tonrob

As far as I know, Awardwallet only logs into airline and hotel accounts via portals. This is, however, very new - and I'm sure that Awardwallet will continue to develop.

Regarding the other thing - Setting up a Hyatt account is a first step, but it doesn't allow you to search for award availability online if you don't already have the points in your account. They are pretty good at having award inventory available though, so if you find a hotel you like that's bookable for cash, phone the Hyatt Gold Passport line and check it's available for redemption before you transfer the points.

Hyatt has a table on their website that shows points required to redeem per night at hotels in different numbered categories - so you can match the category of the hotel(s) you're interested in with the table to see how much they would cost (in points) before deciding to pick up the phone.

Mrs tonrob and I spent 3 nights at the gorgeous Park Hyatt in Hamburg this summer, rated #1 hotel in the city by Tripadvisor and usually selling at EUR 280 per night. We got the first night free using an annual certificate that's provided with the Chase Hyatt card (this being why we happily pay the annual fee each year), with the other two nights being paid for by transferring 30,000 Ultimate Rewards to Hyatt points - very worthwhile in my opinion.

There's lots of great advice on blogs about hotel redemptions, including Hyatt, and here's a link to a recent article from the Points Guy about scoring upgraded rooms and suites using points.

tonrob

On Alitalia's Japanese site there's a coupon code for 25,000 Yen off per ticket - that's worth approx $320 or EUR 242 per person, meaning that flights between the US and EU can be very cheap, and flights within the EU can potentially be free (between Nov 5 and Mar 7, minus a few blackout dates at Christmas/New Year).

This is very likely a mistake on Alitalia's part - but bookings are being made and tickets issued as we speak, so jump on this quickly if you're interested.

Details and instructions are on the View From The Wing blog here.

tonrob

Judging by the most recent comments to the article I linked to - this one may have gone tits-up already.

These deals, when they turn up, are often gone within hours.

tonrob

There are two ways in which you can earn miles and points from airline and hotel co-branded credit cards.


1) Sign-up bonuses

These are usually big chunks of miles given by the issuer either for first use of your new card or upon hitting a certain spending threshold on your new card. Bonuses per card vary - they often change over time, and also they can change depending on where they are advertised. You usually don't get the best bonus by signing up directly from the bank's own website - links posted on affiliate sites, blogs etc. often yield higher bonuses. Be sure to shop around to make sure you are getting the best offer. It can make a huge difference - sometimes AMEX might be offering 10,000 for signing up on their site, but an affiliate might have a link for 100,000 for the very same card. This is very, very common - so be warned and do your due diligence.

Here's a link to a credit card offer list on a pretty reliable blog I read every day - Frequent Miler.


2) Spending using your card

This one's kind of obvious, but what's not as obvious is that there are many ways out there to maximize your spend, and leverage the number of miles/points you are earning.

Category bonuses are a great way to leverage spend. Certain cards, while offering 1 mile per dollar spent on most transactions, offer greater rewards at certain types of merchants - so 2x, 3x 5x per dollar etc. spent at supermarkets, pharmacies, gas stations or office supply stores. Most of these categories of retailer sell branded gift cards for use at other retailers. So, if your card of choice offers, for example, 5x at supermarkets, and your supermarket sells gift cards for 30 other retailers - that means by buying and carefully managing gift cards you can earn 5x on much more of your everyday spending than you would otherwise! There are websites, iPhone apps etc. that help you to keep track of your gift card balances - which means that it's easier to stay in control once you have gift cards spread across several retailers.

coastieexpat

Tonrob .... Many thanks for the updates, thanks to your advice, and a bit of home building work I have going on.... i.e....$$$...spent.... I will eventually score another 100,000 + UR , ( ultimate reward points ).

I get my chase Sapphire this week, looks like a handy card to keep.

Couple of questions......

What do you do when It's time to pay the yearly fee but it's a card you want to keep a hold of ? I pay my $95 BA Visa bill because of the 10% off feature, so it works out in my favour.

Generally speaking, If you could only have, say 3 (points earning )credit cards.... which 3 would you pick ?



How do you organize all these programs ? I get confused with the few I do have.

tonrob

Good stuff! The Sapphire is a good card. People like the great customer service (no annoying menus to go through - you call the number on the back of the card and a human being answers), the cool look the card has (made of metal maybe?) and the 7% Ultimate Rewards bonus annually on what you spend on the card.

Ultimately for me, however, it wasn't a keeper when the annual fee came up, and I 'sacrificed' it when applying for a Southwest card. I have other UR-earning cards in my portfolio so I just couldn't justify the $95. There is a (fairly well-hidden by Chase) Mastercard version of the Sapphire card (the heavily-marketed version that everyone has is a Visa), so I may have another go at some point in the future.


I pay the fee! It's worth a call to the card issuer to grumble, as sometimes you get some points thrown at you to keep the card, or maybe a partial rebate for the fee. So far I've had no luck at all with Chase doing this, but Citi seem fairly desperate and are often happy to refund, and AMEX will sometimes consider it if you've been a heavy user of the card.

Very difficult question!

If you'd have said "pick 3 programmes" rather than "pick 3 cards" then, without hesitation, I'd have gone:

Chase Ultimate Rewards
AMEX Membership Rewards
Starwood Preferred Guest

But as each of those programmes has multiple cards that you can apply for, then it's not so clear cut (e.g. would I give up the enhanced point-earning capabilities a 2nd Ultimate Rewards-earning card would give me in order to get a Starwood card? The answer is "I'm not sure"...

My reasons for choosing the above programmes:


Chase UR and AMEX MR

In each of these two separate programmes you earn points for signing up for credit cards (there are several to choose from, each with their own terms, bonuses, minimum spend thresholds required to hit bonuses and the issuers will allow you to apply for one of each card per lifetime so you can get multiple bonuses). You also earn points for spending.

The points can be used for travel in two ways:

1) Redeem directly for travel at the card issuer's web portal.

2) Transfer points directly into certain airline and hotel programmes (and, in AMEX's case, sometimes receive a % bonus when doing so).

(1) can sometimes be more convenient than (2), but (2) is always better value - often significantly so.

In both of these programmes it is fairly easy to amass significant numbers of points (Mrs tonrob and I have probably done 750,000 in AMEX MR and 500,000 in Chase so far).


Starwood Preferred Guest

Same deal with sign-up bonuses, multiple cards and earn-for-spend here.

Starpoints can be used to redeem at Starwood's portfolio of hotels or transferred to certain airlines (with a bonus).

Starwood hotels include Sheraton, Westin, W, St Regis and Four Points by Sheraton. They also have a "Luxury Collection" that includes some seriously nice and very individual hotels (think very non-chain like) in certain cities around the world - I've stayed in quite a few of them and loved them all.

Starwood allows point redemptions and also was the first chain to allow "cash and points" - and still operates the later far better than any of its competitors.

I value the Starwood cards above the cards issued for any of the other hotel chains due to its flexibility in transferring to airlines (at great rates) if you want to.

AwardWallet for keeping track of account numbers, passwords and balances, and Excel for keeping tabs on my spend requirements, credit cards held and other mileage earning activities that need tracking. I check both almost every day.

tonrob

I've just booked a cheapy trip to Florida for next April, and even though I haven't ironed out all the details, I'll post here about what I've done so far in case it's inspiration for anyone.

My sister lives near Orlando, and my parents spend 5+ months a year with her (B2-ers), so every couple of years we visit this state which otherwise wouldn't be our first choice of holiday destinations. We'd decided to go for two weeks next April, after the Easter holidays and Spring Breaks had calmed down - doing one week staying at their place and another week somewhere close to the beach. The coastal accommodation needed to be a minimum of a 1-bedroom unit (i.e. seperate bedroom), preferable bigger - not essential (many do without), but do-able using miles and points so was therefore decided as a requirement.


Flights - Southwest

As much as we hate to fly economy, somehow it seems less horrid if there is nothing better on the plane - and as Southwest flies direct from our local airport of Hartford to a choice of different Floridian destinations, we opted for this if we could do it cheaply.

The first thing I did (back in July) was apply for the Chase Southwest card that gave 50,000 Southwest points after spending something like $1,000 in 3 months. Having spent this amount the day after the card arrived, I waited patiently for the points to post once the first month's statement was in - which they did promptly.

Southwest's programme is different to many other airlines in that it's revenue based, so instead of having a chart that tells you where you can fly for X number of miles, the points cost of a flight is linked to what the cash price would be if paying that way - therefore the earlier you can jump on a fare (in general) the lower the points price will be.

It turned out that 47,700 of my 50,000 points was enough to get 3 seats from Hartford to Orlando and then 2 seats back from Fort Lauderdale to Hartford - plus the princely sum of around $10 in fees. This left one ticket that needed to be purchased from Fort Lauderdale to Hartford using money ($203).

Luckily I was already in posession of $200 in Southwest gift cards, acquired very cheaply earlier this year as part of the "airline reimbursement" benefit of the AMEX Platinum card. (Incidentally the annual fee for this card is $450 - but this card is an excellent example of why sometimes it's ok, profitable in fact, to pay annual fees for credit cards. This is worth a seperate post in its own right, and I promise I'll do this when I get the time).


Hotel - Hyatt Coconut Plantation resort

Having checked out Marriott Vacation Clubs (we'd stayed in very nice 2-bedroom villas recently in California) we saw that prices were very high (circa $450 a night) and I'm currently very low on Marriott points.

Chase Ultimate Rewards to the rescue! You can convert UR points to Marriott at a ratio of 1:1, but these Marriott properties go for 45,000 points a night - so a week's stay would have cost me 315,000 Chase UR points, which is a lot. (For example I could buy 3 business class returns to Europe on United or another Star Alliance carrier for this).

Luckily, UR also converts to Hyatt at 1:1, but the way the Hyatt programme is structured you need a lot less points to stay at their properties, even though in many cases they are nicer than Marriott (and more expensive too if you were paying cash). Hyatt has fully-equipped 2-bedroom villas in a gorgeous-looking resort property available for 23,000 points per night - so 161,000 UR points for a week - around half of the points I would have needed to transfer to Marriott for an equivalent stay with them. This was a no-brainer and the booking was duly made. While there is no co-pay required to book, Hyatt charges an annoying resort fee of $20 per night, semi-hidden in their small print - so we'll have to stump up for that in order to get our "free" stay.

Hotels chains are increasingly stinging people with "resort fees" that cover services that many wouldn't have wanted to use anyway, as a way of offering artificially-reduced headline rates and also collecting money from people who have saved up points for stays that would otherwise be free. It's a nasty practice and one that's spreading to more hotels - many of which cannot reasonably be classed as resorts, and increasing in price - some charge $30, $40 or more extra per night. Rant over. For now.

So, for now we have flights booked that cost $13 out of pocket and a luxury hotel stay for $140. In real terms (including acquisition cost for the points) I'd adjust the flights to cost around $100 in total - or 6% of the published fare, and the hotel to closer to $500, or 20% of the cash price, so not bad at all. As miles and points have some cost-to-acquire if you're doing this in large quantities, I always try to calculate the true cost of my bookings and try to keep this in the range of 10-30% of what I'd have had to pay if using cash, so this was well within that threshold.

Next job is to find out how to do a one-way car rental from Orlando to Fort Lauderdale without breaking the bank! I'll report back.

GeoffM

Do you actually have a day job, beyond sprouts with your cornflakes?! Much appreciated though.

I've been issued with my first unsecured credit card (Capital One, $1000 limit, no bonuses - this'll just be to build history before I can join in with the big boys) so the same day that was approved online I tried applying for a couple of the ones mentioned in this thread. However, both went for further evaluation so the "soft" hits on my credit score probably won't apply unfortunately - it's now over a week later and no decision yet.

Bink

Geoff, I think Chase has a fairly strict requirement for a 2 yr credit history. I was denied on Chase cards until I hit 2 years and have just been approved on 2 of them (United and BA both worth 50,000 points to me).

I don't know re: other providers but it's long been a frustration of mine that I couldn't get a continental (prior to it being United) or BA card over here as they were both Chase (and I fly with both of them). I don't fly as much now as I used to but when I first came over it would have been highly advantageous to have had a Continental card.

ChocolateBabz

Can't say we have done as well as Tonrob but we did use hubby's United Points to pay for his flight to Hawaii this summer and we just used what was leftover to get him his own iPad. Now to start saving them up again. We have a cash back credit card with Amex rather than miles, might have to look into whether this would be a better option.

GeoffM

That's useful to know, thanks. I had an AMEX in January 2010 which I transferred over here in April 2012 which allegedly transfers history... we shall see whether it does and if it counts! Actually I did get a letter asking for proof of SSN (they already had the number though) and proof of address address from one of them so it wasn't an outright denial - yet!

seawaternow

One way to get MasterCard Chase Sapphire preferred (metal card) is through mastercard.us

Current offer is 40,000 miles after spending $3000 in 3 months, not sure if there is a better offer.

Only Sapphire preferred has 7% annual dividend, and no foreign transaction fees.

coastieexpat

Geoff, I was refused for a chase sapphire recently, ( too many applications! ).

Read this, http://www.extrapackofpeanuts.com/6-...on-phone-call/

They have a reconsideration line you may want to try.

It worked for me, but perhaps the 2 year history will be an obstacle....nothing to lose by trying though

GeoffM

Thanks, that's a useful link. I just got excited as there was a card shaped item in the mail - turns out it was just the secured credit card from Wells Fargo. So the only applications in the last few months are this secured card, the Capital One (prompted by a pre-approval letter, though I was skeptical - and pleasantly surprised), the personal one, and the business one. It's the latter two I'm waiting on but am not expecting much - but of the four, it's these latter two which would reap rewards!

coastieexpat

Good luck GeoffM , I would give them a call if you get refused though

Tonrob. To get office max's 5x points, do I have to go through the Portal ? e.g. If I just went into the store would I still get 5X ?

Thanks

I love your trip/miles redemption reports, very informative.