Some personal news

Yesterday I lost my job, over what I would call a difference of opinion: I thought I was doing a good job, and my boss thought I was doing a bad job, and my boss had the tie-breaking vote.

Background

About 3 years ago I started working extremely part time in a remote “back-office” position. It was fun and I was learning a lot. Over time, the firm grew, and I got more hours. As I spent more time at that job, I had less and less time for my blogs (here and at Saverocity) and my readers. That felt bad, but I was making so much more money working than I ever did blogging that it seemed like the right trade-off. For the last few months I’ve been working full-time, and have barely had any time to write anything, and that felt really bad, but once again, the money was good so I felt ok about the trade-off.

And then I got fired, which obviously doesn’t make the trade-off look very good in hindsight.

Everything is fine for now

I’ve been incredibly fortunate that as my blogging has slowed down, and I only managed to get out a Subscribers-only Newsletter every month or two, a lot of subscribers stuck with me, so I still have a trickle of income coming in from my beloved readers.

After battling through 3 different broken IT systems, I have also put in my applications in for unemployment insurance, SNAP and Medicaid (after enjoying precisely one month of ACA exchange coverage), and while there will no doubt be lots of back and forth with those offices, now I have plenty of time to fill out paperwork, so I’m not terribly worried about paying the bills for the next few months.

All of which is to say, I’m not going to start a GoFundMe anytime soon. I’m not asking for charity — for now!

Going forward

On the other hand, now that blogging is going to be my only source of income for the time being, you should definitely subscribe to my blogs! To that end, I’m immediately reducing the price of a blog subscription from $25 to $15 per month. All subscribers with $20 and $25 subscriptions will see their recurring charge reduced to $15 (obviously readers with older subscriptions won’t see their rate increase).

Is this a bit counter-intuitive? It sure is! Reducing existing subscription rates will decrease my income from subscriptions by a couple hundred bucks a month, and needless to say, I’m not exactly thrilled about that. But the goal is to get my Newsletters and content in front of as many eyes as possible, to convince as many people as possible that my content is worth supporting. If the blog, my Subscribers-only Newsletters, and the (now vast) Newsletter Archive aren’t worth $15 per month, then so be it.

But I’d rather find out sooner than later!

Conclusion

If you like the blog, and it’s not going to break the bank, please subscribe! This site has always been a labor of love, and it’s an incredible feeling to make a living helping people pay as little as possible for the trips that they want to take. If you can’t afford a subscription for now, rest assured the blog itself will always be free (and hopefully a lot busier, now that I’ve got some free time on my hands).

Travel hacking during the plague

I know my gentle readers have a lot on their minds these days, but so does everybody else. That makes the current crisis as good a time as any to step back and see if there are any unusual opportunities to deploy your very specific set of skills.

What to do with existing miles and points balances

This is the easy part. Since you already have the miles and points in your account, you should already be looking for opportunities to strategically redeem them, and those opportunities are now everywhere. Even with reduced flight frequencies as the airlines go into shutdown mode, there are thousands of unsold seats airlines are trying to remainder off by opening up award availability. To take as an example the first route I looked at, non-stop economy and premium cabin award space is wide open between Washington, DC, and Munich during Oktoberfest.

Remember: you don’t need to plan on taking any flights you book. If the crisis hasn’t abated by the time your travel dates come around, the flights will be canceled and you’ll be refunded. If the airline goes under, your miles won’t be any good anyway. The point is, as always, to redeem the miles and points you have for the trips you want to take. The fact that it’s hard to imagine what the world will look like 3, 6, or 9 months from now shouldn’t stop you from jumping on the opportunities that are available here and now.

The same goes for hotel reservations. For example, a casual check revealed 5-night award availability over New Years at the Grand Wailea, A Waldorf Astoria Resort. As above, you don’t need to actually intend to take the trip, but you should certainly take advantage of increased award availability now, while paid bookings are non-existent.

What to earn now

Your existing miles and points balances are a “sunk cost,” and you need to set them aside when considering what to earn now, unless you’re very close to redeeming one of the newly-available awards mentioned above. The last thing you want to do is chase award availability that’s gone by the time you earn enough points. Redeem your existing balance if you can, and forget about them if you can’t. If you don’t anticipate traveling, or even booking travel, for at least three months, you should pivot hard to cash back.

Fortunately, we’re in a great spot for earning cashback. Discover it cards will still earn 5% cashback at grocery stores for the next few days, and then you can pivot to Chase Freedom cards to earn 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar (in both cases on up to $1,500 in spending per card). Safeway, Meijer, and Giant are all running promotions on PIN-enabled prepaid debit card purchases (either in the form of immediate rebates or gas discounts) so this is as good a time as it gets to hammer out those rewards.

What about transferrable points?

So far, so good: if you have points, redeem them for refundable reservations while award availability is wide open. But what about your points balances which can be transferred in only one direction, like Chase Ultimate Rewards and American Express Membership Rewards points?

With these points, it’s necessary to think probabilistically. This is true all the time, but it’s especially true when we’re facing this level of uncertainty.

Once you’ve transferred a point from your flexible points currency to a given program, there are three possible outcomes: you’ll redeem it for a high value (expensive flight, premium cabin), you’ll redeem it for a low value (cheap flight, economy cabin), or you won’t redeem it at all (expiration, bankruptcy).

The same is true if you don’t transfer the point: you can redeem it for a high value (1.5 cents per point with a Chase Sapphire Reserve, for instance), or a low value (1 cent per point in cash, for example).

It’s common to ask the question, should you speculatively transfer points during promotions that award bonuses on inbound transfers? This is a version of the same question: should you speculatively transfer points to book awards you aren’t certain you’ll use just because award availability is wide open?

Manufactured spend, reselling, portal cashback

Two things are true: the present moment is characterized by unusually high risk and uncertainty. Many businesses, large and small, will survive the calamity. Many businesses, large and small, will not. That naturally creates an elevated level of uncertainty in otherwise-calm markets.

Metabank seems to do a pretty good job of manufacturing and distributing prepaid debit cards under normal conditions, but I don’t know whether they have enough cash on hand, or access to federal bailout money, to survive a total shutdown of economic activity.

Likewise most of the cashback portals seem to have low overhead and predictable cash flow. But if online spending shuts down for the next three months, where is their cash flow going to come from? Without it, how are customer cashback payouts going to be funded?

One response to these conditions is to scale back your activities to reduce your personal exposure to these vulnerabilities. That’s a good, natural response and no one will ask questions if you say you took the second quarter of 2020 off to see how things shook out.

But I’ve been around long enough to know that some people are going to be scaling way up, in order to take advantage of huge discounts today to reap outsized profits tomorrow. That’s not for me — I’m a small fish in a very, very large pond, but the folks who pull it off are going to be bragging about it on Twitter, or whatever the post-plague version of Twitter is, for the next 30 years.

Replacing a (potentially) compromised Visa prepaid debit card

If you play this game long enough, you guaranteed to see everything eventually. In many ways, I think travel hackers have a better view into the guts of the US financial system than the people who designed it, because we get to see it from every angle.

There have been lots of report of compromised MasterCard gift cards over the years, typically taking the form of packaging that has been opened and resealed after the card’s data has been swiped. I still haven’t encountered that one, but during the recent Safeway promotion for $15 off two $100 Visa gift cards (a classic negative-cost opportunity to manufacture spend), I ran into what I suspect was a compromised Visa card.

Stuck packaging, missing CVV2, dead magnetic strip

My hackles were first raised when trying to open the card’s packaging, and found it was much harder to open than usual — remember I’d been loading up on these cards for several days, so had a good sense of how easy they typically are to open. This was annoying, but not alarming, since I’ve encountered multiple versions of these cards, so I assumed that I had happened to grab either an earlier or newer generation off the shelf.

Once I’d cracked it open, more or less shredding the original packaging, I immediately noticed that only the last digit of the security code on the back was visible. The obvious problem here was that it meant I was unable to check the card’s balance online, since the website requires you to enter all three digits. Now I was not just annoyed, but worried.

In principle to liquidate the card all I needed were the last four digits on the front of the card, which work as the card’s PIN at money order retailers. Nevertheless, out of an abundance of caution, I used my home credit card reader to see if the card itself had been tampered with, and discovered that the magnetic strip was completely dead.

I want to stress, despite these three clues, I have no proof that the card was actually tampered with in any way. Old packaging, sticky glue dots on the card’s backside, and improper handling could easily explain all three of the issues I saw. Nevertheless, I needed a replacement.

Metabank mailed me one for free

To request a replacement, I called the number on the back of the card and eventually navigated my way to a customer service representative. I explained the situation to him and he asked for the long string of digits above the card’s bar code. Using that information, he told me that the card’s value was still in place. Since I knew (but didn’t tell him) that the card had also been demagnetized, I insisted on a replacement.

I placed the call on the 18th and was assured the replacement card would arrive within 7-10 days. I actually received it on the 24th, just 6 days after my call.

Conclusion

In my case, requesting a replacement was easy since the card’s value hadn’t been used yet, and I want to stress, I do not know whether it was maliciously compromised or simply defective. Nonetheless, I want to make readers aware that if you run into a similar situation, resolving it is relatively painless, as long as you act quickly after discovering the problem. Had the card’s value already been drained, I presume the process would have been substantially more complicated and time-consuming.

Manufactured spend with and without promotions and bonuses

On my way to the store the other day I realized that we hadn’t seen a really good grocery store promotion in a while. The beginning of December featured a Safeway deal for $10 off $100 in Visa gift cards, and Giant offered gas points on Visa gift cards during a similar period, but it’s been a slow couple months since then.

It occurred to me that it might be useful to write up a list of the most common promotions we see come up repeatedly, and why they’re worth watching for. These aren’t secrets, in fact the public travel hacking blogosphere and Twitter typically blow up each time they come around, but rather a sort of index of the most valuable promotions so less-experienced folks might learn what to watch for.

Grocery Stores

Grocery stores are one of the most widely, albeit not universally, available merchants for manufactured spend, since they’re present in most larger communities and typically sell one or more brand of PIN-enabled prepaid debit cards.

Without promotions, manufacturing grocery store spend depends in large part on the cards you have available. I think of grocery store spend as giving me “about” a 50% discount off paid travel, with the US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards earning 2 Flexpoints per dollar (worth 1.5 cents each), and the American Express Hilton Surpass earning 6 Honors points per dollar (worth “about” 0.5 cents each, albeit with the possibility of much higher value redemptions at top-tier properties and on 5-night award stays). The American Express EveryDay Preferred and Gold cards offer 4.5 and 4 Membership Rewards points per dollar, respectively, although with certain additional restrictions (I do not currently carry either card).

That’s a solid core savings on paid travel, and these days it represents the majority of my day-to-day manufactured spend.

During promotions, grocery store manufactured spend can be profitable even if you don’t hold those cards (and even more profitable if you do). The three main types of grocery store promotions are cash discounts, grocery discounts, and gas discounts.

A cash discount is the best form any promotion can take, and you should always be on the lookout for them. Here are some recent examples, and what to watch for:

• Safeway: $10 off $100 in prepaid debit cards. For all such promotions, always pay attention to whether the terms apply to “$100 gift cards” or to “$100 in gift cards.” The former language may mean the promotion requires you to buy lower-denomination, fixed-value cards, while the latter language means you can apply the promotion to higher-denomination, variable-value cards. The “good” version of this promotion was available in September (Visa), October (MasterCard), and November (Visa and MasterCard) of last year. An example of the “bad” version was offered in September on MasterCard gift cards.

• Giant Eagle: $10 off $100 or $150 in prepaid debit cards. This deal was offered in June and November (Visa) of last year, and in December of 2018 (MasterCard).

A grocery discount is a promotion that requires you to buy “something” in addition to a prepaid debit card in order to realize your savings. It’s not quite as valuable as a cash discount, because it virtually guarantees “breakage:” buying items in excess of the required amount in order to trigger the discount. If a promotion gives $15 off $15 in grocery purchases, you’re likely to grab items costing $16 or $17 in order to make sure you’re over the threshold to trigger the discount. Some recent examples:

• Giant: $15 off $15 in groceries when you buy $250 or more in Visa gift cards (June) and $10 off $10 in groceries when you buy $100 in Visa gift cards (July).

• Hy-Vee: $10 Hy-Vee gift card when you spend $125 on Visa gift cards (December, 2016). This form of promotion is actually slightly more flexible than a grocery discount since Hy-Vee gift cards can be spent on a wider range of items.

The final form of grocery store promotion, gas discounts, is the least valuable. I don’t say that because I don’t own a car, but rather because unless you literally drive for a living it’s virtually impossible to redeem as many gas points as you can earn during a single week’s promotion.

Take for example a typical promotion offering 3 fuel points per dollar spend on Visa gift cards at Giant. The first $500 Visa gift card you buy earns you $1.50 per gallon off your next tank of gas, worth $15 on a 10-gallon tank of gas, or $30 on a 20-gallon tank of gas. That’s a good deal, better even than the fixed cash or grocery discounts discussed above.

The trouble is, unlike cash or groceries (at least the canned, paper, and cleaning goods I typically buy), gas points both expire and are worth less, the more of them you earn. Filling up a 20-gallon tank twice in a month might be reasonable. Filling it up 4 times in a month is possible if your commute is long enough and your fuel efficiency low enough. But at that point you’ve only accounted for four $500 prepaid debit cards, $2,000 in spend, and perhaps $60 in credit card rewards. That lack of scalability is why I consider gas promotions to be the lowest-value grocery store promotions.

Office Supply Stores

Like grocery store manufactured spend, office supply store manufactured spend has the feature of being worthwhile all the time on cards that bonus office supply store spend, but much more broadly profitable during periodic promotions.

Without promotions, someone with a Chase ink Plus, Bold, or Cash card can simply buy $300 Visa gift cards from Staples.com, paying an $8.95 shipping fee and earning 1,545 Ultimate Rewards points per card. At 1.25 cents per point this is again a minimum discount of “about” 50% off paid travel booked through the Ultimate Rewards portal, with an even higher discount if you also carry the Chase Sapphire Reserve and redeem points for 1.5 cents each.

But during promotions, even unbonused office supply store spend may be worthwhile. When Staples waives activation fees on Visa or MasterCard gift cards, your only cost is your time and liquidation fees. Earning 300 Ultimate Rewards points with a Chase Freedom Unlimited while paying $1 in liquidation fees sounds to me like a good deal. At that point, the question simply comes down to whether or not you can scale the deal.

Likewise, when Office Depot and OfficeMax offer $15 off $300 in gift cards, as they did in December, it doesn’t really matter what credit card you use to earn rewards, since you’re virtually guaranteed to come out ahead no matter what.

Conclusion: promoted, unpromoted, or unbonused?

There are, of course, unbonused manufactured spend opportunities available year-round, like the Vanilla prepaid debit cards available at many drug stores, the Metabank cards available at Simon Mall locations, or the lower-denomination fixed-value cards available at stores like Bed Bath & Beyond.

The interesting question is: what is going to make you spring into action? if you’re grinding it out, manufacturing spend all day every day, then any given promotion on any given day is just icing on the cake, perhaps encouraging you to free up some credit limit headroom to maximize it on your most valuable credit cards, but nothing more.

On the other hand, even if your time is too valuable to justify manufacturing spend on a day-to-day basis, there may be promotions that come around every month, quarter, or year that motivate you to wring every last dollar, roll of toilet paper, or tank of gas out of them.

The calculation is up to you, but hopefully the suggestions above help get you on the right track.

Travel hacking in weak periods of manufactured spend

Sometimes it feels like the travel hacking community only has two speeds: greed and panic. It’s always either the golden age of manufactured spend or its funeral. Worse yet, it’s people who have been playing the game the longest that are most prone to these mood swings, even though they should have enough experience to know better!

The unfortunate fact is, if you aren’t able to stay involved in the community through periods of weak opportunity, you’re not going to be around when periods of peak opportunity return. With that in mind, I thought I’d give a little pep talk and share some strategies for surviving through the lean times.

Clean up your credit card portfolio

This is always good advice, but it’s especially good advice in periods of limited opportunity. American Express recently announced they were breaking their Delta Platinum co-branded credits cards by increasing the annual fee to $250 and ending the bonus redeemable miles earned when you meet the $25,000 and $50,000 spend thresholds. In periods of peak opportunity, those changes might be negligible, while in periods of weak opportunity they have turned the card into a $250 companion ticket that doesn’t even include their entire route network, so I’ll be cancelling when my next annual fee is due.

Pivot to signup bonuses and annual benefits

If manufactured spend is going to play a smaller role in your travel hacking strategy, then logically signup bonuses and recurring benefits should take on a larger role.

Chase World of Hyatt credit cards aren’t very useful for manufactured spend (unless you’re spending your way to Globalist status), but offer a free Category 1–4 Hyatt night each year, which is almost certain to cover the card’s $95 annual fee, and currently give up to 50,000 bonus points on $6,000 in spend.

Likewise the Bank of America Alaska Airlines credit cards aren’t very attractive in periods of unlimited manufactured spend, but their annual companion tickets are extremely valuable; why not pick one or more up while times are slow?

Focus on one or two goals

When opportunities are plentiful, just about everything becomes worthwhile: hotel points, airline miles, cashback, chasing status, mileage running, reselling. When times are lean, you can focus on a few concrete goals.

A 5-night award stay at a top-tier Hilton property costs 380,000 Hilton Honors points, or roughly $64,000 in grocery store spending on an American Express Surpass card. If your liquidation options are limited, that may be all the manufactured spend you can do in a year — but you still get a 5-night award stay at a top-tier Hilton property! A quick glance at winter holiday rates at the Grand Wailea, A Waldorf Astoria Resort, suggests a cash price of about $11,000. I’m not going to pay that much for a 5-night stay — but $64,000 in manufactured spend is well within the realm of possibility.

I don’t fly Southwest, but it’s easy to imagine those who do finding it worthwhile to spend $120,000 per year on their co-branded credit cards in order to earn a companion pass. That works out to $10,000 per month, or roughly $1,000 every 3 days. In times of peak opportunity, that might be a rounding error, but even when times are lean it’s easily manageable if it’s your only goal.

Get creative

Everybody has opportunities they know about but don’t pursue because during fat years, the juice doesn’t seem worth the squeeze. There’s nothing wrong with that: most people pursue the techniques that are most interesting and rewarding for them. You may not like buying and depositing money orders, but love tracking gift cards in a spreadsheet for resale. We’re different, and that’s great.

But when your favorite liquidation avenues close, you may find that you have the time (and need) to at least explore those other options. Maybe gift card reselling isn’t at much work as you think it is. Maybe your office supply stores are better stocked than you thought. Maybe specialized gift cards are easier to liquidate than you expected.

Conclusion

In my experience, most people get into travel hacking through one big discovery. For me, it was finding out that Kiva loans triggered the “charitable contribution” bonus on the US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards card., which meant I was earning up to 6% in travel rewards on short-term loans.

And likewise, most people fall out of travel hacking when their one big discovery ends, as all deals eventually do. If you cut your teeth buying coins, then money orders seem like a pale imitation. If you started with Tio payments, then it’s hard to get excited about Plastiq payments. And if you flew around the world with Plastiq payments, the next deal isn’t going to seem very exciting.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and nobody is obliged to keep travel hacking after the hobby loses their interest. But let’s not pretend it’s travel hacking that quit; it was you.

Reminder: restrictions do differ between different shopping portals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not all shopping portals have identical restrictions

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

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

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

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

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While Lemoney offers 4% cashback to everyone:

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Conclusion

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

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

Microhacking fixed-value prepaid debit cards: when is it worth it?

Long-time readers know that for many years my main method of prepaid debit card liquidation was through Walmart money orders, which typically allowed me to liquidate $2,000 in debit cards per trip, and if the cashier was in the right mood, potentially even more than that. The game is always changing, and that avenue has lost most of its interest for me in the last few months: having a blocked ID meant making smaller transactions, if I was able to liquidate anything at all. What makes sense at one success rate and volume makes less sense under different conditions, and that’s fine (if regrettable).

The key advantage of Walmart money orders was volume. Even total costs as high as a penny per point might conceivably be worth paying if you can buy enough miles and points at that rate: $1,600 for a round-trip flight to Europe or Asia in business class is a pretty good deal, after all (with economy even cheaper).

With that liquidation opportunity in my past, I naturally got to thinking about other opportunities, and when and whether they’re worth pursuing.

Office supply stores

Office Depot/OfficeMax and Staples both regularly run promotions on Visa and MasterCard prepaid debit cards. The OD/OM promotions typically offer $10 or $15 off $300 or more in gift card purchases, and the Staples promotions usually waive the activation fee, which amounts to the same thing within a dollar or two. If you have a legacy Chase Ink Plus/Bold or Ink Cash card, these promotions are always worth emptying out the shelves of your local stores for: 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar are worth at least 5% cash back and potentially much more than that if transferred to a high-value travel partner.

The current promotion is for $15 off $300 in Visa purchases, though the only store in my area was wiped out on the first day.

Grocery store fixed-value cards

For the last week I’ve been taking advantage of Safeway’s promotion for $10 off fixed-value prepaid MasterCard debit cards, which brings the total price of a $100 gift card down to $95.95 (after the $5.95 activation fee). This is a good opportunity to illustrate the value of volume:

• purchasing a $100 prepaid card for $95.95 using a credit card that earns 3% in rewards at grocery stores yields a profit of $6.93 before liquidation.

• purchasing a $1000 prepaid card for $1003.95 using a credit card that earns 2% in rewards yields a profit of $16.13 before liquidation.

Mechanically, paying full price for a higher value card yields more profit than paying a discounted price for a lower value card.

In general, I don’t try to put a value on the time I spend manufacturing spend. After all, I like getting out of the house and going for walks, so it would seem strange to “bill” myself for the time I spend doing something I enjoy.

It’s equally true that if the same time can be spent doing something more profitable, rather than less profitable, it would be more profitable to do that instead! That brings us to another interesting question.

Grocery store variable-value cards

Grocery stores also sometimes offer discounts on variable-value cards, and when they do it’s almost always worth maximizing the value of those promotions, whether it takes the form of gas points or grocery discounts.

The interesting thing is that depending on your liquidation costs, it may still be more profitable to buy unbonused variable-value cards than discounted fixed-value cards. Using the same logic as above:

• purchasing a $100 prepaid card for $95.95 using a credit card that earns 3% in rewards at grocery stores yields a profit of $6.93 before liquidation.

• purchasing a $500 prepaid card for $505.95 using the same credit card yields a profit of $9.23 before liquidation.

Consequently, if your liquidation costs are low and fixed for each card, you’re better off buying the more expensive, high value card. If your liquidation costs are high and variable, the discounted, lower-value card may be more profitable.

Conclusion

These three examples aren’t meant to be comprehensive, but rather to spell out the logic I use when deciding which opportunities are worth pursuing. Travel hacking is not just intensely localized, it’s also intensely personalized: the opportunities I have available aren’t the same ones you do, not just because we live in different regions of the country, but because we have different abilities and responsibilities. A person with limited mobility may need to do as much volume as possible in as few trips as possible, while a traveling salesman may have the opportunity to visit dozens of different stores per day.

And to me, that’s not just fine, it’s great! If we didn’t know different things, we wouldn’t have anything to learn from each other.

Barclaycard gutting Arrival+ travel benefits November 1

I’m not sure how old this news is since I rarely log into my credit card accounts on my desktop, but when I logged into my Barclaycard account the other day I was greeted by a foreboding message:

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Never a message you want to see from your primary credit card, and sure enough, a quick comparison of the old (current) and new Cardholder Guide to Benefits reveals the damage is near-total. Here’s are some of the most important changes.

Trip Delay

Most travel hackers prefer the more generous trip delay insurance provided by the Chase Sapphire family of cards, but since I don’t have one of those (I use a legacy Ink Plus to make my Ultimate Rewards points transferrable), I put most of my travel charges on my Arrival+ card, which currently offers a benefit of up to $300 for delays of 6 hours or more.

I can’t say that I “rely” on Barclay’s trip delay coverage since I’ve never actually used it (my only experience was using the Sapphire Preferred trip delay coverage), but the ability to earn some points, and possibly trigger a hotel promotion, on someone else’s dime at least partly makes up for the inconvenience of a long flight delay.

On November 1, the benefit disappears (it’s possible trips purchased before November 1 will still be covered, but I wouldn’t rely on that possibility).

Purchase Protection Benefits

I don’t know what else to call the suite of current benefits, which include “Extended Warranty,” “Price Protection,” “Purchase Assurance” (goods stolen or damaged within 90 days of purchase), and “Satisfaction Guarantee” (the ability to return items that the retailer refuses to refund).

These benefits all disappear November 1, and are replaced with “Cellular Telephone Protection.” Besides the obvious requirement you charge your monthly bill to the credit card in order to qualify, there are a number of additional requirements that I think would make my phone ineligible, particularly the exclusion of “Eligible Cellular Wireless Telephone(s) purchased from anyone other than a cellular service provider’s retail or internet store that has the ability to initiate activation with the cellular service provider.”

Since I bought my iPhone directly from Apple, which is not a cellular service provider, the question of whether my phone would be covered depends on precisely what work the word “or” is doing. In other words, is a phone eligible if it is purchased from a cellular service provider’s retail store or a cellular service provider’s internet store (the obvious grammatical reading), or is it eligible as long as it is purchased from a cellular service provider’s retail store, or from any internet store that has the ability to initiate activation with the cellular service provider?

Phones purchased directly from Apple would be excluded under the first reading but covered under the second.

The maximum benefit is $800 per claim and $1,000 per 12-month period, after a $50 deductible per claim, and you can make a maximum of 2 claims per 12-month period.

Unchanged Benefits

The card will continue to offer “Baggage Delay,” “Trip Cancellation and Interruption,” and “Travel Accident Insurance” (this is not medical insurance — it’s basically an accidental death and dismemberment policy that only applies during your trip), although there may be some changes to the coverage terms and amounts. The rental car collision damage waiver benefit also remains, and is still secondary to your primary auto insurance policy.

Conclusion

Obviously the loss of the trip delay benefit is the worst of these changes, and if you’re the kind of person who relies on trip delay reimbursement, you’re going to need to find another card. Besides the Sapphire family of cards, there are several more cards from Chase (United Explorer and Club, Marriott Bonvoy Bold and Boundless), US Bank (Altitude Reserve), that offer a trip delay benefit and that you might already carry for one reason or another. Additionally, American Express is reported to be adding a trip delay benefit to certain cards beginning January 1, 2020.

I don’t think it is reasonable for most people to pay an annual fee on a credit card they wouldn’t otherwise carry exclusively for the trip delay benefit, but if you’re already paying for it, you had better be using it!

Chase's missed opportunity to do the right thing

I mentioned in Friday’s post that the airport transfer I ordered through the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal to pick us up at the Sofia airport never arrived, and that we ended up taking the (cheap, convenient) subway instead. I wrote, “I have a request in with Ultimate Rewards to refund the points, so hopefully this mistake will end up being free, but overall it was a silly experience and waste of time.”

Oddly, that’s not how it worked out.

Chase wanted the transfer company’s permission to refund me

On my first call with Chase, on Thursday, October 10, I was placed on hold several times as the representative tried to contact the transfer company, but wasn’t ultimately able to. She told me they would contact the company and be in touch by phone or e-mail once they’d resolved the issue.

I received the first e-mail followup on Saturday, from the e-mail address “VNA-INTL.chasetravel@customercare.expedia.com,” which is obviously the e-mail address for the person at Expedia that handles Ultimate Rewards reservations:

“Thank you for contacting Chase Travel about Refund Request for your Budapest Express - Transfers on travel in dates Sep 08,2019 and travel out dates Sep 28,2019 .

“We have made multiple attempts but are still in the process of making contact with [Budapest Express - Transfers] for your Refund Request. Please expect an email update from us within 24 hour.

“Thank you for choosing Chase Travel.

“Sincerely,
”Arnold Fajardo
”Travel Consultant Supervisor
”Chase Travel”

Ignoring Arnold’s grammar, this is a very strange e-mail for multiple reasons: the dates of my trip were not September 8-September 28, they were September 27-October 9. The name of the transfer company is given as “Budapest Express - Transfers,” when the pickup was at the Sofia airport in Bulgaria, and the company in my original reservation was “P-Airbus,” which is obviously a nonsense, but it’s a different nonsense than “Budapest Express - Transfers.”

The transfer company didn’t give it

The next e-mail, from the same Expedia e-mail address, tried to break the news to me gently:

“Thank you for contacting Chase Travel about your cancellation request for your reservation at Budapest Express - Transfers.

“We have advocated your case with Budapest Express - Transfers and due to their policy in relation to your reason for cancelling your reservation, they have unfortunately denied your request.

“We apologize that their response was not more favorable.

“We apologize for the delay in answering your e–mail. We are currently experiencing an extremely high volume of e–mail requests preventing us from responding within our normal standards.

“Thank you for choosing Chase Travel.

“Sincerely,
”Alvin Elona
”Travel Consultant Supervisor
”Chase Travel”

Again, obviously I did not cancel my reservation for any reason. They simply never showed up.

I’m not mad about the points, I’m confused about the missed opportunity

Obviously, in the grand scheme of things, 2,000 Ultimate Rewards points aren’t that big a deal to me, and they certainly aren’t that big a deal to Chase. But in its own way, that makes the situation more, not less, confusing. I understand Chase doesn’t have any way to exercise control over the service providers Expedia uses. But when you’re putting your customers, with whom you have a direct relationship, completely in the hands of your partners, the obvious way to resolve partner disputes is to err on the side of caution. Instead, Chase decided to very mildly annoy me in order to save $25 because they’re not willing to stand up to their partner.

Like I say, I’m not mad, I’m just confused.

I would have been better protected using a credit card

The final piece of this microdrama is that if I had simply booked an airport transfer with a credit card, and they didn’t show up, my credit card company would have cheerfully reversed the charge within minutes. By putting customers through this absurd three-step dance, where Chase contacts Expedia, Expedia contacts their in-country partner, and then it’s up to the partner whether or not to grant a refund, Chase may save 25 bucks here and there, but also sends a loud and clear message not to trust them with third-party reservations.

It’s not going to bankrupt them, and it’s not going to bankrupt me, but that doesn’t make it a good business decision.

Balkans travel: don't make my mistakes, learn from them!

When I wrote up my then-upcoming trip to the Balkans, I was still a bit vague about how I planned to get around once we were there. I had previously traveled between Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade by train, so my hope was that we’d be able to do as much travel as possible that way. Ultimately, that’s not how it worked out, and the result was two pretty expensive mistakes (and one cheap one).

In the interest of making sure nobody else makes the same mistakes I did, here’s my guide to how I’d suggest putting together our trip the right way.

Sofia airport transfer

The right way to do it: Sofia’s international airport has a subway station just steps from the arrival hall. Simply follow the blue line marked with a capital “M” to either of the two exits it leads to (you’ll see what I mean when you get there). Tickets cost 1.60 leva each, and there’s a vending machine that accepts credit cards in the station so there’s no need to change money at extortionate airport rates.

What we did: remembering that Robert Dwyer at Milenomics had recently written about using Ultimate Rewards points for airport transfers, I thought it would be a nice treat to have a guy waiting in the arrival hall for us, given our late night arrival and unfamiliarity with the city. As Robert explains, the Ultimate Rewards booking process is a bit complicated, and I think I ultimately had to disable some security settings to complete the reservation, but I was ultimately able to pay about 2,000 Ultimate Rewards points for a $25 transfer. When we arrived around 9:00 pm, we dutifully followed the instructions to find the meeting point. Then we waited. And waited. And waited. Then we took the subway. I have a request in with Ultimate Rewards to refund the points, so hopefully this mistake will end up being free, but overall it was a silly experience and waste of time.

Sofia-Belgrade

The right way to do it: there are three ways to get between Sofia, Bulgaria, and Belgrade, Serbia.

• There is a train once per day, departing Sofia at 9:30 am (and departing Belgrade at 6:10 in the off-season and 9:12 during the summer). Tickets can only be bought with cash, and are about 40 leva each. In the summer (between roughly mid-June and mid-September), there is a direct train, while the rest of the year requires two transfers. The transfers are at the tiny stations of Dimitrovgrad and Nis and are very simple, since everyone is going to the same destination as you — just follow the most confident-looking person. The direct train takes about ten hours (there’s a one-hour time change), and the off-season trip takes about 11 and a half due to the added wait time. Unfortunately, the direct train terminates at the less-convenient Topcider train station in Belgrade, so while we were able to walk to our hotel from the Beograd-Centar station, you will probably need to take a cab from Topcider (unless you’re staying in that neighborhood).

• There is a bus company called Florentia Bus that operates one, non-stop bus per day between Sofia and Belgrade (continuing on to Zagreb, Ljubljana, and ultimately Italy). It departs Sofia at 2:30 pm and arrives in Belgrade around 10:00 pm local time (remember the time zone change). Tickets cost between 20 and 30 euros. However, and I cannot stress this enough, you must book these tickets in advance. If you do not book your ticket in advance, you will not be able to buy a ticket, and you will not be taking this bus from Sofia to Belgrade. Every bus is sold out, every day, so if you think you might want to take this bus, book your ticket at least a week ahead of time. If you’re not sure which day you will want to travel, book tickets for multiple days. Just don’t try to buy tickets in person, because an extremely impatient woman who speaks exclusively Bulgarian is not going to sell you tickets in person. Trust me on this.

• The right way to get to Belgrade, however, is to book a door-to-door minivan shuttle. There are a ton of “companies” that offer this service, but your best bet is simply to ask the concierge at your hotel in Sofia to arrange it for you. The cost shouldn’t be higher than 50 euro per person, so if it’s higher than that, ask at somebody else’s hotel.

What we did: as you may have gathered by now, we took the train. We arrived in Sofia Saturday night and planned to go down to the bus station Sunday morning to buy bus tickets for that afternoon. When we got there around 10:00 am (after the morning train to Belgrade had already departed, unfortunately), the woman at the Florentia Bus desk said that while the bus was full, we could come back at 2:00 pm to see if everyone with reserved seats had checked in. This, and I cannot stress this enough, was a lie, and you should not believe her if she says this to you. This fiasco meant that we had to spend an extra night in Sofia (fine), no-show the first night of our Belgrade reservation (expensive, although the Hilton Honors points I redeemed for the reservation were eventually automatically refunded), and take the indirect train the next morning (long, hot, and boring, although cheap).

Belgrade-Sarajevo

The right way to do it: in the recent past, minivan operators offered door-to-door transportation from Belgrade to Sarajevo as they do between Sofia and Belgrade, but apparently Bosnia and Herzegovina has now banned those transfers, so the best way is the once-a-day bus. It leaves Belgrade’s central bus station at 4:00 pm and arrives at a poorly-lit parking lot in Sarajevo around 10:45 pm. Tickets cost 2,630 Serbian dinar each, about $25. The bus ride is fairly unpleasant, especially in October when you’re taking narrow mountain roads in the dark, so the truly ambitious might consider renting a car and driving themselves.

What we did: fortunately, we got this one right. The morning after we (finally) got to Belgrade, we sauntered down to the central bus station and were able to easily buy tickets for the next day. For some reason in order to reach the busses themselves, you need to go through a turnstile, so when you buy your ticket the cashier will give you one turnstile token for each ticket. I have no idea if this is supposed to be security theatre of some kind, or simply a way to keep the loading and unloading area from getting too crowded with friends and family, but that’s what the token she gives you is for.

Sarajevo-Mostar

The right way to do it: there are two daily trains from Sarajevo to Mostar, leaving at 7:15 am and 4:49 pm and arriving about two hours later in each case. Tickets cost 11.90 Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible marks, or a bit less than $7. You can book tickets in person, or make a reservation online and pick up your tickets at the station, from the window with an “online tickets” sign barely taped to it. There, an elderly gentleman will go through dozens of loose-leaf sheets of paper looking for your reservation until he eventually asks for help and finds it and hands you your ticket. Then you’re good to go!

What we did: we got this one right. The train between Sarajevo and Mostar was easily the most modern and comfortable piece of transportation we used during this entire trip. The train even supposedly had wifi on board, although I was never able to get it to work. I have no idea whether Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entire train network has been retrofitted with these trains or if only the Mostar route got them, but the whole region would be well-served if they followed this example.

Mostar-Dubrovnik

The right way to do it: unfortunately, Mostar is the end of the train line, so if you’re traveling onward as we were, you need to take to the roads. There are several busses a day departing Mostar’s main bus station for Dubrovnik, with the latest departing at 12:30 pm during the off-season (there’s also a mid-afternoon bus during the summer). Due to the political geography of the Balkans, the bus crosses the Croatian border twice, and makes a stop in Neum, so a lot of the trip is spent waiting at international borders. Busses are apparently forbidden from taking the more direct route that crosses the Croatian border only once at Orahov Do. If you want to take the more direct route, you’ll need to rent or hire a car.

What we did: we got this one right as well. There was plenty of space on the bus and I booked our tickets the morning of our departure. Importantly, the Mostar-Dubrovnik bus does not stop at the location labeled in Google Maps when you search for “Dubrovnik bus station.” Instead, it stops at the “Autobusni Kolodvor” shown here. This is walking distance (we walked it) from central Dubrovnik, but it’s a pretty intense walk so if you’re staying near the Old City and have any mobility or health issues I’d strongly consider taking a bus or taxi instead.

Dubrovnik-Sofia

The right way to do it: at the most basic level, the right way to do it is to not do it at all. The only reason we needed to get back to Sofia is that due to procrastination I’d waited too long to book award tickets and was stuck booking a paid (albeit cheap) round-trip itinerary: since we flew into Sofia, we needed to fly out of Sofia as well. What you want to do is plan far enough in advance that you can book award tickets into Sofia (or Dubrovnik) and out of the other. That would let you follow the same trail through the Balkans we took, without having to double back in order to catch your return flight. Alternatively, this is an itinerary tailor-made for United’s “Excursionist” routing rules: if you are already booking an award itinerary between the US and Belgrade, it doesn’t cost any more Mileage Plus miles (although there will be some additional taxes and fees) to add an additional award leg between Dubrovnik and Sofia. If you are on a paid reservation like we were, then your only option may be a paid flight, but that can also be fairly cheap if you’re able to book it far enough in advance.

What we did: this was easily my most expensive mistake of the trip. I did end up booking a paid one-way back to Sofia, where we ended our trip, but I booked it so close in that it ended up costing an embarrassing amount of money. Don’t be like me.

Conclusion

I’m going to squeeze this trip for some more content next week, but I want this post to stand alone as a beginner’s guide to the logistics of Balkans travel. It is cheap to travel around the Balkans, which is great, but it is not fast and it is not particularly comfortable. You can pay more to get somewhat more comfort, and somewhat more speed, but it’s not a place you should try to visit in a rush.

And obviously, the fewer dumb mistakes you make, the cheaper and more comfortable your trip will be.