Monitoring prices and rebooking can be one of the highest-return plays

For experienced travel hackers, the game can sometimes feel a bit mechanical: you earn the most valuable points you can at the lowest cost you can, and periodically re-evaluate which points are the most valuable, and how to earn them at the lowest cost. This doesn’t necessarily make it easy (electrical engineering is also “mechanical” — but it’s still hard!), since earning and redemption opportunities are constantly changing, but when you have a framework in mind it makes it relatively simple to calculate which miles and points are worth earning and when.

But travel hacking isn’t just about earning miles and points efficiently; it’s about paying as little as possible for the trips you want to take. When business class awards are available, or hotel rooms during peak demand periods like the Kentucky Derby are bookable with points, that can often mean saving hundreds or thousands of dollars booking awards. But the cheapest way to book a room, flight, or rental car may well be with cash, and monitoring those prices can save you with a few clicks hundreds of dollars that would take hours of manufactured spend to earn.

The bad old days: Southwest, hotels, and car rentals

These are the three buckets I put the best-behaved companies from the pre-pandemic days into.

• Southwest Airlines would allow you to change or refund Rapid Rewards points into your account up until your flight’s departure, so monitoring the price of your flights from the time you book up until your flight time would allow you to shave down the price a few hundred or thousand points at a time. Paid flights were slightly more restrictive, since any price difference would be deposited in an eventually-expiring travel bank account that could only be used by the original ticketed passenger, which created some urgency to plug more money into the Southwest Airlines ecosystem.

• Hotels have long had flexible rates which require no upfront payment and cancellation policies between 1 and 5 days before arrival. This creates an obvious incentive to immediately book every hotel you’re even considering staying at. If prices fall, rebook at the lower price, and if prices rise, cancel the more expensive reservations and keep the cheapest. If you have high-level status in multiple hotel loyalty programs, this also allows you to monitor for upgrades as you approach your travel date: at the same price point, you might prefer a Globalist suite upgrade at the Park Hyatt Vienna over a standard room at the Hilton Vienna Park, but access to the Hilton executive lounge over a standard room at the Park Hyatt. Booking both in advance lets you pick the one you end up wanting more. And no, I’m not comparing the two hotels in terms of price or quality, but if a family of 4 is deciding whether to book one room at the Park Hyatt (hoping for a suite upgrade that accommodates them all) or two rooms at the Hilton, the prices can sometimes end up fairly close.

• Rental cars are even better, since they don’t even require billing information to book most rates, and Autoslash exists to both find the cheapest rates and monitor existing reservations to alert you when rates fall and you should rebook. Purely as a courtesy to the overworked rental car company staff I usually cancel my prior reservations when I rebook, but it’s not strictly necessary.

Other than those obvious examples, before the pandemic opportunities to rebook and save money were fairly limited. Mid-level airline elite status usually allowed you to redeposit awards tickets for a full refund, so if flights were expensive enough to meet whatever your threshold is to book using airline miles (and everyone’s threshold is different!), but subsequently dropped below that threshold, you could cancel your award tickets and rebook using cash.

Likewise, schedule changes that move your departure or arrival by more than an hour could be refunded to the original form of payment, so if you booked your flights far enough in advance you had a good chance of having an opportunity to request a penalty-free refund, as I did in May, 2020.

The opportunity set has greatly expanded

All of the tools I described above still exist, but the new “permanent” (where I have I heard that before?) policies adopted by US airlines have increased the number of opportunities to save money by booking early and continuing to monitor prices afterwards. However, while they sound similar and were announced around the same time frame, to take advantage of them you need to understand the key differences between airline policies.

1. Which fares are eligible? United, American, and Delta exempt Basic Economy fares from their no-change-fee policy, as Alaska does with its Saver fares and JetBlue with its Blue Basic fares. If you’re trying to play fares against each other, be sure not to book a fare that’s non-changeable and non-refundable! Note that these non-changeable fares are still eligible for refund under Department of Transportation rules if there’s a significant schedule change.

2. What happens when you cancel? For paid fares, unless you’re eligible for a refund due to a schedule change, or booked into a refundable fare class, you’ll usually be given a “flight credit” (United), “travel credit” (American, JetBlue), “eCredit” (Delta) or “Wallet” (Alaska). These funds expire, so it’s important to keep a close eye on them.

3. Who can use the ticket value? I believe (but correct me in the comments if I’m wrong) Alaska is the only airline that allows you to deposit “Wallet” funds into your own Wallet or, by requesting a voucher be e-mailed to you, any other Mileage Plan account. This is notably a way to share Companion Fares without sharing the cardholder’s credit card information, since Companion Fares can be paid for in full using Wallet funds, even if the person booking the ticket is not an Alaska Airlines credit cardholder (if Wallet funds don’t cover the full cost, any residual must be paid for with an Alaska Airlines credit card).

4. What are your expected flight needs? This is a highly individualized calculation. For example, my partner and I fly to the Pacific Northwest on Alaska and the Midwest on American and Delta at least once or twice per year, so any travel credit, eCredit, or Wallet funds I receive by cancelling a flight on those airlines is absolutely certain to be used. Conversely, it appears I have not flown on United since October, 2017 (although I may be breaking that streak this summer!), so I would never book a paid United flight as a “backup” since there’s virtually no chance I would ever use the flight credit.

Conclusion: use flexibility to your advantage, but don’t get too clever

Especially with respect to hotels and rental cars, making multiple reservations as far in advance as possible and then monitoring prices for opportunities to rebook has always made sense. But the added flexibility of pandemic airline policies makes this is a meaningful way to save money on all the main components of travel planning.

Still, as the voice of caution, I have to remind my beloved readers not to bite off more than they can chew. While rental cars don’t typically charge no-show fees, airlines and hotels absolutely do, so if you don’t trust yourself to keep a close eye on all your reservations as your travel date approaches, don’t bother, since a single no-show penalty is going to wipe out any savings you may have been counting on in advance.

Is this is the best way to get to England?

Like a lot of people, I’ve been missing international travel for the past few years, but without any actual need to travel abroad I haven’t been terribly anxious about it, instead sticking to road trips here in the mid-Atlantic and flights to visit friends and family. With the (first) omicron wave subsiding for now, however, I’ve ramped up planning for a long-awaited trip to England and the (delayed) centenary of the democratic school I attended in the 90’s, Summerhill.

More than almost any other country, possibly short of the Maldives and its mandatory local transfers, England is loathed by travel hackers for the extortionate surcharges they impose on award tickets. It’s not unusual to see cash fares that are only marginally lower than the fees imposed on top of miles redeemed for awards.

So here’s my thinking as I work through my plan to book our trip to England.

Comparing like to like

The most astonishing thing to me while searching for flights is that basic economy fares across the Atlantic no longer include checked bags. Obviously this has been the case on domestic flights for years, but it never would have occurred to me that people had started flying internationally with only what they could stuff into an overhead bin. It seems frankly barbaric.

Since our trip is planned for a few weeks, checked bags are non-negotiable, which meant the first calculation was to determine the true cash cost of our tickets. While non-stop basic economy flights were available for as little as $738 roundtrip, once the cost of checked baggage was added the price rose to $881 per person.

At $738 I might have just pulled the trigger and booked with cash. At $881 I needed to find a better way.

United award availability is wide open

For reasons known only to Rishi Sunak and the Queen, the extortionate Air Passenger Duty is only charged on flights departing the United Kingdom. Non-stop flights on United from the US to London only incur the nominal $5.60 US tax, and 30,000 MileagePlus miles. Importantly, they also include a free checked bag, making this a $440 value, or 1.45 cents per mile — whether or not you think that’s a good deal depends on whether you hate flying United as much as I do.

Since I have 30,000 MileagePlus miles in my account already, and my partner just shy of that, emptying both our United accounts in one fell stroke is a no-brainer.

That leaves the return.

British Airways Executive Club offers a backdoor to one-way tickets

If one-way tickets were available for half the cost of roundtrips, I’d just book the return with cash. But adhering to an ancient pricing tradition, one-way tickets back from England are extortionately expensive — starting at over $2,000 per person!

Meanwhile, the Air Passenger Duty makes award tickets booked through British Airways’ oneworld partners Alaska Air and American Airlines equally absurd: 32,500 Mileage Plus miles and $390, or 30,000 AAdvantage miles and $377. Out of the question.

Then I remembered British Airways Executive Club. Not only does Executive Club allow you to book one-way, distance-based tickets, but it also doesn’t require you to have the full amount of Avios in your account to book: you can “plus up” the difference between your balance and the number of Avios required for your flight. On an “off-peak” date, a “true” economy award costs 13,000 Avios and $389. However, British Airways allows you to spend just 4,550 Avios and “buy” the remaining 8,450 Avios for just $100, or 1.2 cents per Avios.

Since I plan to redeem my Ultimate Rewards points for much more than 1.2 cents each, I have no interest in transferring 26,000 points to Avios to book a “true” award. Instead, the 10,000 Ultimate Rewards points I need to transfer to book this award is essentially a way to pay a small surcharge to book a one-way ticket where it otherwise wouldn’t be possible. $489 isn’t exactly half the price of an $881 roundtrip, but it’s good enough for me. With our oneworld elite status through Alaska Airlines, checked bags will be no problem.

Any suggestions?

I haven’t pulled the trigger on any of these redemptions yet so if any of my beloved readers have a better idea how to spend as little cash as possible on a simple non-stop roundtrip to London, I’m all ears.

Combining Ultimate Rewards points, transferring Hyatt points, and Hyatt booking follies

Today’s post is a bit of an information dump, but it combines a number of issues I’ve been working through to get my trips booked for this spring and summer and that I haven’t seen covered clearly anywhere else online.

Combining Chase Ultimate Rewards points

For those of us with multiple Ultimate Rewards-earning credit cards, combining points between our own accounts is routine: earn 5 points per dollar in a quarterly bonus category, like this quarter’s grocery store bonus category on the Chase Freedom, then transfer those points to a card that allows for transfer to Chase’s travel partners or higher-value Ultimate Rewards travel portal redemptions.

But what about combining points between new household members or employees? It’s possible, but there are a few important things you need to know.

First, combining points is always done from the “sender’s” side. There’s no way to “request” points, or “pool” points held in multiple card accounts. Each sender Ultimate Rewards account has to initiate a non-reversible transfer to a “receiver” account.

Second, adding a new receiver account can no longer be done online; you’ll need to call the number on the back of your Ultimate Rewards-earning credit card and provide the recipient’s credit card number. Since my flexible Ultimate Rewards card is a business card, in my case I chose to have my sender add one of my non-flexible Freedom cards as the receiver card. I was then able to instantly convert those non-flexible points into flexible Ultimate Rewards in my legacy Ink Plus account.

Finally, senders are only allowed to add “one member of your household or owner of the company, as applicable” as recipients.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Most importantly, it means that you should not set up you and your partner as mutual recipients, since this would use up the recipient slots of each household member. Instead, it would be ideal to keep the receiver’s recipient slot open to add an additional recipient. In this way, points could be moved and consolidated in larger and larger numbers across multiple Ultimate Rewards accounts before being transferred to a single travel partner account.

Additionally, it suggests the possible value of keeping your flexible Ultimate Rewards accounts attached to separate Chase online accounts. The logic here is that while you want to preserve the flexibility of your own Ultimate Rewards points, you also may want to have more than one household transfer target, so if you have, for example, a Chase Sapphire Preferred or Reserve and a flexible Chase Ink product, you could attach separate recipient targets to each online account.

I have not experimented with this extensively, but wanted to alert readers to some interesting possibilities they can explore further for themselves.

Chase World of Hyatt point transfers are no longer instant

Transfers from Ultimate Rewards to World of Hyatt used to be immediate: log out and log back in and your balance was already updated. Regrettably, no more. I submitted a transfer on the evening of Thursday, February 17, and my points didn’t land in my World of Hyatt account until the morning of Saturday, February 19. It wasn’t the end of the world, but since I wasn’t aware of the new delay, it certainly kept me awake for a couple nights frantically refreshing my Hyatt account.

On the one hand, if you’re planning a trip weeks or months in advance, you have nothing to worry about; your points will probably arrive in plenty of time. On the other hand, if you’re frantically booking a last minute stay, don’t count on immediate Chase transfers for your Hyatt redemptions.

Member-to-member Hyatt points transfer timing

World of Hyatt, like Hilton Honors, allows members to transfer points between each other for free using the Point combining request form. For an upcoming stay, I submitted the form on Saturday, February 19. I received an immediate automated response, and the transfer was finally completed on the following Friday, February 25.

So if you’re planning to combine points in order to book an award, give yourself plenty of time to allow the transfer to go through.

Hyatt award booking chaos

Of course, combining Ultimate Rewards points, transferring them to World of Hyatt, then combining them in another member’s account aren’t done for fun. They’re done to book Hyatt awards, and this is where I ran into the truly stupefying and genuinely serious consequences of Hyatt’s new award charts and booking system.

It’s worth reminding readers of two facts:

1. World of Hyatt properties are still defined by category;

2. Within each category, award nights are charged at either an “off-peak,” “standard,” or “peak” rate.

This has the key corollary that a Category 1-4 free night certificate is worth 50% more on a Category 4 “peak” day than on a Category 4 “off-peak” day, saving 18,000 points instead of 12,000 points.

Now let’s get to the chaos. When booking a multi-night stay, World of Hyatt will only show you the rate available on the first night of the stay, even if the property moves from “standard” to “peak” during the stay.

To find out the nightly award rate, you have to view the property’s “Points Calendar.” Here’s the calendar for the Hyatt Place New York City / Times Square:

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In this case, trying to search for a 2-night award stay will show that standard nights are available “from” 17,000 points per night.

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But unless you have enough points in your World of Hyatt account to book the reservation, it will not show you the final price of 37,000 World of Hyatt points, which might lead you to transfer 34,000 Ultimate Rewards points instead, and then find out to your horror you’d run out of time to book the award.

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Finally, and most egregiously, in order for award availability to appear online, the exact same room type has to be available for every night of your stay.

Putting it all together

You’ve made it this far so I don’t want to make you do any more homework and I’ll put the pieces together for you. When planning a Hyatt award and transferring Ultimate Rewards points, take the following steps in this order:

1. Find the property you want to stay at and click the “Points Calendar” button

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This will allow you to see the award rate for every night of your planned stay. Add those rates together and you will get the total cost of your stay.

2. Check standard award availability for your entire stay. Plug your hotel and dates into Hyatt and it will show you whether there is standard award availability in a single room type for your entire stay (although it will miscalculate the total cost of your stay if award rates vary by night). If so: congratulations! Transfer the required number of Ultimate Rewards points you calculated in Step 1 to Hyatt and hope the space is still available when the transfer is completed.

3. If standard award availability isn’t available for your entire stay, don’t despair. It may be the available room types simply shift during your stay. Now comes the boring part: check each day of your stay individually for standard award availability, and book “clusters” of nights in each room type. For example, standard award availability might be available in a two queen room for 2 nights, a one king room for 2 nights, and an accessible king room for 1 night. Book them each separately.

4. If necessary, call the hotel and ask to stay in the same room for your entire stay across all your reservations. They might not accommodate you, depending on the circumstances, but moving your crap around a single hotel is a lot easier than moving between hotels, which I’m not too proud to confess I’ve done more than once over the years.

Matching Hyatt Explorist or Globalist status to MLife Gold status in 9 words

1. Click here

2. Log in

3. Click “OPT IN”

4. Log in

Your MLife status will be matched in 10-15 minutes, in my experience, although you do need to log out and log back into MLife to see your updated status.

I’m offering these 9 words as a public service, because I don’t do any “search engine optimization” or care about the amount of traffic my site gets, and every other blog I’ve seen write about this status match takes up to 560, 713, or in one particularly extreme case, 1,088 words without describing the actual actions required to match status.

My experience using Fluz as intended

Gift card arbitrage occupies an odd position between “pure” travel hacking and extreme couponing: it’s lucrative enough that most travel hackers do it at least occasionally, but close enough to extreme couponing that they have the dignity to be a little embarassed about it. Over the years a few businesses have sprung up to smooth that embarrassment.

Raise acts as an intermediary or marketplace for folks who want to buy and sell unneeded gift cards at a fraction of their face value. Because they’re buying and selling gift cards that have already been issued, and often have had part of their balance spent down, you can find cards in a wide range of values and at various discount rates there.

The United MileagePlus X app sells newly-issued gift cards in the exact denomination you need for a given purchase. Instead of offering discounts off face value, they pay you in United MileagePlus miles. Depending on how highly you value MileagePlus miles, their payout rates can be competitive with the rewards you’d earn on a credit card.

Note that whenever you pay with a gift card instead of a credit card, you’re naturally sacrificing the purchase protections offered by most credit cards. That may be fine when you’re ordering a pizza, but probably not when you’re buying expensive, durable goods.

How Fluz is supposed to work

All of this is by way of introduction to Fluz, a gift card merchant with what I would call a “hybrid” approach. Signing up for Fluz comes with a seemingly-unbeatable offer: 3 “vouchers” worth up to 35% of your first three gift card purchases. The person who refers you also receives a voucher after you complete your first purchase (my referral code is “FREEQUENT” if you feel like signing up after reading this post).

The first thing you need to know is that the service is “app-only:” there’s no way to use it from a desktop without using a smartphone emulator like BlueStacks. This will become relevant shortly.

The second thing you need to know is that unless you build your life around it, you’ll never get any value from Fluz. That’s because unlike Raise, which sells gift cards at an upfront discount to their face value, and MileagePlus X, which awards miles based on the value of the gift card you purchase, Fluz “vouchers” don’t discount the price of the gift cards you buy with them. Instead, you earn a “Rewards Balance” that you can redeem against the future purchase of a gift card, but only once you’ve reached $26 in earnings.

Confused yet? Wait — it gets worse. The 3 vouchers you get for signing up are also capped, at $3.50 in value each. So ordering 3 $10 Domino’s pizzas will only earn you $11.40 in rewards ($3.50 plus the “base” earning of 3% on each transaction), leaving you less than halfway to the $26 threshold for actually redeeming them.

Still with me? One final point. Earnings are also based on payment method. Paying with an ACH debit earns the highest rewards, a debit card somewhat less, and a credit card or PayPal least of all.

One thing I will say in Fluz’s favor is that their “voucher merchants” include most of the food delivery services I’ve heard of: Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, Caviar, and Seamless. I don’t use those services, but if you do, you could conceivably hit the earnings threshold relatively quickly and then redeem your rewards for additional free food deliveries.

My mixed experience using Fluz as intended

I’ve completed two transactions at “voucher merchants,” one entirely successfully and one completely disastrously.

My first purchase was for a $15 CVS gift card, while I was standing in line at CVS. This was how I, naively, believed the app was supposed to work: figure out how much your items cost, then buy a gift card in the closest possible denomination without going over. I paid for the gift card, generated the bar code, and then spent 10 minutes at the register trying to get the cashier to accept it, before ultimately failing. A bit flustered by this ordeal, it was only when I got home that I realized Fluz had attached an elaborate set of instructions to the gift card, including printing it out at home to ensure the barcode was scaled correctly for CVS’s scanners, and with the final addendum, “if none of these instructions work, ask to speak to a manager.” An app-only service that requires you to haul around a portable printer? Is this what Silicon Valley calls “disruptive?”

Thus began my first Fluz adventure: getting a refund. That process began with an e-mail I sent through the app saying I’d been unable to use the gift card. That led to this bizarre veiled threat from them:

“CVS not accepting it could be a cashier issue, which we find is what usually happens.

We can process a refund for you. I would discourage filing a chargeback as our process will involve locking your account until the chargeback has been processed with the bank.”

From my perspective this was absurd: why would I care if my account was locked with a company that couldn’t deliver a working product? A month later, I’ve now had my refund “approved” twice, although the fifteen bucks is still noticeably missing from my account.

My second transaction went much smoother, buying a $17.46 Domino’s gift card that I was able to immediately enter into the Domino’s order page to cover the exact amount of my order, earning $4.02 in rewards (which, again, I’ll never be able to redeem).

The lesson, such as it is, was simple: buy digital gift cards and use them online.

A new life awaits you in the Fluz colonies

At the end of the day Fluz is a fairly primitive data-mining gimmick dressed up in a multi-level marketing ballgown. But even I can admit it’s a handsome gown: gift card purchases are passed through Fluz while retaining the underlying merchant’s categorization, so while you may lose out on credit card protections, you’ll still usually earn bonus points when buying gift cards to restaurants, grocery stores, or gas stations with the relevant credit cards.

So what would it look like to really maximize the value of the Fluz app? First, you’d have to be absolutely insufferable in referring your friends and family. Obviously there are times we do this (you can find my personal referral links right here!), but for sane people there’s a natural limit on how many people you’re willing to pester to do what. In order to maximize the value of the data they harvest, Fluz is relatively strict about account creation and identifying details, so it’s not like a grocery store where you can spin up an unlimited number of rewards accounts by tinkering with your e-mail address.

Second, you’d need to get used to building your life around “voucher stores” in order to maximize the value of the vouchers you earn from your referrals. Dunkin’ instead of Starbucks for your coffee, CVS instead of Walgreens for your prescriptions, Burger King instead of McDonald’s for your fast food, etc. Depending on your geography you may find those restrictions somewhat onerous or not at all.

But finally, to get the most value using Fluz as intended, you’ve got to lean into the data harvesting business model and link a checking account in order to maximize your earnings. That means no credit card rewards, no credit card protections, and no chargebacks. For civilians who have one or zero checking accounts, this should be the highest bar, but in reality is probably the lowest. For travel hackers with dozens of checking accounts sitting around, it’s trivial to leave $50 in one of them in order to pay for the occasional meal at Applebee’s.

To be clear: I don’t think you should use Fluz as intended, but if you do, you’ve got to go all-in if you want to wring any value at all out of the system.

How (I think) the just 4 U double dip works

While I do my fair share of manufactured spend at Safeway, until this week I’d never actually redeemed any of their “just 4 U” loyalty points. Instead, I’ve been taking advantage of their upfront cash discounts on prepaid debit cards. Like many of you, that changed in a big way for me this week, and I’ve now redeemed enough points that I think I can explain how and why the just 4 U double dip works.

What’s a double dip?

Double (and triple, quadruple, etc.) dips represent travel hacking in its purest form: claiming credit multiple times for the same activity. For years you could claim Alaska and Delta flight credit for the same flights, for instance, so each Delta flight you flew would earn redeemable and elite-qualifying miles with both programs — a truly free lunch, my favorite price point.

You can also consider “negative” dips, the most common of which is so obvious people rarely bother to mention it: when you redeem miles or points for tickets or hotel rooms, you don’t receive the full value of the purchase, because the full value of the purchase includes the points you would have earned paying with cash! Redeeming 100,000 miles for a $1,000 flight doesn’t give you 1 cent per mile in value — it gives you 1 cent per mile minus the value of the miles a paid ticket would have earned.

People (myself included!) sometimes use the term “stacking” interchangeably, but at root there is a distinction. If you click through a shopping portal before making a hotel reservation, you’ll earn points through the shopping portal, through your credit card, and through the hotel. That’s a stack. If you click through 2 shopping portals and both of them ultimately pay out (not unheard of), that’s a double dip.

What’s the just 4 U double dip?

Once you start redeeming just 4 U rewards at scale, you quickly notice some wonky elements of the program, the wonkiest of which is that under certain conditions, the amount you owe for groceries can drop below $0 when an item triggers two different kinds of rewards.

You may occasionally be able to ask for a cash refund of the negative balance, but even if you’re occasionally successful the hassle for staff and managers is unlikely to make it a long-term cash-out strategy. Instead, you should try to spend down the resulting negative balance. Fortunately, that’s easy, because the usual rewards exclusions don’t seem to apply to these negative balances.

How does the double dip work?

I’m grateful to FlyerTalk user planetmans for pointing me in the right direction here, since the actual experience at checkout is quite confusing. There are, broadly speaking, three “buckets” of just 4 U discounts: “item” rewards (individual items that are free or discounted), “department” rewards (like the $3 produce and $7 meat department rewards currently available), and "basket” rewards which are triggered by the total price of your purchases.

Item rewards can be stacked as necessary to reduce the price of an item to $0. For example, the other day I redeemed one Reward for a free jar of pasta sauce, which was also on sale, so my receipt shows a $2.79 “Regular Price,” $0.80 in “Card Savings,” and a second $1.99 adjustment in “Grocery Rewards.” All of these are printed together and reduce the item’s price on the receipt to $0. Today I picked up the same jar of pasta sauce, no longer on sale, so the receipt just shows the $2.79 Regular Price and a $2.79 Grocery Rewards adjustment. There’s no double dip here.

Department rewards and basket rewards, on the other hand, are calculated and applied after the final price of each item is calculated. Since they are not tied to the price of specific items, they can reduce your amount due below $0. Hence in planetmans’s example, it’s essential to buy items from the produce or meat departments that are not free in order to trigger both department and basket discounts. That means the purchase of a $7.01 hanger steak will trigger both the $7 off $7 spent in the meat department reward and the $7 off $7 in basket rewards, creating a negative balance of $6.99 — the double dip.

As a side note, I can confirm the meat department Reward is triggered by vegetarian items in the meat department (Safeway carries Impossible and Beyond brand items, in addition to several I didn’t recognize). Unfortunately, there’s only so much vegetable protein slurry anyone needs, and it’s much harder to donate raw meat than non-perishable goods.

Once you understand the rules, the double dip becomes much easier to trigger. The biggest problem you’re likely to run into at scale is also the most annoying part of grocery shopping: unadvertised discounts. As in the example I gave above of the store brand pasta sauce, grocery stores are constantly fiddling with prices through “card savings” that are often not displayed prominently, if at all. You may find the perfect $7.01 lamb chop only to discover at checkout that Safeway decided to give $0.50 off the purchase of lamb chops, reducing your total meat department purchase price to $6.51 and killing your double dip. There’s no fail-safe way around this, but you can reduce your risk by checking your grocery store app and carefully inspect prices for any surprise “club savings” and things of that nature.

When free changes make it worthwhile to hunt for lower fares

If you’ve been following the airline industry at all for the last 6 months, you know that lots of US airlines have made their COVID-19 change and cancellation fee waiver policies permanent for most fare classes:

• United eliminated change fees on all but Basic Economy fares, and on award tickets;

• Delta eliminated change fees on all but Basic Economy fares;

• American eliminated change fees on all but Basic Economy fares and the redeposit fee for cancelled award reservations;

• and Alaska eliminated change fees on all but Saver fares.

There are some exceptions to these policies, mainly for itineraries originating outside the United States, but the overall picture is clear: as long as you don’t book Basic Economy or Saver fares, then you can change your itinerary up to departure by paying any positive fare difference. However, the airlines are handling negative fare differences differently:

• United states “If your new flight costs less, you’ll be able to change for free but will not receive a refund of the fare difference.”

• Delta states “Notwithstanding any rules or ticketing policies to the contrary, if the newly selected flight is for the same travel dates, for the same origin and destination, and results in a lower ticket price, then the reissued ticket will be deemed issued at the same ticket price as the original ticket (i.e., any fare difference will not be issued in the form of a credit).” This is a little bit confusing since it suggests that if you change the dates, origin, or destination of your flights, then the fare difference will be issued in the form of a credit.

• American by contrast states they allow “customers to keep the full value of eligible tickets if they change their travel plans prior to their scheduled travel. Although customers will have to pay the fare difference for a new flight, customers will not lose their ticket value if the new flight is less expensive.”

I wasn’t able to find definitive guidance one way or the other on Alaska’s website. But fortunately, back in December I booked a companion fare itinerary that had since radically dropped in price, so I decided to find out.

Alaska’s confused and confusing booking engine

One thing I love about Alaska companion fares is just how much value you can wring out of them. Their extremely generous routing rules mean you can stitch together two or three vacations with a single companion fare.

Back in December, I booked a roughly 3-week vacation in July with stops in California, Oregon, and Montana for a total of $1,792.30: a $1,664.10 primary fare and $128.20 companion fare. When I checked the identical itinerary this week, it had fallen to $1,105.04: a $943.61 primary fare and $161.43 companion fare.

Alaska Airlines offers two methods of changing an existing itinerary: you can change some or all of the flights on the itinerary, or you can cancel the itinerary and do a new search. I immediately encountered two problems: first, neither option allowed me to select the exact same flights I had already booked. This makes a certain amount of epistemological sense (how can you rebook an itinerary onto the exact same flights?).

The more serious problem was that rather than being offered a travel credit of $687.26, I was being asked to pay an additional $33.23.

The site didn’t offer any useful information beyond that, so I knew it was time to call in.

A helpful phone rep (and those 33 mystery dollars)

After a brief hold, I explained the situation to my Alaska phone rep and she immediately understood the situation. She did a search for the exact same flights on the exact same days, and came up with a slightly higher fare difference of $720.49, which she said I’d receive in my travel wallet. Meanwhile, I’d owe the exact same $33.23 in additional taxes that I saw online, which I had to pay by credit card.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, she did not see the humor in this situation, and did not see the logic in my proposal to simply use some of my $720 credit to pay the $33 in taxes. She did, however, explain that the $33 was the result of a fee that had been waived through December, 2020, but reimposed January 1, 2021. Since I’d booked my ticket in December, but was repricing it in February, I needed to cough up the difference.

Now that I know where the $33.23 online charge comes from, what I don’t know is whether the online booking engine would have automatically calculated my $720.49 credit and deposited it in my account, or if I would have permanently lost it had I gone ahead rebooking the flights online. This is obviously irrelevant when rebooking flights originally booked after January 1, 2021, but if you’re making changes to flights originally booked in 2020 be prepared to call in to be on the safe side.

Conclusion

The bottom line is, change fees are terrible because all fees are terrible, so anything and everything airlines do to reduce or eliminate them is an unalloyed good. But having said that, not all change fee waivers are made alike, and there’s a big difference between a policy that lets you keep the full value of your tickets and one that merely lets you rebook without paying even more on top of fare differences.

When individual airline policies don’t voluntarily meet your needs, remember you always have the option to watch out for schedule changes and assert your rights, instead.

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.