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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/
Both the personal and business Marriott credit cards have recently increased their signup bonuses to 80k Marriott points after $3,000 in spend. This is the highest offer I’ve ever seen, though it looks like the annual fee of $99 for the business card and $85 for the personal card are NOT waived. I don’t seem to see a bonus for adding an authorized user for this offer.
Both cards earn:
5 points per $1 spent at Marriott properties
Tip 1:Â Be able to read Japanese
Okay, that’s not good advice. Let’s try again.
Tip 2: Have family or friends that can read Japanese
Okay, say you don’t have that either. What if you don’t know Japanese and would still like to experience an authentic Japanese ryokan experience?
The different types of Japanese style lodging
First of all, there are a couple of types of Japanese style lodgings. Ryokan are the full blown traditional Japanese style inn experience with Japanese style rooms. They will typically include dinner and breakfast. Often they will have either a private or shared bath (onsen.) Ryokan will usually be in the price range of 6,000 to 30,000 yen per person.
Now that I’m 24 hours removed from my mileage run to Dallas and have no further runs on the books, I figured it would be a reasonable time to reflect on my decision to do the runs in the first place, add some context where I omitted it, and decide if it makes sense to do again in the future.
For some context, see my post on The Case for Mileage Running, in which I outlined my initial rationale for spending three nights on a plane for no purpose other than to get on a plane in the opposite direction two hours later. For those new to travel hacking, also see here for a description of the difference between redeemable miles and elite qualifying miles.
Hello from the Centurion Lounge at San Francisco International Airport, which has been my temporary home for three of the past four Tuesday nights before a series of mileage runs to Dallas!
Yep, you read that correctly (although despite the fancy shoes, mileage running has nothing to do with actual running).
I write a lot about how I approach travel hacking, which is largely based on evaluating the (opportunity) costs of taking advantage of a particular hack and comparing it to the rewards I reap from it. So it may come as a surprise to hear that I have (not once, not twice, but thrice) opted to pay money to take an overnight flight to Dallas only to turn right around once I get there and arrive in San Francisco before it’s time to head into work.
With the announcement of Chase extending their infamous “5/24 rule” to extend to all co-branded and business cards, there has been a lot of discussion about what to do in the interim before the rule takes effect and what to do after the hammer falls. For those who are unfamiliar, the 5/24 rule is that Chase will not approve you for a card if your credit report shows more than five new accounts in the last two years. This was designed to weed out applicants who ‘churn’ their cards for the signup bonuses without adding meaningful value to Chase as customers.
I’ve been enjoying the benefits of being an American Express Platinum cardholder in the last few months due to being added as authorized user to Esther’s Ameriprise American Express Platinum card (thanks Esther!) The Centurion Lounges and concierge service have been great! Today I discovered a couple new benefits while flying out of Toronto Pearson (YYZ)
I’m on a lightning trip through New York, Toronto and Boston this week, strategically avoiding all the Super Bowl craziness going on in San Francisco. I’m flying currently to Boston from Toronto Pearson. I gave myself a decent amount of time to get through immigration and security, but thankfully, my American Express Platinum card made that even faster! First, Global Entry got me through immigration and customs extremely quickly, skipping that entire line. Next, I run into a pretty long security line. But what’s this I see? Apparently, through a program called Cloud 10, American Express has partnered with Toronto Pearson to bring benefits to certain American Express cardholders. And tada, there was a completely empty special security line specifically for Platinum and Centurion cardholders. Thus, the entire process of immigration, customs, and security took me a grand total of 7 minutes.
Via Point Me to the Plane, Air New Zealand business class from SFO, LAX, and a bit less so out of IAH are widely available to fly nonstop to Auckland (AKL). I was able to find a good amount of availability from SFO for the next few months.
It doesn’t look like continuing awards from AKL to Australia on Air New Zealand are very open though.
Via View from the Wing, JAL First class space is also widely available between Tokyo and Sydney from March to December this year.
Recently, a co-worker of mine asked for help booking his family’s summer travel to London. Searching for himself, his wife, and three kids, the price he had found (despite building in flexibility on both ends of the trip) was $14,000 for 5 people.
….for economy.
Summer travel to Europe is expensive. London travel is even worse, because it always has a steady flow of business travelers.
Given that my co-worker had a fairly tight set of constraints on his trip, the traditional sources of flexibility we look for — changing dates, changing locations — weren’t going to be sufficient in this situation. Add to that the fact that he needs five tickets, and we had a challenge on our hands.
I was livechatting Discover tonight to follow up on some 5% category and Apple Pay issues from Q4, and at the end the representative asked if I had any other questions while I had her there. I took the opportunity to ask for any spending promotions. I didn’t expect anything other than maybe a lower APR, since one of my favorite blogs, Doctor of Credit, had not reported anything recently.
To my surprise…
Last week, Citi announced it was lowering the public offer for the Citi Thank You Premier to 40k points after meeting minimum spend requirements. This is obviously sad but probably expected given that it brings the bonus in line with the standard bonus for the Chase Sapphire Preferred.
Two days ago, Miles to Memories reported a back-door way to get the 50k Citi Premier offer to appear. Well, after some googling around, I found the front door:
