Grocery store rewards datapoints at the end of a lucrative few weeks

The last few months have seen a more or less continuous stream of offers supercharging the value of grocery store manufactured spend:

• Between September 4 and 10 Green Dot cards earned 5 points per dollar at Giant/Martin’s/Stop and Shop;

• In quick succession Safeway offered $10 off $400 in Visa, MasterCard, and then again Visa gift cards;

• Then Giant stepped up and offered triple points on Visa gift cards, double points on MasterCard gift cards, and 10 points per dollar spent on Happy gift cards;

• And in the meantime, Safeway began offering 8 points per dollar spent on Happy gift cards (and unlike Safeway’s Visa and MasterCard offers, the coupon can be used an unlimited number of times on a single account).

Giant versus Safeway (1): Giant

Obviously a lot of people live in areas with convenient access only to Safeway or to Giant/Stop and Shop/Martin’s stores, so the decision of which offers to focus on has been made for them, but I do want to draw attention to a few important nuances for folks with access to both programs.

Giant’s program is the simplest, with points redeemable for either groceries or gas in 100 point increments, Each 100 points is worth $1 in groceries or a $0.10 per gallon discount on gas at participating service stations (i.e., worth $1 when filling a 10-gallon tank, $2 when filling a 20-gallon tank, etc).

Importantly, when redeeming points for grocery rewards, you do not need to redeem them or spend them in a single transaction, and you can make multiple redemptions in order to “fill up” your grocery rewards balance. As long as you shop at Giant at least every few months, this drastically reduces the risk of breakage, since you can fill up and spend down your grocery rewards balance however you choose.

Finally, there are three quirks of the Giant program that are worth being aware of:

• First, in my experience grocery rewards cannot be used to pay for alcohol (this presumably applies to tobacco products as well, though that’s just a guess);

• Second, they can’t be used to cover any taxes on the transaction. In my experience this creates the kind of bizarre situation where if you just buy fresh produce (untaxed here) then your grocery rewards can be used to cover your entire purchase, but if you throw in a pack of toilet paper (taxed here), you’re left owing some trivial amount on the transaction. Unless they’re getting a steep discount on interchange fees, it’s hard to imagine they’re paying Visa less than $0.20 on a $0.20 credit card charge. Obviously that’s not my problem, but it’s a reminder not to leave your wallet at home if you plan to purchase taxable items with grocery rewards. Your grocery rewards balance also can’t be used on gift cards.

• Third, purchases that are fully covered by grocery rewards do earn additional flexible rewards points. This isn’t normally a big deal since unless you’re a caterer or something you probably aren’t earning more than a dollar or two a month in rewards from your regular grocery spend. Nonetheless, Giant does periodically offer bonus point earning on the purchase of various items, and the fact that you can redeem grocery rewards while earning additional flexible points may over time modestly increase the overall return on your manufactured spend.

It sounds obvious because it is, but also remember that when Giant is offering bonus points on gift cards with activation fees, the fees themselves do not earn bonus points, while when they offer bonus points on gift cards without activation fees, like the recent Happy gift card promotion, the entire value of the card earns bonus points.

Safeway versus Giant (2): Safeway

I started with Giant because their program is simpler, but obviously there are some times when and some people for whom Safeway is the only game in town, so it’s worth doing a quick look at “just for U” as well, if only by way of comparison.

While Giant flexible rewards points can be converted directly into grocery rewards, Safeway adds an intermediate currency: each time you earn 100 just 4 U points, they’re converted into what they call “Rewards.” Your Rewards balance can be “passively” redeemed by using it at participating gas stations (as with Giant, 100 points/1 Reward is worth $0.10 off per gallon), or “actively” redeemed for groceries (the equivalent of Giant grocery rewards).

Here’s the finicky part: 1 Reward (100 just 4 U points) is not consistently worth $1 off groceries, which makes it slightly more complicated to directly compare Giant and Safeway promotions. Take, for example, the current Giant promotion for 10 flexible rewards points per dollar spent on Happy gift cards, and the current Safeway promotion for 8 just for U points per dollar spent on the same cards. We know the purchase of a $500 Happy gift card will earn 5,000 flexible rewards points, worth $50 off a future shopping trip, while the purchase of the same card at Safeway will earn just 4,000 just for U points, worth 40 Rewards.

Redeemed one at a time, those 40 Rewards could be used for $40 off a grocery bill. But Safeway allows the redemption of multiple Rewards at increased value: 7 Rewards can be redeemed for $10 off, meaning 35 rewards can be redeemed for the same $50 in groceries, and the remaining 5 redeemed for another $7. The Safeway promotion is actually slightly more lucrative at the margin, despite the lower earning rate!

Obviously promotions at the two chains don’t always overlap, so it’s not like you always have the choice between more and less lucrative versions of the same promo, but when they do, make sure you’re calculating your return properly.

Finally, a few more notes on Safeway’s program:

• Unlike Giant’s flexible rewards which allow you to flexibility build up and spend down a grocery rewards balance, Safeway Rewards redemptions are of the traditional coupon form of “$10 off your next purchase of $10 or more.” This is a time-honored method of encouraging customers to buy more than necessary in order to “make sure” their purchase triggers the coupon, but as long as you’re buying stuff you need at prices that are fair I don’t see any great harm in it.

• Safeway’s terms exclude using Rewards for the purchase of “all fluid items in the refrigerated dairy section—including fluid dairy substitutes,” and states that “[s]ales tax payments and redemption value deposits are not purchases and are not eligible to earn points.” While I’m sure the tax and bottle deposit terms are enforced, I do not believe the exclusion of refrigerated liquid dairy products is, although if anyone knows for sure feel free to leave your datapoints in the comments.

• Finally, Safeway Rewards can be redeemed for one-off free items. These are mostly generic or own-brand items (3 Rewards can be redeemed for a free 24-ounce “Signature Cafe Soup”) with value that mostly falls in line with the value when redeemed for groceries (the same 3 Rewards are worth $4 in groceries), but you might see some interesting high-value redemptions rotate through: 4 Rewards can be redeemed for $7 in the Meat Department, which gives a significantly higher value per Reward even than the maximum redemption of 7 Rewards for $10. But those high-value one-off redemptions are relatively rare, and maximizing your Rewards in multiples of 7 will typically be the most efficient way to redeem them.

Conclusion

Although I’ve jokingly referred to travel hacking over the years as a kind of extreme couponing, until this year I really never bothered to learn anything about the actual practice of couponing. Hell, I did most of my grocery shopping at places like Whole Foods that don’t even offer coupons!

But then we stopped traveling, and then I lost my job, and it turns out I was right all along: everything I ever learned about getting free travel applies equally well to getting free groceries!

On a more serious note, for folks who do have the ability to earn more in free groceries than they’ll ever want or need (while earning travel rewards on the side, of course), there are a lot of organizations, from food pantries to diaper banks, that are seeing more demand for their services than anytime since the Great Depression. In ordinary times those organizations benefit more from the cash donations they can use to buy deeply discounted goods from wholesalers, but most of them also accept in-kind donations, so it’s well worth considering calling around a few local organizations to see what they need most, and whether you can get it to them for free, whether it’s through Safeway, Giant, or whatever grocery store rewards program is operating near you.

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.

The return of free+ groceries at Giant/Stop & Shop/Martin's

One of the most lucrative, most annoying grocery store promotions returns this week, just in time for folks who have been waiting to max out their Freedom second quarter bonus spend: receive $15 off $15 or more in groceries when you buy $250 or more in Visa gift cards at Giant, Stop & Shop, or Martin’s grocery stores.

Here’s how it works.

Load the digital coupon to each of your accounts right away

This promotion has taken a few different forms over the years, but the current version is a single-use digital coupon that has to be activated online before you can use it. The digital coupon expires July 6, 2019, but this is slightly misleading, and has tripped me up in the past.

Once you’ve loaded the coupon, you have until July 6 to use it, but the coupon will not be available to load that long. In past versions it’s only been available during the period covered by the current week’s circular, so I suspect it will disappear on June 27 if you haven’t loaded it by then.

Here’s the digital coupon you’re looking for:

View fullsize

You can have an unlimited number of loyalty accounts, but they do need to be created with unique e-mail addresses (for login and coupon loading) and phone numbers (for in-store lookup). There’s no verification of either, so you can be creative, but I recommend using a password manager like 1Password or LastPass so you can easily reuse your duplicate accounts during future promotions.

Select $15 in groceries before taxes and after coupons are applied

The terms of the offer state that it “will be applied to your grocery order before taxes and after all other coupons and savings are applied.” I’m not sure if this was made deliberately confusing in order to encourage people to buy more “just in case” their order doesn’t reach $15, but in practice it has not mattered for me. I simply keep a running mental total of the display prices of my groceries until I get to a little over $15, and if I end up a little short due to a coupon or unadvertised discount I just grab a box of Altoids off the candy rack to get me over the top.

I’ve had trouble replicating it but it seems that certain coupons or discounts can even reduce your grocery total below $15 while still triggering the credit, meaning you may be able to buy groceries at a negative cost (or get a discount on your gift card activation fee).

Add a $500 Visa gift card

Note that unlike in earlier versions of this promotion where you received a paper coupon you could use for later grocery purchases, the Visa gift card has to be purchased in the same transaction as your groceries. That means having to deal with ordinary cashiers who may not be familiar with the procedure, which requires a supervisor’s “key turn.” Hopefully over the course of the next two weeks you’ll give them enough practice to get comfortable.

So far so good.

But what do you buy?

I do a lot of grocery store manufactured spend already, and I love free groceries, so naturally I love it when this promotion comes around. The flip side of that is it turns grocery shopping into a part-time job two weeks at a time. I’m well aware that most travel hackers enjoy considerably more residential storage space than I do, but the fact is still that I live in a one-bedroom apartment and there’s only so much room to stockpile groceries. Even things that I use a comparatively large amount of I don’t buy months of in advance because there’s nowhere to put it.

That being said, here are my friendly suggestions for what to think about loading up on during the promotion. I typically devote a day to a single item or category so I don’t have to think about mixing and matching each day.

• Paper goods. Paper towels and toilet paper. You know you’ll use them eventually, and they never go bad, so load up and stuff them in the back of the closet if you have to. Just don’t forget they’re there!

• Toothpaste. This is a favorite of mine since it also lasts forever (I hope?), is relatively expensive, and takes up relatively little room. This also goes for things like electric toothbrush heads which take up almost no space and are almost as expensive as printer cartridges.

• Feminine hygiene products. Expensive and non-perishable: not everybody needs them, but if you do, you know you’ll use them eventually so this is a good chance to stock up.

• Dried, canned, and non-perishable groceries. The problem with actual groceries is they’re not very expensive so $15 represents 7 or 8 boxes of pasta, 4 or 5 jars of pasta sauce, etc. But I usually devote a day or two to each, since I know I’ll get through it eventually. If you’re a bean guy, buy 15 cans of beans. If you’re a soup gal, but 15 cans of soup. Canning is miraculous technology.

Think about stuff you can give away

I always throw this option in because travel hacking in many respects is a case of what my mom always calls “the rich getting richer.” Virtually every midsize or larger city will have a resource center that can put you in touch with local diaper banks, homeless and domestic violence shelters, transitional housing, etc. and they’ll typically have a long list of things their clients need. You shouldn’t claim a tax deduction for donating stuff you got for free, but Giant’s corporate shareholders will no doubt receive some leniency in heaven for their generosity towards the needy.

Success removing a disputed item from my Experian credit report

Last month I explained the process I followed to dispute a derogatory remark on my Experian credit report. Experian told me it would take a month to resolve, and sure enough, when I logged on exactly a month later, I saw two alerts, that my dispute had been “updated” and that it had been “resolved.”

Commenters had me convinced I didn’t stand a chance

I encourage readers to go back and read the comments to my earlier post, because there’s some valuable information there about best practices in pursuing a dispute. The basic idea seems to be that as easy as it is to dispute items online, it’s just as easy for creditors to certify their original submissions are accurate, leaving you right back where you started, while if you want to make a creditor actually document their claim, you need to resort to an exchange of hand-written, certified letters. One commenter even suggested using non-white paper to get a better result!

But my dispute was resolved frictionlessly

Fortunately, in my case it didn’t come to that. My assumption is that the small credit union in question either didn’t know how or didn’t care enough to respond at all, so I won the dispute by default, the two sweetest words in the English language.

The status of the dispute now simply says, “This item was removed from your credit report.” Experian also allows me to view how the derogatory item was reported before being removed, which is a nice touch.

Conclusion

Disputing derogatory items online with Experian is so easy that I think it’s probably worth doing even for disputes you think will probably be rejected, but it’s obviously worth doing for well-founded claims and those against smaller creditors that may not have the willingness or sophistication to follow through with the process.

But be aware of the two-track online and snail-mail processes, since if the first doesn’t work, you may need to resort to the other.

Disputing derogatory remarks with Experian, a developing story

If you entered the travel hacking game through the big credit card affiliate bloggers, you probably know that folks who rely on credit card signup bonuses to build their points balances closely monitor and protect their credit reports, sometimes going to outlandish lengths like paying off credit card balances before their statements close, hoping that low reported balances will make them ever more creditworthy, eligible for more exclusive cards and higher credit limits.

Since I earn the overwhelming majority of my miles and points through manufactured spend, I find these antics to be mostly amusing (and mostly harmless). Indeed, since I aggressively take advantage of offers like the Chase Slate introductory $0 balance transfer fee and 0% APR on balance transfers, my credit utilization rate is often at or above 90% on one or more of my open credit cards.

That doesn’t mean I don’t really screw up sometimes: I recently discovered Barclaycard doesn’t allow you to make same-day payments after 8 pm Eastern time, which left me paying my balance off a day “late,” with Barclay’s cheerfully chalking a late payment up on my credit report.

However, I recently found a much more serious derogatory remark on one of my credit reports, which I decided to dispute.

Reminder: which credit cards monitor which credit reports?

There are three major credit bureaux, and each calculates a separate FICO score based solely on the information reported to that bureau. While a number of banks and credit cards now offer free access to your FICO score, each typically partners with only a single bureau. That means to get free access to all your FICO scores, you need to know which credit cards track which bureaux:

• Experian: Chase Slate (FICO)

• TransUnion: Chase Slate (VantageScore), American Express (VantageScore), Discover (FICO), Bank of America (FICO), Barclaycard (FICO)

• Equifax: Citi (FICO)

As a victim of the Chinese cyberattack on the Office of Management and Budget, I also have free access to MyIDCare, which monitors all three credit bureaux and alerts me to any changes on my reports (and a bunch of sillier stuff like when sex offenders move into my neighborhood).

The credit union, the negative balance, and the charge-off

Back in November or December of 2018, I started getting automated calls from a credit union I had experimented with for a manufactured spend liquidation strategy, telling me my account had a negative balance and asking that I call back immediately.

When I did, the young man on the other end told me a complicated story about my account being mistakenly credited multiple times for the same transaction, all the way back in the summer of 2018. Since I had withdrawn the money already, when the credit union discovered the “error” and debited my account, it created a negative balance they were now trying to collect.

This all seemed quite plausible. The only problem was, the young man was unwilling to provide any documentation of this curious series of events. The amount of money involved wasn’t enormous, but I have a general principle to not give people money unless they can have some sort of evidence that they’re actually owed it, the subject of a delightful book about the financial crisis by the journalist David Dayen, “Chain of Title.”

Disputing Experian derogatory remarks is fast and easy

That brings me to this February, when MyIDCare reported that a new derogatory remark had appeared on my Experian credit report: the credit union had charged off my negative balance. Interestingly, so far the charge-off has been reported only to Experian, and my other scores haven’t been affected (keep in mind they were nothing special to begin with).

Since the credit union had never been able to provide any documentation, I decided this would be an interesting opportunity to learn how to dispute credit information. And it turned out to be a breeze!

A simple Google search took me to Experian’s main dispute page. At this point, you have the option of creating a “free” account or a “limited” account. This is a little bit confusing because neither account costs any money. The difference is the “free” account is used to upsell you additional Experian services, while a “limited” account is used only to dispute items on your Experian record. I created a limited account.

This took me directly to the Experian Online Dispute Center, and my new charge-off was sitting right at the top of the page. After selecting it, I was given five dispute options:

• "Payment never late”

• “Not mine or No knowledge of account”

• “Account paid in full”

• “Account closed”

• “Unauthorized charges”

I thought “Unauthorized charges” most closely resembled my complaint (since I’d never authorized the debit), so I selected that. On the next page, a comment box let me explain what happened in a few words, and then I submitted the dispute. The whole process took perhaps 10 minutes.

Conclusion

I’ve heard horror stories about how difficult it is to remove false information from a credit report, and indeed I’m not particularly optimistic that I’ll succeed in having the charge-off removed. On the other hand, I’m fairly impressed with how streamlined Experian’s dispute process is, so if you’ve been dreading figuring out how to dispute derogatory or incorrect information on your credit report, take heed: it’s easier than you think.

Experian estimated the dispute would take about a month to resolve, and I’ll keep readers updated as the situation develops.

East Coast Alaska Airlines companion fare strategies

As I mentioned last week, In order to get to Maui and back I stitched together 3 legs using a single Alaska Airlines companion ticket. While folks on the West Coast are probably familiar with Alaska and their companion ticket, now that the merger with Virgin America is complete it might be time for residents of some East Coast cities who had ruled out Alaska because of its limited route network to take another look.

Two flavors of Alaska Airlines companion fares

There are technically two flavors of Alaska Airlines companion fares. For the past several years Bank of America has offered a taxes-and-fees-only companion fare to new Alaska Airlines Visa cardmembers after spending $1,000 on the card within 90 days.

Then, on each account anniversary, you’ll receive another companion fare for $99 plus taxes and fees.

Besides the $99 co-pay for anniversary companion fares the two are otherwise identical.

What’s so great about Alaska Airlines companion fares?

Three features make Alaska companion fares unique:

1. they can be used systemwide;

2. they can be used on any economy fare;

3. and both passengers receive mileage credit as if they were both flying on paid tickets.

In fact, the only restriction I’ve ever encountered using a companion fare is that the Bank of America cardholder has to be either one of the two passengers traveling on the fare or have their name on the credit card used to make the reservation.

The fare does not have to be paid for with the Bank of America credit card that triggered the fare. You can even use an authorized user card, as long as it has the name of the Bank of America cardholder, and even that isn’t required if the Bank of America cardholder is one of the passengers.

That means using an Alaska companion fare isn’t mutually exclusive with many methods of payment, for example using a Chase Sapphire or Barclaycard Arrival Plus card for trip delay insurance, or a US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards card for a Real-Time Rewards redemption.

A final note on fares: since the companion fare can be used to book any economy fare class, and both tickets book into the same fare class, you can use the companion fare to book tickets that are upgradeable using miles or MVP Gold guest upgrades. However, that upgrade space is extremely limited so I would not suggest paying more for an upgradeable fare speculatively if upgrade space is not available at the time of your booking; it likely never will be.

Alaska Airlines routes from the East Coast

Alaska serves a surprisingly large number of cities, especially now that Virgin America’s routes have been integrated into the system, but they are almost entirely reliant on five West Coast hubs: Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.

That means flying from the East Coast to anywhere in the middle of the country will require backtracking: flying first to the West Coast, then connecting to a flight retracing your steps. You probably won’t want to do that — Seattle is a long way out of the way if you want to fly between Washington, DC, and Cancun.

However, lots of people fly to the West Coast as their final destination, and others fly onward to points West, North, or South, and for those folks the companion fare can still provide a fantastic value.

What I’ve done is break up Alaska Eastern time zone airports into six buckets, based on which of Alaska’s hubs are served from that airport.

Seattle

• Tampa (TPA)

• Atlanta (ATL)

• Charleston (CHS)

• Indianapolis (IND)

• Columbus (CMH)

• Detroit (DTW)

• Pittsburgh (PIT)

Seattle and San Francisco

• Raleigh/Durham (RDU)

Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles

• Fort Lauderdale (FLL)

• Washington (IAD)

Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles

• Washington (DCA)

• Philadelphia (PHL)

• New York City (JFK) (plus San Jose and Las Vegas)

Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and San Diego

• Orlando (ORL)

Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego

• Baltimore (BWI)

• Newark (EWR) (plus San Jose)

• Boston (BOS)

Three strategies for East Coast companion fares

If you live in or near one of those Eastern cities, I think there are at least three useful ways to judge the value of Alaska Airlines companion fares: connecting onward, backtracking, and non-stops.

Connecting onward is the most obviously high-value use: if you fly to Hawaii or the Pacific coast of Mexico at least once per year, and are willing to do so in economy, the ability to book any economy fare in the system can give you enormous value and flexibility. For example, from Washington, DC, there are no non-stop flights to Hawaii, so you’ll have to make a connection somewhere. If that’s the case, why not Seattle instead of Atlanta? Over the Thanksgiving dates I checked from DC, Alaska flights to Hawaii were already the cheapest options — adding a companion fare is icing on the cake. From New York, Alaska was the cheapest option to every Hawaiian island but Kauai (Delta undercut them by $15).

Backtracking is a less obviously appealing option, as I gestured at above. However, for many destinations in the Mountain West, it can still make sense. For example, my hometown of Missoula, MT, is a notoriously expensive city to fly in and out of (fortunately flights are also very often overbooked, and I received my only $1200 voluntary denied boarding voucher there). Over the Thanksgiving weekend, for example, Delta isn’t selling fares eligible for American Express companion tickets, so two tickets would cost $1,596, while two Alaska tickets would cost just $1,373 with a companion fare. A $223 savings isn’t revolutionary, but it’s still more than the Alaska Airlines Visa’s $75 annual fee.

Finally, obviously a lot of people have perfectly good reasons to fly between the East and West coasts without connecting at all. If you live in Baltimore, New York, or Boston, you might simply use Alaska companion fares to pay for the occasional trip to the West Coast. It’s lovely there!

The point is, the Alaska companion fare is such a good deal it’s worth considering even if you don’t think of yourself as a “typical” Alaska passenger, which is to say someone who commutes up and down the West Coast.

Alaska Companion Fare routing rules

Here I’m leaning entirely on Scott Mackenzie at Travel Codex, who is the authority on all things Alaska Airlines:

“Although the terms and conditions say the fare must be for round-trip travel, this isn’t strictly true. You can book one-way travel. You can book open jaws. You can book multi-city travel between completely different cities. I’ve confirmed that Austin to Seattle, Portland to Maui, and Honolulu to Sacramento — all on different dates — will qualify…

What you can’t do is book travel that is clearly not anything close to round-trip. In the example of AUS-SEA//PDX-OGG//HNL-SMF we flew west and then flew east. Kinda sorta maybe round-trip, even if we never hit the same city twice.”

Since Alaska allows up to 4 entries in a multi-city itinerary (not four legs — Alaska will add connections on its own as necessary), my itinerary IND-PDX-OGG-DCA wasn’t entirely optimized. I could have added a longer stopover in Los Angeles on the way back, or a longer layover in Seattle on our outbound itinerary.

Ultimately, because of Alaska’s strong North-South axis on the West Coast, a truly optimal itinerary would need to include several West Coast stops. For example, this is a valid companion fare itinerary:

• JFK-SEA//PDX-SFO//LAX-LIH//OGG-LAX

You can put an unlimited amount of time between each of these legs, meaning as Scott points out, these are really “four one-way fares booked on a single ticket.”

Of course, that begs the question: why would you want to book four unrelated one-way fares on a single ticket? First of all, the fares don’t have to be unrelated. Our flights from Indianapolis to Portland, Portland to Maui, and Maui back home were not “unrelated,” after all. But even in the case of totally unrelated fares, there are reasons you might consider it.

Since Alaska prices out all itineraries as one-way fares, it’s not uncommon to find a situation where one leg of your trip is expensive with cash and cheap with miles, while the other leg is cheap with cash and expensive with miles. If the dates and directions all line up properly (no small feat), you could use a single companion fare to book four one-way fares, then fill in the rest of the itinerary with miles or cash as you see fit.

Likewise, especially frequent travelers might consider “nesting” different trips inside a single itinerary. Someone traveling frequently between Washington and Los Angeles, for instance, might book:

• DCA-LAX//LAX-OGG-LAX//LAX-DCA

If you squint at this just right you see it’s actually two unrelated roundtrips: one between DCA and LAX, and one between LAX and OGG. To make this work you’ll need to book an additional roundtrip between LAX and DCA, of course, but in exchange you get can get two companion fares for the price of one.

Conclusion

Bank of America has added some restrictions in recent years to who is eligible for certain new credit cards, unfortunately including the personal Alaska Airlines Visa card. The business card is supposedly unaffected for now, so even if you don’t have any Bank of America Alaska Airlines cards you should be able to sign up for one personal and at least one business card, naturally conditional on your creditworthiness.

The main effect of those changes should be to discourage folks who already have multiple personal Alaska Airlines cards from cancelling them, unless they’re absolutely certain they won’t be flying Alaska anytime in the near future, since it seems that it will be increasingly difficult to collect new companion fares going forward.

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.

Some recent redemptions, from good to mediocre

I usually try to write up a post for each award trip I take, both to share my thinking about my points and miles strategy and to keep myself honest about the value of the rewards currencies I earn. I've been doing quite a bit of redeeming lately, so I thought I'd cobble together those redemptions into an overview of the value I've been getting from my points lately.

Hilton Prague Old Town

After spending a few days in Karlovy Vary, we're going to return to Prague to use as our base for the last part of our trip this summer. Back in the days of last-night-free Club Carlton stays my go-to property in Prague was the Park Inn, but that property has no appeal whatsoever if you're not paying half price (although cash rates are just $166 for the nights of our stay).

That left a few options:

• InterContinental Prague for 40,000 IHG Rewards Club points per night, or $260 per night if buying points at 0.65 cents each.
• Hilton Prague for 40,000 points per night, or $200 per night if buying points for 0.5 cents each.
• Hilton Prague Old Town for 36,000 points per night, or $180 per night.

There are also two Marriott properties in the city centre, but a quick glance showed both their points and cash rates were too high, as usual.

The Hilton options were especially appealing because our stay will be exactly 5 nights, making this possibly the first time I'll ever have taken advantage of Hilton's fifth-night-free benefit on award stays.

By the way, I'm using 0.5 cents per point as the price I purchase Hilton Honors points at, since a dollar spent at grocery stores earns either 6 Hilton Honors points or 2 US Bank Flexpoints, worth 3 cents towards travel. In other words, the opportunity cost, not the out of pocket cost, of the Hilton Honors points.

In this case the decision was easy to redeem 180,000 Hilton Honors points for 5 nights at the Hilton Prague Old Town. The actual paid rate for the room I booked was almost $2,000 after taxes, giving a shocking 1 cent per point redemption value, but even using the more realistic $1,200 total at the Hilton Prague yields a redemption value of 0.67 cents per point, or the equivalent of 4% cash back on grocery store spend.

One interesting thing this highlights is the difference between the absolute number of high-value redemptions you make and the volume of high-value spend you do. For example, if you only make a single high-value Hilton redemption each year, whether it's the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island (3.8 cents per point in December), or the Grand Wailea Waldorf Astoria (1.9 cents per point over New Year's), you may be earning a substantial return on a high amount of spend — $63,000 in the case of those two properties, which cost 380,000 points for a 5-night stay.

Many travel hackers think of Hilton as a "backup" chain to their preferred program, whether that's World of Hyatt or Starwood Preferred Guest. What I'm trying to point out is that Hilton Honors points may be worth earning even if it's just for the occasional stunt redemption, and not as a core part of your travel hacking practice, precisely because those high-value redemption turn the Hilton Honors Ascend American Express card into a powerhouse for uncapped grocery store bonus spend.

Park Hyatt New York

Since my World of Hyatt Globalist status is ending this month, I decided to put together a final stunt redemption as a Globalist and took the train up to New York City for Presidents Day weekend.

The Park Hyatt New York costs 30,000 World of Hyatt points per night, and the cash rate for our stay was about $860, giving a respectable 2.9 cents per transferred Ultimate Rewards point. We were upgraded to a one-bedroom suite and abused the hell out of the breakfast benefit, so in terms of maximizing the value of Globalist status, mission accomplished.

However, I can't imagine any reason to go back to this hotel. Besides the unavoidable Hyatt service gaffes, the room's elaborate electronic bells-and-whistles were a source of constant frustration, and the location doesn't have any particular advantage over the 25,000-point Andaz 5th Avenue a mile away.

Obviously a $300 hotel night in New York City isn't unreasonable, especially with $100+ of breakfast included every morning as a Globalist, but there's no way to argue the Park Hyatt New York is a value play.

Hyatt Regency Lexington

For an April trip to Lexington, Kentucky, I booked four nights at the Hyatt Regency Lexington, which is my preferred place to stay in Lexington during Keeneland. They didn't have points-only award availability, but I was able to book a Points + Cash stay for 16,000 World of Hyatt points and $255. A cash stay would cost $900, for a respectable 4 cents per transferred Ultimate Rewards point.

The Hilton across the street wants 160,000 points for my stay, which would give a value of just 0.56 cents per Honors point, so the Hyatt was clearly the way to go.

Note that if points-only award space was available for 8,000 points per night, I would have made a Guest of Honor reservation instead, even though the per-point redemption value would fall to just 2.8 cents each.

Mediocre Delta redemptions

Finally, I've made a few sad-sack Delta redemptions lately:

• I redeemed 80,000 SkyMiles and $55 for my partner's roundtrip flight to Prague. As I noted in my original post about the redemption, the price jumped from $953 to $1409 while I was watching it, which changed it overnight from a terrible 1.12 cent per mile redemption to a mediocre 1.7 cent per mile redemption.
• For my flight to Lexington I redeem 23,000 SkyMiles for flights that would have cost $321 in cash, for a 1.4 cent per mile redemption. It would have been narrowly superior to redeem US Bank Flexpoints for the flight at 1.5 cents each, but I chose not to in order to build a bigger, more versatile Flexpoints balance. Since Flexpoints can only be redeemed for the full price of an itinerary, the risk of having too few Flexpoints is the total inability to redeem them, while the risk of having too many is having some leftover for a future redemption. Delta SkyMiles, on the other hand, are not valuable enough to hoard, so redeeming them is always my first choice, within reason.

The forgotten joy of booking independent hotels

I'm currently in the middle of planning a summer trip to the Czech Republic to revisit some of my old haunts and check out the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The plan is to spend a few nights in Karlovy Vary before returning to Prague. This gave me the occasion to do something I haven't done in years: book a non-chain hotel!

Chain hotels are great

For many people, it's become easier and more desirable than ever to avoid chain hotels. AirBNB is a popular option for parents traveling with kids since you often get more space and the use of a kitchen, and in many places it's also cheaper than whatever chain hotels are available. And of course if you're going on safari, camping with bedouins, or hiking Kilimanjaro you're not likely to have options when it comes to accommodations.

But personally, I like chain hotels. Of course there are exceptions, but you can generally count on clean beds, hot water, and decent service. Manufacturing spend on Hilton Honors and Ultimate Rewards-earning credit cards lets me prepay for discounted stays at Hilton and Hyatt properties, and those two chains account for the overwhelming majority of my annual stays.

While there are a lot of hotels in Karlovy Vary, not one of them belongs to a chain. That means while planning this trip I got to brush up on the art and science of booking independent hotels.

Booking independent hotels is tricky

The biggest problem going in is that there's no floor for hotel quality. While hotel chains impose standards (that are occasionally not met), non-chain hotels don't even have standards to fall short of, so filtering a search by number of stars is the beginning, not the end, of finding a suitable room.

I started my search on TripAdvisor to get a sense of the price range available during our stay. After filtering for four-star and five-star hotels, it became a game of trying to make an optimal choice across the variables of price, location, and quality. The third-ranked hotel in town costs $196 per night while the fourteenth-ranked costs $148. I'd surely pay something to move up 11 spots, but would I pay $50 per night? Probably not.

TripAdvisor is a decent way to get a sense of prices and narrow down your options, but you probably don't want to book directly through TripAdviser. That's because you want to lower the final price you pay as much as possible. There are two obvious ways to do so.

Book using credit card rewards

The premium Ultimate Rewards-earning credit cards, US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards card, Citi ThankYou Premier, and I'm sure some other cards offer increased value when you redeem your points for travel booked directly through the credit card company. That means if a property is available for the same (or a lower) price through a credit card portal, you can get more than 1 cent per point in value.

In my case I'd like to redeem my Ultimate Rewards points for 1.25 cents each for my stay, but the property I identified as the best value wasn't available through Chase's travel portal (in such cases you may still be able to book by calling the bank in question).

Book through a shopping portal

Another great option is using a shopping portal like TopCashBack to click through to a online travel agent like Hotels.com. When you do that, you're able to earn both cashback and Hotels.com Rewards free nights. TopCashBack pays out less when you choose to collect Rewards nights (5% instead of 9%), but the two programs together still offer the equivalent of 15% off the price of your stay (once you accumulate 10 Hotels.com Rewards nights).

A drawback of making reservations at chain hotels through Hotels.com is that you typically don't get elite status benefits. But if you're staying at an independent hotel, that's no drawback at all!

Pay with discounted gift cards

Finally, you can save even more by paying with Hotels.com gift cards bought at a discount. For example, the cashback portal Lemoney pays 11% on the first $100 in Hotels.com gift cards you buy each month (and you can stock up when Lemoney periodically lifts the limit on the number of times you can earn "Turbo Cashback"), and Hotels.com gift cards are available through Raise for 7% off.

You can apparently combine the balances of Hotels.com gift cards on this page, although I've never used that feature myself.

Conclusion

So, that's how I plan on booking our independent hotel in Karlovy Vary to hopefully get the equivalent of a 26% discount off the room rate. What other tips are there for saving money on independent hotels?

Sleeping the rails

As some readers may know, in a former life I worked as an English language teacher in Russia. At that time, it was typical for expats to arrive on a business visa, which as a rule only allowed you to be present in the country for 91 out of every 180 days. The idea was, you'd arrive on a business visa, get a job, and then switch over to the appropriate visa at some later date (I think of this whenever I hear about unauthorized immigrants who "overstay" their visas to the United States — that was me and most of my friends, and it was simply the way things were done).

In the winter of 2007-2008, rumors started to spread that the Russian Foreign Ministry had issued a new decree that visas could only be issued in the home country of foreign passport holders. While previously people had hopped over the border to the Baltic states, those Russian embassies were refusing to issue visas to third-country passport holders. However, we were hearing reports that the Russian Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, was still issuing visas to third-country passport holders — for now.

With that in mind, my company bundled me off to Kiev to spend the Christmas vacation waiting for a visa. The embassy was no longer issuing one-day visas, so I would have to spend 10 days in the country while my visa was prepared. In Kiev, the hostel I ended up in was owned and operated by a fanatically racist Englishman (this is a common problem in expat communities), and after a day or two I decided I couldn't stay there any longer. But where to stay? Having just gotten off an overnight train ride, I quickly arrived at a solution. Here's a map of Ukraine:

View fullsize

Glancing at this map, you can immediately see there are four cities located roughly equidistant from one another: Kiev, Lviv, Odessa, and Dnipro (still called Dnepropetrovsk while I was there). Not only are they roughly equidistant, but they're also all about 7-9 hours apart by train. The solution to my housing problem was obvious: I'd board a train about midnight each night, sleep on the train, and arrive in a new city around 8 am. I could spend the day exploring the city and get back on the train that evening.

I eventually got back to Kiev, got my visa, and headed back to Russia. But that adventure has always left me wondering: could it work here?

Using Amtrak for both housing and transportation

Trying the same thing in the United States poses several difficulties:

• our trains are far less frequent than trains in Eastern Europe, often passing through a given community as rarely as once a day;
• our trains are more expensive than trains in Eastern Europe (although often less expensive than you think, and very often less expensive than flying);
• and our network of train stations is more limited, with routes that typically either feature very frequent stops or very infrequent stops.

So, I decided to investigate if it's possible to replicate something like what I did in Ukraine, and if so, at what cost?

Back and forth

Due to less frequent US train schedules, the easiest way to do what I'm describing is simply to go back and forth on the same route. Head north, south, east, or west one night, and head back the next night.

For example:

• Northeast Regional 65/67 southbound from Boston to Richmond, leaving 9:30 pm and arriving 9:29 am, and Northeast Regional 66 northbound from Richmond to Boston, leaving 7:00 pm and arriving 7:58 am, roundtrip (2 nights) from $166;
• or City of New Orleans 59 southbound from Chicago to Jackson, MS, returning on City of New Orleans 58, roundtrip from $196.

This is, obviously, a pretty boring way to travel since you'd be bouncing back and forth between the same cities. It is cheaper than a typical downtown hotel, though, at less than $100 per night.

Hub and spokes

A more interesting way to sleep the rails would be starting at an Amtrak hub and taking individual routes out and back each day. This would give you the benefit of a little variety in your site-seeing. Amtrak, unfortunately, is a little short on hubs, with the only ones I can think of worth mentioning being Chicago (11 routes), Los Angeles (5 routes), and New York (14 routes). New Orleans is another possible option with 3 routes.

I think all three hubs are fairly promising, depending on the part of the country you want to see. For example, from Chicago you can overnight to Denver on the California Zephyr ($97), Pittsburgh on the Capitol Limited ($57), West Virginia on the Cardinal ($62), Memphis or Jackson on the City of New Orleans ($86), North Dakota on the Empire Builder ($102), Buffalo or Rochester on the Lake Shore Limited ($59), Colorado on the Southwest Chief ($102), or Texas on the Texas Eagle ($98).

Circle the country

To circle back to my original anecdote: is it possible to spend time around the country while spending every night on a train, instead of in a hotel?

The short answer is no: long-haul train schedules are too infrequent in the United States to give people the opportunity to arrive in the morning and leave the same night on most routes. Here's one option I found that illustrates the network's limitations:

• Empire Builder westbound from Chicago, leaving 2:15 pm and arriving in Portland 10:10 am 2 days later;
• Coast Starlight southbound from Portland, leaving 1:50 pm and arriving Los Angeles 9:00 pm one day later;
• Sunset Limited eastbound from Los Angeles, leaving 10:00 pm and arriving in New Orleans at 9:40 pm two days later;
• Overnight in New Orleans;
• City of New Orleans northbound from New Orleans, leaving 1:45 pm and arriving in Chicago at 9:00 am the next day.

The route described above would cost, if booked sufficiently far in advance, about $483, and would take 7 nights to complete, from beginning to end, although you'd be on the hook for one night in New Orleans. That would give you a cost per night spent in the coach car of a train of $80.50. Not a bad deal, and a much better set of views than a roach motel in Chicago (I've seen my fair share).

Don't forget Amtrak unreliability

Of course, the stylized route above assumes that four different Amtrak trains all run on schedule. This will not happen, because Amtrak trains don't run on schedule. On most versions of this run you would end up spending many more nights on trains than I indicated, which would drive down your per-night cost of sleeping on Amtrak trains.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, American cities and Amtrak routes aren't very accommodating to the kind of tour I was able to take of Ukraine. Only rarely are cities served by the kind of morning and evening trains that are typical in Eastern Europe. But if you have to spend 10 days in the United States waiting for a consular official to stamp a visa in your passport, remember that we do have trains, and you can see a lot of the country in 10 days without spending very much money.