Bonus points at Amazon with US Bank Cash+

While Amazon.com as a rule doesn't participate in shopping portals (their partnership with Hawaiian Airlines' online mall ended earlier this year, but purchases only earned 1 Hawaiian mile per dollar, so it was no great loss), it's long been known that the Citi Forward card, which offers 5 ThankYou points per dollar spent at bookstores, would also bonus purchases made with Amazon.

Last quarter I selected bookstores (along with charity)  as one of my bonus categories with the US Bank Cash+ card, which gives 5% cash back in two categories of your choice each quarter, and made a little over $100 in purchases at Amazon to see if US Bank would treat these purchases the same as Citi. And sure enough when my statement closed today, I saw that for $126.95 in Amazon purchases, I had earned $6.35 in cash back:

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Although both the Discover More/it and Chase Freedom are bonusing Amazon.com purchases this calendar quarter, this is a great option to earn 5% cash back at Amazon during the rest of the year. And if you spend less than $1,500 on Amazon purchases, you can earn the rest of your cash back through bonused Kiva loans.

Free online debit loads to Bluebird

A few days ago there was an uptick in interest in Bluebird, when cardholders received an e-mail telling us that from now on online debit card loads would be free.

For a little background, debit card loads in-store at Walmart have always been free, and capped at $1,000 per day and $5,000 per month, a limit that's shared with Vanilla Reload Network loads. The low cap is unfortunate, but this does give the flexibility to use the $5,000 cap to drain gift cards or Visa Buxx cards, if that's a more lucrative option for you than buying Vanilla Reload Network cards, as it is for some people.

I had a bit of trouble setting up my Bluebird account for online debit loads, so I want to share my experience and let you know what to expect if you decide to take advantage of this new free option.

The Card

I decided to add my business PayPal debit card, which earns 1% cash back on signature and online transactions, and is loadable using PayPal My Cash cards. The principle here is that I can load my PayPal account with $1,000 at a cost of $7.90, then drain the account at 1% cash back, earning $10. In this way I'll manufacture $1,008 in lucrative gas station spend, and a small profit of $2.10.

The Problem

The card was successfully added to my account, but I wasn't able to add funds. Instead, I received this curious error message: 

This request cannot be completed at this time. Your Permanent Bluebird card must be activated before adding money using your bank account. If you’ve received your Permanent Bluebird card and already activated it, please call Account Protection Services at 1.800.660.2454. Our hours of operation are 9am - 8pm EST, Monday - Friday. If not, your Permanent Bluebird card will be delivered within 7-10 business days of your completed registration.

A quick trip to Flyertalk revealed that I wasn't the only one experiencing this problem. However, I was able to continue loading my account normally using Vanilla Reload Network cards, and bill pay out the funds, so the whole situation was extremely murky.

The Solution

A few days later, I received a call from Bluebird's "Account Protection Services," who asked me to verify that I had an account, and that I was trying to add debit cards to it. I confirmed that, and she then asked me to fax in a copy of my driver's license and the front of the debit cards I was trying to add. 

After a quick trip to the office, I called back to make sure they'd received my fax.  It took the representative 3 tries to find it, but when she did, she was immediately able to verify my name and the card numbers of my debit cards, and lifted the hold on my account.

I then logged back into Bluebird and was able to successfully load $100 from my PayPal debit card. 

Conclusion

Here are my thoughts on online debit loads so far:

• Don't be worried if you aren't immediately able to use a new debit card – you may have to go through the same slightly inconvenient process;
• Be sure to only add debit cards that have your name on the front. Anonymous gift cards could cause real problems with your account; 
• The $1,000 monthly limit on debit card loads is in addition to your $5,000 monthly in-store and Vanilla Reload limit; 
• You can set up 10 recurring $100 loads each month, so you don't have to log in to Bluebird each day;
• But if you do, be sure you have enough money in your debit card account to cover the scheduled transactions!

What are your experiences with online debit loads? 

What's next: product changes

Since my April round of applications, I haven't applied for any new credit cards (although I have done a few product changes, which – usually – don't involve a "hard pull" of your credit report). That's been for a few reasons. I've already got the two most lucrative credit cards for hassle-free manufactured spend: the Citi ThankYou Preferred card with 5 ThankYou points per dollar spent at drug stores (no longer available online, and in-branch applications have reported a high failure rate), and the Barclaycard Arrival World MasterCard, which earns 2.22 cents in value per dollar spent. Using just those two cards, I'm able to pay off student loans at pennies on the dollar (made even better using my favorite hack, now featuring Plink), and pay for hotels and airline tickets at about a 65% discount (while earning points for those paid flights and stays). Add in my Delta Business Platinum American Express card, which earns 1.4 Skymiles per dollar at the $25,000 and $50,000 spend levels, and that accounts for just about all of my manufactured spend budget (although I can't resist maintaining a 50,000 Club Carlson point balance, good for two free nights at any Club Carlson property in the world).

While it's still true that you'll never earn more points per dollar than you do meeting a minimum spending requirement, I have no interest in scoring every single signup bonus before I'm 30. That's why I focus on putting spending on the wildly lucrative cards I already have, instead of applying for 3-4 new cards every 91 days.

However, my year of manning the mint with Citi ends with my January statement, and my first Barclaycard annual fee is due in April, so naturally I've turned my mind towards the future. In this occasional series I'll share my thoughts on my next moves. Today's edition: product changes!

American Express Hilton HHonors Surpass

This is a card I've been eyeing since I finally found PIN-enabled Visa gift cards at a local supermarket. Earning 6 HHonors points per dollar spent at grocery stores, and 50,000 HHonors points for upgrading my current, no-annual-fee version of the card, seems like a great value proposition, even at $75 for the first year.

To illustrate this, take a property I love in a city I love, the Hilton Prague Old Town (the Hilton Prague hotel is even more spectacular, but slightly less convenient), which in June (high season) goes for 50,000 points per night. Obviously I'll earn one free night just for upgrading, which makes that night cost about $75, or a little less (depending on whether you decide to prorate the $75 annual fee over all the additional points you earn, or just over the upgrade bonus – the latter is slightly more accurate but much more complicated). The advance purchase rate in June is around $250 after taxes, so you're paying about 30 cents on the dollar.

If I were able to aggressively manufacture spend on the Surpass card at grocery stores, I could earn additional nights after every $8,333 in spend. If that takes the form of Visa gift cards at a cost of $5.95 per $500 card, I'd be paying around $101.15 per night, or $80.92 if I redeem my points in batches of 5 nights, with the 5th night free, a 60-68% discount. In other words, it's a good workhorse of a card (for the first year), but not one that offers incredibly outsized value.

Unfortunately, recently my local supermarket...stopped allowing gift card sales to credit cards. Until I find a more reliable source, I'm shelving the upgrade.

Citi Dividend Platinum Select

While this card does typically offer a small signup bonus of $100 in Dividend Dollars for new applicants (although it has also reached as high as $300), I'm more interested in the rotating 5% cash back categories. Unlike the Chase Freedom and Discover More/it, the Dividend Platinum Select's cap on bonused earnings is annual, instead of quarterly, meaning that a single lucrative quarter (2013 offered drug stores in Quarter 1) allows you to max out $300 in Dividend Dollars. Since I won't be using my ThankYou Preferred card after mid-January, it's an obvious candidate for a product change.

Barclaycard Arrival World MasterCard - No Annual Fee

I currently have the $89 annual fee version of this card, which I've explained before is only worth carrying for the first, fee-free year. Barclaycard does have a reputation for offering annual fee waivers (or statement credits for their cards' annual fees) to good customers, so my intention is to call in April to ask if they'll offer me an $89 statement credit. After all, I am a VERY good customer. If not, then I'll call back and ask for a product change to the no-annual-fee version of the card, keeping my credit history with Barclaycard and any points I've stockpiled. Since the redemption structure is actually identical for the $89 and fee-free cards, I won't lose any of my points' value when I make the product change.

In future installments in this series I'll be discussing the cards I'll be canceling outright and the new cards I'll be applying for in the new year.

Breaking: Does the latest VR redesign change everything?

Reports are already trickling out on Flyertalk about the latest redesign of Vanilla Reload Network reload cards. In the last 24 hours, I've purchased all three generations of reload cards. Here's a "VR Classic:"

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American Express on this card was widely understood to refer to the hyper-lucrative Bluebird product, and MyVanilla refers to MyVanilla Debit cards, which my readers are familiar with. This version also includes a few additional account options, including the "momentum" prepaid visa, a product I've been meaning to investigate for a while, but that has extremely limited geographic distribution in the United States. Mio is a product that's already been thoroughly investigated, and unfortunately their risk management department is extremely intolerant of what they perceive as abusive behavior.  The same is true of netSpend.

Then I found a slightly newer generation of Vanilla Reload network reload card:

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Here you see the addition of American Express Serve, which is a terrific product, but unfortunately you're not allowed to have an active Serve account and an active Bluebird account at the same time. There's also the addition of the PayPal Prepaid MasterCard, which is NOT the same thing as the PayPal Business Debit MasterCard you can apply for if you have a "Business" or "Premier" PayPal account, and which offers 1% cash back on signature purchases. Instead, it's a fairly abusive prepaid debit product for the under-banked.

Finally, here's the latest generation of Vanilla reload card I picked up today:

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Here we see two new additions. Something called Money Network (which appears to be a mostly-scammy Bluebird competitor) But what, you ask, is MasterCard rePower? Good question.

It appears that MasterCard has developed an integrated reload network for all the prepaid debit products that are linked to the MasterCard payment network. This has – traditionally – only mattered if you were lucky enough to live in an area where retailers (Rite Aid is the classic example) allow the sale of Green Dot Moneypaks with credit cards. However, with the addition of Vanilla Reload Network functionality and the widespread ability to purchase reload cards with a credit card, the ability to manufacture spend has potentially just smashed through all previously understood limits.

To put it mildly, there are a lot of options for MasterCard prepaid debit cards. 

Now, there are a lot of products on that list, and it's guaranteed that not all of them will pan out. High fees, low limits, and the absence of a bill pay feature are going to necessarily make some of those prepaid debit card products useless for manufacturing spend. However, my anticipation is that at least some of them are going to prove to be lucrative enough to double or triple my monthly manufactured spend. 

As always, you'll find the latest updates on all these products right here on the blog. I intend to work my way through all the most promising options, and will report back as I encounter success and failure.

Earn Delta MQM for Hilton stays

I've said before that 90% of casual travelers are better off crediting Delta flights to an Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan account, rather than a Delta Skymiles account.  For those who stubbornly persist in pursuing Medallion elite status (for example, to enjoy free award changes and redeposits with Platinum or Diamond Medallion status), Hilton has brought back a promotion from last year whereby you can earn 250 Medallion Qualifying Miles for each 2-night stay between September 30 and December 13, 2013 (up to 10,000 MQM).

You have to register for the promotion here, and select Delta as your "double dip" earning partner in your Hilton HHonors account.  In my experience stays are credited according to the earning preference you have selected when you make the reservation, rather than your earning preference at the time of your stay.

Since any MQM you earn in excess of your Medallion status will roll over to 2014, there's no reason not to take advantage of this promotion if you have any 2-night Hilton stays planned during the promotional period. You'll also earn double Skymiles for stays completed under this promotion. 

More free Gogo inflight wireless

Back in June Blackberry sponsored a promotion  offering free inflight internet access to their customers on Gogo-equipped flights. It was a really useful promotion, since they verified you were a Blackberry user based on your browser's "user agent," which is easily spoofed.

Well, Gogo is back at it again, this time with a promotion sponsored by Allstate. They're offering 30 minutes of free in-flight internet on weekend flights on users' "mobile devices," i.e. smartphones. I have to assume this promotion applies on a per-flight basis, so you should be able to get 30 minutes of wifi per flight, not per weekend.

If you are actually using the internet on your mobile phone, then enjoy! There's no need to hack this promotion.

However, I believe that they're almost certainly verifying your device type this time the same way they did during the last promotion: based on your browser's "user agent." That means if you want to enjoy 30 minutes of free wifi on your laptop, instead of or in addition to your smartphone, you should be able to use the same technique as last time to "spoof" a smartphone browser and get your 30 minutes of access.

I'm taking my next Gogo-equipped flight on October 11, and I'll post an update when I land verifying that this hack works.

Check your e-mail for lucrative Barclaycard promotions

Barclaycard seems to be running a pretty consistent promotion across many of their proprietary and co-branded credit cards, offering 5 bonus miles/points/whatever per dollar spent for "gas station, restaurant or department, toy or game store purchases" between October 1, 2013 and December 31, 2013. You can earn up to 2,500 bonus miles this way (on up to $500 in purchases).

You must receive an e-mail about the promotion in order to be eligible, because registration for the promotion is through a link in that e-mail. I received the promotional e-mail for my Barclaycard Arrival World MasterCard, which means I'll earn 7 Arrival miles per dollar spent at gas stations – an easy category for manufacturing spend. 3,500 Arrival Miles are worth $38.50 in statement credits against travel purchases, thanks to the 10% rebate on travel redemptions.

Mommy Points reported an identical promotion for her US Airways MasterCard and one of her readers reported it for the NFL Extra Points Visa Signature.

Since these bonus categories don't have anything to do with each other, I hope that this is an effort by BarclayCard to get into the quarterly bonus game and that we'll see more (and more lucrative) promotions like this in the future.

Finding a use for Skybonus tickets...to fly to Peru?

Before I get to today's post, I want to mention that my responses to e-mails and comments have been a little bit uneven the last week or so since I'm having some computer trouble. I plan on buying a new Macbook in October, when "online shopping" is a 5% bonus category with my Discover More (now "Discover it") card, and I'll get another 5% back by clicking through the Discover shopping portal. Apple products for 10% off? Yes, please!  Meanwhile if I somehow missed your question feel free to leave another comment or e-mail me at freequentflyer@freequentflyerbook.com.

Earlier this month, I posed the question, "What do you do with SkyBonus points?" My problem was simple: on the one hand, you can redeem Delta's small-business rewards points, called SkyBonus, for roundtrip domestic airline tickets. On the other hand, you can only redeem them for tickets in the cheapest fare buckets, so it's difficult to find situations where you'll get more value than you would redeeming for Skyclub lounge passes or amenity vouchers, for those unfortunate moments when you aren't upgraded to First Class.

Last week I took a look at my elite status re-qualification pace, and figured out that I had only a few remaining trips coming up this year that I hadn't already booked, including a flight from Boston to Chicago in late November. But I ALSO was cutting it pretty close with my Medallion Qualification Miles to re-qualify for Platinum Medallion with Delta next year. Thanks to their award chart devaluation I'm going to be crediting my Delta flights to Alaska Airlines next calendar year (hopefully after a status match gets me to MVP Gold or MVP Gold 75K), but in the meantime Platinum Medallion is absolutely priceless for the ability to rebook awards – for free – from the "medium" and "high" levels to the "low" level as award availability appears. I do this probably 10-15 times a year and it saves me tens of thousands of miles each year.

Then I saw this FlyerTalk thread about $480 round-trip flights to Lima, Peru from Boston, one of my nearby airports. That helped me do a bit of mental accounting: a paid flight to Chicago (on a T fare – eligible for Skybonus ticket redemption) would cost $295, but net me just 2,264 MQM and 4,528 Skymiles. Instead, I could pay $480 and earn 8,526 MQM and 17,052 Skymiles. The difference in fares, just $185, was made up for by the difference in earned Skymiles ($188, valued at 1.5 cents each), but I'd also earn 6,262 MQM, more than enough to put me over the line for Platinum Medallion status next year, in case some of my later trips come in under expectations.

A paid ticket to Peru and a Skybonus ticket to Chicago...do I need any vaccines to spend 90 minutes in the Lima airport?

Unleash your manufactured spend: updates

In my week-long series last month on using Walmart's bill pay service to manufacture miles and points (Unleash your manufactured spend with Walmart Billpay), I discussed my own plan to use that technique to double my manufactured spend. In Part 4, I discussed buying gift cards at grocery stores with credit cards that bonus that spend, and using those gift cards to load my Bluebird and Gobank accounts at Walmart registers. Meanwhile, I planned to use my unlimited access to Vanilla Reload Network reload cards to load my 3 MyVanilla Debit cards, which I would use for billpay at Walmart.

Unfortunately, that plan was short-circuited on two fronts. First of all, as I reported here, Gobank finally got around to closing my account, which eliminated that option for liquidating grocery store gift cards and Visa Buxx cards for free.

Then just last week, on my regular walk through my local chain grocery store, I was told that they had started accepting only cash for Visa gift card purchases. I think it probably hasn't been hard-coded into the registers they use, but if the new policy is consistently enforced it will radically decrease the convenience of buying those gift cards.

On the positive side, I've had ongoing success paying off my credit cards using MyVanilla Debit cards at Walmart. While there have been reports of MyVanilla Debit cards being closed for suspicious or excessive loading and unloading patterns, I've been able to load and unload $1,000 per week on all three of my cards without any trouble at all. I keep each individual payment below the $2,000 level which has caused problems at some stores. Hopefully that volume keeps me below the radar and I'll be able to continue to take advantage of this technique.

I HAVE ever been to South Korea! Have you?

I woke up to a curious headline on View From the Wing: Have You Ever Been to South Korea?

Turns out if you bought a ticket to or from South Korea on Korean Air Lines or Asiana Airlines between January 1, 2000 and August 1, 2007, you're entitled to come cash and coupons in the settlement process. I spent 3 weeks in South Korea in the summer of 2006, so I went ahead and entered my flight information.

Turns out not only is documentation not required, but flight details aren't even necessary. You just need to specify the number of economy, business, and first class tickets you purchased in each of the eligible years. I entered one economy ticket in 2006, "certified" my response (under penalty of perjury!), and submitted it. It took about 90 seconds. 

So if yu traveled to or from South Korea on Korean Air Lines or Asiana Airlines during the eligible period, submit your claim here.