On the Justice of Squeaking Wheels: made whole by filling out an automated survey

Anybody who knows me knows, the only thing I hate more than driving is renting cars. It combines all the worst features of the travel experience: you’re charged a constantly fluctuating price (thanks Autoslash!), with ambiguous requirements (do I qualify for a USAA rate as a member, or is that for employees of USAA?), face unlimited liability for anything that happens on the road in an unfamiliar car, and are upsold at every single step of the transaction. It’s a terrible experience for customers, and I imagine an even more terrible experience for the cashiers who have to deal with a stream of furious customers all day every day.

I’ve tried to eliminate as many of these variables as possible over the years. In 2020, I bought non-owner car insurance from USAA for the first time to cover personal liability while driving a rented car. I naturally pay for my rentals with a credit card that includes insurance for the value of the car itself. And I fuel rental cars before returning them to avoid paying their extortionate fuel charges.

But that leaves one pain point: picking up and returning the car itself. Different rental car companies have tried to address this in a variety of ways: elite check-in desks, “choose your own car” gimmicks (National’s “Emerald Aisle,” Budget’s “Fastbreak,” etc). But I’m not actually that annoyed by waiting in line for a rental car. After all, I just waited in line to check my bags, waited in line to board, waited to get off the plane, waited to collect my checked bags, and waited to take a shuttle to the rental car lot. What do I care if I have to wait another 15 minutes to get the car keys?

No, what drives me nuts is how car rentals are so completely unlike any other element of the travel experience, and no lesson you learn anywhere else can be applied to understanding how rental car companies operate:

• an airline schedules a set of flights, some of which take off late and some of which land early. But one flight landing early (besides giving the pilots and flight attendants a little more time to use the bathroom or get a bite to eat) doesn’t make any other flight take off any earlier, and in fact realistically is more likely to clutter up the taxiways and gates.

• a hotel sets a check-in time and check-out time, which they’re typically willing to be flexible about if your room is ready early or you want to keep it a bit longer, assuming there isn’t another guest about to check in.

Car rental companies operate more like private jet services or love hotels. You can show up early, or check-out late, but you’re definitely paying for every minute you have possession of the car.

Getting charged for showing up early

Over the New Years holiday my partner and I flew to Hawaii where we met up with my mother-in-law (yes, I know this is also the plot of the Netflix limited series “White Lotus”). Our flight was scheduled to land around 1 pm and hers around 3, so I booked a weekly car rental at the only-slightly-off-airport Budget Car Rental site, with a pickup and dropoff both scheduled for 1 pm on Wednesdays, a week apart.

Then our flight got in early — very early. We were scheduled to arrive at 12:50 pm but were already at the Budget office at 11:30 am. We didn’t have anything else to do (the Kona airport is kind of in the middle of nowhere) so we decided to pick up the car and drive into town to explore for a couple hours.

I popped in to see if the car was ready yet, and after a few minutes in line, was asked “when are you returning the car?” I naturally replied, “I have it reserved until 1 pm,” and the cashier responded, “but you’re picking it up early. That means you need to return it early.”

And she was right!

After stressing about it for 7 full days, I managed to get the car back at 12:20 pm the following Wednesday — 40 minutes before the end of my original reservation, but 50 minutes after my 7-day “week” expired.

They stuck me with a fee that was, for one hour, a full 14% of the cost of the week-long rental.

But then they gave me my money back

On January 5, in what must have been just a few minutes after returning the car to the lot in Kona, I received one of those thousands of automated e-mails asking for feedback on my experience renting from Budget. Like any normal person, I never complete these surveys unless something is obviously amiss or an employee goes above and beyond. But since I was still steaming about this stupid “late” return charge, I went ahead and filled out the survey.

Shockingly, 5 days later, I received another message from the same generic survey provider:

Thank you for taking the time to tell us about your recent experience. We appreciate your feedback since it helps us improve our service and your rental experience.

I deeply regret that we were not able to meet your expectations regarding your previous rental. We will send in an adjustment for the extra hour charge. Please allow 7-14 business days for this to reflect on your end.

I wasn’t exactly convinced this would actually happen (the e-mail address’s domain was “app.medallia.com”), but was willing to watchfully wait. Then, as much to my surprise as yours, on January 26, 21 full days after I returned the car, Budget refunded me almost $100, which seems to actually be slightly more than they charged me for the extra hour, even accounting for taxes and fees.

Conclusion

I know this was a long way to go to complain about how terrible rental car companies are, which is why I’m trying to make a slightly different point: sometimes, somebody actually reads those surveys you submit after flying, staying at a hotel, or renting a car, and if they do, then making as specific, particularized complaints (or praise!) as possible seems likeliest to get the most favorable results.

Quick hit: easily adding all available Amex Offers (if you're an idiot, like me)

Yesterday I was excited to see Danny the Deal Guru’s post about a simple technique to quickly add all your available Amex Offers to your cards with a simple click. It worked for him and some other people who commented, but it didn’t work for me. Since I’m computer illiterate, I assumed it had something to do with my ad blocker or privacy settings, or the fact that I use Apple hardware, or any one of a hundred other things.

This morning I caught my second wind and decided to try again. Upon closer inspection of the error message, I saw a string that looked familiar: “U+201C.” That looks like a unicode character. Some light googling revealed that it was, indeed, a unicode character, specifically the “left double quotation mark” character, like the ones on the left side of those quotes.

Turns out, JavaScript doesn’t like left (or right) double quotation marks. JavaScript likes upright double quotation marks, and after replacing the former with the later, the code sailed through.

It turns out, in the original Reddit thread, user blamsonyo had used upright quotation marks, and if I had bothered to click through and copy the original code I wouldn’t have had a problem. Lesson reinforced: when possible, go to the original source! Save the games of telephone for summer camp.

Maximize just 4 U points by pulling forward redemptions across regions

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my first experiences redeeming Safeway’s just 4 U rewards points and described how by triggering more than one reward with the same purchase, you can create a negative balance that can be spent on items that aren’t normally eligible for redemption.

That’s a great way to increase the value of just 4 U points by making them more flexible, but it doesn’t help with the program’s biggest shortcomings: limited redemption opportunities and quickly expiring points. For example, in March the most rewards I could redeem on groceries was 43 (representing 4,300 just 4 U points). Before this month I didn’t look at the program very closely, but assuming that’s standard, it means there’s never any reason for an account to earn more than 4,300 points, on average, each month.

When big earning opportunities come along, like the current offer for 8 points per dollar spent on Happy gift cards, you might almost reach that threshold with just a single purchase! Furthermore, not all redemptions are created equal. If you’re trying to redeem a full 43 rewards per month, you’re probably going to end up with stuff you don’t want or can’t use.

Fortunately, there is a workaround that allows you to redeem more of the highest-value rewards each month. The technique is relatively simple, but the underlying logic is a bit strange.

Albertsons is a sprawling behemoth

You probably know that as a grocery store conglomerate, Albertsons was stitched together over decades from over a dozen regional chains. In many places this was an extremely disruptive process; in my hometown when Albertsons acquired Safeway they were required to spin off our existing Safeway stores into a new local “chain,” a process I’m sure was repeated countless times across the country.

Albertsons retained many of the regional brands they acquired, presumably because they have some nostalgia value for local customers, but eventually rolled out the just 4 U program to most of them. So there’s an Albertsons just 4 U, a Jewel Osco just 4 U, a Safeway just 4 U, etc.

Here’s where it starts to get tricky: instead of consolidating all their stores into a single program, or consolidating each brand’s just 4 U program into its own rewards silo, Albertsons consolidated stores by region. Here’s a somewhat outdated regional map posted by user diburning on FlyerTalk in January, 2020:

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Many, but not all, of these regions and brands are inter-operable, but in a very peculiar way. What Albertsons seems to have done is, for every inter-operable store region, create a dummy rewards account corresponding to each inter-operable customer account. There’s nothing unusual about this from a programming point of view: they don’t want two people to be able to enroll with the same login credentials, or list the same telephone number, in two different regions sharing the same backend, and they don’t want users to have to delete one account and create another when they move from one region to another.

As a result, if you have a “Seattle” Safeway just 4 U account, you also have a “Nor Cal” Safeway just 4 U account, and an “United” Albertsons account, and a “Houston” Randall’s account. The most important thing to remember at this point is that these accounts exist simultaneously. You don’t close one and create another when you change your preferred store location.

However, when you change your preferred store location between regions, you are “logging out” of one region’s program and “logging into” the other region’s. When you do this, two things will happen:

• all of your clipped just 4 U earning coupons will appear unclipped.

• all of your clipped just 4 U rewards will disappear.

But this is only because you are looking at your account in a different region. Switch back to your original store location and your coupons will still be clipped and your rewards will be safe and sound. Needless to say, this can be quite scary the first time it happens to you, so I encourage you to try it yourself to make sure you believe me.

However, one thing will not happen when you switch between regions: your just 4 U points balance and unredeemed rewards will still be available for redemption in the new region.

Multiply your monthly high-value redemptions by shopping in different regions

What this means is that you can redeem “excess” just 4 U rewards by shopping in different regions the same month. For example, if I earn 4,400 just 4 U points in March, I would ordinarily only be able to redeem 22 rewards in March for $29 off groceries, then 22 more rewards in April. But if I am able to shop in another inter-operable region in March, I can redeem those 22 April rewards again for another $29 discount. Scaling this technique allows you to vastly increase the number of just 4 U points you can redeem each month, reduces the risk of them expiring unredeemed, and therefore mechanically increases their value.

Obviously to a certain extent this depends on the accessibility of different regions. The more you travel to different regions, the more opportunities you have to redeem your points for the highest-value rewards. Note, however, that you can also “redeem at a distance” by clipping rewards in other regions and then simply sharing the phone number linked to your account with anyone you want to give free groceries to, or “earn at a distance” by having other people enter your phone number after you’ve clipped a coupon in their region.

Conclusion

To the extent that you’re able to scale this technique in order to drain your just 4 U rewards exclusively for the most valuable “basket” rewards, the cash value of just 4 U points asymptotically rises towards 1.32 cents each. This is good to know not because it’s a particularly high value, but because it allows you to quickly and easily evaluate the attractiveness of any given just 4 U deal. Earning 8 just 4 U points on $413.90 in Happy gift cards, for instance, yields approximately $43.71 in rewards, and you can simply compare that return against your liquidation costs to determine if the deal is worth pursuing.

More Delta Platinum and refund hijinx

Right now all travelers, but especially travel hackers, are juggling even more decisions than usual. In the before time, we might make speculative bookings far in the future as soon as award space opened up for trips we weren’t sure we’d be able to take. Now even a last-minute trip is “speculative,” depending on constantly changing infection numbers and quarantine restrictions, not to mention our own health conditions.

Back in May I wrote a couple posts about cancelling airline tickets for a refund instead of store credit and my plan to use Delta’s COVID-19 flight change policy to lock in a low-cost companion ticket that I hoped could then be used on other, more expensive dates.

As a reminder, the key to that second trick was that travel to any destination, booked before May 31 for travel before September 30, 2020, could be changed to any dates before September 30 with no difference in fare charged. The policy’s intention was obvious: they wanted people to be comfortable booking flights with the knowledge that if they need to postpone their trip they won’t be on the hook for more money. But taken literally, it also meant you could search the schedule for the cheapest available travel dates, then change your flights to any desired dates before September 30, as long as the destination remained the same.

Of course, back in May there was still hope the country would pull together and defeat the virus. Once it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, my focus shifted from getting a deal on a New Orleans trip to getting a refund.

Fortunately, as early as June my outbound 10:14 am flight was cancelled and I was rebooked on a 8:20 am flight, so I knew I was entitled to a refund. With the original reservation dates finally approaching, last week I pulled the trigger.

Don’t cancel your flight, apply for a refund

In the e-mail notifying me of the schedule change, Delta wrote:

“We also understand that your new itinerary may not be best suited for your travel needs and we have the following options to give you flexibility.

• “If you prefer to change your trip from the itinerary listed below, please visit My Trips on delta.com or follow the step-by-step instructions here. If you need additional assistance, please contact us at 1-800-221-1212.

• “If you would like to cancel your flight, the value of your ticket will become an eCredit, and you can find more details available here. You'll be able to use your original ticket number as the eCredit number when you are ready to redeem it by following the step-by-step directions here.”

As you can see, Delta doesn’t even mention the possibility of a refund, despite knowing perfectly well I’m entitled to one. My main concern was that if I canceled my reservation and received an eCredit, that might break the link in their system showing that I experienced a schedule change as well. So instead, I applied for a refund without canceling my reservation. Fortunately, Delta lets you apply for a refund online.

Redeposited companion ticket

My secondary worry about canceling my flight was that the terms and conditions of the companion ticket are crystal clear:

“Cancellations/Ticket Changes/Reissuance: If the primary ticket or the Companion ticket is cancelled, both tickets will be cancelled and the Companion ticket will not be reissued. Subject to the fare rules of the primary ticket, the value of the primary ticket, less a $200 administrative service charge and any fare difference, may be applied to future travel. Cancellations are subject to the rules of the fare purchased. Neither a new Companion Certificate nor Companion ticket will be issued upon a cancellation.“

If I canceled my ticket, I thought there was a good chance I’d be both stuck with store credit and out a perfectly good companion ticket, the worst of both worlds.

Thankfully, a few days after my refund was processed, I logged into Delta and saw my previously “closed” companion certificate had been restored with a reassuring checkbox next to it, ready for use. I recalled that when I submitted my refund request, the confirmation page mentioned in passing that companion tickets would not be reissued “unless they are subject to our COVID-19 cancellation policies.” But of course I didn’t request a refund under their COVID-19 cancellation policy, I requested a refund under longstanding Department of Transportation guidance on flight cancellations!

A classic case of good execution but poor communication.

Conclusion

Obviously we play a lot of games with loyalty programs, so I try to stay philosophical about the games travel providers play with us. Turnabout is fair play and so on, after all. If they think they can get a few bucks more from customers by charging for seat assignments or priority boarding, I’m inclined to say more power to them.

Refunds on the other hand are a real opportunity to put companies’ values (if any) on display, since it’s a situation where they’re the ones in a position of power: they already have your money, you want it back, and there’s no particular reason to believe you’ll spend it with them in the future once you have it back. No one expects a company to be exactly eager to issue refunds, but especially under conditions when customers are clearly entitled to them, I have a lot more respect for companies that issue them gracefully rather than belligerently.

Although Delta could have been more proactive about alerting me to my right to a refund, their simple online form and reissuance of a companion ticket they weren’t strictly speaking required to offer left a much better taste in my mouth than the lecture I got from my Alaska Airlines representative.

Once (if) we get out from under COVID-19, I’ll be interested to see whether Delta continues to reissue companion certificates on refunded tickets. It’s a small gesture, but given the importance of their relationship with American Express, I think it would behoove them to adopt a single policy on companion ticket cancellations — and follow it.

Pro tip: using the 1Password iPhone browser to painlessly add just for U offers

On the occasion of a new Safeway offer for $10 off $100 in Visa gift cards, I thought I would share my preferred technique for adding these offers to all my just for U accounts.

Logging in and out of just for U is a pain

Like all such services, just for U is designed to keep you logged in as long as possible. If you use the internet in a tracked browser window (i.e., not in “incognito” or “private browsing” mode), then just for U will load you up with cookies that even logging out may not completely clear.

This is inconvenient if you manage multiple just for U accounts and want to add these single-use coupons to each account. Even if you use a private browsing mode which clears your tracking cookies, you then can’t use the same window for anything else simultaneously or the cookies will still be retained!

Using the smartphone app for your local stores is an alternative, but it still requires remembering usernames and passwords, or constantly flipping back and forth between the app and your password manager.

The most elegant workaround I’ve found is the built-in browser in the iPhone app of my password manager, 1Password.

Configuring the 1Password browser

I’m sure all password managers have a similar tool, but since 1Password is the one I’m familiar with, here’s how I use it.

1. For each just for U account, enter the URL of your store’s login page in the “website” field so that clicking on the website takes you directly to the login page.

2. Click on “Settings,” then “1Password Browser.” I set the User Agent to “Safari (Mac)” so that the browser loads the desktop version of the website.

3. Click “Clear Web Data” so you don’t have any cookies lingering around.

Adding just for U coupons to multiple accounts

Now you can easily add coupons to multiple accounts with just a few clicks:

1. If you have a standard naming convention for your accounts, you can click on “Categories” and type the name into the search bar, e.g., “Safeway.” This will pull up all your just for U accounts.

2. Click on the first one, then the website bar, and the 1Password browser will open and automatically enter your login credentials.

3. Add the relevant offer, and press “Done” in the top right corner.

4. Press settings, then “Clear Web Data” to reset the browser.

5. Press “Categories,” and repeat steps 2-4.

Using this technique it takes 30 seconds or less to add offers to each account, and doesn’t require messing around with my desktop browser settings.

Conclusion

1Password is a paid product, but the version I have doesn’t require an ongoing subscription. I believe there are other free or “freemium” password managers on the market, and they all should have some kind of similar functionality. The important thing is simply to put in the time up front to configure your login credentials. Given the “better than free” nature of these gift card deals, as long as grocery stores are willing to keep printing money that investment is almost certain to pay off in the long run.

The more you know: earning secret Giant gas and grocery points

I’ve been doing most of my grocery store manufactured spend lately at Safeway, since they’ve had great offers recently for better-than-free Visa and MasterCard prepaid debit cards. When these deals come along it almost doesn’t matter what credit card you use, but the best options are obviously cards that bonus grocery store spend, like the Chase Freedom this quarter, the Sapphire Preferred or Reserve in May and June, or the American Express Hilton Honors Surpass or Aspire cards, with their uncapped 12 points per dollar spent at grocery stores through July.

As a reminder, you typically have two weeks to redeem these Safeway promotions, but they are only available to “add” to your Shop Your Way account during the week they appear in the app, so be sure to add them to all your accounts immediately when the promotions go live.

The other model of grocery store discount is the one preferred by the Giant/Stop & Shop/Martin’s grocery store chain, where you earn bonus gas points on prepaid debit cards instead. In some areas, including mine, these points can now be redeemed for credit towards a future grocery purchase, so they are much more “cash-like” than they used to be. Still, given the choice, I prefer a slightly smaller up-front discount than the hassle of trying to perfectly match up my grocery bill with my store credit.

Strange, but true: earn bonus gas points even when your store doesn’t advertise them

Word typically goes around Twitter and the blogosphere quickly once a new grocery store promo goes live, which is extremely convenient if you’re like me and either don’t receive or instantly trash your weekly circular. The circulars are available online, so it’s easy to plug your ZIP code in and see whether your local stores are participating.

Or so I thought.

Earlier this week, Stephen Pepper over at Frequent Miler mentioned in passing:

“If you live near Giant or Stop & Shop stores, this deal isn’t appearing in your weekly ad. For some reason, that’s been the case for the last couple of months or so – gift card deals are displayed in the weekly ad for Martin’s but not Giant or Stop & Shop. This offer is still available at all three chains though despite not being listed in all weekly ads.”

I’ve been travel hacking long enough to know that as bizarre as this sounds, that’s no reason to doubt it — the very existence of travel hacking is so bizarre most people have trouble believing it really exists. But I wanted to make sure, so I trundled over to my local Giant, which did not list the promotion in this week’s circular, to find out for myself (and, obviously, my beloved readers).

Embarrassingly, I’d moved so much of my grocery store spend over to Safeway that the entire Giant store location had been redesigned since my last visit, and I was almost afraid Giant had stopped selling prepaid debit cards altogether. It turned out they had moved the gift card center to just inside the store’s one-way exit, so you conveniently now have to walk all the way through the store, past the checkout lanes, then re-enter the store to make your purchase.

Since I had not yet maxed out the $1,500 cap on one of my Chase Freedom cards, I used that to buy the prepaid Visa debit card, knowing I’d come out ahead whether or not I earned the bonus gas points. Fortunately for me, and for you if you’re in an area served by Giant, Pepper was right and I did earn the bonus points.

But that’s not all.

Stranger, but still true: earn bonus gas points even when they don’t show up on your receipt

When I sat down to write this post, I was expecting to write the exact opposite of the above. I was planning to share a contrary datapoint, concluding that while there may be some stores where bonus points are earned regardless of whether the promotion is advertised or not, you shouldn’t count on it, and do your own research instead.

That’s because when I checked out, the bonus points did not appear on my receipt. Whenever you check out at Giant using a rewards card, there are two lines on the bottom portion of the receipt, “Points this visit” and “Points total.” The receipt reported that I had earned 0 points on the card, and that my points total was also 0.

It was only when I sat down to write this post that it occurred to me to double check using the Giant app, and as soon as I opened it, there they were: 1,524 points, redeemable for $15 in free groceries.

Conclusion

There’s no reason to believe there’s necessarily a connection between these datapoints. It may be the fact prepaid debit card deals aren’t printed in some stores’ circulars is one error, points nonetheless being awarded is a second, unrelated error, and awarded points not appearing on receipts is a third, also unrelated error. Likewise, it’s possible each error will be fixed independently of the others.

What I can say is that, based on my experience during this promotion, it is probably worth at least finding out whether your own stores are awarding gas points, whether or not the promotion appears in your circular.

My COVID-19 Delta companion ticket experiment (and one weird datapoint)

Most people aren’t in a position to plan travel these days, but like me, you might be in a position where you need to book travel. In my case, that meant making a companion ticket reservation using a card I plan to cancel.

News to me: Delta companion tickets are linked to your co-branded credit card, not your Skymiles account

I only have one Delta Platinum Business credit card, so I only get one companion ticket a year, which means it takes some time to collect datapoints (and they’re stale by the time the next one comes around). For that reason, I was not aware of a curious development: Delta companion tickets are now automatically charged to your co-branded Delta credit card.

This may not seem like a big deal at first glance, since if you have a Delta co-branded credit card in the first place you’re probably fine earning bonus Skymiles on your purchase, and you might even be working your way towards a $25,000 or $30,000 high spend threshold anyway. Otherwise, why have the card?

It is, however, a change: in the past, Delta companion tickets could be booked with any American Express card, even cards that weren’t issued by American Express, like the Fidelity 2% cash back card, which used the American Express payment network before eventually moving over to Visa.

I wasn’t trying to be that clever, however. I simply wanted to pay with my American Express Hilton Honors Surpass card, since I plan to cancel my Delta card in the next few days. The payment was accepted, and my e-mailed receipt shows the last four digits of my Hilton card.

But the charge was put on my Delta card anyway, even though my Delta card isn’t even saved to my Delta wallet! I hope you’re as astonished as I am: not only did they charge a card I didn’t authorize them to charge, they charged a card that wasn’t saved to my account.

In my case this didn’t end up mattering, but do keep it in mind if you are planning to put a Delta companion ticket on a different American Express card, for example to meet a minimum spending requirement, high spend bonus, or to trigger an Amex Offer.

Book Delta speculatively by May 31 for travel before September 30

There are two slightly different rules on the Delta website that I’m hoping to take advantage of which led me to make this reservation the way I did:

• “Tickets originally purchased between March 1 and May 31, 2020, can be changed without a change fee for up to a year from the date you purchased it.”

• “for travel within the United States originally scheduled to depart March through September 30, 2020, all change fees are waived; You can rebook your trip to the same destination for travel departing before September 30, 2020, with no difference in fare applied."

Since, if epidemiologically possible, we’re hoping to take a trip to New Orleans in the fall, the way I read this is that I could book the cheapest possible flight to New Orleans departing anytime before September 30 and be able to change it to any date before September 30, at any price, while paying no change fees and no difference in fare.

By booking before May 31, I also have the backup option of using the price of the ticket towards any other Delta ticket up to a year after the date of purchase.

So, it is worth it?

In my case, I had the icing of being able to redeem a companion ticket that would otherwise be lost when I close my Delta card, but it’s worth considering who else might want to take advantage of this opportunity.

The clearest case is if you have a trip you know you need take on Delta before September 30, since according to my reading of these rules you can book the cheapest dates on the calendar, then simply change your flights to the correct dates without paying any fees or difference in fare. Delta appears to be saying all flights between two given airports, departing before September 30, are now priced at the lowest fare available anytime before September 30 between those same airports. Nice of them!

Another option is using the pre-May 31 change fee waiver as a kind of travel bank to liquidate fixed-value points on cards you plan to cancel, or to trigger airline fee credits. For example, the American Express Platinum cards offer a 35% rebate when you redeem Membership Rewards points for certain premium cabin tickets. Booking an expensive first class Delta flight, receiving the rebated points, and then using the value towards flights you actually plan to take might be one way to lock in that increased value.

I don’t carry any cards that offer annual airline fee credits so it’s not a sub-field I follow particularly closely, but if you can find some sub-$50 Delta fares, they might automatically trigger credits on cards like the American Express Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve.

Conclusion

Let me close with a word of (gentle) warning. The actual financial mechanism here is that you, the passenger, are making an unsecured loan to Delta, a troubled airline. That doesn’t mean you don’t have rights: you have a lot of rights! But if the pandemic lasts longer than expected, or Delta manages the aftermath worse than expected, then your rights are going to have to get in line along with everyone else’s rights: employees, bondholders, shareholders, airports, suppliers, etc.

I don’t mean to come across as pessimistic. I think Delta is an unusually well-managed airline! I just mean to say that, as in all these games we play, this is not a case of “pulling one over” on Delta, it’s a case of making a calculated bet, and your calculation may well end up being different than mine.

Reminder: restrictions do differ between different shopping portals

Starting online purchases at a shopping portal is one of the simplest techniques travel hackers use, and it’s also one of the most reminiscent of extreme couponing: click through an online portal (be sure to clear your browser’s cookies first), make a purchase, and you’ll earn some miles, points, or cashback from the portal in addition to your credit card rewards.

While there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different online shopping portals, with a little bit of experience they can come to seem more or less interchangeable (they’re mostly operated by the same firm on the backend), which can be both a good and bad thing. It’s a good thing when it means the same technique will work on multiple portals, like the Wall Street Journal/Barron’s subscription deal; it’s a bad thing when the same restrictions are imposed on each portal, or even across portals.

It’s worth keeping an eye out for differences between portal restrictions

For my sins, I’ve had to book a couple upcoming hotel stays with cash, and decided to see what the current situation was on my online shopping portal accounts. The problem, in general, is that merchants got wise to people double-dipping through both shopping portals and their proprietary rewards programs, and so began to limit portal payouts when you log into your rewards account before completing a reservation. To give a simple example, if you click through to Hotels.com through TopCashBack, you’ll receive 8% cashback if you make your reservation without logging in, but only 2% cashback if you log in first:

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BeFrugal is slightly more competitive, at 10% and 2.5%, respectively:

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While this may seem like a cheap move for Hotels.com (because it is), the logic is obvious: they already operate a loyalty program offering a rebate of “about” 10% on hotel stays (every ten nights booked through the site earns a free night of equal or lesser average value). Giving people an additional discount just for knowing about it must give their director of marketing enough heartburn as it is.

This compromise at least makes shoppers stop and think: it’s true 12.5% (through BeFrugal) is higher than 10%(logged into Hotels.com), but a 10% cash payout might be more valuable than a 10% in-kind payout with a 2.5% cash bonus. In fact, I think under virtually all circumstances it would be.

But not all shopping portals have identical restrictions

Ideally, what you’d like is a shopping portal with a competitive payout rate that still works on rewards-earning transactions, and that’s why it’s worth checking the restrictions on each portal, instead of just assuming they’re all identical.

Lemoney, for example, offers 5.5% cashback at Hotels.com without restriction on whether you’re also collecting Hotels.com free night credits:

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To be clear: while my full cashback amount has already tracked properly, it won’t be payable for months so there’s no way of telling whether I’ll actually receive the full amount.

I found the same was true at Hilton, where BeFrugal offers 6% cashback to non-members and non-elite members, but just 1.5% to Silver, Gold, and Diamond elites:

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While Lemoney offers 4% cashback to everyone:

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Conclusion

Shopping portals have never played a particularly large role in my travel hacking game, simply because I’ve always been fortunate enough to have access to adequate manufactured spend to meet my travel needs, so this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive look into shopping portals, let alone a recommendation to use one over another (although feel free to find my own personal referral links on my Support the Site! page).

But it is meant as a reminder that while shopping portal terms are often similar, they aren’t always identical, and the differences between them can end up being more lucrative than you expect, particularly when you do end up needing to pay cash for travel expenses.

Hotel benefits by length of stay

The other day I was looking at hotels for an upcoming weekend trip with flexible dates. I settled on a convenient Hilton property, and was immediately annoyed that I only really needed 4 nights, even though the fifth award night would be free. I vented on Twitter and Milenomics contributor Robert Dwyer pointed out that if I had a Citi Prestige card I'd be sitting pretty with that card's fourth-night-free benefit.

That got me to thinking about the connection between length of stay and optimal booking options.

One-night stays

One-night stays are great because they're opportunities to redeem free night certificates at chains where you don't otherwise have any points or status. For example:

• Chase IHG Rewards Club Premier cards offer an anniversary free night certificate good at properties costing up to 40,000 points;
• the new suite of Marriott and Starwood credit cards will offer anniversary free night certificates good at properties costing between 35,000 points and 50,000 points, depending on the card;
• Chase Hyatt credit cards offer anniversary free night certificates good at category 1-4 properties (up to 15,000 points per night).
• For stays within the United States, the US Bank Radisson Rewards ($50 annual fee) and Radisson Rewards Premier ($75 annual fee) cards offer up to three anniversary free night certificates valid only at Radisson Rewards properties in the United States when spending $10,000, $20,000, and $30,000 on the cards each cardmember year. If you're going to spend $30,000 on one of these cards my general feeling is that you may as well pay the extra $25 annual fee and get 75,000 additional points annually between the two additional points per dollar the Premier card earns and the 15,000 additional anniversary points.

For longer stays, I don't like free night certificates because they force you to overpay for the nights that aren't covered by the certificate, or move between properties during your trip. But for one-night stays they're ideal, and I often use them for things like airport properties before an early morning flight.

Another option for one-night stays, depending on the property, is booking through one of the luxury travel portals:

• the Visa Signature Luxury Hotel Collection offers a package of benefits including free Wi-Fi, breakfast for two guests, and a $25 food and beverage credit. If the price is the same as through other booking channels, then on a one-night stay the food and beverage credit can handily offset things like resort fees (which would also be owed on award stays), while on longer stays, the resort fees continue to mount while the food and beverage credit can be used only once.
• likewise American Express offers a Fine Hotels and Resorts booking channel to their Platinum cardholders, which offers a more generous $100 food, beverage, or spa credit at some properties. Just as above, on a one-night stay that credit naturally goes further than on longer stays.
• Finally, you can use a Virtuoso travel agent like classictravel.com to secure similar benefits while booking with the card of your choice.

Two- and three-night stays

This is the real wheelhouse of hotel points and fixed-value points, especially if you're able to redeem cheap fixed-value points like US Bank Flexpoints against your stay (if the total cost is above $500), since you'll also earn points on the room rate you pay. If you'd otherwise pay cash, redeeming points is usually a good idea in this window, since easily-earned points like Hilton Honors, World of Hyatt, and (under certain circumstances) IHG Rewards Club points don't offer any advantages, and the resort fees at luxury properties eat up the potential value of the food and beverage credits discussed above.

Some third-night-free offers may also be available through American Express Fine Hotels and Resorts, but unless you've done your research in advance I wouldn't sign up for a Platinum card just in hopes of capitalizing on third-night-free offers.

Four-night stays

At the four-night mark, three additional opportunities open up:

• fourth-night-free booking options through American Express Fine Hotels and Resorts. These are somewhat more common than third-night-free offers, so for four-night stays in cities served by Fine Hotels and Resorts this may be worth checking since the free night and on-property benefits may lower the total cost below any points redemption you'd otherwise consider.
• the Citi Prestige fourth-night-free benefit allows you to book four-night stays while only paying the room rate on 3 nights (although taxes and fees are still owed on the fourth night).
• the Chase IHG Rewards Club Premier card fourth-night free benefit on award stays, which means that otherwise-marginal redemptions may be worthwhile, if the free fourth award night boosts you well above your points' imputed redemption value.

Five-night stays

Presumably because their Top Men told them that virtually no one books five-night award stays, Hilton Honors, Marriott Rewards, and Starwood Preferred Guest all offer the fifth night free on awards stays (Hilton only in the case of elites, but if you're not a Hilton elite I don't know what to tell you).

Seven-night stays

Finally, if you actually have a seven-night stay with Marriott planned at a Category 5 or higher Marriott Rewards property, you should consider booking it with a Hotel + Air Package before August 1, 2018, in order to receive 120,000 or more airline miles alongside your hotel redemption.

Conclusion

I give most people the benefit of the doubt that they understand their travel needs better than I do, so I try not to tell people what they should or shouldn't do. The flip side of that is that you should take the time to assess your own travel needs and figure out which configuration of airline, hotel, and credit card programs works best for you.

For example, if you take the occasional five- or seven-night international trip, but are putting your manufactured spend on a Radisson Rewards credit card, that's not an indictment of the program, it's a mismatch between what you're doing and what you need to be doing to pay as little as possible for the trips you want to take.

Likewise, if your travel consists of taking the occasional road trip to Chicago, you may well want to be earning free night certificates and points you can redeem at the Radisson Blu Aqua, one of the few really great hotels in the Radisson Rewards program in the United States.

Pro tip: an easy Amtrak Guest Rewards mistake to make

Amtrak Guest Rewards, the loyalty program for the United States' national passenger rail system, underwent a dual devaluation in 2015/2016 which made Amtrak Guest Rewards points much more difficult to earn (with the end of Chase Ultimate Rewards transfers) and somewhat less valuable (with the zone-based award chart replaced with a revenue-based redemption scheme).

As an Amtrak enthusiast, this was disappointing to me, since in just my first few years of travel hacking I had been able to redeem my Ultimate Rewards points for phenomenal value in bedrooms on long-haul routes like the Empire Builder, Southwest Chief, City of New Orleans, and Coast Starlight, not to mention saving hundreds or thousands of dollars on Northeast Regional trips.

Since the devaluation, Amtrak Guest Rewards points can still be very valuable for Amtrak redemptions, in my experience ranging from 1.71 to 2.9 cents each, depending on the route and class of service. The problem is that earning them has become so onerous that the program has lost even more value than the points themselves.

Three ways to earn Amtrak Guest Rewards points

The three easiest ways to earn Amtrak Guest Rewards points are:

• The Bank of America Amtrak Guest Rewards World Mastercard, which earns 1 Amtrak Guest Rewards point per dollar spent on onbonused purchases.
• The American Express Starwood Preferred Guest Credit Card, which earns 1 Starpoint per dollar spent on unbonused purchases, which can be transferred 1:1 to Amtrak Guest Rewards.
• And the American Express Hilton Honors Ascend Card, which earns 6 Honors points per dollar spent at (more expensive) supermarkets, which can be transferred to Amtrak Guest Rewards at a 10,000:1,500 ratio, or the equivalent of 0.9 Amtrak Guest Rewards points per dollar spent at bonused merchants.

The Starwood Preferred Guest option may be time-limited by the impending merger of that program with Marriott Rewards, but if you have a lot of Starwood Preferred Guest points you're anxious to get rid of, Amtrak Guest Rewards is worth considering as a pressure valve for those large balances.

The third option, the Hilton Honors Ascend Card, is not time-limited but the unfavorable transfer ratio and high cost of grocery store manufactured spend will likely turn most people off unless they're in particularly dire straits.

Don't forget: Starwood Preferred Guest transfers to Amtrak do not earn bonus points

In complete fairness to Starwood, they have always made clear in the description of the program itself that only "Transfer Air Miles" redemptions are eligible for a 5,000-Starpoint bonus when you transfer multiples of 20,000 Starpoints: "Transfer your Starpoints directly to miles with your frequent flyer program. Even better: We'll add 5,000 bonus Starpoints for every 20,000 you transfer at a time."

Meanwhile, "Rail Miles" redemptions read simply, "Transfer Starpoints to Amtrak Guest Rewards at a 1:1 ratio and get on the next train."

However, someone on the backend had the brilliant idea of using the same interface to order both redemptions. And, as you may have guessed by this point, they screwed it up:

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So we find ourselves in this situation where the terms of the program clearly say one thing, but the implementation of the program clearly says something completely different. You can even reproduce the same effect by submitting a transfer of 80,000 Starpoints and be told 20,000 Bonus Starpoints will be added to the transfer.

But to be clear: this is not how the program actually works, and you will not receive the bonus Amtrak Guest Rewards points automatically when transferring multiples of 20,000 Starpoints to Amtrak.

Conclusion

I know folks who are rightly concerned about losing out when Starwood Preferred Guest irrevocably transitions into Marriott Rewards in August, and I think Amtrak Guest Rewards is a sensible place to stash at least some points, given their relatively high, relatively consistent value, even post-devaluation.

But this post is a warning not to go overboard on those transfers when you see Bonus Starpoints in the dialog box since you won't, actually, receive them.

At least, not automatically. What you can or can't convince Starwood's agents to do, as a one-time courtesy to you, is entirely between you and them.