January 9, 2015

PSA: Don’t Apply for the Chase Hyatt Visa Credit Card Unless You Are Getting a $50 Statement Credit

Last night, while helping a client map out a personalized credit card application strategy, I was recommending the Chase Hyatt Visa credit card but I couldn’t remember if the $50 statement credit “hack” was still around. After pretending to make a reservation on hyatt.com, sure enough there was an offer for a $50 statement credit on the card in addition to the 2 Free Nights with the annual fee waived for the first year. Basically Chase is paying you$50 to acquire 2 Free Hotel nights – sounds good to me!

Here is how to get the Chase Hyatt Visa credit card with a $50 statement credit which is better than the standard, public offer that does not have this $50 statement credit:

Log in to your Hyatt Gold Passport Account (you need to do this at some point in the process, I recommending doing it first).
Pretend to make a reservation at a United States Hyatt hotel. I chose my favorite Hyatt hotel, the Andaz Maui.
Select any room type and click through to the next page which brings you to the “Complete New Reservation” page
Scroll all the way down to where it asks for your credit card information. Right next to that should be a box to click with the offer for a $50 statement credit on the Chase Hyatt Visa credit card (see picture below).
Click that box and then on the next page, click the apply button which will take you to the Chase website with some of your information pre-filled from your Hyatt account. If you didn’t log into your Hyatt account before, it will ask you to do so here.
You DO NOT need to complete the reservation – feel free to close the reservation page once you apply for the card.

The offer next to where it asks for your credit card information

The following page confirming the signup bonus

This isn’t groundbreaking news as this offer has been around for a while now but I want to make sure no one is applying for an inferior offer for this card. I don’t see this offer or hack mentioned too often on the blogs, so hopefully this will bring some attention to it.

January 8, 2015

Point & Center: 100 Free American AAdvantage Miles, Only 26,250 Miles Roundtrip for a Award Flight to Europe and More!

Welcome to the first Point & Center feature of 2015. Let’s get to it with some real quick updates of what’s going on in the points/miles world.

1) 100 Free American AAdvantage Miles for Joining PointsHound – PointsHound, which is a site that offer miles or points for booking hotel rooms through them, is offering new users 100 Free AA miles simply for signing up – no purchase required. You will also get an additional 2,000 miles if you actually reserve a hotel room by March 31st. I definitely recommend signing up to get the free 100 AA miles but if you do book a hotel room through them, remember you will most likely not earn stay credit with the hotel program nor have your elite benefits recoginzed. I mainly use PointsHound if I have a non-chain hotel stay. (H/T View from the Wing)

2) How to Fly to Europe for 26,250 Virgin Atlantic Miles Roundtrip…with a catch – Virgin Atlantic is having an award sale that is discounting the amount of miles needed for an award flight by 25% for ALL destinations. If you orginate on the East Coast of the United States, that means a roundtrip award is only 26,250 miles but with one major issue – fuel surcharges of $500 per person. The other approach is to use this for a one way TO London where the cost would be 13,125 miles + $134 in fuel surcharges (its more expensive departing FROM London). You must book your tickets by January 22nd and this is valid for economy only. This is similar to their award sale last year that I wrote about here.

Cost of Discounted Awards

3) Starwood Best Rate Guarantee Improves – Starwood has one of the easiest Best Rate Guarantees as you don’t need even need a current reservation to make a best rate claim to get a cheaper rate at Starwood branded hotels. Starwood recently announced an enhancement to their best rate guarantee by now offering customers 20% off the lower rate if it is found outside the Starwood reservations channels (website, mobile app & phone reservations). The old discount used to be 10% off. You also still have the option to select 2,000 Starpoints instead of the 20% discount.

4) A Pretty Awesome Club Carlson Promotion – Club Carlson is enticing its members to stay at Club Carlson hotels (Radisson, Radisson Blu, Country Inn & Park Plaza) in Q1 2015 by offering 15,000 points after staying 2 nights or 30,000 points after staying 3+ nights for stays from January 12 to March 29. This promotion called “Extend Your Stay, Earn 30K” is by far the best promotion of Q1 across all major hotel chains. Additionally, some Club Carlson members were sent an email offering them an extra 10,000 points on top of the bonuses if they registered by January 12th. Here is the link to register.

5) Starwood Q1 Promotion – Starwood has also announced their Q1 promotion which is open for registration as well called the SPG Double Play Promotion. You can earn double points on stays of 2+ nights and 1,000 point bonus after every 5 nights. The 5 nights do not have to be consecutive to earn the 1,000 point bonus. Compared to the Club Carlson offer, this pales in comparison but is still worth registering for.

As always, I recommend registering now even if you don’t think you’ll have an applicable stay in the period because if the need for a stay unexpectedly arises, chances are you won’t remember to register for these promotions (this applies to the Club Carlson offer above as well).

6) Start Linking Your American & US Airways Frequent Flyer Accounts – The next step in the merger of American and US Airways is to combine the frequent flyer accounts of both program so members will have just one resulting frequent flyer program (which will be your American AAdvantage account and you will keep your existing AA number). However, before they can completely merge the frequent flyer accounts, American is asking members to link their AA account to their US Airways account.

Per One Mile a Time, American announced the following:

“The time has come – beginning tonight, members with accounts in both programs will be able to match their accounts on aa.com and usairways.com (full sites only; not on the mobile sites or the app). Members will automatically be presented with the option to match their accounts on either site when they log-in or by selecting the Match My Account link in the My Account section. Once a customer has successfully matched their account, they will see a success message online, receive an email and will see a success message in the My Account section on both sites. Matching accounts is simply a way to self-identify, so the process to merge the accounts in second quarter of 2015 is easier on the business.”

Hopefully this is a sign that members will soon be able to transfer miles back and forth between programs but this has not been announced yet. Here is to hoping its sooner rather than later!

January 5, 2015

Good Deal Alert: 100,000 Point American Express Platinum, 50,000 Point Premier Rewards Gold Rewards & 30,000 Point Everyday Preferred Credit Cards

I know every blogger has posted about this but I wanted to make sure my readers had a chance to get in on this offer as well. Right now using, the Card Match Tool on creditcards.com, there are some great offers on American Express cards including the Platinum, Premier Rewards and Everyday Preferred cards. However, this is targeted and seems to be aimed at folks who either do not have Amex cards already or barely use their existing Amex cards. Each of the these offers are significantly higher than the standard public offers and I recommend applying for them if you are targeted for any of these offers. Note you cannot get these offers if you already these cards before at somepoint.

To check to see if you got this offer, click the Card Match Tool link and fill out the info requested. Do not worry about putting the last four of your social security number, this does not generate a hard pull nor does this affect your credit score.

The CardMatch Tool

Here are a rundown of the three offers and how I would rank them. Note I only recommend applying for one card if you happen to be targeted for multiple offers.

1. American Express Platinum Card (60,000 to 100,000 points)

60k to 100k Points after spending $3k in 3 months
$450 Annual Fee NOT Waived
$200 Airline Travel Credit Annually (since this is calendar year you can do this twice and cover $400 of the $450 annual fee)
Elite status with Starwood, National, Hertz & Avis Rent a Car
Lounge Access with Delta, Centurion, & Airspace Airport Lounges
Free Global Entry or TSA Precheck

The normal offer on this card is 40,000 points and 100,000 points is the about the highest offer I’ve seen (some rare people have seen 150,000 point offers). I’m sure people have concerns over the annual fee but the points are easily worth ~$1,500 plus you get $400 in airline gift cards plus the other perks listed above. Keep the card a year and then cancel the card before the next annual fee is due. I wrote how to get a 100,000 point offer on the Business Platinum Card here.

2. American Express Premier Rewards Gold Card (50,000 points)

50k Points after spending $1k in 3 months
$175 Annual Fee IS WAIVED the 1st year
Triple points on airfare, double points on gas and groceries

The normal offer on this card is 25,000 points so this is double the standard offer. This is a solid card to rack up points if you pay for airfare typically or do not currently have a card that earns a bonus at gas stations or grocery stores.

3. American Express Everyday Preferred Card (30,000 points)

30k Points after spending $2k in 3 months
$95 Annual Fee NOT Waived
Triple points on groceries, double points on gas
50% bonus on points if you have more than 30 transactions in a billing cycle

A relative newcomer to the Amex lineup, the standard offer on this card is 15,000 points so again double the standard offer here. If you hit the 30 or more transactions in a month you actually earn 4.5x on supermarkets and 3x on gas which is fantastic.

Neither my wife nor I were targeted for any of these as we already have a ton of Amex cards and use them heavily. In speaking with my clients about this offer (who got early access to this deal as a perk for being a client if it made sense for them), only 2 out of 10 clients who have written me back so far were targeted so this is definitely limited. However, its well worth a shot to see if it works for you. Good Luck!

*Unlike many of the other blogs discussing this offer, I do not have an affiliate link for creditcards.com. Didn’t see too many bloggers mentioning a disclosure that they got paid on these offers…

January 4, 2015

Have a Handful of Orphan Miles? Here is an Easy Way to Redeem Them with Points.com

Update: A good catch by one of the commenters. Most of these programs have minimums of 1,000 + miles/points. I only actually exchanged my Frontier miles and didn’t try the others yet. Seems dumb it shows you what you could exchange say 58 miles for if it won’t let you actually do it due to program minimums. This option becomes less useful now but will still work for orphan balances above a program’s minimum. My fault for not testing completely – Sorry about that.

I was going through all my accounts on AwardWallet (highly recommended to track all your points/miles balances) and I noticed a handful of “orphan miles” sitting in accounts that I mostly likely wouldn’t use again. Orphan miles are balances of less than a few thousand points/miles with no intent to ever use that program again. Additionally, these points/miles may be expiring soon and you have no possible way to extend them or use them. Sure you might be able to redeem some miles for magazines or other items but let’s say your balance is too small to even do that. I want to maximize the value of every last mile and embedded within this post from View From the Wing today, I remembered from that post there is a way to exchange these orphan miles/points for miles I actually care about using Points.com.

You need to create an account at Points.com and register the programs you want to transfer the miles/points out of. While you can register a ton of programs at Points.com, you can only exchange points from the following programs with no fee: Aeroplan, American Airlines, Amtrak, Asia Miles, Delta, Frontier, Hawaiian Airlines, Icelandair, JetBlue, US Airways, Virgin America, IHG, La Quinta, Melia Rewards, Trident Hotels, and a few non airline/hotel loyalty programs.

My “orphan” accounts (along with my wife’s) include:

600 points at La Quinta (must have gotten these for signing up for their loyalty program as I’ve never stayed at a La Quinta)
58 & 31 Hawaiian Airline Miles respectively (just redeemed the bulk of our Hawaiian miles for our April 2015 trip to the Big Island & Maui)
2,608 Frontier Miles (wife flew them a while back and the miles will soon expire. No desire to ever fly them again/use their miles for flights)
500 Choice Hotel Points (unfortunately not a partner on Points.com)
250 Wyndham Points (unfortunately not a partner on Points.com)

To exchange the points, you must first add the loyalty program to your Points.com account which is pretty straightforward as you give your membership number and name on the account or in some cases the username/password of the account. From there, you can click trade, exchange & buy on top of the page and fill in the information of the points you want to get rid of. You’ll see a list of possible options, choose your favorite and points.com will process the transaction in about a week.

Here are some examples using my orphan accounts.

Easy enough to input the miles you want to get rid of

My exchange options for my unwanted Frontier miles (my snapshot doesn’t show all possible exchange options)

My La Quinta Options

And even options for my 58 Hawaiian Miles

This goes to show you why I register for every free point/mile opportunity and track every account in AwardWallet even if I know I wouldn’t ever use that program. Is this a big deal and way to stockpile a ton of miles by exchanging “bad miles” for “good miles”? Nope, as I don’t think converting 58 Hawaiian Miles into 7 American Airlines miles is significant 99.9% of the time. However, imagine you were just 5 miles short of an award flight you want with AA miles – then these 7 miles aren’t so meaningless after all. Additionally, this is also a way to extend the expiration date of the miles in programs like American Airlines and US Airways.

Some people would argue this is a waste of time and that might very well be true. But if Chasing the Points cares about clearing off 2 cents off a gift card, then maybe I should care about redeeming 600 useless points/miles for something that might be helpful down the road.

January 2, 2015

New for 2015: Delta One Way Award Flights Now Bookable!

Out of the major US airlines, my least favorite frequent flyer program has been Delta SkyMiles. Nicknamed “SkyPesos” by some, the award costs for Delta flights were generally astronomic, searching for awards on Delta.com was awful and to add insult to injury, all awards had to be booked as roundtrip awards. That meant even if you found low level availability on one leg (lucky you if you did) but there was nothing except peak level on the return, there was no way to book just the low level flight until yesterday, as one way awards on Delta are now bookable!

In addition to allowing one way award flights, Delta updated their award chart to have 5 tiers with the hope being there would be more lower level availability (levels 1 and 2). And arguably maybe the biggest improvement is the award search engine on Delta.com is enhanced, allowing you to see the lowest award availability over a 5 week period. However, there were negative changes made as well including the elimination of stopovers on awards (which matches the change made by American Airlines last year).

New Award Chart

So with all these changes does everything work on Delta.com as intended? I’ll walk you through my experience yesterday as I am going to Aruba over Martin Luther King weekend and I needed to book a return flight home still.

I don’t have the screenshot but I tried to price out the one way flight home on December 31st (before the new award chart took effect) and it was pricing at 35,000 miles which was the saver roundtrip award amount under the old SkyMiles award chart (this was totally expected). Yesterday morning I did the exact same search and I tested out the 5 week calendar (even though I had a specific day I had to return on) and the results were much more encouraging.

Notice the 5 Weeks Option under Calendar View

There is actually some low level availability!

With the exception of just a handful of days, most days had availability at the lowest level (level 1) or second lowest level (level 2). I was pleasantly surprised by this as I excepted standard rates (now called level 3) for the majority of the days based on Delta’s history of stinginess with low level awards, this is a limited route with only one non-stop option daily and the fact this is a peak time to travel to Aruba to escape the New York winter. I think having the 5 tiers is a definite improvement as I’m sure some of the days with level 2 availability would have been priced higher under the old chart.

Now obviously this is a limited example that may not truly show the effect of the changes to the SkyMiles program but other bloggers seem to have a similar opinion that low level availability and the award searching are better than before (here and here). Time will tell if this in indeed the case but this is a good start to Delta SkyMiles for 2015.

PointsCentric

Points & Miles Travel Consulting