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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.
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Correction: There is a 5,000 point bonus for adding an authorized user and having the user make a purchase in the first 3 months. I missed it in the offer details.
I got this offer in the mail recently:
The offer is is for 50,000 points + 5,000 points for adding an authorized user and having them make a purchase in the first 3 months + a $200 Marriott gift card for spending $3000 in the first 3 months. Annual fee of $85 is waived the first year.
Note: this post may contain unsolicited advertisements opinions. You don’t have to click on the links read them, but we appreciate when you do. Oh yeah, and lest we forget, the Chase Sapphire Preferred bonus is up to 50k.
Last Wednesday, 2pm EST marked the moment we had all feared. As if the Marriott acquisition of Starwood weren’t bad enough (although I actually haven’t decided how I feel about it yet), American Airlines (AA) delivered a huge blow to the last of the highly lucrative, ‘big 3’ airline award charts.
Via an official HHonors representative on FlyerTalk, Hilton HHonors has a status match program. Email a request to HHonorMyStatus@hilton.com with your HHonors and something showing your elite status in another program, and see what happens! Send your request by January 11, 2016 and you’ll have the matched status through March 2017.
Since you can automatically get either HHonors Silver from credit cards like the Hilton HHonors American Express or the Citi Hilton HHonors Visa Signature, or HHonors Gold from credit cards like the Hilton HHonors Surpass American Express or Citi Hilton Reserve card, I would say it’s only worth it to match to Diamond or possibly Gold if you have neither credit card.
Maximizing personal concierge services
I’m not normally one for attending conferences (unless they’re academic/research-oriented ones), in particular those related to travel-hacking since so much information can be found online, but after a number of my internet-friends decided to attend TravelCon II, I figured that if nothing else, I’d have a great weekend hanging out with them in Vegas. However, I decided  to attend on one condition: I would have no out-of-pocket costs for my flight or accomodation.
EDIT January, 2016: It looks like Chase has caught on and nulled out the social media links for certain credit card products like the Freedom. If you have an old referral link that you’ve saved before, that should work though.
I noticed a bunch of new referral offers in an email from Chase earlier this morning, so I logged into chasereferafriend.com as usual to generate some referral links. However, when I put my information into the site, I sadly couldn’t find the Twitter or Facebook options anymore!
On our way back from Travelcon, Esther and I stopped by the Virgin America Loft at LAX for breakfast and refreshments t-shirt before our leg home to San Francisco. I have Virgin America (VX) Gold status from the Membership Rewards promo they are currently offering, so I get lounge access as a benefit of that status, but in any event, both of us have Priority Passes (me from my Amex Plat and she from her Citi Prestige), so we would be able to get free entry through that.
A few months ago we reported on a set of targeted offers for the Marriott credit card based on your Marriott status. Although the links were public, you couldn’t click through to the application page unless you had been linked from your Marriott account page.
However, via learn2churn on reddit, it appears that there are now publicly accessible links for the best of these offers, of which there are two variants:
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links. You aren’t required to click on our links to get the deals, but it would be much appreciated!
Just a quick collection of posts I saw that were interesting, as well as a short experience with the Hilton Best Rate guarantee.
Via Doctor of Credit, there’s a great Amex Offer currently running right now, where you can get $50 of $100 at AirBnB, including gift cards. Please read the follow-up post with all the details you need to know about the deal! If you are are buying gift cards, here are the key things you need to know:
Hello! I’m on my way back home after a quick trip to Bogota, Colombia (and sadly missing TravelCon II.) I’m currently sitting in the Admirals Club at Miami Airport because I’m too lazy to go through a security checkpoint without TSA Pre to get into another terminal for the Priority Pass lounge there. Just enough time to write a couple of short blog posts before my connecting flight!
