Tag Archives for taxes.
Here’s a CEO who spent 1.83 million American Express Membership Rewards points to cover a surprise tariff bill at the guitar pedal manufactuing company he runs in Oklahoma Cty.
You are legally entitled to a refund of TSA security fees and customs and immigration inspection fees on unused nonrefundable tickets on request. When you don’t ask, airlines keep that money.
The Holiday Inn Express Durango Downtown-Animas River adds a mysterious fee to bookings at the property that’s made out to look like a tax. A reader shares the fee, asking what it could be?
You can only buy tickets in-person at limited hours, but you can’t buy tickets during those hours. That means there’s no real option to buy them in person, which means that booking online isn’t a choice customers are making, and therefore the web booking fee is not optional. Yet Frontier still excludes these charges from their domestic airfare excise tax calculation.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 changed the tax treatment for business entertainment expenses. It made airline club lounge memberships no longer deductible to a business. But a bit of financial engineering would seem to make lounge access still deductible.
My $24,000 credit card tax payment this morning processed with a flat fee of $2.50 instead of the usual 1.87%, for a savings of $446.30. Here’s how.
Tax day is right around the corner, and so is the year’s first quarterly Estimated Tax deadline of April 15th.
Many people pay their taxes due via credit card. It can be worth it for earning credit card initial bonuses, threshold spending bonuses and credit towards status, and for high rebate cards even just earning the spread between cost and reward value
There’s a lot of confusion over taxes and fees when flying from London, because there are so many of them. European and British airlines like British Airways add fuel surcharges or ‘carrier-imposed surcharges’ onto tickets. These are extra fees for no particular reason, that are quoted as part of the total price when buying a ticket for cash. They are extra fees collected on top of your miles when you redeem points, making them even worse.
The IRS audited Hyatt for the tax years 2009 – 2011 and found that it wasn’t paying tax on loyalty program revenue. It didn’t include the revenue received for what was then Gold Passport (now World of Hyatt) in income, and didn’t include payments from the program as expenses. It just ignored the program, even though it collected money and invested it earning a return.
The IRS wanted Hyatt to not only pay up for those years but to go all the way back to the beginning of the program in 1987, with a quarter of a billion dollars of income at issue and a tax deficiency of $65 million.
Capital One’s position that TSA PreCheck or Global Entry statement credits need to be included in 1099 reporting, when you’ve received enough other benefits from them to trigger a 1099 ($600+ in a year), is unique in the industry as far as I am aware.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
