April 29, 2015

1,000 Free American Airlines Miles for Answering a Few Quick Questions

American Airlines is giving away 1,000 free miles for answering a few questions about the AAdvantage program. It is an easy test of sorts to see how much you know about the American Airlines AAdvantage program but there are helpful videos to watch before you get the question for each of the different topics. Additionally, you can register for a grand prize of two first class tickets to anywhere American flies.

AA1000Miles

Link to Watch Videos & Earn 1,000 Free Miles

You don’t have to watch the videos (feel free to skip to the end to get the questions) as I’m nice enough to include the answers below.

Exploring My Account – All of the above

Inside Elite Benefits –  Iron

Principles of Redeeming Miles – Flights

Earning Miles with Credit Cards – 25% off

Earning with Partners – Dining Out

Seeing the World: Flying & Earning – 6,700

After completing all the questions, I got a notice saying miles will be posted in 6 to 8 weeks. Considering this took me all of 2 minutes, I highly recommend everyone register and answer the questions to get 1,000 free AA miles.

April 28, 2015

Question of the Day: Would You Consider This a Partial Ocean View?

I’m at the Andaz Maui right now with my wife celebrating our second first anniversary trip (that’s not confusing at all) and I used points + cash combined with a diamond suite upgrade for our stay. We stayed here last year on our second honeymoon trip and used the same points + cash combined with a diamond suite upgrade. Last year, we got room 539 which had a great, almost full view of the ocean. This year, we got room 138 and this ocean view. 

 

Last year, not from our room but same sightline

 
 

This year…


As you can see, just a little bit different. I have my own theories on how we got the worse suite in the resort (I’ll explain in a different post) but I did mention my disappointment to the hotel and their response was they could move me to a normal room with a better ocean view or stay in my suite.
We chose to stay in the suite but to all of you, would you consider this an acceptable partial ocean view? Would you have switched to a normal room with a better view? 

April 23, 2015

Award Trip Breakdown: Aloha From Hawaii!

A big Aloha to all of you as we are currently en-route to Hawaii, flying Hawaiian first class JFK-HNL-KOA on our first big trip of 2015. This is our second time to the Hawaiian islands (after spending our second honeymoon here) and this time around we spending 3 nights on the island of Hawai’i (better known as the Big Island) followed by 6 nights in Maui.

Last year when we made this trip we flew Hawaiian in economy the whole way and back but we decided to splurge with our points and fly Hawaiian “First Class” for this trip. Before you said that’s a waste of points, I’ve read the reviews and I know Hawaiian “First Class” is more comparable to a domestic first class product with big recliner seats instead of lie-flat seats but it still beats economy for 11 hours on the JFK to Honolulu route. I’ll be sure to post my experience and if I thought it was worth the additional miles.

Hawaiian A330 First Class

Hawaiian A330 First Class

On the Big Island we are staying at the Hilton Waikokola Village. I had initially booked our 3 nights with Hilton HHonors points but on Cyber Monday there was a fantastic 50% off sale on all rooms. I decided to book a room in their new MAKAI rooms which offer an upgraded level of service and amenities. With the 50% off sale, it was only about $50 more a night for this room category compared to the base rooms (which were under $100 with this sale) and I’m interested to see if the premium is worth it.

The Massive Hilton Waikokloa Property

The Massive Hilton Waikokloa Property

For Maui, while the allure to stay at a new hotel was promising, it was actually more tempting for us to return to the Andaz Maui. We stayed here last year after staying a few nights at the Grand Wailea and we simply loved it. I booked a Points & Cash stay but unfortunately it seems like the hotel has stopped making these available (I actually booked this stay last year when points & cash awards were more available). It works out well for me that Hyatt’s promotion is ongoing in which I will get 20% of my points back. I did see on the Flyertalk thread for this property that people aren’t as enamored with the property recently so I’ll report back to see how it compared to my stay last year.

Andaz Maui

Andaz Maui

I highly recommend following me on Twitter and Instagram as I will be posting updates and pictures on those social media sites instead of the blog. I do plan on writing up a trip report on the blog that further documents our travels and how easy it was to do on points and miles. So while I’ll post some pictures and details on the flights and hotels in the trip report, you can expect much more analysis in how I booked these awards, what points/miles I used and my recommendations for others to replicate this. Blog posts will be a little less frequent while were away but I will be checking my email. So stayed tuned for more details on this trip and Mahalo!

April 20, 2015

PSA: Don’t Apply for the Alaska Airlines Credit Card Unless It Has a $100 Statement Credit

Update (5/10:) Link below does not work anymore but I found a workaround to still get the $100 statement credit.

If I’m being honest, one of the things that really irks me about this hobby is several well-known bloggers not making their readers aware of the best offer on a particular credit card. The latest example is the Alaska Airlines credit card which according to these expert bloggers only has a 25,000 mile signup bonus. The truth is there is actually a public offer that has a 25,000 mile signup bonus + a $100 statement credit for spending $1,000 in 3 months.

Alaskan Airlines

The best part about this card (and Bank of America cards in general) is that you can get several of them on the same day for just one credit pull. I was able to get 2 Alaska credit cards on my wife’s latest churn on the same day without issue. Recently Frequent Miler reported he was able to get 4 Virgin Atlantic credit cards (which are also issued by Bank of America) in his crazy quest for a week on Necker Island. It is nice to see Bank of America being so liberal giving out multiple cards on the same day when other banks have tightened up this practice.

While this may not be groundbreaking news to many of you, consider this your friendly public service announcement to always make sure to apply for the Alaska Airlines Visa with the $100 statement credit. With every application, Bank of America is essentially paying you $25 ($100 statement credit – $75 annual fee) to acquire 25,000 Alaska miles. If you were able to get 3 of these cards in a day, that one credit pull would be worth 75,000 miles in addition to receiving $75 dollars. That sure beats paying $225 for the same amount of miles if you didn’t know about this offer and listened to those other bloggers.