Travelocity is offering 20% off a minimum $800 hotel purchase using promo code AMEX20H (purchase by August 16 for travel through December 31). Price is reduced instantly. Then, if you’re traveling by September 30, the American Express Link, Like, Love promotion can get you another 20% off in the form of a statement credit. (Minimum $350 spend and 3 nights. This can only be used once per cardmember.) These two combine for a 36% discount. Sadly, I don’t believe that the Travelocity American Express is eligible for the Amex Link, Like, Love promotion (because the card is issued by Barclays), or else you could get another 10% rebate on your actual spend. Wow. But without that, an $800 3-night stay consumed by September 30th will cost you $512. Not bad.
500 Free Hawaiian Airlines Miles
They’re offering 500 miles for connecting your Hawaiian Miles account with your Twitter handle. I figure that since you can now earn 2 Hawaiian Airlines miles per dollar spent at Amazon, for some of you every Hawaiian mile now counts. (HT: toddreg on Milepoint.)
Using Amex Gift Cards to the Meet Minimum Spend Requirements for Credit Card Signup Bonuses
Now that the US Mint has stopped allowing you to buy coins with credit cards with free shipping to earn miles (you used to then just put the coins in the bank and pay off your credit card), I’ve gotten lots of questions about cheap and easy ways to meet the minimum spending requirements for credit card signup bonuses. See, lots of those great 50,000, 75,000, and 100,000 mile signup offers don’t fully kick in until you’ve put a reasonable chunk of change on those cards. And most folks (including me!) aren’t comfortable playing games like buying diamond rings on the Costco website with a Visa or Mastercard and returning them in-store where they only process American Express. Play that game too many times and you can easily get banned from Costco. So I thought…
Where the First Class Award Seats Are
When I redeem my own awards, my strong interest is in international first class travel on better airlines. Sure, I’m on the East Coast and so Western Europe is fine in business class. That’s transportation. But the beauty of miles is that they can deliver aspirational rewards, the kinds of experiences I would never be in a position to pay for out of pocket. But thanks to miles and points, getting there can be part of the trip experience too, not just something to ‘get through’. Now, I should say that I (1) pay attention and accumulate a lot of miles, and (2) am redeeming for only two people, myself and my wife, this would be harder if we were traveling with kids (both because they aren’t usually ‘doing their fair share’ to earn the…
Amex Stopped Charging Taxes to Transfer Points to Miles
An interesting side effect of the failure of Congress to re-authorize the FAA, in addition to airlines not charging federal taxes on ticket sales, is that the American Express Membership Rewards program is not charging their fee (which ostensibly recoups taxes) on transfers to U.S. frequent flyer mile programs. Normally Amex charges $0.0006 per point (capped at $60 per 100,000 miles transferred) when moving points to U.S. airline mileage programs. The fee isn’t charged when transferring to hotel programs or to non-U.S. programs like British Airways and Singapore Krisflyer. That means if you’re considering a transfer to a U.S. program like Delta or Continental (before the Amex-Continental relationship ends September 30), this is a good time to do it – save yourself up to $60. To me the transfer fees are annoying, but the lack…
If Your Underwear Doesn’t Speak, You Can’t Fly Today
In one of those bizarre “there must be more to it than that” sort of stories, a woman is suing JetBlue for making her prove to them that she was wearing underwear. Apparently she was, but the Captain wouldn’t fly with her and she wound up taking another flight four hours later. Ms Knowles said she was wearing a baggy blue T-shirt over a pair of short dark denim shorts she had put on for the flight on July 13, last year when she was forced off the plane at LaGuardia Airport. She was taken to a hangar, where she lifted up her T-shirt to prove she met the dress code. The supervisor seemed surprise at her shorts and she was allowed to return to the flight, but was then told the pilot refused to…
Is There a Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity to Buy Airline Tickets Tax Free?
The U.S. House adjourned for the day without a temporary extension or re-authorization for the FAA. The last full re-authorization was four years ago, and 20 short-term extensions have been passed since then. The latest one runs out at midnight tonight. This is expected to mean the furlough of 4000 employees, but does not affect air traffic control. Which of course leads me to wonder about the usefulness of those 4000 employees anyway. Republicans in the House, led by Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica, are at odds with Senate Democrats — primarly over the Essential Air Service program. I’ve explained in the past just how wasteful this this program is, and that it really can’t be made more effective. Mica doesn’t propose to gut much from the program, just to end subsidies that amount to…
The End of Buying $1 Coins from the Mint to Earn Miles
Via Million Mile Secrets, the US mint deal is officially dead. They’re no longer accepting credit or debit cards for the purchase of $1 coins, and they say it’s precisely because people were buying the coins to earn frequent flyer miles and depositing the coins in the bank to pay off those credit cards. But they’ve known for a long time that this was going on. I first wrote about it in June 2008. In the summer of 2009, the deal exploded as the Mint lifted the per-person cap on purchases. Scott McCartney learned all about it on the first Star Mega DO and wrote a Wall Street Journal column about it. That was nearly two years ago. After attention in the press, the Mint took some heat for letting the practice continue. And they…
100 Free ANA Mileage Club Miles
One Mile at a Time beat me to the punch, I got an email last night from ANA that I didn't read and I saw a thread on Milepoint but I was pretty tired… Ben was more on the ball. So he posted about an All Nippon Mileage Club Survey offering 100 points. It’s 16 quick questions about their website and about social media. The real value in the offer, as Ben points out, is that ANA has a great website to search for Star Alliance awards but that they’ve implemented a restriction requiring you to have some miles in your account before you can use the search tool without extra effort for a workaround. This should get you the 100 miles you need to save you effort down the road. I really liked the…
250 Free Starwood Points
The recent free points offers for ‘liking’ Starwood hotels on Facebook haven’t worked out too well, they get much greater response than expected and they end the offers early. I haven’t blogged any of them, because I’ve been busy and haven’t seen them until maybe 8-12 hours after they’re posted on various other websites… and they’re already dead. It seems that hotels expect to narrowly target, say, guests at the hotel with a sign in the lobby — connect with their existing guests. But they just say ‘like us on Facebook and we’ll give you points’ with no other qualifying criteria, the offers get posted online, and we all go, “Free points??? YEAH!” And then a motel in Heth, Arkansas all of a sudden has 15,000 fans (most of whom would never be willing to…
