DoorDash (my referral link) recently put out this promo to encourage people to text receipt photos in exchange for 25% back in DoorDash credits. I don’t think it’s targeted, but some people don’t seem to have received the email. I thought I’d put out a blog post since DoorDash sent another few marketing emails saying “We didn’t get much interest.” Surprising to me since it’s so easy to do! 😅
Categoryloyalty programs
As part of my friend’s 30th birthday in the Maldives, we booked out Ithaa, the underwater restaurant at the Conrad Maldives. You can read about that in our previous post here.
Before heading to the restaurant, I thought: “it’d be great if someone could earn Hilton points off this lunch!” As a Hilton Diamond member, I volunteered as I would get a 100% bonus on any points earned.
I asked our host about this, and he said I could add my HHonors number to the final invoice afterwards. We proceeded to have a very nice underwater lunch. Afterwards, we were brought to the hotel reception to settle our bill. I asked about adding my HHonors number to the bill, but unfortunately was told that we needed to have been staying at the resort to earn points. But wait! With a restaurant bill of $6100 for a 15 person lunch, I would earn 61,000 base points + 100% bonus, making it 122,000 points total. I quickly checked how much it would cost to book a room for the night, and surprisingly, low level award availability was still available. The Conrad Maldives Rangali is a top category Hilton hotel, which makes the lowest standard award redemption 95,000 points. For some reason recently, the overwater villas have been available for the same price as a standard beach villa (h/t OMAAT.) There were no additional service charges or taxes since the room rate was paid in points. So I asked the reception, what if I booked a room right now? They hesitantly said yes, that would work.
So I booked a points stay for a water villa on the spot and gave the confirmation number to the reception. They had us email 2 of our passports to the hotel. However, it took around 40 minutes for them to find the reservation and make a room available for us. Initially they thought I was in a beachfront villa as they couldn’t see the confirmation. Eventually, they had me email the confirmation to them to get the check in process rolling.
We took a small dhoni over to the other island where the overwater villas were. Unfortunately, the hotel was being unusually strict about guests even just visiting the room, saying that only 1 additional person could visit the room at a time beyond the 2 registered guests even though they knew we’d only be there for a few hours.
So a few of us went to check out the villa, and swim around while the rest of us hung around the island. The villa was quite nice, with a very large bedroom and bathroom, and a back deck leading straight into a shallow part of the ocean that we could swim in. As a Diamond guest, we also received a welcome gift of sparkling wine and chocolates, along with a selection of fruits that came with the room. After they left us alone though, everyone came over to hang out and have a party! 🙂
Overall, it was a nice resort visit, though customer service was somewhat slow. Plus, we got a free overwater villa with lunch and access to the rest of the resort!
Following up on the points, I waited 2 weeks for the stay to credit to my account, but it never did. After filing a missing stay request with Hilton, after 4 days, the stay credited, but only 1000 Diamond bonus points and 2000 points from the Points Unlimited bonus offer. Something wasn’t right here. I speculate that they messed up my check in, which I why it took so long. So I called up Hilton customer service, and they were able to pull up the bill and credit the stay… by adding another stay to my account with another 1000 Diamond bonus and 2000 points bonus! So a total of 6000 bonus points on top of the base points, and 1 extra stay credit for no reason.
As you all know, the Alaska Airlines / Virgin America merger was finally approved recently. Alaska is taking more steps to merge the two airlines, and part of that process is a merger of the two frequent flier programs.
Many people got the following email stating that their Virgin America Elevate accounts and Mileage Plan accounts would be merged on January 9.
Dear Michael,
We have some exciting news about Virgin America’s integration with Alaska Airlines. Starting today, Elevate members can now earn points when flying on Alaska Airlines.
On January 9, Elevate members will be receiving a Mileage PlanTM number, but based on our records, you’re already enjoying the benefits of Alaska’s award-winning Mileage Plan. If we got it right, there’s no need to contact us. But, if either of these account numbers are wrong, please let us know by December 26, so we can update our records accordingly, and assign you a Mileage Plan number if needed.
Elevate: ************
Mileage Plan: **********
Yesterday, Yelp announced a brand new Yelp Cashback program. You can earn up to 10% cashback on select Yelp partner restaurants. The program is brand new, so I haven’t had the chance to play with it or see if the restaurants I would typically frequent are part of the cashback program, but might as well sign up as it is free.
First, sign up for the program by going to https://www.yelp.com/cashback
Next, link up a credit card. It says the cashback program is powered by Empyr, and not Rewards Network which is used by the various hotel and airline dining programs, so it is possible that you could double dip if a restaurant is in both. I could be wrong about this though. A fellow travel hacker noted though, that the list of restaurants seemed to be identical to iDine, which is on Rewards Network, so double dipping might not be possible. Also, it looks like only Visa, Mastercard, and American Express cards can be enrolled, so no Discover cards.
You can find cashback restaurants by including the term “cash back” in your search (can be combined with other terms, so you can search “cash back indian“.) You can also select the Cash Back filter in the mobile app or desktop website.
I was sent these instructions on how it would work. It looks like online orders are excluded, and they will send a credit to the first card you linked at the end of the month with your accumulated cashback. I hope the credit doesn’t mean you lose points on the cashback earned though, but that is likely the case. I might recommend linking a debit card first, then a points earning credit card. If you already linked a credit card first, you can remove it from your Account Settings -> Payment Information.
I’ll see if this actually affects which restaurants I decide to eat at! My common criticism of the various other dining programs is they never had enough density or restaurants that I wanted to eat at.
You can read the announcement here:
https://www.yelpblog.com/2016/12/earn-rewards-save-local-businesses-yelp-cash-back
A couple of weeks ago, Rapid Travel Chai posted about a flyer who earned distance based redeemable mileage by booking flights through though the Citi ThankYou portal. I wondered if there were other ways to still earn distance based redeemable mileage and discovered one way inadvertently a few weekends ago. Obviously, IRROPs isn’t a controllable situation, but it’s something to keep in mind when you are deciding how to resolve it.
I was scheduled to take the last flight out of Chicago on a Sunday night, UA 308 from ORD to SFO at 11:30 PM. At 9:30 PM, I hopped over to the L station and was waiting for my train to O’Hare, when I got a notification that the flight had been cancelled. Wait what?! But I had to get to work the next day. I quickly checked if there were any flights also getting back to SFO that night, and apparently there were none, or none that I could make given that I was 50 minutes away from the airport.
So I resolved myself to staying an extra night in Chicago and taking the next available flight. Apparently United had already booked me on the 3:55 PM flight that would get to San Francisco at 6:25 PM. Not cool. I called in to see if there were any earlier nonstop flights, and all the United ones were booked. However, the United agent offered to check if there were any American or Delta flights that were earlier. Given that I’m American an Executive Platinum, I jumped at the opportunity to earn more American miles and possibly be upgraded to First Class (which I was after same day changing to a flight with more First Class availability!)
I was rebooked to AA2639, leaving Chicago at 10:15AM and getting in at 12:47PM, which would at least let me catch the rest of the workday.
I wondered how how AA would calculate the miles earned since it was United booking the flight for me. However, when I checked my itinerary on the AA.com site, it said the cost of the flight was the amount I had paid UA before taxes and fees, which was $129. I resigned myself to just earning $129 * 11 = 1419 miles.
However, when I logged into my account, instead I earned 1,846 miles + a 2,216 bonus for being EXP, which is the right amount for distance based earning!
So apparently, flights booked through interline agreements count as some special kind of fare that still earns distance based mileage! I’m pretty sure this would not work if you were originally flying AA and IRROPs forced them to put you on a different AA flight. I suspect AA flights that are marketed by partners as well as certain tickets like consolidator tickets may also earn distance based. Anybody want to give it a try? Anyways, next time you run into an IRROPs situation and have the chance to be booked onto a carrier with a revenue based mileage program that used to have a distance based one, keep this in mind!
Before I dive into what is (intentionally) a controversial topic, I just want to take a second to welcome all our new readers who found us through Doctor of Credit. We’re super excited to have you, and hopefully you’ll find that we have an interesting thing or two to share. And of course, I’d be remiss to thank all of our existing, long-time readers (dad, I’m talking to you) for supporting us and valuing our voices. As we close in on the anniversary of our starting the blog, I couldn’t be happier with how it has turned out, and I know Esther and Michael feel the same way. We’ve managed to break some deals, share some different perspectives on hacking, tell some funny stories, and extend our hobby with our friends in family. What more could we want?
With that out of the way, onto the main event…
I f***ing love Delta Skymiles
Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but it isn’t that far off.
Being good at anything, be it a job or a hobby, is all about having a set of tools that you know inside and out. As a software engineer, it matters less how many programming languages I know so much as having a set that covers a sufficiently diverse functionality and knowing that set very well.
Travel hacking — and for the purposes of discussion, I’m going to limit the scope of discussion to redeeming airline miles — is no different. As great as it is to know the ins and outs of 20 different programs, fragmentation (i.e. maintaining balances across all those programs) is expensive both mentally (you have to remember what program is good for what redemptions) and financially (since you’re likely to have orphan balances). That is to say, having a few programs that you accrue balances in and making active choices to invest in those programs is far more beneficial for the average person than a shotgun approach.
I’ll use myself as an example. Although I have access to pretty much every frequent flyer program on the planet (through transferrable currencies like Chase Ultimate Rewards, American Express Membership Rewards, and Starwood Preferred Guest), and although I know some international programs have some really nice redemption opportunities, I generally stick to the following six: Alaska, United, Air Canada, Virgin America, Southwest, and you guessed it, Delta.
Admittedly, six is still a lot, but the choice of those six were very intentional:
- Alaska has great slate of partners (most of OneWorld) and very flexible routing rules.
- United doesn’t charge fuel surcharges and is a member of the Star Alliance.
- Air Canada offers cheaper business class redemptions on Star Alliance partners relative to United.
- Virgin America flies SFO-JFK and is a fixed-value currency.
- Southwest is price-competitive on random short flights, also has a fixed-value rewards program, and all awards are fully refundable.
- Delta Skymiles are a fixed(ish) value currency.
This is nominally a post about Delta, so let’s talk about it. Why are Delta Skymiles in my Swiss-army knife of airline miles, and why do I like them so much?
For starters, they transfer from Membership Rewards, so I have very easy access to them. But more importantly, you can pretty much always book an award flight on any route Delta flies. This is made possible by the fact that they have five different levels of award pricing for each route, and although it’s primarily a ploy to reduce the value of your miles (to closer to 1 cent a piece on Economy class redemptions), I actually appreciate the opportunity to be given a choice whether to use miles or points irrespective of the cash price. I can always decide that the “value” is too low, but that’s a decision for me, not for the airline.
To be clear, it annoys me to no end that they got rid of their award chart, and I find it insulting. Restricting access to information is one of the most in-your-face power plays you can make. But consider the purpose the Skymiles serve for me. If I’m flying somewhere domestically (for which United and Alaska typically offer poor redemptions, if there’s even availability) in Economy, and neither Southwest nor Virgin America fly to my chosen destination, I can always fall back to flying Delta, since I know that there will be availability. My redemption value (cents per point) might be something like 1.2, but if you consider the fact that it costs me between 0.3 and 0.5 cents to earn a single Skymile (via Membership Rewards), that’s pretty much a no-brainer versus paying cash (this is separate from the argument of whether to use a cash back card or a points-earning card because we’re talking about redemption, not accrual).
Moreover, I’ve found Skymiles to be the most consistently useful currency for my parents, who fly mostly domestically out of New York and (almost) always together. Delta covers most of the map, and if their cash prices out of New York are competitive (which they almost always are), then I can pretty reliably save them money by using Skymiles, not to mention the fact that the multiple tiers of awards makes it far more likely that there is award space available for two. Given that my dad basically wants to avoid paying cash (i.e. retail price) at all costs, Delta offers me an unbeatable value proposition.
Diversify, and always explore.
The only reason I am able to speak this positively about Delta is that I never bet the house on them. I didn’t pour all my loyalty into its arms (whether miles or status), and as a result, I was well positioned to adapt to the changes in their loyalty program. This is true of every program in my toolkit. I keep as many points as possible in transferrable currencies, and when changes do occur (inside or outside my toolkit), I constantly re-evaluate the role the program in question can play in my overall strategy.
It also pays to re-evaluate your strategies even in absence of program changes. For example, my parents recently got a Chase Sapphire Preferred card, which gives them access to 1.25 cent per point redemptions on flights through the Chase portal. Although historically they’ve put their spending on the U.S. Bank Flexperks card (between 1.3 cents and 2.0 cents per point) at 1 point per dollar, if they instead put their daily spending on the Chase Freedom Unlimited card (1.5 points per dollar), they can both take advantage of Chase Ultimate Rewards transfers when beneficial or get a guaranteed 1.875 cents per point on their spending (1.5 * 1.25) when redeeming for flights (I actually like this strategy better than a 2% cash back card, although the 2% card is strictly better than the FlexPerks strategy).
That’s me, what about you?
The original idea for the post was to talk about the strategy of combining refundable awards bookings with revenue-based airlines (Southwest by default and JetBlue/Virgin America if you have status) with good last-minute award availability on more traditional chart-based programs, but this was a bit more spicy and it’s something I’ve been thinking about more and more as I scale up my miles earning to a point where my balances are hitting six and seven figures.
So what about you? What are your go-to programs? What do you use each program for?
Happy hacking!
Related Reading
NOTE: Please read comments about potential eligibility requirements that are not officially listed on the promotion site. As with everything YMMV.
For any of you who follow the major blogs, you’ve heard by now that JetBlue is running a promotion where they will ‘match’ your Virgin America points balances after you send them an email with a screenshot of your Virgin America balance and fly a single round-trip flight with them by August 31.
It’s not quite a ‘match’ as the bonuses are tiered, but the ratios are all greater than 1:1:
If you already have the points, shoot an email to pointsmatch@jetblue.com and get on your way (and do it stat because hordes of others will get in line soon)! But if you don’t, then what?
Well, because Virgin America recently became a 1:1 transfer partner of SPG, things are much more interesting, as you can transfer SPG points in order to pad your VX balance before sending a request off to JetBlue. Unfortunately, the requests do take a bit of time to process, but assuming that goes through and then JetBlue acknowledges your registration, is it worth it?
Let’s do some math.
For each tier, here are the number of SPG points (assuming don’t have any Virgin America miles already) you’d need to transfer to hit that tier (remember that for every increment of 20,000 SPG points you transfer, you get an extra 5,000 miles).
| Promo Tier | SPG Points |
| 500-5000 | 0/1500/2500 (depending on SPG status) |
| 5001-10000 | 5001 |
| 10001-30000 | 10001 |
| 30001-50000 | 25001 (+5000 from bonus) |
| 50001+ | 40001 (+10000 from bonus) |
Virgin American points are worth about 2.1-2.3 cents when redeemed towards their flights, but VX happens to be a bit marked up relative to other airlines, so let’s conservatively (and arbitrarily) say you’ll get about 1.7 cents of value. JetBlue points are good for 1.4 cents towards flights, and they are generally price competitive, so we’ll leave it there.
Since there’s also a required flight component, let’s also assume you live in a JetBlue (B6) serviced-area and can get a round trip flight for either $100 or $200 (both are reasonable from quick glances).
How good a deal is this? Well, here’s the value you get:
| Promo Tier | B6 Points | VX Points | Value (minus $100) | Value (minus $200) |
| 500-5000 | 5000 | 2500* | $12.50 | -$87.50 |
| 5001-10000 | 10000 | 5001 | $225 | $125 |
| 10001-30000 | 30000 | 10001 | $590 | $490 |
| 30001-50000 | 50000 | 30001 | $1210 | $1110 |
| 50001+ | 75000 | 50001 | $1900 | $1800 |
But this excludes the SPG points you had to give up. Combining the above two tables, we can calculate a breakeven point for how much you have to value your SPG points at for it to be a good deal (breakeven = value / # points). If you value them below the breakeven point, go for it. Above, don’t:
| Promo Tier | SPG Points | Value (minus $100) | Breakeven | Value (minus $200) | Breakeven |
| 500-5000 | 2500* | $12.50 | .50 cpp | -$87.50 | -3.50 cpp |
| 5001-10000 | 5001 | $225 | 4.50 cpp | $125 | 2.50 cpp |
| 10001-30000 | 10001 | $590 | 5.90 cpp | $490 | 4.90 cpp |
| 30001-50000 | 25001 | $1210 | 4.84 cpp | $1110 | 4.44 cpp |
| 50001+ | 40001 | $1900 | 4.75 cpp | $1800 | 4.50 cpp |
Simply put, this promotion offers some mammoth value if you have more than 10,000 SPG to spare. I’m already game because I actually have enough VX points to qualify for the top tier, and Michael just sent off a 20,000 point transfer. Esther also had enough points to qualify for the top tier from MSing on the VX card. What about you? Are you in?
Happy hacking!
I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about the Total Rewards program, which is the loyalty program of a number of casinos and hotels around the United States, notably Harrah’s, Caesar’s Palace, the LINQ, the Cromwell, Rio, Paris, and more. Specifically, I heard that Diamond status, which you can get through a match with FoundersCard had a lot of great benefits, like waived resort fees, buffet privileges and more (possibly even a free stay in the Bahamas!) So I wanted to create a Total Rewards account to take advantage of the benefits. Great, right?
Well, as I tried to create an online account, I got this lovely error:
I tried to remember if I had created an online account already, and searched my email and password manager for any clue that I had already. No dice. I tried using the password reset feature with all the emails I could have possibly used with no luck.
Turns out that I had probably at some point in the past signed up for Total Rewards account in person on a trip to Vegas and lost my account information. I had never set up an online account either, and you can only set up an online account with your Total Rewards number. Except for I didn’t have that. And Total Rewards’ policies *say* that for security reasons, they can’t give out Total Rewards account numbers over email and phone. So was my only choice to go visit a Total Rewards casino? I wanted to use Diamond status to see if there were any extra discounts or benefits on my account *before* I booked a hotel in Vegas, not after.
I called Total Rewards, and they were less than helpful, and basically said I needed to go in person to replace my card.
On a whim, I also sent Total Rewards an email pleading my case, saying that I have no recollection of ever setting up an account online or in person, but the system wasn’t letting me create a new account, and I wanted to use my FoundersCard benefit. I got this reply:
Hello Michael,
Thank you for contacting Caesars Entertainment. I would be happy to see if you have a Total Rewards account number. For security purposes, please provide your date of birth, address, and month/location of your last visit. We look forward to hearing from you and assisting you further.
Have an amazing day!
I was digging around the bowels of FlyerTalk the other day, looking for some help with the schedule change policy at British Airways, when I found this little tool.
It’s known that the North American British Airways call center has fairly long wait times and can be… less than helpful. So typically I’ll call the North American call center first, and if the wait seems too long or the agent isn’t being very helpful. I’ll go and call another region. But it’s a tedious process to guess which offices might be open in each time zone.
So here is a tool that tells you what BA offices are open at the current moment!
All you need to do is select your current location, what kind of office you are looking for, and it will tell you if your local office is open as well as what other offices are open currently.
Here is a a link to the original FlyerTalk thread
As a follow up to the guide on how to get to Asia using your transferable points, Adam from The Jet Set Blog commented that he also had a comprehensive guide for Europe. He’s also planning to add guides for each major region, so I’d give him a follow.
I’ve got some reading to do! And now that I will have 100k extra MR points, Alitalia is looking like an increasingly attractive option for business redemptions.
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