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Just bought EQP to requalify for IHG Diamond through end of 2025! Since I usually buy miles for 0.5 cents, the $768 to buy 110,000 EQP was only a $218 premium, and I get Diamond again https://buff.ly/3VNGVUu
Ran into the Mexican car insurance scam with Budget in Merida, Mexico 🇲🇽
Base rate was $18 USD a day, but if you didn't get the CDW costing minimum $85 USD a day, I had to put down a deposit of 330,000 MXN / $16,000 USD which obviously got rejected by all my credit cards.
1/
EDIT (4/20/2016): Hilton has updated the link to the status match page, the old one no longer works! You can access the new page here
EDIT: There seems to be more datapoints for successful matches from IHG Platinum vs. Hyatt Platinum. Please leave us your datapoints, either here or in the reddit thread!
Also, make sure you send in .JPG files for the match, otherwise Hilton will reject your request and you will have to followup to send it again, as the form won’t let you send another request.
EDIT: After temporarily disappearing, GiftCards.com is back on TopCashback at 1.5%
For a long time, Giftcards.com was a good way of meeting minimum spending by allowing you to buy PIN-enabled Visa gift cards which were liquidatable in any number of ways. However, since they raised their gift card fees, it became quite expensive to purchase them without some kind of portal cash back.
To add insult to injury, Giftcards.com was pulled from most portals a couple months ago, but now it’s slowly making it’s way back.
I’m currently in the Admiral’s Club in JFK, finally going home after 10 days in Japan with Esther and her husband and a brief stop in Dublin.
Why Dublin? I jumped on a Dublin to US business class sale and bought a couple of round trips. I would have flown to Hawaii for extra miles but I value actual time spend in the office, so I’m just going back and forth between Dublin and San Francisco.
I was doing some bookkeeping on Mint tonight, and I decided it would be both fun and educational to look at my travel expenses from last year and do an accounting.
Let’s start with a graph:
$4,473. That’s a big number.
Granted, I got a ton of trips out of my $4,473 (Phoenix, India, Japan, Chicago, the U.S. Southwest, Bogota, Bali, Vegas, LA, and NY x 3), but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a lot of money.
Via reddit / various blogs, there are new increased signup bonus offers for both Hilton cards from American Express.
For the no fee card, the new offer is 75,000 points after $1000 in spending, compared to the normal 40,000 points after $750 in spending. The card offers 7x points on Hilton purchases, 5x at restaurants, supermarkets, and gas stations, and 3x everywhere else. It also offers Silver status in Hilton HHonors and Gold status if you spend more than $20,000 in a calendar year. I wouldn’t actually do this, or use the card for restaurants, supermarkets, or gas stations, by the way.
If you follow any of the major blogs, you’ll know that U.S. Travel Association’s Daily Getaways are just around the corner. Daily Getaways is an annual event offering discounted rates on a variety of travel (typically hotels/attractions) related packages. I typically write these sorts of deals off because generally speaking, if there’s something that looks like a good deal, it either carries lots of weird restrictions, is overly specific (e.g. for a place I wouldn’t go), or is likely to go unused.
I’ve collected a couple of Hyatt tips, tricks, and notes recently that I wanted to share.
Hyatt Points + Cash is a great way to get a better redemption value out of your Hyatt points, while earning elite stay credit and allowing DSUs. Obviously you can find cash rates and availability easily, and it’s pretty easy also to find points availability and rates when searching over all hotels in an area. However, if you’re looking for Points + Cash availability for multiple hotels, you normally need to click into a specific hotel to see whether Points + Cash is available.
It’s pretty common knowledge that (at least among major airlines, excluding budget airlines and the likes of Southwest, Jet Blue, and Virgin America, which tend to charge by segment) that one-way flight bookings are usually more than half the cost of a round-trip. This is basic microeconomics: the one-ways are targeted at people who have some weird or unexpected plan that requires they be somewhere by a certain date or time but not necessarily back (or with a return from a different location).
In the spirit of Travel is Free and my earlier compilation of an award chart for Virgin America, I decided it would be fun to document my findings for Virgin Atlantic (VS) to see if there was any good value to be had.
(For whatever reason, I spend a lot of time combining the Virgin award charts. I think I might be the equivalent of a travel-hacking hipster, playing with programs and credit cards because they’re explicitly not in vogue).
It looks like Chase wasn’t too happy with its phone bill this past month, because they’ve added a way to check your application status online! Just go to the Customer Center and scroll down to the bottom right.
Clicking the link will bring you to a page that looks like this:
It seems like they only give you information on personal applications, although that may be different if you’ve linked your business account to your personal account. If so, let us know in the comments!
