tonrob

Am I winning yet?

Get your vote on. The very future of sprout-fuelled travel depends on it!

coastieexpat

Looks like you could status match from Club Carlson to Best Western Platinum Elite, ( FWIW ) ...

http://www.statusmatcher.com/Report.php?id=2151

I'm still studying this, I'm new to the hotel rewards thing, and I don't mind paying for a room now and again. BTW do you think the Amex hotel redemption , ( the one with 20% less points ) is a good deal, they have a pretty good selection of smaller hotels in Europe for 8-10,000 points ( after discount ).

P.S. I voted, but the Parrot thread is surging forth, ( also travel related funnily enough ).

Thanks for the United / Ink bold info, I'll pass that on. I'm glad I was on the right track though.... I must be learning something

Cheers.

tonrob

Personal and business versions available, expires 23rd December.

This isn't a bad offer at all - it's usually around the 30,000 - 35,000 mark. There was a targeted 70,000 offer a few months ago that was available to all via a bit of URL jiggery-pokery, but as far as "legit" deals go for this card this is one of the best publicly-available offers for this card.

tonrob

I'm on the fence about the value. To me, it's a question of opportunity cost.

AMEX points can frequently be transferred to airlines with bonuses of 30%, 50%, even 66% (latter being Delta last year).

So 10,000 AMEX points could get you - say - 13,000 Virgin Atlantic miles. If you valued the fare component of a return in Virgin's Upper Class (80k return) at, say, $2,000 - then your MR points are worth 3.25 cents each, so that means the opportunity cost of the European hotel room example you mentioned is $325 a night. That may be a bit high depending on how nice the hotel is.

Virgin Atlantic points also transfer to Hilton at 1:2, so 10,000 AMEX = 13,000 Virgin (with bonus) = 26,000 Hilton. In my recent post about the Conrad villas at Koh Samui I noted I'd priced them at 50,000 Hilton minus a 25% Gold discount (so 37,500). So is the hotel available through AMEX still worth it compared this way?

There does come a point where all of this becomes a bit academic. If you're not planning to travel on Virgin Atlantic and you're not going to Asia anytime soon then my two examples are worthless. There is a lot to be said for redeeming rather than hoarding (you can always earn more for next time) - so sometimes a bird in the hand and all that...

GeoffM

Amtrak Guest Rewards are offering a 30% bonus on the points you buy or give. Small rewards but might be enough to tip you over the points needed for a reward for a few less dollars.

tonrob

Good spot!

There are even some instances in which it's cheaper to buy the points and redeem them for travel instead of buying the ticket with cash! Mrs tonrob and I traveled from San Diego to Santa Barbara in 2010, and I discovered that buying points and redeeming in business class was marginally cheaper than paying cash for coach class - so that's what we did. I think this applies most on what Amtrak deem "special routes" (ones that need fewer points) - I think thee include San Diego - LA - santa Barbara, Vancouver - Seattle - Portand, OR and Boston, Portland, ME. I think they've increased the redemption prices since then so not sure how well the econiomics of this still hold out.

While I'm at it I also noticed this the other day for 100 free Amtrak points.

lansbury

Not sure Delta pesos are worth much, you need a truck load of them to get a ticket.

tonrob

It can be tough sometimes, but they do have their uses. Last year Mrs tonrob, the Sproutette and I were due to drive down to Hilton Head in October. Just two days before we realized that a particularly shitty weather system was sweeping in and was likely going to force us indoors for at least a few days of our holiday. This was not the holiday we wanted, so, after a bit of deliberation and head-scratching, I managed to book the of us on Delta from BDL-ATL-PHX for 25,000 miles apiece, and also scored some nice Starwood, Hilton and Hyatt resort accommodations in and around Scottsdale and Sedona using points.

The Points Guy did a run down of some of the best-value uses of Delta miles the other day - including a few that I'd have never thought of.

For me - I'll carry on collecting Delta miles as even though you sometimes need to redeem a ton of them to get anywhere, for now they're very easy and cheap indeed for me to earn so I figure I may as well until things change.

tonrob

A number of weeks ago, the nice people at Staples ran an offer in which if you spent $100 on a Visa gift card you could submit an electronic rebate for a $15 Staples gift card. They'd done this kind of things before, and I'd never really bothered looking into it too much but this time I decided to pay attention.

There was a limit of 10 per household. The $100 Visa gift cards came with a fee of $4.95 each, but Staples also sold $200 cards with a fee of $5.95 - so the cheapest way to max out your allowance was to buy 5x $200 cards at a total (fee) cost of $29.75. I also happen to carry a Chase INK Bold card, which earns me 5x ultimate Rewards points spent at office supply stores - and UR points are very useful things as they transfer at a rate of 1:1 to United, Hyatt, Amtrak and a number of other places. I also happened to know a few more households who were not interested in participating but were happy for me to send rebates to.

Therefore for a cost of $148.75 I was able to get $750 in Staples gift cards as well as 25,000 United miles (which I'd value conservatively at around $400. Sure, I'd end up with a stack of Visa gift cards that I needed to use, but the $1,000 profit was tempting enough to go for it.

This was a few weeks ago, but today my first $150 Staples gift card turned up. Staples stuff is usually over-priced, so I was seriously considering going via Gift Card Granny and selling the things for a loss of around 10%. Then I had another idea. I perused the weekly flier for free-after-rebate items. By buying stuff that's free-after rebate using my Staples gift cards, I'd end up getting a check for the full amount of each item in addition to the actual item itself, and I could also earn Staples rewards in the process. So, even though it will be slower to cash out, I decided to go down this route and see what free stuff I'd end up with along the way in addition to maximizing my overall profit.

Today is day one, and so far I'm the proud owner of a 3xPC McAfee Total Protection 2013 (whatever the hell that is) along with 16x each of Duracell AA and AAA batteries, none of which cost me a penny. Is anyone interested in buying some software...?

lansbury

He is basically saying that he still believes his predictions about the skymiles program for 2013 will be correct, and there will be a major devaluation of their worth. If you got them spend them, but if he is correct it probably isn't worth anyone getting the credit card to start collecting them.

tonrob

Tomorrow (29th) is the last day for the current 35% transfer bonus offer from AMEX Membership Rewards programme to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club.

And if this isn't of interest (Virgin does charge similarly high fuel surcharges as BA) then Virgin miles do transfer 2:1 to Hilton HHonors, so you can look at this as an AMEX to Hilton ratio of 1:2.7, which is actually quite good depending on how you intend to use your Hilton points.

tonrob

View from the Wing has also posted his top uses for Delta miles today.

I think the important thing in this discussion is that whatever the mileage (or hotel) programme, people need to do at least a little research into the programme before sinking too much of an investment into collecting the associated miles or points.

Delta has a reputation for having miles that are hard to redeem, or having awards that require a lot of miles. When you look deeper though this is worst when looking for domestic award space. This will inconvenience a lot of people, and for those people perhaps Delta isn't the programme for them. I still maintain that if you are ultra-flexible with dates/times and even locations then you can get cheap Delta domestic redemptions (e.g. my holiday to Phoenix last October booked 2 days in advance), but for most this isn't possible. The linked article does show that for some destinations, using their partners, Delta is the best programme there is (e.g. best business class award space to Australia, French Polynesia, India etc.) - so if you fancy an exotic holiday and are flexible on dates then Delta could be great for you. Their miles are also ridiculously easy to earn thanks to a combination of credit and debit cards available.

Knowing your programme before investing is important for any airline though. Flyertalk is littered with literally hundreds of posts from individuals who jumped on the great Chase BA offers of the last couple of years. Not only did people sign up for the card in droves, but they then went ahead and spent $30,000 on the things in order to get the companion voucher, all without doing any research on how the BA programme worked or what it was good for. Many then realized that they weren't prepared to pay the high taxes and fees levied on BA fares to and from Europe, and as a result became very pissed off. Last night I priced out two business class award tickets from Boston to Frankfurt next summer. Taxes and fees on BA were approx. $2,100 whereas United charges around $160 to fly Lufthansa. BA charges half the miles if you use a 2-4-1 voucher, but I can empathize if the difference in fees for an award redemption is still hard to stomach.

Airlines should do a better job of being transparent with how their programmes work, and many are far more complex than they need to be - but on the flip side people need to take a reasonable amount of responsibility for understanding what they're committing to before applying for credit cards and implementing spending strategies that cost them time, effort and points on their credit score. While the airlines' programmes are complicated, there are some good blogs out there that do some of the heavy lifting by analyzing the programmes, providing simpler summaries and listing pros and cons etc., and I try to link to them here when I spot something useful - but Google usually turns these up easily to for those that are interested.

So all in all I wouldn't write off Delta completely, but caveat emptor applies here as it does to all loyalty programmes.

tonrob

As mentioned earlier, Mrs tonrob and the Sproutette are off to Germany for a bit next summer, where I will join them for a while as I did last summer. Last year they stayed for around 6 weeks and I traveled for 2 - albeit via an intentionally roundabout route involving catching Amtrak cross-country to Seattle in a sleeper before enjoying Lufthansa first class to Frankfurt - all of which cost me just a couple of hundred dollars.

As New Year is approaching, our thoughts are turning to actually booking some stuff. Mrs tonrob wants to travel business class so she can be comfortable with the Sprouette and hopefully get some sleep. Having had a look today at availability I can see that there seems to be plenty of outbound availability in June and early July, but absolutely nothing in business on the return (just plenty of economy) for the whole of July and August. It may be that Lufthansa hasn't yet released business class award space, so for now I just booked using United miles as I have plenty of them and they allow one-way awards. Total cost was 100,000 miles and a co-pay of $5.00 for the two of them. The outbound is overnight and return is a day flight, so if they end up in economy on the way back that's ok according to Mrs tonrob - but the beauty of booking the out and back separately is that we can watch the calendar on United's site for a bit and see what opens up towards the front of the plane.

For my adventure - one of the bargains of the mileage world is using US Airways miles to North Asia (basically Japan, China or South Korea). This costs 90,000 miles in business or 120,000 in First - which is less than the cost than a return to Europe even though you are allowed a European stop-over! (I also get a 5,000 mile discount on all bookings as a benefit of holding the Barclays US Airways MasterCard). I am therefore thinking of a quick First Class round-the world jaunt heading to Frankfurt outbound over the Pacific, with a short visit to - say - Seoul - along the way, and then returning over the Atlantic as normal.

There's a bit more jiggery-pokery in arranging this as (a) there are quite a lot of permutations possible and (b) you can't book US Airways partner awards online and (c) US Airways phone agents are reputedly as thick as shit. I am therefore going to try an award booking service for the first time having read a couple of interesting blog entries Frequent Miler made on this subject. The fee ($99 for a successful booking) is nothing compared to the money I'm saving overall and the benefit to my blood pressure.

For clarity I don't know the guy that runs the award booking service from Adam and have only read a couple of good reviews by third parties - I therefore have linked to his site just for interest but I gain nothing at all if any of you end up trying this yourself. I am not endoring or recommending hi myself, but I will let you know how my experience goes as I'm assuming this type of thing may be useful to others...

tonrob

The unashamed hottie of the miles and points world, Mommy Points, has just blogged a good overview of the Chase Ultimate Rewards shopping portal.

I wouldn't dream of buying anything online without going through some kind of shopping portal first to earn extra miles and points, and 9 times out of 10 this is the portal I use. The bonuses are often so good that I buy things I don't need but that I think I can re-sell on Craigslist just to get the miles.

While this isn't my primary source of miles, I have recently been acquiring between 5,000-10,000 per month via this portal, so I definitely think it's worth a look.

As a reminder, Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer to United (for redemption on Star Alliance carriers), Hyatt (for very nice hotels) and Amtrak (for nostalgic train squalor) among other things.

tonrob

... plus 120,000 US Airways Dividend Miles. Just booked it!

I couldn't be arsed waiting for the miles booking guy so decided I was going to give this a whirl myself. Searching award availability is a bit of an art, as the web tools provided by the various airlines ranges from excellent to downright shite. US Airways' website, whose miles I was considering using (because of their excellent value round-trip award to North Asia for 90k in business or 120k in first) falls firmly into the shite category. However I'd read on Flyertalk that the way to go about searching for Star Alliance award availability was to instead use the website of Japanese-based ANA, so I did.

It took about an hour or so of buggering about online to work out what could possibly be done and then what was actually avaulable in July, which is when I wanted to travel. With this info in hand I called the US Airways reservations line and within 20 minutes I had a first class ticket for $228.34 (and 120k miles) that would take me right round the globe!

My itinerary starts at Newark (I'll book an Amtrak train there for free using Ultimate Rewards points, which transfer to Amtrak), where I fly United first class to Frankfurt to join my wife and daughter during their summer break with the in-laws. At some stage I'll dip back into the points and miles to book a side trip for Mrs tonrob and I while the grandparents look after the Sproutlet.

After 10 days in Germany I'll move on, using Thai Airways first class on the A380 to Bangkok, connecting into another Thai first class (777-300) to Tokyo Haneda. Having read reviews such as this one about the amazing ground service in Bangkok for first class passengers, this one has been on my bucket list for some time. Luxury spa with Thai massage between flights!

I have 3 nights in Tokyo - I'll book a hotel using points sometime soon - before returning to New York (JFK) first class aboard an ANA 777. I arrive at ten past four, half an hour before I took off in Tokyo(!), so I'll grab a free hotel in Manhattan before a free Amtrak train home the next morning.

This is probably my most complex miles/points itinerary overall yet, but I'm very pleasantly surprised about how easy it's been and what great vale everything is. I can't tell you exactly how much I "saved" on airfare because I'm not entirely sure how to price out the cash equivalent even if I wanted to!