An annoying (but probably good) change to Visa gift cards from Staples.com

Like most (all?) travel hackers, I consider flexible Chase Ultimate Rewards points to be the most valuable currency for hotels (World of Hyatt) and award tickets (United Mileage Plus and Southwest Rapid Rewards), and even find myself redeeming them for paid airfare periodically at 1.25 cents each through my Chase Ink Plus card.

That means it’s a no-brainer for me to spend $50,000 per cardmember year at office supply stores, to earn 250,000 Ultimate Rewards points. That’s not the only way I earn Ultimate Rewards points (I also have two Chase Freedom cards and a Freedom Unlimited), but it’s a commonsense way to make sure I have a steady stream of points coming in each month.

Staples.com Visa gift cards can no longer be activated by Blackhawk phone reps

While I stock up on prepaid debit cards at Staples and Office Depot during promotions, my city unfortunately only has one of each, and they quickly sell out, so I top up my spend with monthly purchases of $300 Visa gift cards from Staples.com.

Those cards are mailed unactivated and unusable, and for each order, a separate letter is mailed with activation codes that can be entered online or over the phone.

In my experience, those activation codes typically arrive a day or two after the physical cards, and Blackhawk has long offered a workaround if the activation codes are delayed: after verifying your identity, their phone reps were able to submit manual activation requests without the activation codes.

Sometime between the beginning of October (my last order) and this week, that process stopped working. You can still activate gift cards using their phone system, but only using the automated phone tree; there’s no longer an option to speak to a phone rep to request manual activation of cards (or anything else).

This is annoying, since I typically order 18 cards per month, and waiting for the activation codes to arrive and then manually activating them is a pretty tedious chore, especially since the website makes you complete a “captcha” for every single card you activate. I’ve spent so much time looking for traffic lights and bicycles I can’t tell them apart anymore.

The previous system was extremely vulnerable

While phone reps previously “verified” your identity before submitting activation requests, the information needed to verify your identity was delivered along with the physical gift cards: your name, mailing address, order number, and the last four digits of the cards themselves (depending on the phone rep).

That meant anyone who knew what was in the envelope (anyone who knows what Blackhawk sells) could steal the cards and call in to have them activated using only the information in the gift card package itself.

It’s possible this threat was finally realized, or that enough such thefts actually occurred, and that led Blackhawk to make the change. It’s also possible, and perhaps more likely, that they decided to lay off some of their call center workers and needed to reduce the number and type of calls they handled.

Conclusion: probably for the best

If you manufacture a lot of spend, wasting a day or three waiting for activation codes to arrive can feel like an eternity, and I was definitely frustrated trying to find a way to talk to a phone rep until I realized the option had been completely removed.

But the frustration of not being able to immediately liquidate cards pales in comparison to the frustration of trying to get your money back if one or more orders of gift cards were stolen and liquidated.

Having gift cards and activation codes arrive on separate days is a fairly primitive form of one-factor identification (you have to be able to check the mail at the same address on two separate days), but since the previous system was zero-factor identification, on balance I think the inconvenience isn’t worth complaining about too much.

On the other hand, if your activation codes never arrive, then the inability to speak with a phone rep to resolve the issue is going to get very annoying, very quickly.

Product review: what is a Torro bracelet and who wants one?

Welcome back, folks. The past few weeks have been extremely annoying and frustrating for me, which was not helped in the slightest by my birthday falling in the middle of last week. However, that’s all behind us now, so I’m moving my birthday to this week and to celebrate I’m back in the saddle, grabbing the blogging bull by the horns, wrangling some fresh content, and no doubt additional rodeo metaphors as well.

The 21st century economy is a strange, dreary place

Back in October, I got an e-mail from “Houston Golden,” “Co-Founder at BAMF Media and Head of PR for Torro Bracelets,” offering to send me something called a “Torro bracelet” to review. I get a surprising amount of unsolicited e-mails like this given how small the site is, but who am I to turn down some free blog content? So I said I’d be happy to take one of these gadgets and write a review, although first I did warn him the review would be honest.

A few strange e-mail exchanges led me to wonder, what is BAMF Media and why is its co-founder also the head of PR for a jewelry company? The answer, you may have already guessed, is that BAMF Media is a marketing company and I assume its co-founder is the “head of PR” for all their clients.

So if you want to buy a white label product from China, stamp it with your company’s logo, and market it in the United States, you hire BAMF Media to engage in some “PR hacking” to make sure everyone in the “BAMF influencer program” tells their followers to go buy your product.

I find this entire ecosystem unspeakably depressing, but on the other hand I have a giant stack of drained gift cards by my desk so I’m not exactly in a position to judge.

Torro is a product you never knew you needed because you don’t

I can be a bit slow, so it took me a little while browsing the Torro website for my free item to realize what the product actually is, and I had to confirm it with the founder (and I assume sole employee) to make sure I understood.

So, deep breath: Torro bracelets are USB charging cables. But they’re USB cables you can wrap around your wrist. That’s it. Take a look:

The model I selected is the “Penny II” (sadly seems to have since sold out) in the medium size, and you can see it’s a bit tight on my extremely narrow wrist, so I’d suggest ordering a large no matter how small you think your wrists are.

Torro bracelets aren’t even very good charging cables

If you squint just right you can kind of see the logic behind the product.

If you’re going out on the town and don’t want to carry a bag, you might find a regular-length charging cable cumbersome to bring with you, but since we all live on our mobile devices these days, you might also reasonably worry about your phone dying, for example if you plan to call a car in order to get home.

Likewise, if you’re traveling (they reached out to me specifically to describe this as a “travel hack”) you might get robbed and lose your regular charging cable, and need to power up your phone in order to cancel your credit cards or whatever.

Which is why it’s notable that Torro bracelets aren’t very good charging cables. There’s probably a more technical way to put it, but the phone end of the cable is both stubby and bulky, like Danny DeVito. It literally does not fit into the charging hole of my iPhone case. Here’s a comparison with my normal charging cable (Torro on the left in both pictures):

It’s both too wide to fit into the charging gap on my case, and too short to reach the charging port on my phone from outside the case. Now, some cases are easy enough to pop off it might not matter one way or the other to you. But if your product is only supposed to do one thing, you’d hope it could at least do that one thing with a minimum of fuss.

They also sent me an external battery, which seems to work ok, although unlike my Limefuel battery (an excellent product that does not seem to be manufactured anymore) it doesn’t have any way of indicating the remaining charge.

So, who wants it?

I told BAMF Media that if they sent me two bracelets I’d do a reader giveaway for the second, but they didn’t seem to think that was a good enough “PR hack,” so I just have the one. However, I’m not using it, so if anyone wants it, wish me happy birthday in the comments and include your best throwaway e-mail address and I’ll pick somebody to bestow it on. Free USPS shipping within the United States! Terms and conditions don’t apply.

My version of the co-branded paradox

I was listening to the latest episode of the new Milenomics² podcast, which everyone should subscribe to, and sign up for bonus Patreon content from, and the hosts brought up what they call the “co-branded paradox.” By this they mean the counter-intuitive way that even if you like staying at Hyatt properties, or like flying on Delta, your best bet for a credit card to use on everyday spend is probably not a Hyatt or Delta co-branded credit card.

That’s for the simple reason that while those cards may offer other worthwhile benefits, they actually earn points at a lower rate than other available options. A Chase World of Hyatt credit card may be worth carrying for the annual free night, but for non-bonused spend you’d be better off using a Freedom Unlimited card, which earns 50% more Ultimate Rewards points. At restaurants, the World of Hyatt card earns 2 points per dollar, but so does the Chase Sapphire Preferred, which allows you to transfer your points to Hyatt or any of Chase’s other transfer partners.

Likewise, you might want to carry a Delta Platinum card for the annual companion ticket or to take advantage of free checked bags, but that card only earns 1 SkyMile per dollar spent, while a no-annual fee Amex EveryDay earns 1.2 Membership Rewards points everywhere when you use the card 20 times per month (and the $95 EveryDay Preferred earns 1.5 points everywhere when you use it 30 times per month).

This is even more true in the case of products like the Chase IHG Rewards Club credit cards, which earn just 1 point per dollar spent on unbonused purchases: the more you value IHG Rewards Club points, the less you should be willing to spend on their co-branded credit cards, for the simple reason that a simple 2% cash back credit card earns almost 3 points per dollar, given that points can be purchased year-round for 0.7 cents or less.

All this produces a simple conclusion: get co-branded credit cards if you like their benefits, but don’t use them for actual purchases, where you can earn more points, more valuable points, or both using other products.

This is fine as far as it goes, but I actually think the logic of the co-branded paradox can be taken one step further.

Put everyday purchases on the card that earns the least useful rewards

What listening to the Milenomics podcast got me thinking about was the fact that most frequent travelers are usually already optimizing their earning of their most useful loyalty currencies. If you’re a paid business traveler that likes flying on United, you’re already earning United miles every time you fly. The fact that you like flying United shouldn’t encourage you to earn more United miles because your paid travel is already taking care of that. Likewise if you’re spending 55 nights a year at Hyatt properties for work, you’re likely already earning somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 points per year, plus two annual free nights (at the 30-night and 55-night thresholds) and any points earned from seasonal promotions.

To me, this is the real co-branded paradox: if your paid travel and manufactured spend are already optimized around the most useful rewards currencies, then your everyday spend should be going to the least useful rewards currencies, the ones that are nice to have lying around but that you don’t count on for your major travel needs.

A few examples off the top of my head:

  • Barclaycard Choice Privileges Visa. If you’re like me, you don’t stay at Choice Hotels properties very often. But when you do want to stay at a Choice Hotel, you can get terrific value from having a handful of Choice Privileges points lying around.

  • Bank of America Amtrak Guest Rewards MasterCard. This is another card that doesn’t make any sense to put hundreds of thousands of dollars in spend on, but if you do like to occasionally ride on Amtrak, you might like to have 20 or 30 thousand points kicking around so you don’t have to pay cash for what would be an especially high-value redemption, like 2.9 cent-per-point long-haul sleeper accommodations.

  • US Bank Radisson Rewards cards. I don’t carry any of these cards anymore because, with the exception of the Radisson Blu Aqua in Chicago, I have mostly found Radisson properties to be trash heaps. However, if you do still carry any of these cards due to their anniversary point bonanzas, you might also consider using them for everyday spend, earning as they do 5 points per dollar on unbonused spend.

Conclusion

Of course in one sense I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek: obviously you shouldn’t prioritize earning less-useful currencies over more-useful currencies. But this is another way of expressing my long-standing observation that people really are inclined to earn too much, and redeem too little, of the currencies they consider most valuable. If there’s one good thing about the end of the Starwood Preferred Guest program it will be that we won’t have to listen to people complain that Starpoints are “too valuable to redeem” ever again!

If you’re maxing out a couple of Ink Plus cards at office supply stores every year and sitting on a million Ultimate Rewards points already, then I think it can make perfect sense to put away the Freedom Unlimited card when you go out to eat and pulling out something a little more exotic. Not because Amtrak Guest Rewards points are more valuable than Ultimate Rewards points in the abstract, but because they might be more valuable to you at the frontier you are personally operating at.

How bad would a Hyatt devaluation need to be?

I’ve been following with interest the changes Hyatt has made to certain types of award reservations. To roughly summarize the changes:

  • points can now be redeemed for “premium” suite award nights;

  • Points + Cash can now be redeemed for standard and premium suites;

  • qualifying paid stays can now be upgraded to premium suites with points;

  • the cash co-pay on Points + Cash stays is now 50% of the “standard” room rate for the room type you’re booking instead of a fixed amount based on hotel category;

  • a new 40,000-point redemption tier will be introduced to cover certain newly-acquired luxury properties.

I’m frankly not sure if it was part of this update or not, but I also noticed recently that award nights at Hyatt Ziva and Zilara all-inclusive properties can now be booked online (you used to have to call to book).

Hyatt is a competitive program for travel hackers

If you earn miles and points mostly or exclusively through manufactured spend this shouldn’t come as surprise, but to break it down simply:

  • a Category 1 Hyatt property costs 5,000 points per night, or $3,333 in spend on a Chase Freedom Unlimited or $1,000 on a Chase Ink Cash or Ink Plus at office supply stores;

  • a Category 4 Hyatt property costs 15,000 points per night, or $10,000 in spend on a Freedom Unlimited or $3,000 in spend on Ink Cash or Plus;

  • a top-tier Category 7 property costs 30,000 points per night, or $20,000 on Freedom Unlimited or $6,000 on Ink Cash or Plus.

We can break down Hilton’s award chart in the same way:

  • a bottom-tier Hilton property costs 5,000 points per night, or $833 in grocery store or gas station spend on an American Express Ascend card;

  • a mid-tier Hilton property costs 50,000 points per night, or $8,333 in bonused spend;

  • and a top-tier Hilton property costs 95,000 points, or $15,833 in bonused spend.

(Note that since grocery store spend costs about 50% more than in-person unbonused spend, the out-of-pocket costs for the same spot on the Hilton award chart end up being somewhat more expensive than Hyatt).

This is what I mean by a “competitive” program: Hyatt properties won’t always be cheaper than Hilton properties in a specific city or on particular dates, but having access to both programs gives you a better chance of paying as little as possible for the trips you want to take than relying solely on one program or the other and being stuck paying cash when it fails you.

Likewise, having credit cards that are useful for unbonused spend, office supply store spend, and grocery store spend means you’re able to take advantage of more promotions and opportunities, instead of relying on a single merchant or bonus category.

That brings me to today’s topic.

How bad would a Hyatt devaluation need to be to make the program uncompetitive?

I think it’s useful to think through questions like this ahead of time, so you don’t fall into the trap of motivated reasoning once a devaluation actually happens (something credit card affiliate bloggers are especially vulnerable to, but a risk for anyone).

You can imagine multiple forms a Hyatt devaluation might take:

  • Hyatt could change or end their transfer relationship with Chase. This is the least likely situation in the short term since Chase loudly promotes its uniform transfer ratio, but there’s no natural law that says Hyatt will remain a Chase partner forever, or that Chase will never revamp the Ultimate Rewards program.

  • Hyatt could introduce higher award categories and steadily shift properties upwards. Hyatt told Pizza in Motion that they have “no plans for any Hyatt-branded hotels or resorts to move to a new Category 8,” but all that wording requires is that the Park Hyatt sign come down and be replaced with a Small Luxury Hotels of the World or Joie de Vivre sign. No Hyatt branding? No problem.

  • Hyatt could restrict award space or introduce dynamic pricing. This is in many ways the most likely or even inevitable form a devaluation will take, since Hilton has had dynamic pricing for years and Marriott will launch it in 2019. 30,000-point properties might limit their availability to a few low-season weeks per year, while mid-tier properties might cost a few thousand points less for part of the year and tens of thousands of points more when people actually want to visit.

A change to the relationship with Chase would be the most catastrophic from a travel hacker’s point of view. Changing the transfer ratio or perhaps capping annual points transfers would make Hyatt a truly niche program, still worthwhile under specific conditions but uncompetitive with Hilton or even Radisson Rewards, which has US Bank co-branded credit cards that still earn 5 points per dollar on unbonused spend and a much larger footprint than Hyatt.

Meanwhile, category inflation isn’t the end of the world as long as the Chase relationship remains the same, although eventually you might see your favorite properties inflated out of eligibility for annual credit card free night certificates (currently good at Category 1-4 properties).

Conclusion

There should be no question in your mind that something will eventually give in the World of Hyatt program, and this post isn’t about predicting whether or not it will happen — it definitely will. There has to be enough money to go around between Chase, Hyatt, and Hyatt’s owner-operators, and a fixed credit card earning ratio and fixed award chart are simply incompatible with that. I don’t know which piece will buckle first under the pressure, but the transmission mechanism between Chase Ultimate Rewards, World of Hyatt, and award availability and price will change because it has to change.

The point of this post is to encourage you to think in advance about what kinds of changes would make you walk away from the program, or at least radically reduce your dependence on it. How bad would the transfer ratio have to become? How hard would it have to be to find award availability? How low would your typical redemption value have to fall?

If you don’t think about it in advance, then when the devaluations do start to roll in and you’re bombarded with affiliate bloggers explaining how “it’s not really that bad,” you’re not going to be ready to tell if they’re right or not.

What I learned from a week using Autoslash

Long-time readers know I detest driving, which can lead to funny situations like taking an Uber from Houston to Galveston, but due in large part to lifecycle effects I’ve recently found myself renting cars more and more. With newly limited vacation time (out of grad school) and increased income (thanks, Obama), it can make much more sense to rent a car than to rely on public transportation or put-upon relatives.

For reimbursed business travelers, car rentals can play an important role in a travel hacking practice, since they’re a bonus category on many credit cards (either as part of the “travel” category or as a bonus category in their own right), you can easily earn free rental days to use for personal travel, and the car rental agencies also partner with other loyalty programs like airlines, hotels, and Amtrak if you prefer those rewards.

But since I’m not a reimbursed business traveler, my focus is on keeping costs as low as possible. That’s where Autoslash is supposed to come in.

What is Autoslash?

Autoslash has gone through a number of iterations over the years. I believe they used to automatically rebook car rental reservations as lower rates became available, but lost the ability to do that some time ago, so now they offer two slightly different features:

  • “Get a Quote” allows you to submit a request for specific rental dates and times. A few hours after submitting a request, they e-mail a link to their results, which then send you to Priceline to complete the reservation.

  • “Track a Rental” allows you to submit existing reservation details, and Autoslash will send an e-mail if they detect lower prices. This feature works the same as “Get a Quote,” except that it will continue to monitor your reservation so if even lower rates become available you’ll be notified.

I’m not 100% sure if you book through a “Get a Quote” Priceline link if Autoslash automatically also creates a “Track a Rental” submission. I’m not sure about that because, as we’ll get to shortly, Autoslash has some shortcomings.

Rental #1: Minivan Success for Thanksgiving

Of my three recent experiences using Autoslash, this was by far the most successful: the system worked exactly as it was supposed to:

  • I submitted the dates and time I needed through the “Get a Quote” function, and received my quote an hour or so later.

  • I then pulled the corporate account number and coupon codes out of the Priceline reservation and plugged them into a new National Car Rental reservation, after clicking through to National from Lemoney, which offered the highest cashback earning rate (after applying my “Turbo Credits”).

  • I found the same rate and completed the reservation with National.

I then submitted my reservation details as a “Track a Rental” request to Autoslash, and a few hours after that they found an even lower rate, which I was able to use to rebook my rental.

This was Autoslash at its best: it found a low price for an oddball vehicle type I never would have thought to search for, found and applied a corporate code and a coupon code, and delivered a lower price than I would have found on my own.

Rental #2: Autoslash Errors over Christmas

If Rental #1 was an unqualified success, Rental #2 was a bust. The Autoslash e-mail linked to rates that weren’t available on Priceline or on National’s own site. I ended up copying over Autoslash’s rate codes to get the same rate available on Priceline, which was $50 or so higher than the rate Autoslash was advertising.

I then plugged the rate details into the “Track a Rental” feature, and quickly got another e-mail from Autoslash with the same advertised rate they couldn’t actually produce once I clicked through to Priceline!

So, I might have booked a better rate than I could have found on my own, but a higher rate than the one Autoslash was promoting. Call this one a wash.

Rental #3: Autoslash Breakdown for Halloween

This week we made a last minute decision to drive out to West Virginia for some birthday leafing, so I hopped onto Autoslash to see what our options were. A nearby hotel has a Hertz office, so I plugged in the address and our dates to see what was available.

A few hours later, I got the usual Autoslash e-mail, clicked through, and saw the only rental options were miles away. I tinkered with Priceline’s search options, and submitted another, even more specific Autoslash request, but simply couldn’t find our local Hertz office listed.

So, I headed over to the Hertz website, plugged in the same address, and was immediately informed that the local Hertz office is only open until noon on Sundays. Once I submitted a third Autoslash “Get a Quote” request with noon as the return time, I received another Autoslash quote I was able to successfully plug into the Hertz website, again after clicking through the Lemoney cashback portal.

Conclusion: all this is fine except…the Autoslash folks are weird jerks

If you’re bored by this point, that’s fine. I was bored by this point too: I hate driving, I hate renting cars, I hate the work that goes into hunting down discounts, and I hate the fact that I do it anyway because if I don’t I’ll feel like I got ripped off.

The most straightforward thing you can say about Autoslash is that it was supposed to solve that problem, and it doesn’t.

Using Autoslash made booking my rental cars take hours and hours longer than it would have otherwise. Thankfully, I have a travel hacking blog, so I get to write it up for the edification of my readers.

But if you don’t have a travel hacking blog, this is just work, and it’s not work that pays very well. And making it all even better, the Autoslash team themselves seem like total jerks. After spending hours figuring out why they weren’t returning rentals at my local Hertz office, I asked for help on Twitter, and they immediately replied:

“Shouldn't be any need to recreate our rates @ Hertz—you get the exact same rates and Gold bennies via our links to Priceline *and* you get to support a small bootstrapped startup that employs fellow @FlyerTalk members you prbly know personally. Pls don't steal use of our service!”

So I went from being pissed off by how bad their service was to being accused of “stealing” use of their service! Not a great look, as they say.

Conclusion

I’ll keep using Autoslash for my increasingly-frequent car rental needs, but it’s just one tool, and hopefully this post has spelled out some of the things you need to watch out for: advertised rates that aren’t actually available, Autoslash not knowing the working hours of local rental offices, and the amount of portal cashback you’re sacrificing by using their Priceline affiliate links. In other words, it’s not a tool you can rely on exclusively, but needs to be combined with your own outside research.

On that last point: if Autoslash worked consistently well, I wouldn’t mind giving up a few bucks in portal cashback by using their affiliate links. But the fact that they don’t work consistently well and fly to the attack against users who are troubleshooting their errors doesn’t exactly endear them to me.

If you’ve had better luck than me using Autoslash, feel free to sound off in the comments.

Gaming out my Waldorf Astoria stay

As I wrote last month, this January I’m heading to Maui for what I’m expecting to be an unusually-for-me expensive vacation, so I’ve spent some time in the past few weeks gaming out what the options are to save money on the trip without annoying my partner too much along the way.

Shorter car rental

Since we plan to drive around and explore Maui, I had initially planned to rent a car at the airport and drive to the Grand Wailea. I quickly realized this made no sense: not only would I pay for 5 days of car rental, but I’d also pay for five days of valet parking, since the Grand Wailea doesn’t have a self-park option.

By taking a cab or shuttle from and to the airport, I’ll save on both daily rental costs and daily valet parking: a roundtrip shuttle for two from the Grand Wailea’s preferred vendor costs just $99, and I may be able to shop around to bring that down even lower.

Amex Offer of $70 off $350

I was targeted for the current Amex Offer of $70 off $350 spent at “Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts in the US, Amsterdam, Berlin, Edinburgh, and Paris; and, Conrad Hotels & Resorts in the US.” While such promotions sometimes exclude Hawaii, this one doesn’t seem to, so I’ll use my Hilton Ascend American Express card to check in and put the first $350 of room charges on that card.

As I wrote in my original post, the Grand Wailea currently claims to give a $15 per person daily in-room dining credit as their Diamond breakfast benefit. Readers quickly pointed out in the comments that with a $7 delivery charge and 20% fixed gratuity, that works out to about $19 in actual food if you’re trying to spend the exact amount of the credit.

Instead of trying to game the room service menu to spend exactly $19 per day, I figure we’ll just order what we want and let the excess count towards the $350 threshold for my Amex Offer.

Hilton Honors American Express Aspire Card Referral

Thanks to American Express’s “universal referral” system, I can refer my partner to an Aspire card despite not having one myself (you can find my universal referral links on the Support the Site! page). I’ve written about it before, but it’s worth spelling out again just how good this deal is:

  • I receive 20,000 Hilton Honors points for referring my partner;

  • My partner receives 150,000 Hilton Honors points after spending $4,000 within 3 months;

  • My partner gets a $250 airline fee credit in 2018 and another $250 airline fee credit in 2019;

  • We already have an eligible stay planned where we’ll be able to use the $250 Hilton Resort statement credit (a cardmember year, not calendar year, benefit);

  • And she’ll get an unlimited Priority Pass membership that allows up to 2 guests, so if I ask nicely she might take me with her into lounges when we travel.

182,000 Hilton Honors points (after earning 3 points per dollar on $4,000 in spend) are over half the points cost of our stay at the Grand Wailea, which I jokingly valued at $8,500 but realistically value at around $2,000. Valuing the airline and resort statement credits at half of face value, this works out to roughly $1,375.

I don’t like paying $450 annual fees. I’ve never paid a $450 annual fee. But this is a no-brainer for us since we already have a stay at an eligible resort booked.

Conclusion

There is one interesting question you might have after reading this: my Ascend card will get a 20% discount on exactly $350 in spend, while my partner’s Aspire card will get a 100% discount on up to $250 in spend, so which card should the first Grand Wailea room charges go on, and which card should be the backup?

In part, the answer is that we don’t have to decide until we know the final room charge. If it’s less than $350, we’ll put the entire charge on the Aspire card and get $250 back. If it’s more than $600, we’ll put $350 on the Ascend and the remainder on the Aspire, maximizing both opportunities (and the higher Hilton earning rate on the Aspire).

But for final charges between $350 and $600, what’s the right order to place the charges in? I think my preference is to put $350 on the Ascend and receive $70 back, then put the remainder on the Aspire, because the remaining cardmember year Aspire credit will remain available for later use.

But there’s a good argument, an argument I might even agree with depending on the day, that the Aspire resort credit is available at such a limited footprint of properties that maximizing that credit when we do have the opportunity is a much higher priority than triggering a piddling 20% discount, the kind of discount I can beat 365 days a year through manufactured spend.

Sound off in the comments if you feel strongly about it one way or the other.

Redeeming US Bank Flexpoints in any amount for any ticket

This weekend, I noticed something interesting while booking a couple upcoming trips over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, something that might increase the value of US Bank Flexpoints for certain redemptions.

Prior to 2018, US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards Visa points could be redeemed for up to 2 cents each in airfare in $200 redemption bands through the US Bank’s contracted “Travel Rewards Center.” You could book multiple tickets on the same reservation, but you needed to pay for at least one ticket entirely with Flexpoints. For example, you could book two $500 tickets for 60,000 Flexpoints, or for 30,000 Flexpoints and $500.

On Sunday, I logged in to set about redeeming about 47,000 Flexpoints for two reservations with two tickets each. One reservation had two $200 tickets and the second, two $500 tickets. If you run the numbers, you notice this was the ideal situation for me: 47,000 Flexpoints are worth $700, so I’d be able to pay for one ticket on each reservation entirely with Flexpoints, and the second ticket with cash.

But oddly, when I actually went to book the ticket, US Bank offered to let me apply all 47,000 Flexpoints to the $1,000 reservation (leaving $300 leftover to pay in cash). I fiddled around with several options, and it seems to me US Bank no longer requires you to choose between paying with Flexpoints or paying with cash: you can now use any combination of Flexpoints and cash for any number of tickets, through the US Bank travel portal.

Why it matters

There are two key reasons you might be interested in this change, if you weren’t already aware of it:

  • It’s the easiest way to completely empty your Flexperks balance. Since you can redeem any number of Flexpoints, up to your entire balance, for 1.5 cents each towards travel through the Travel Rewards Center, you never need to worry about having too many points or leaving orphaned points in your account. By contrast, Real-Time Rewards redemptions require you to have enough Flexpoints to cover the entire amount of your purchase, possibly causing you to over-earn, or orphan, small Flexpoint balances.

  • US Bank still offers $25 airline allowances “with each redeemed airline award travel ticket.” Since you can now book any number of tickets with any number of Flexpoints, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to request a $25 allowance per ticket booked through the US Bank Travel Rewards Center, regardless of the number of Flexpoints you redeem for that reservation.

Conclusion

While a minor change to the overall Flexperks programs, which already offered a fixed 1.5 cents per Flexpoint in redemption value, the ability to redeem any number of Flexpoints up to your account balance is a modest improvement in the overall value proposition, since it virtually guarantees you’ll be able to redeem your entire balance at its maximum possible value, eliminating the risk of orphaned points as your manufactured spend or travel hacking practice changes over time.