How to glamp right. Hint: don't be me

I'm still recovering from a 3-night glamping adventure, so no serious miles-and-points analysis today. Instead, here are my thoughts on what you should keep in mind when going glamping for the first time.

Introduction

I grew up in Western Montana, which means I grew up camping. Camping meant driving (as kids) or hiking (as adults) as far as you could before sundown, leaving just enough time to throw up tents and start a fire before having a quick dinner, telling some jokes, and turning in for the night. Space and carrying capacity being limited, you packed exactly what you planned to eat for each meal, each day in the wilderness — plus maybe a few protein bars.

So when my friends invited me camping, that's more or less what I expected. It turns out Madeline Island is a fully-developed resort community that happens to have a state park where camping is permitted.

Things I did wrong

Here's a quick rundown of the things I did wrong on this glamping adventure:

• Pillows. When you're hiking into camp, you bring a sleeping bag with a padded top — a pillow would take up an impossible amount of space. When you're glamping, you drive right into the campsite, and can fill the whole car with pillows if you like. After the first night, I ended up sleeping in the car since it was more comfortable than lying flat on my back on the gravel ground of the campsite.
• Sports equipment. When you go glamping in a resort community, there are community amenities like tennis courts and softball fields. Since I've been teaching my partner tennis this summer, the trip would have been a lot more fun if we'd brought some rackets and balls. Check ahead of time what amenities are available near your glampsite.
• Bathing gear. Needless to say, when camping in Western Montana your only chance at a bath is a very quick dip in the nearest (ice-cold, glacier-fed) river. Our glampsite had running water and showers, but it didn't occur to me to bring towels. Or shampoo. Or soap. Remember: I thought we were going camping!
• Firestarters. On the night my partner and I got the campfire going, it took us hours to carefully coax the wood up until it was finally hot enough to cook on. When our friends started the fire, they put some prefabricated fuel cubes in the fire and lit them, which only took a few minutes. Do that instead.

Things I did right

Having said that, I got a few things right:

• Way too much food. Rather than planning each meal in advance, we went on a shopping spree beforehand buying both the stuff we wanted to cook over the campfire and a variety of snacks that we knew we'd eat eventually. This was a great move, since when glamping the urgency of coordinating meals is much lower, and you may end up needing more snacks between meals.
• Camping uniform. Since I wasn't planning to shower, I picked a pretty simple camping uniform: long underwear, a pair of shorts, and a long-sleeved, lightweight shirt. It kept me mostly bite-free from disease-carrying insects, and worry-free from getting dirt and grass stains, since they were basically my workout clothes.
• Reading material. Just like when camping, the days in camp are long and boring. Bring everything you can think of to read. Stock up on podcasts. Download movies. You may think you're there to enjoy nature's beauty, but when the sun rises at 5 AM and sets at 9 PM, it's unlikely you're going to spend every daylight hour communing with woodland creatures.

Conclusion

This trip was not exactly like anything I'd done before. I've stayed at relatively luxurious guesthouses in the national parks of California and Alaska, and I've gone camping in the wilderness areas of Western Montana. But the idea of combining showers and flush toilets with tents and sleeping bags on the ground positively baffled me.

Still, while I probably wouldn't drive 6 hours in each direction to do it again, I'll say I'm glad I gave it a shot.

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Thoughts towards earning domestic airline miles as cheaply as possible

[For reasons I cannot begin to understand, I am camping far from civilization this week. I have a couple posts scheduled, but won't be participating as actively as usual in the comments or on Twitter.]

Last week I received polite notification from Suntrust that my services as a customer would no longer be required, which inspired this post.

My simple heuristic for booking air travel

When booking air travel, I usually follow variations of the following simple decision-making heuristic. First, I ask...:

1. How much are paid airfares? If American- or Delta-operated flights are near the top of a Flexpoint redemption band, I'll redeem Flexpoints for paid, mileage-earning airfares in order to credit them to Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan. If American- or Delta-operated flights are less than $300 or so, I'll redeem Ultimate Rewards points for 1.25 cents each for paid, mileage-earning airfares. If neither of those are true, I ask...
2. Is there Delta low-level availability? Since for a little over a year I've been able to manufacture SkyMiles at such a trivial cost, Delta low-level availability will almost always offer me the cheapest out-of-pocket cost. If there isn't Delta low-level availability, I ask...
3. Is there American low-level availability? Since I can transfer Ultimate Rewards points to British Airways for cheap short-haul flights, and get preferred seating with my Alaska Airlines MVP Gold 75K status, American is often a convenient and even comfortable way to travel. For the longer flights that make Avios redemptions impractical, I can use the Alaska Airlines miles I still have left over from the days of the Bank of America Alaska Airlines debit card.

Those three simple questions cover the vast majority of my air travel needs.

No more cheap Delta and Alaska miles; what next?

With my Alaska Airlines debit card closed along with everyone else's, and my Suntrust card retired a little ahead of schedule, I no longer have access to unlimited, virtually free domestic airline miles.

That got me thinking that it might be worth doing a little math on the cheapest way to earn redeemable domestic airline miles through manufactured spend.

• United Mileage Plus. United is in an interesting position, since it's a transfer partner of Chase Ultimate Rewards. The Chase Ink Plus (and Sapphire Preferred) cards offer an unusual dual value proposition: Ultimate Rewards points are both worth 1 cent each and also entitle the cardholder to buy United miles for 1 cent each. Many readers don't like it when I draw attention to this dual functionality, but that doesn't keep it from being true: the ability to redeem Ultimate Rewards points for cash means you face a tradeoff between cash and Mileage Plus miles. That creates the following dynamic: if you value United miles at between 1 and 1.25 cents each, you are best off redeeming your Ultimate Rewards points for paid airfare at 1.25 cents each; if you value United miles at between 1.25 and roughly 1.5 cents each, you're best off transferring Ultimate Rewards points to United; and if you value United miles at more than 1.5 cents each, it may start to make sense to sign up for a Chase United Club card, which earns 1.5 United miles per dollar spent, depending on how much unbonused spend you're willing to manufacture with the card. Here's a chart which illustrates the principle:

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In this chart, every dollar you spend above the "Breakeven spend" point generates profit, having already paid off the card's annual fee with the Club card's "Excess value."

The key is that whether you like it or not, you're buying Mileage Plus miles for 1 cent each when you transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards points to United.

• American AAdvantage. This one's simple: since no credit card earns more than 1 AAdvantage mile per dollar spent, the American Express Starwood Preferred Guest is the cheapest way to earn AAdvantage miles through manufactured spend: it earns 1.25 AAdvantage miles per dollar spent when you transfer Starpoints to American in increments of 20,000 Starpoints.
• Alaska Mileage Plan. As above, so below. No (currently-available) cards earn bonus Mileage Plan miles, so Starwood Preferred Guest transfers offer the best earning rate at 1.25 Mileage Plan miles per dollar.
• Delta SkyMiles. Here we can get some more traction, since SkyMiles is a transfer partner of American Express Membership Rewards at a 1-to-1 ratio. The cheapest option depends on your ability to buy and liquidate prepaid Visa debit cards at gas stations. If you have access to unlimited gas station manufactured spend, the $95 Amex EveryDay Preferred card gives 3 flexible Membership Rewards points per dollar spent at gas stations (when you make more than 30 purchases during your statement cycle). If you don't have access to gas station manufactured spend, the $175 Premier Rewards Gold card offers 2 Membership Rewards points per dollar spent at grocery stores. Both are better values than the $195 American Express Delta Platinum or $450 Delta Reserve cards, unless you don't have access to either gas station or grocery store manufactured spend. In that case, the slight difference between the 1.4 SkyMiles per dollar (at $25,000 and $50,000 in spend) earning rate of the Platinum card and 1.5 SkyMiles per dollar (at $30,000 and $60,000 in spend) rate of the Reserve card usually makes the Platinum card the better bet, unless you're gunning for Delta Medallion elite status.

Conclusion

Now that my fountain of Delta miles has dried up, I'll likely rely more and more on Flexpoints (for more expensive flights) and Ultimate Rewards points (for cheaper ones) when booking domestic travel and international economy travel.

The ability of airline miles to offer out-sized value when booking international premium cabin travel is often exaggerated (ignoring things like availability constraints), but it's not a fabrication: there really are trips where miles, when earned cheaply enough, offer a much greater value than equivalent flights booked using rewards currencies like Flexpoints, Arrival+ miles, or Ultimate Rewards points.

So with those flights in mind, I'll continue building up modest balances in a variety of domestic rewards programs, while always remembering that the least valuable mile is the one I don't redeem.

Can current cardholders get one more TripIt Pro subscription from Barclaycard Arrival+?

[For reasons I cannot begin to understand, I am camping far from civilization this week. I have a couple posts scheduled, but won't be participating as actively as usual in the comments or on Twitter.]

A few months back the free TripIt Pro subscription I received through my Barclaycard Arrival+ MasterCard expired. I reached out to Barclaycard on Twitter to ask how to renew my subscription, and they told me to "log into the website and from the ‘Account Summary’ page click on the ‘Tripit Pro’ link to activate," then gave me a unique code to use instead of entering my credit card information.

Being lazy and not getting any particular value from TripIt Pro, I didn't act on this information until last week, when the Arrival+ devaluation was made official and free TripIt Pro subscriptions were explicitly discontinued.

Never being one to pay for a benefit I don't use, I logged into my TripIt account and entered the unique code I'd been given, which instantly upgraded my account to TripIt Pro.

The TripIt Pro benefit has been removed from my online account

As indicated by Barclaycard's Twitter team, before the devaluation, "TripIt Pro" was a benefit on the "account summary" page of my Barclaycard Arrival+ card account. Now it's gone.

Current cardholders should still be eligible for free TripIt Pro subscriptions

Since the devaluation goes into effect on November 17 for existing cardholders, if you signed up for the card before the card was rebooted earlier this month, you should still be able to sign up for a free TripIt Pro subscription.

The easiest way is probably to do what I did, and contact @AskBCUS on Twitter to ask for your upgrade code. If you're not a Twitter user, you should be able to call in and ask for an upgrade code.

TripIt Pro is like TripIt, but with lots of text messages

TripIt allows you to organize all your upcoming trips, which I find mildly useful when assembling trips with multiple components, especially multiple airline ticket confirmation numbers. It's genuinely convenient to have them all in one place.

TripIt Pro is like that, but also with lots of text messages throughout each travel day about your inbound and outbound gate assignments and any flight delays. Honestly, it's usually more stressful than it is helpful, knowing ahead of time just how many terminals you need to dash in order to make your connections.

The potentially useful service that TripIt and TripIt Pro don't provide is allow you to easily search for alternative flights on your ticketing carrier. Instead their "alternate flight" search is essentially a Kayak search of all flights between point A and point B.

But TripIt Pro is included in your (hopefully waived) annual fee

As I mentioned yesterday, the worst thing you can do is pay for a benefit and not take advantage of it. So if you signed up for the Arrival+ card on the understanding you'd receive a free TripIt Pro subscription, go ahead and sign up!

You might like it.

Travel benefits versus travel hacking benefits

[For reasons I cannot begin to understand, I am camping far from civilization this week. I have a couple posts scheduled, but won't be participating as actively as usual in the comments or on Twitter.]

With the announced elimination, as of January 1, 2016, of the "First Friday" dining benefit of the overrated Chase Sapphire Preferred, we've seen the predictable surge of posts extolling all the non-points benefits of the card. This makes a certain amount of sense since the card is so useless on the earning side that writing about actually using the card for purchases requires heroic level of delusion, even from our affiliate blogger friends.

If you're feeling self-loathing, you can read:

• Mommy Points drooling over trip delay and cancellation coverage;
• a Thought Leader in Travel giddy over primary car rental insurance;

If you have some self respect left you can instead read Miles to Memories reminding you to product change to Freedom or Doctor of Credit gaming out bonused restaurant spend on other, better cards.

Glancing at my Feedly did get me thinking about an interesting distinction: the one between travel benefits and travel hacking benefits.

Travel benefits are nice and not worth paying for

It's trivial to game out situations which would make credit card travel benefits pay for themselves many times over:

• Trip delay and baggage delay insurance. Chase will reimburse up to $500 per ticket for unreimbursed meals and hotel expenses if a delay forces you to stay overnight. With a $95 annual fee, using this benefit once could conceivably pay for 5 years of annual fees;
• Trip cancellation insurance. In covered situations, Chase will reimburse up to $10,000 in non-refundable reservations. That is a large multiple of $95.
• Primary car rental insurance. If you rent a car with your Chase Sapphire Preferred, the rental car is insured by Chase, so you don't need to make a report to your own insurance company.

If you have a Chase Sapphire Preferred, you should take advantage of those benefits. The last thing you want to do is pay for benefits and not use them.

But you also shouldn't pay for them. Here's why:

• You may already have cards that offer baggage delay and trip delay insurance. The Barclaycard Arrival+ covers up to $100 per day for up to 3 days when your baggage is delayed by 12 hours or more. The Citi Executive / AAdvantage offers up to $500 for baggage delays of 3 hours and $500 for trip delays of 3 hours or more, as does the Citi Prestige.
• You may already have cards that offer trip cancellation and interruption insurance — see above.
• Primary car rental insurance is not worth paying for, and virtually all your cards offer secondary car rental insurance. There are three kinds of insurance that matter when you're renting a car: a collision damage waiver, medical insurance, and personal liability. Your personal car insurance policy will usually include a collision damage waiver and personal liability policy. "Secondary" collision damage waiver policies, like those offered by most credit cards, will cover your deductible when filing a claim with your insurance company. When bloggers promote the advantages of primary rental car policies, they're gesturing at the fact that your insurance premium may go up when filing a claim with your insurance company. But you'll have to file a claim anyway if another vehicle is involved in your accident. Now, to be fair, that won't always be the case. My dad once backed a rental car into a tree and totaled it — that's the ideal use case of collision damage waivers. But it radically narrows the range of cases where you won't have to file a claim with your own insurance company, which is supposedly the evil avoided by primary rental car insurance.

You should know the benefits of your cards, and have a rough idea of what card to use for what kind of purchase. Personally, I use my Arrival+ MasterCard for pretty much everything, but you should certainly find the right combination of cards that works for you. The point is that you don't need to pay an extra $95 per year for those benefits; you likely already have them.

Travel hacking benefits can be worth paying for

For me, the difference between a travel hacking benefit and a travel benefit is that travel hacking benefits are available to be consciously exploited by the cardholder. No one would say they "hacked" their trip by paying for it with a Sapphire Preferred card, even if the trip was delayed enough to trigger the card's trip delay benefit. But someone who's going to pay for Global Entry can affirmatively sign up for a card that reimburses that expense and effectively spend the same $100 twice: once for Global Entry and once for a potentially-lucrative super-premium credit card.

As an exercise, here's a roundup of some travel hacking benefits that may be worth paying for, under the right circumstances:

• $100 Global Entry fee reimbursement. American Express Platinum and Business Platinum cards are supposed to reimburse this fee once every five years (the term of Global Entry enrollment), although I've heard reports that the reimbursement actually resets annually. Citi Prestige cards also provide this benefit once every five years, although the card is too new to know whether that limit is enforced in practice.
• Airline reimbursements. While statement credits are worth (much) less than cash, these are still benefits that can be actively gamed. The American Express Platinum and Business Platinum cards give $200 airline fee credits, which can be used as intended (for airline fees) or used to purchase gift cards with some airlines (for example, American Airlines). The Citi Prestige gives an even more generous $250 credit which can explicitly be used for airfares — no gift cards required.
• Lounge access. If you're going to pay for a lounge membership, it often costs the same amount to sign up for a credit card that gives lounge access, but may have auxiliary benefits as well. The American Express Delta Reserve card gives lounge access (but not the ability to bring in guests) when you fly on Delta-coded or Delta-operated flights and earns 1.5 SkyMiles per dollar when you spend exactly $30,000 or $60,000 in a calendar year. Its $450 annual fee is the same as an "Individual" Sky Club membership. The Citi Prestige and Executive / AAdvantage give Admiral's Club access for the cardholder and up to two guests, and at $450 each cost the same or less than an Admiral's Club membership for non-elites with AAdvantage. The Chase United Club card earns 1.5 United Mileage Plus miles per dollar spent, and has a $450 annual fee — $100 less than the annual membership fee for non-elites.
• Golf. The Citi Prestige offers a phenomenally complicated "free golf" benefit, which gives you up to 3 free rounds of golf per calendar year at select courses. The key thing to know is that it gives you, the cardholder, 3 free rounds of golf per calendar year. In other words, if you typically play golf in foursomes, it's a 25% discount — the benefit can't be applied to any other golfers in your group, or indeed to anyone else at all. But if you like to golf alone at premium courses, this is a straightforward way to do so for free.
• Fourth night free. The Citi Prestige offers an also-complicated-but-less-so fourth night free benefit when making reservations through their "Citi Concierge" (call 1-561-922-0158 to reach them). If you are in the habit of paying for 4-night hotel stays with cash, this benefit offers an almost unlimited upside to making such reservations through Citi Concierge. My suspicion is that the benefit isn't long for this world, but it might justify paying the card's annual fee if you have near-term plans to take advantage of it.

Conclusion

I don't pay $450 annual fees and I don't recommend my readers do, either. When you pay an annual fee, you're forced to pay it in cash. That's why the value you get from a card needs to be measured in cash, as well. The distinction I've tried to draw in this post is between benefits that have cash value and those that require you to assign speculative, emotional value to them.

When you read a blogger telling you how priceless peace of mind is, you know to keep at least one hand on your wallet.

That's not to say that the Chase Sapphire Preferred doesn't have generous flight delay benefits. Indeed, if you regularly fly United Airlines in and out of Chicago or Denver, you could face overnight flight delays on a weekly basis, and let Chase pick up the tab for your points-earning hotel stays.

But that's an extreme case. Virtually everyone will be better off looking to the travel benefits already offered by their credit cards, and if they have cash left in their budget for credit card annual fees they should spend it on cards that offer concrete, recurring, lucrative benefits.

Let's go rail running!

Earlier this year, Frequent Miler wrote about the possibility of achieving Amtrak elite status through "rail running:" boarding trains for the sole purpose of earning enough Tier Qualifying Points with Amtrak Guest Rewards to achieve "Select" status, which allows the transfer of up to 50,000 Amtrak Guest Rewards points to their hotel partners, Choice Privileges and Hilton HHonors.

Being based in Ann Arbor, Frequent Miler couldn't make the numbers work out for himself, but after writing about Choice Hotels a few times recently, I wondered under what circumstances rail running could make sense.

Making rail running work

Here are the basics of rail running for Amtrak elite status:

• 5,000 Tier Qualifying Points are required to earn Amtrak Guest Rewards Select status;
• 2 Tier Qualifying Points are earned per dollar spent on Amtrak fares, except;
• each one-way trip earns a minimum of 100 Tier Qualifying Points, but;
• a maximum of 4 one-way trips per calendar day are eligible for the 100-Tier-Qualifying-Point minimum.

The ideal rail run, then, is two one-way tickets in one direction, followed immediately by two one-way tickets back to your starting location. That means you need to find three stations which are close to each other in one direction and a train schedule that keeps you from having to wait very long at the second station you arrive at.

Do such stations and such a schedule, along with cheap enough prices to justify rail running, exist?

A few promising station constellations

There are a number of promising station constellations (three stations closely packed together) on the Pacific Surfliner route in California. Here's one:

• Oceanside, CA (OSD) — Carlsbad, CA - Village (CBV) — Carlsbad, CA - Poinsettia (POI)

Tickets for each leg cost $8.10 for AAA members on the random December day I checked, for a total cost of Select status of $405. Unfortunately the schedule doesn't allow for an immediate turn in either direction (although if you go northbound POI-CBV-OSD and then turn around you may be able to rely on the southbound train being delayed as it nears the end of its route — it only has to be delayed 6 minutes for you to make the connection).

Another candidate on the same Pacific Surfliner route is SNA-ANA-FUL, at the same price.

Down South, the City of New Orleans has a slightly longer, but cheaper option:

• Hazlehurst, MS (HAZ) — Brookhaven, MS (BRH) — McComb, MS (MCB)

AAA tickets on the same random December day cost $4.95 and $7.20, for a roundtrip cost of $24.30, or $303.75 for Amtrak Select status. Same-day turns only work starting Southbound, which would give you a leisurely 3 hour lunch in McComb, Mississippi.

Here's an easy one for our brothers in Philadelphia on the Keystone Service:

• Philadelphia, PA (PHL) — Ardmore, PA (ARD) — Paoli, PA (PAO)

Each leg costs $5.85 for AAA members, for a roundtrip cost of $23.40 and $292.50 for Amtrak Guest Rewards Select elite status. Best of all, the train operates frequently enough that you should be able to put together an easy same-day turn, for example departing Philadelphia at 4:45 PM and returning to Philadelphia at 6:25 PM.

Amtrak Guest Rewards points are valuable!

So far I haven't mentioned the fact that during the course of all this rail running, you'll also be earning redeemable Amtrak Guest Rewards points! At least 5,000 of them, in fact.

And since the point of this operation is to transfer your Amtrak Guest Rewards points to Choice Privileges, you have to assign those redeemable points at least $50 in value, since that's the cash value of the Ultimate Rewards points you'll save. In other words, to max out your annual 50,000 in Amtrak Guest Rewards points transfers to Choice Privileges, you only have to transfer 45,000 Ultimate Rewards points to Amtrak.

If you are thinking about rail running, wait until Amtrak runs a promotion

Amtrak periodically offers double points on paid travel, their so-called "Double Days" promotions. The last Double Days promotion ran from March 16 to May 16, 2015. If you wait until the next one, you'll be able to score even more redeemable points, saving yourself the corresponding number of Ultimate Rewards points when the time comes to transfer them into your Amtrak Guest Rewards account.

Conclusion

Researching this post was a lot of fun, but I fully understand most of my readers are not actually going to go rail running in order to achieve Amtrak elite status. Nonetheless, I think it's an idea that's more defensible than it appears at first blush, especially if you have your heart set on one of Choice Privileges' Preferred Hotels & Resorts.

If you decide to go rail running, remember: you need to book two one-ways in each direction to earn the maximum of 400 Tier Qualifying Points each day, and the goal of the game is finding the cheapest trips and shortest turnaround times possible!

Citi Double Cash Purchase Tracker — Revealed!

The Citi Double Cash is, at face value, a no-annual-fee, 2% cash back credit card. But rather than awarding 2% cash back on purchases, the geniuses in Citi's credit card division came up with a way to drag out their cash back awards over the life of a balance (compare to Barclaycard's practice of awarding Arrival+ miles as soon as purchases move to posted from pending status). 

According to the card's terms and conditions, there are two ways to earn cash back:

"Cash Back on Purchases: Unless you are participating in a limited time promotional offer, you will earn 1% cash back based upon eligible purchases appearing on your current month's billing statement. Eligible purchases you make will be accumulated in the 'Purchase Tracker' shown on your billing statement. The Purchase Tracker shows the balance eligible to earn cash back on payments each billing cycle.

"Cash Back on Payments: You will also earn 1% cash back on payments you make that appear on your current month's billing statement as long as the amount paid is at least the Minimum Payment Due that is printed on your billing statement and there is a balance in the Purchase Tracker. The balance in the Purchase Tracker is reduced by eligible payments you make. When the Purchase Tracker reaches $0, you won't earn cash back on payments until more eligible purchases are made."

This Rube Goldberg contraption raised a few obvious questions: what's a "Purchase Tracker?" How often is it updated? Most importantly, would payments made against purchases in the same billing cycle award all 2% in cash back when the statement closed, or would cardholders have to wait for a second statement to close before they earned the second 1% cash back?

Now that my first Citi Double Cash statement has closed, I'm prepared to reveal all.

What does a Purchase Tracker look like?

There are two versions of the Purchase Tracker: the one that appears on your billing statement, and the one that appears online. They reflect the same information, but in slightly different ways. Here's the Purchase Tracker that appears on my billing statement:

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And here's my online Purchase Tracker:

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As you can see, my Purchase Tracker reflects all the purchases and all the payments I made during my first billing statement, and I received 1% cash back on each.

The Purchase Tracker is not updated in real time

The online Purchase Tracker only reflects purchases and payments on your last billing statement; it is not updated in real time, and my best guess it that it's unnecessary to wait for your purchases to post before making payments against them.

In other words, all your purchases in the current billing cycle are added to your previous Purchase Tracker balance, and all your payments during the current billing cycle are compared to that new total. If your total payments are less than that new Purchase Tracker balance, you'll receive 1% cash back on the total payments amount.

Statement credit redemptions are not payments and are not supposed to reduce the Purchase Tracker

When redeeming your Double Cash cash back balance as a statement credit, you're informed that the redemption will not reduce the amount in your Purchase Tracker, since statement credit redemptions are not treated as payments.

On the one hand, that means you won't earn cash back on the amount of your statement credit redemption. On the other hand, that means that even when you pay off your entire remaining balance, you will still have a balance in your purchase tracker.

Direct Deposit redemptions aren't immediately available

While you can redeem your Double Cash cash back for statement credits immediately, you cannot redeem your balance as cash back deposited into a bank account until you initiate two ACH "pull" payments from that bank account. Since my "payments" were balance transfers from my new Chase Slate card, I did not have any eligible linked bank accounts, and made a statement credit redemption instead.

Conclusion

If you pay off your entire Citi balance before your statement closes each month, the Citi Double Cash card is a true 2% cash back card. If you instead take advantage of its 15-month 0% introductory APR by paying off your balance as slowly as possible, you won't receive the entirety of your second percent of cash back until you pay off your balance in your 15th month of card membership.

Fun with Choice Privileges Preferred Hotels & Resorts

On Friday I wrote a quick rundown on the basics of redeeming Choice Privileges points at their thousands of hotels all over the world at reasonable cost, compared to the big chains I usually write about. Readers were quick to point out that I had missed a key value proposition of the Choice Privileges program, which is their Preferred Hotels & Resorts collection. So let's rectify that today.

Preferred Hotels & Resorts can be more expensive than normal Choice properties

The Preferred Hotels & resorts collection cost between 30,000 and 60,000 Choice Privileges points per night, and each property's cost does not vary by season (indeed I don't know if it varies even from year to year).

Preferred Hotels & Resorts availability can be checked online...

Just navigate to the Participating Hotels page and click on "check availability" next to the property that interests you. There are three kinds of availability: "No Availability," "Availability," and "Minimum Stay Required."

At the property I looked at (Pier 2620 Fisherman's Wharf) the minimum stay requirement for many nights was 3 nights for arrivals on the given night, while earlier arrivals could stay through the restricted nights. Those restrictions likely vary by property.

...but cannot be booked online

To book a Preferred Hotels & Resorts property, you need to call the appropriate booking phone number. For US residents, it's 888-770-6800.

How do Preferred Hotels & Resorts compare?

With that out of the way, let's see if we can get any value from this program.

There are two easy places to watch for outsized value from this program: at the low, 30,000-point-per-night level and the high, 60,000-point-per-night level.

At the low level we see an imputed redemption value of $333 per night, which is competitive with low-to-mid-tier properties in all the chains but Hilton (it's competitive with top-tier Hilton properties).

At the high level, 50,000- and 60,000-point redemptions are competitive with mid-to-top-tier properties in all the chains but Hilton (where imputed redemption values top out at $352 per night).

At the bottom end I wasn't able to find any properties that cost more than $333 per night for a random date in August I searched. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but I certainly wouldn't stockpile Choice Privileges points on the off-chance of finding one.

At the top end, Drew at Travel is Free conveniently assembled 31 Preferred Hotel & Resort properties bookable with Choice Privileges points, all of which are among the top 500 hotels in the world, apparently according to Travel and Leisure. My value added is searching for prices at all 31 properties and seeing whether any are, in fact, good deals at 50,000 or 60,000 Choice Privileges points.

These are the only two of Drew's 31 properties where I found nightly rates exceeding the properties' imputed redemption values:

• Montage Beverly Hills – 60,000 points
• Montage Laguna Beach – 60,000 points

That's not to say that the other properties aren't nice, or expensive. They're just not expensive enough to justify manufacturing the spend required to stay there on a Choice Privileges co-branded credit card (for the dates I searched).

Squaring the circle: the Amtrak co-branded credit card and Amtrak elite status

As Drew points out when he writes about Choice Privileges, the key to maximizing the program is not earning Choice Privileges points through hotel stays or through co-branded credit card earning. The key is transferring points from Amtrak Guest Rewards to Choice Privileges at an extremely favorable ratio: 5,000 Amtrak Guest Rewards point can be converted into 15,000 Choice Privileges points, and Amtrak Guest Rewards is a transfer partner of Chase Ultimate Rewards.

In other words, it's possible to buy Choice Privileges points for a third of a cent each (rather than 1.1 cents each) by transferring your Ultimate Rewards points first to Amtrak, then to Choice Privileges.

But there a catch.

According to Amtrak's website:

"Members that are active cardholders of the Amtrak Guest Rewards MasterCard issued by Chase Bank with an Amtrak travel spend on the card of over $200 per calendar year may redeem up to 25,000 Amtrak Guest Rewards points per calendar year for hotel points and Audience Rewards.

"Current Amtrak Guest Rewards Select or Select Plus Members...may redeem up to 50,000 Amtrak Guest Rewards points per calendar year for hotel points and Audience Rewards.

"Current Amtrak Guest Rewards Select Executive Members...are not subject to point limits when redeeming for hotel points and Audience Rewards."

Since the Amtrak Guest Rewards co-branded credit card is no longer available for new applicants, unless you already have the card, you'll need Amtrak elite status in order to take advantage of Amtrak Guest Rewards points transfers to Choice Privileges.

[update 7/13/15]

Here's the actual dollar cost of Choice Privileges properties when transferring Ultimate Rewards points to Choice through Amtrak:

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Choice Privileges is a weird loyalty program

On Monday I wrote for the first time about Choice Privileges, the loyalty program of Choice Hotels International. They have a seemingly generous rewards program, with their Barclaycard-issued Choice Privileges Visa Signature card earning 2 Choice Privileges points per dollar spent everywhere, and reward nights starting at just 6,000 points, but the program is weird enough to explore in depth before diving in.

Choice Privileges does not have an award chart

The range of points required for redemptions at Choice Privileges hotels is located nowhere on the Choice Privileges website.

But the points required for an award night at any given hotel is not a secret! Anyone can search for Choice Privileges hotels in a given city and select "Choice Privileges Reward Night" as the rate type. You'll see all the Choice properties in the city and their points cost (if rooms are available).

Choice Privileges reward nights cannot be booked far in advance

Choice Privileges includes in their "Rules and Regulations" the following restriction:

"Members who have not yet achieved Elite Status must make their free night reservation personally through the Program Line or through their online account no more than 30 days prior to planned arrival for stays in their country of residence. Sixty days prior to their planned arrival at all other locations worldwide."

Needless to say, this is not how most hotel loyalty programs work.

Co-branded credit cardholders do get to book nights 50 days in advance, which may allow them to steal a march on non-elite, non-cardholders.

Choice Privileges has hotels everywhere

It is genuinely weird looking at how many properties this chain I've never had any interest in has all over the world. Use Award Mapper to check out cities you're interested in and marvel at all the little orange dots.

Choice's "no blackout date" policy is meaningless

Many hotel chains have poorly-enforced or disingenuous "no blackout date" policies. Here is Choice's (although from context it apparently only applies to "Points Plus Cash" reservations):

"There are no blackout dates.  Restrictions, taxes and fees apply.  There are over 1,500 Choice hotels with reward nights available at 8,000 points or less.  Reward night locations worldwide are available from 6,000 to 35,000 points (excluding Australasia, where reward nights are available up to 75,000 points)."

There's no enforcement mechanism. There's no explanation. There's no guarantee at all. And indeed, it can be pretty tough to find award availability at some properties, especially within 30 days.

Choice Privileges could be the best loyalty program for many travelers

I don't have the same focus on luxury travel many bloggers — and, to be honest, many of my readers — do. But I also don't have the attitude of those who say "I don't care about my hotel — it's just somewhere to sleep." I care about my hotels a lot because I spend a lot of time in them! Hotels are fun! And after spending a week researching Choice properties around the world, I don't think Choice hotels are for me.

But if you're looking for a single loyalty program that will have properties virtually everywhere you go, and a credit card that doesn't require you to navigate bonus categories, you could do a lot worse than Choice Privileges and its co-branded Barclaycard-issued Visa Signature card. Here's the imputed redemption value table I posted on Monday:

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Those imputed redemption values are low, and they're especially low in the context of where properties fall within the Choice Privileges category distribution. Here are some downtown properties in Sydney, Australia, according to Award Mapper:

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The 16,000 point Econo Lodge (actually the Hotel Harry, an Ascend Hotel Collection member — I believe Award Mapper's Choice Privileges database is out-of-date) wins with a $178 IRV, compared to the Hilton's $222-$259 (depending on season) IRV, the Park Hyatt's $666 IRV (or $300 in Ultimate Rewards points), and the Radisson's $222 IRV.

It's easy to find cheaper hotels in Sydney in July (it's winter down there), but in the Southern summer paying $178 for what seems like a perfectly nice downtown hotel will seem like a steal — if you can find award availability at that rate!

Quick hit: activating Sam's Club gift cards

Back in June I wrote about my super-boring strategy to take advantage of an American Express Offer for You of $20 off $20 or more spent at Sam's Club.

It turned out to be anything but boring: only today was the last of my $50 Sam's Club gift cards activated. Here's the story, and some advice on how to proceed if you've been having trouble with your own gift cards.

Activating Sam's Club gift cards is supposed to be easy

When $50 Sam's Club gift cards are shipped, you receive two e-mails, confusingly with almost identical subject lines:

• Your UPS shipping confirmation and tracking number is in an e-mail with the subject line "Your SamsClub.com order has shipped‏;"
• The link to activate your Sam's Club gift cards is sent almost simultaneously, and has the subject line "Your Sam's Club Gift Card has Shipped‏."

If you don't know that Sam's Club gift cards require activation in the first place, you might be forgiven for not even opening the apparently-duplicate e-mails.

Guilty.

Here's what my inbox looked like:

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As you can see, half are actual shipment notifications, and half are activation codes.

The activation process is unreliable

Sometimes clicking on the activation link works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sam's Club is aware of the problem.

When cards won't activate, you need to call

To have your cards manually activated, call the number on your receipt (888-537-5503) and select menu options 3, 5, and 7, in that order. You'll be connected very quickly (within a few seconds) to a representative, who will ask for your order number, shipping and billing address, and the gift card number.

The gift card number they need is the number underneath the silver strip

Sam's Club phone representatives have apparently never actually seen Sam's Club gift cards, and every single representative I spoke to asked me for "the number on the back of the card." If you look at an actual gift card, however, you'll immediately see that there are 3 "numbers on the back of the card," and not one representative knew which number they needed to send an activation request.

It turns out it's the gift card number located under the scratch-away silver strip.

If at first you don't succeed, call, call again

My orders were shipped between June 3 and June 5, and were just finally activated on July 6 and July 7. That's a long time, and I wasn't sitting idle; I was calling every 2-3 days in order to find out the status of the activation request. In fact, I didn't make any progress until I had the phone representative open an actual support ticket, which finally seemed to set the gears in motion, and my cards were all activated within 5-6 days after that.

Conclusion

At the end of the day (or, in this case, the end of a month of waiting), I got a few hundred dollars of household supplies from Walmart at a generous 70% discount through this American Express Offer for You, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat, even knowing how much of an aggravation it would turn out to be. Walmart sells a lot of useful things!

I hope this post will reduce any readers' aggravation if they find themselves going through the same process, now or in the future.

Arrival+ devaluation and imputed redemption values in a 2.11% world

Last week a number of bloggers "confirmed" some forthcoming changes to the Barclaycard Arrival+ MasterCard. The trouble is, they confirmed different things!

• Amol at Travel Codex wrote: "The first changes for new cardmembers should go into effect sometime in September, although it may vary for different people depending on when their cardmember year begins."
• Matt Zuzolo at Bankrate wrote: "These changes will go into effect in November for cardholders who got the card before Sept. 30, 2014, and in August 2016 for cardholders who got the card on or after Oct. 1, 2014."
• Summer Hull at Mommy Points wrote: "For those interested in applying for either version of the card, Barclaycard is targeted mid-July for a relaunch of the products for new customers.  At that time the 5% rebate on travel purchases will be in place, but it won’t expand to all categories until November (reportedly for tech related issues)."

I really like my Arrival+ card

As a reminder, I don't have any third-party credit card affiliate links anywhere on this site (although I do have a couple of personal referral links on my Support the Site! page).

So I don't have any incentive to write about cards I don't carry or cards I don't love. And I really like my Arrival+ card:

• True Chip-and-PIN functionality makes it fantastic for buying train tickets when you've just arrived in Europe, without exchanging money at extortionate airport rates;
• "Travel redemptions" are eminently gameable;
• Barclaycard treats a wide range of online transactions as purchases, and MasterCards are much more widely accepted for such transactions than American Express cards;
• I've had the annual fee waived on both of my account anniversaries to date.

Two changes to be aware of

While I'm not entirely convinced when the new changes will come into effect, all the reporting so far indicates that they will eventually be applied to existing cardholders. For me, there are two key changes to think about:

• the Arrival+ mile rebate on travel redemptions will go down to 5% from 10%;
• and travel redemptions will start at $100 (10,000 Arrival+ miles).

The first change means that the card is, at best, a 2.11% cash back card, while the second change means that the $89 annual fee will no longer be eligible for rebate. In other words, if you can't get Barclaycard to waive the annual fee, you'll actually have to pay it.

That raises the breakeven point of manufactured spend on the card from $40,050 to $80,909 — that's the point at which you're making any profit over a straight 2% cash back card, if and only if you actually pay the $89 annual fee (if you have the annual fee waived, then the card is still strictly superior to a 2% cash back card like the Fidelity Investment Rewards American Express or Citi Double Cash).

Imputed Redemption Values in a 2.11% world

I use the term "imputed redemption values" to designate the amount you have to save on hotel points redemptions in order to justify earning hotel points rather than cash back on your most-profitable cashback-earning credit card. So far, I've been using 2.22% cash back as my benchmark, and you can find those imputed redemption values here, which will remain valid for existing Arrival+ cardholders, for now.

But the upcoming devaluation of the Arrival+ MasterCard means those values will not be relevant to new cardholders, so I've recalculated my imputed redemption values for the hotel chains I follow using both the new 2.11% maximum earning of the Arrival+ MasterCard and a straightforward 2% cash back earning rate, like that of the two cards mentioned above. I've also included the 2.22% earning for the benefit of existing Arrival+ cardholders.

Club Carlson

This calculation has been additionally updated to reflect the end of the last-night-free benefit for co-branded US Bank cardholders.

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Hilton HHonors

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Starwood Preferred Guest

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Marriott Rewards

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Hyatt Gold Passport

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IHG Rewards

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Choice Privileges

This is the first time I've included Choice Privileges, the loyalty program of the Choice Hotels chain, in my hotel analyses. The administration of this program appears to me to be a complete disaster, but they have a remarkable number of hotels all over the world and what appear to me to be fairly generous imputed redemption values.

I'll have a more in-depth post coming on this program later this week, but for now, here's the imputed redemption value of manufacturing spend with the Barclaycard-issued Choice Privileges Visa Signature card, which earns 2 Choice Privileges points per dollar spent with the card:

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Those are obviously very competitive imputed redemption values for top-tier properties. The only trouble is that it's wildly unclear to me whether Choice Hotels actually has any top-tier properties.

For example, the excellently-located Comfort Inn Central Park West costs just 25,000 Choice Privileges points. But a paid stay in July (Choice Hotels only allows award bookings within 30 days for non-elite members) costs just $209 — well below the $278 imputed redemption value for such a stay.