July 9, 2014

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!

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

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.

June 16, 2014

Who Wants 1 Million Points?

Via Mile Nerd, points.com is running a contest where one lucky receipent will win one million points in the program of their choice!

Yes, it is a longshot you will win but let’s daydream where one million points could take you. Let’s say you choose United miles. To give you an idea what you could burn one million miles on, you could use them for:

4o Roundtrip Domestic Flights in the Continental US or
8 Roundtrip Business Class Flights to Europe or
10 Roundtrip First Class Flights to Hawaii or
7 Roundtrip Business Class Flight to Australia

Link to signup for the contest is – HERE.

Good luck – you’ve got to be in it to win it!

Note I do not receive anything if you enter the contest – I simply think for 10 seconds of work, its worth daydreaming where one million miles can take you

PointsCentric is on vacation, using his points and miles, without access to wifi and thus, cannot respond to emails or comments. Please enjoy this run of scheduled posts – I will respond to all email and approved comments upon my return. Thanks!

May 20, 2014

Roundup of Four Offers for Free Points & Miles!

This has been a good week for free points and miles as several deals appeared this week. I’ll give a brief rundown of each.

1) Create a Southwest Frequent Flyer Account and Earn 750 Miles! Hopefully most of you followed my advice previously and created your frequent flyer accounts already but if not, Southwest is offering 750 miles for signing up for an account. I have a referral link I can send you directly to signup in which you will receive the 750 miles and I will receive 500 miles for referring you. Please contact me if you’d like me to refer you!

2) 500 United Miles – United has a dining program in which you can earn 500 miles just for signing up! I’ll go more in-depth on airline dining programs in another post but basically you link your frequent flyer number and credit card and if you go out to eat at a participating restaurant, you get extra miles! Once you signup and link a credit card, there is no extra work – just pay with that credit card at the restaurant!

3) 2,000 Marriott Points Per Month via Social Media. Marriott just launched a new program called “Plus Points” in which members can earn up to 2,000 Rewards Points per 30 days for participating in specific social media tasks on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare. This includes liking hotels on Facebook, tweeting certain hashtags and more. The Points Guy has a good rundown of the info here. If you did this for a few minutes each month, you could potentially earn 24,000 points a year which is a free hotel room up to category 5!

Free hotel room for playing around on social media!

4) 500 IHG Points! The hotel program for Intercontinental, Holiday Inns and more is offering 500 free points for taking 3 really short quizzes (seriously it takes 20 seconds each). Here are the links to the quizzes (below just click the quiz) and here is a separate link to the answers (c’mon how easy can this get).

1. 300 Point Quiz

2. 100 Point Quiz

3. 100 Point Quiz (#2)

Now of course none of these deals alone will get you enough miles for a free trip but every little bit helps. You never know when you might be 500 or 1,000 points short. Remember the points and miles game is a marathon, not a sprint and every little bit helps.

April 16, 2014

750 Free United Miles + Potential for 750 More!

It seems almost every week there is a way to get some free miles out there and this week’s offering includes 750 United Miles for joining MyPoints. You will receive 500 miles for signing up and verifying your account and an additional 250 miles for completing your profile. I did both and it took approximately 5 minutes.

1,500 United Miles!

MyPoints is an online shopping portal that allows you to earn bonus points or miles for shopping online. So for shopping you might already be doing, you could be earning 2x, 5x or I’ve even seen 40x the amount of points or miles! I plan on discussing the benefits of online shopping portals in a future Points & Miles 101 post but to summarize quickly, instead of heading to say Macys.com or Target.com, you would first log in to your MyPoints account and click through to a store’s website from the MyPoints website. They will track any potential order you make and award you a certain bonus amount of points (typically ranging from 2x-5x) per dollar spent.

So for a quick example, let’s say you need to buy a new bathing suit for the upcoming summer season and Macy’s has a great one at $30. Let’s ignore tax and shipping for a moment – if you were to purchase this bathing suit normally, you might earn 30 points if you use a rewards credit card. However, for a few extra clicks and logging in to MyPoints first and seeing Macy’s is currently offering 4 bonus points per dollar spent, you would earn an additional 120 points for buying that same bathing suit (4 points x 30 dollars)!

I mentioned in the title for a potential of 750 more United Miles and you could earn that if you make your first purchase of $25 or more via MyPoints within 30 days of membership. Full terms below.

Terms & Conditions

(h/t to Gary via Mile Nerd)

April 8, 2014

Quick & Easy 500 Free Virgin Atlantic Miles!

Virgin Atlantic is offering 500 miles if you download their shopping tool bar in your internet browser. Instead of clogging your main internet browser, download this in another internet browser you don’t use (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome etc.)

The direct link is here. Please note it will ask you to log into your Virgin Atlantic account first and then re-click to download the toolbar. The terms do state they will remove the miles if you uninstall the toolbar hence my recommendation to not use your main internet browser.

Enjoy – who doesn’t love free miles?

(H/T to Head for Points)

*Note I do not receive anything if you enter the contest – I simply think for 10 seconds of work, its worth daydreaming where one million miles can take you*

**PointsCentric is on vacation, using his points and miles, without access to wifi and thus, cannot respond to emails or comments. Please enjoy this run of scheduled posts – I will respond to all email and approved comments upon my return. Thanks!**

Note I do not receive anything if you enter the contest – I simply think for 10 seconds of work, its worth daydreaming where one million miles can take you

PointsCentric is on vacation, using his points and miles, without access to wifi and thus, cannot respond to emails or comments. Please enjoy this run of scheduled posts – I will respond to all email and approved comments upon my return. Thanks!