiring suite upgrades for any March 2017 stay first.

Why? When the new 2016 Diamond Suite Upgrades are released in March, I presume they will expire 2/28/17. With the new policy, you will not be able to book any trips for March 2017 using a DSU until the 2017 Suite Upgrades are released on 3/1/17 – that kind of stinks as it forces you to use it last minute (if even available) for a March 2017 stay. But you can book those March 2017 stays now using your 2015 DSU that expire tomorrow. It seems strange but it’s true. Unfortunately, you can only book 13 months in advance on Hyatt otherwise I would recommend this strategy for any possible 2017 stay.

Now I understand many people don’t know about their travel plans ~13 months in advance but if you have any inkling of a trip you’d like to take that would involve a Hyatt Diamond Suite upgrade, I’d book it now knowing you can always cancel it later for free (though you obviously lose the DSU at that time, which isn’t a big loss considering you are losing it tomorrow if you don’t book anything with it).

2) Book Starwood Hotels before the March 1st Devaluation – As part of their annual category changes, Starwood has released the list of hotels that will be either moving up or down a category for 2016. These changes go into effect for bookings made on March 1st so you can lock in the pre-devaluation rate if you book before March 1st, even if your stay is after that date. Some of the noteworthy hotels increasing in categories are:

The Walt Disney World Swan – Category 4 to Category 5
Sheraton Maui Resort & Spa – Category 5 to Category 6
The Westin Maui Resort & Spa – Category 5 to Category 6
The Westin Lagunamar Ocean Resort (Cancun) – Category 5 to Category 6
The Westin Grand Cayman Seven Mile Beach – Category 5 to Category 6 (particularly bummed about this one)

Westin Grand Cayman

3) Consider Applying for a American Airlines Citibank Credit Card – All of the bloggers who have Citibank affiliate links have been posting non stop this week how the 50,000 mile offers on the Citibank Platinum Select and CitiBusiness AA cards are changing on Monday 2/29. While I don’t doubt they will have to take down their affiliate links for the 50k offer, I’m rather confident there will still be 50k links floating around as Citibank is known to do. It is usually possible to find a working link for many Citibank offers after they supposedly expire so I am not concerned about the change in offers.

I personally don’t think anyone needs to rush out and apply for either card today but if you are risk-adverse and want to guarantee an easy 50,000 AA miles, then I guess go for it. However, I will not be nor I am recommending it to any of my clients. Here is a non-affiliate link for the personal card and business card if you must.

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:

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.

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?

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.

February 10, 2016

I Dragged My Feet & Got Burned: Citibank Kills Funding Bank Accounts With A Credit Card

The big news from yesterday was that you can no longer fund a Citibank bank account with a credit card. I have written about this quite extensively in the past as seen here, here, and here. Some of these posts are still among my most viewed posts on a daily basis – especially funding a Citibank Savings Account with a credit card as I think I was among the first bloggers to blog about that specific deal.

RIP

With all the time I’ve spent on the topic and recommending it others, you’d think I would make sure to maximize this promotion for my wife and I. While it’s true we both got new Citigold Checking accounts and I got my own Savings Plus account in the past year, I never got around to setting up a Citibank Savings Plus account for my wife. There was no good reason to delay it other than the thought I’ll get around to it next weekend (or the weekend after that) as I (stupidly) thought this “deal” would always be available. I ended up dragging my feet on this and with a newly increased credit line on my Citi Prestige, I could have funded this account up to $25,000. My procrastination is going to cost me at least $400 (based on 1.6 cents a point in value) for at most 10 minutes or so of work.

I imagine someone will make this argument in the comment section so I’ll head it off now but no, I do not think I killed this deal. My traffic is nowhere near the levels of Million Mile Secrets and other big blogs who posted about this deal in the same level of detail. Their daily traffic levels are over 10x what I receive so I refuse to believe it was my post that killed this deal for anyone.

Over the past year or so, I’m sure Citibank saw a huge increase in both 1) the number of accounts funded with a credit card and 2) accounts closed shortly after opening. It is probably the second point that killed this deal as Citibank was losing on the credit card processing fees but hoped to recoup that customer acquisition cost by having new, long term Citibank customers. I’m quite confident that many of us in this game opened the account with a credit card and then closed it within 6 months to a year – thereby making this quite expensive for Citibank (especially if you opened a Citigold account under the 30,000 to 50,000 American AAdvantage or Thank You point offers).

I want my readers to takeway the following from this post. Within the past year, we have seen many of the easy routes for free and/or cheap manufactured spend disappear, often with no warning like this. The game keeps evolving & combined with the devaluation of frequent flier / hotel loyalty programs things have certainly gotten tougher for many travel hackers as compared to 12 months ago. Please take my advice and don’t procrastinate when a valuable deal is staring you in the face – jump on it and take advantage while the proverbial “iron is still hot”. Additionally, always have backup plan – whether it is to simply to meet a minimum spend requirement or liquidate Visa prepaid gift cards.

Now as Jay Z says, On To The Next One