When free changes make it worthwhile to hunt for lower fares

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alaska’s confused and confusing booking engine

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

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

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

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

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

A helpful phone rep (and those 33 mystery dollars)

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Some good discounts on flexible rates at Delaware North properties

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For those unfamiliar, Delaware North is a concessionaire that operates hotels, restaurants, and campsites at many parks and forests in the United States. They don’t offer their own loyalty program or co-branded credit card, and their locations show up in some, but not all travel booking portals: for one property I checked, a limited room selection was available through Chase’s Ultimate Rewards travel portal and Hotels.com, but not through US Bank’s travel portal or Priceline.com.

That means for access to the complete inventory of rooms, you’ll probably need to pay cash through Delaware North’s own booking engine (and then ideally redeem credit card points like Barclay Arrival+ Miles or Capital One Venture Miles against the purchase), and it also means it’s one of the rare occasions when discount codes can actually reduce your out-of-pocket expenses.

Use code “MYESCAPE” for a 20% discount on flexible rates at Delaware North properties

I found out about this offer because we got on a mailing list after staying at the Big Meadows Lodge at Shenandoah National Park last fall (subscribers can listen to my partner and I reflecting on the trip on episode 10 of The Manifesto podcast on the Milenomics Podcast Network).

Like any hospitality company, Delaware North is constantly running offers like discounted rates for AAA members (10%), senior rates (10%), military rates (20%), and advance purchase rates (25%).

Even more importantly, those rates are available throughout the season, including on weekends, so you may have no choice but to use one of those rates if you want to stay on Friday or Saturday between June and August.

Having said that, the “MYESCAPE” offer is pretty good, if you’re able to use it. A 20% discount off the best available rate is as good as the military discount, but with a more generous, no-fee change and cancellation policy up to 48 hours before arrival. The other discounted rates charge a $15 cancellation fee up to 72 hours before arrival, and the cheapest advance purchase rates cannot be changed or cancelled at all.

In other words, if you’re planning an eligible trip at an eligible property, the “MYESCAPE” code offers a pretty good discount and a lot of flexibility should your plans change.

Different properties have different blackout dates (and rooms are going fast)

There are two things to be aware of here. First, the booking engine varies slightly between different properties: some use three different fields for “Group Code,” “Promo/Corporate Code” and “Travel Industry ID,” and some use a drop-down menu. Not realizing this, at first I thought the “MYESCAPE” code didn’t work at “drop-down” properties.

But it does! You just have to be sure to select “Promo” as the code type when beginning your search.

Second, while the “MYESCAPE” e-mail I received specified only Fridays and Saturdays between July and August were blackout dates (and indeed I could find availability throughout the season between Sunday and Thursday), the promo code doesn’t work the same at all Delaware North properties.

  • In Yellowstone it works throughout June (including weekends), then availability completely disappears. It also doesn’t work at the Holiday Inn or Choice Hotel properties there.

  • The Tenaya Lodge at Yosemite has wide open availability in June, July and August, except over the July 4 weekend.

  • At the Peaks of Otter Lodge it works in May and June, but there’s no weekend availability at all.

  • At The Gideon Putnam there’s some weekend availability in June, before weekends are blacked out for July and August.

  • The Honey Creek Resort has a minimum stay requirement over the weekend of July 4.

  • The Lodge at Geneva has no Saturday availability at all, while Friday nights are available throughout the season.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the code to work at any of Delaware North’s properties outside the United States, in Australia and New Zealand.

Conclusion

While room availability under this promotion is limited at many properties after May or June, if you squint just right there’s a certain logic to it, since they are advertising it as an opportunity to “use your saved up vacation time.” Many white collar workers really do have weeks and weeks of vacation time saved up from all the trips they weren’t able to take in the last 12 months, which means weekend and holiday blackout dates aren’t quite as annoying to plan around as they used to be, and will be again soon.

The added flexibility of a 48-hour, fee-free cancellation policy is likewise a nice nod to the fact that almost no one has any idea when they’ll be comfortable traveling again.

So if you live within driving distance of a Delaware North property in the United States, and prefer a room with running water over roughing it, it’s worth clicking around a little bit to see if you can find dates, locations, and prices that work for you. Shenandoah National Park is by far the closest Delaware North property to us, and has relatively few opportunities for indoor crowding, but I also might speculatively book a late June stay at the hotel-style Peaks of Otter Lodge, in the hopes that the vaccine rollout will have reached us by then.

What the Times got right and wrong about travel hacking

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The New York Times Magazine had an article in yesterday’s paper issue (although, confusingly, it’s been available online since last week) about travel hacking. I spoke to the author for about an hour all the way back in April, 2020, when the article was still taking shape, which was its own interesting experience. I tried to put the writer on the right track, which comes across a little bit in the piece (“Pretty much every player at this level disliked Brian Kelly and The Points Guy for one reason or another”), and I truly hope my input made the piece a little less cringe-worthy than it would otherwise have been.

But, there’s still plenty to cringe about.

What the Times got right

Besides “everybody hates Brian Kelly,” the article does capture a few important insights.

First, rewards are paid for by people who don’t collect or redeem them, and this is mechanically true of all rewards of all kinds. When the grocery store offers $20 in free goods each time you buy a $5.95 gift card (whether you use a credit card or pay with cash), the money has to come from somewhere. You can split it up any way you like: some of it as a kickback from the gift card issuer, some of it from the payment processor, some of it from the shareholders, and some of it from higher prices, but every penny has to come from somewhere.

Second, I appreciate that the author gave Jimmy Carter the credit he deserves for airline deregulation. Carter has been maligned for decades because he didn’t get along very well with congressional Democrats and he once gave a speech that made your parents feel bad, but he was a great president so I always like to see him recognized, whether it’s for his achievements in the field of aviation, or for the legalization and proliferation of microbreweries.

What the Times got wrong

The sad thing about the Times article is that it misses the point I tried to make to the author in our brief conversation: Brian Kelly doesn’t matter. He, Gary Leff, Ben Schlappig, and whoever else you want to throw in may be revolting little gremlins, but that’s all they are. They are not members, in any meaningful way, of any community I’m a part of. And that’s the mistake the Times author keeps making: swapping in and out anecdotes about clowns like them, Randy Petersen, or Stefan Krasowski, with the experiences of actual travel hackers.

These are two separate stories. If you want to write an expose about the credit card sales grift, then you need some information about the credit card sales grift (the author quotes Kelly simply saying “I don’t like talking about numbers.” Well, what are we talking about then?). If you want to write about travel hacking, then you can write about travel hacking, if you can find anyone willing to talk to you about it. The author tried something that couldn’t be done: turning credit card salesmen themselves into avatars of travel hacking.

And that’s ultimately the most frustrating thing about the article. It could have been either of two kinds of service journalism:

  1. tell people how to watch out for online credit card grifters;

  2. or tell people how to maximize the value of loyalty programs.

Either project would have been perfectly worthy. Indeed, I make my living helping people do both! But instead it settled into the one place that does no service to anyone: claiming that online credit card grifters are, in fact, helping people maximize the value of loyalty programs. The one thing they are absolutely, positively, resolutely, not doing!

Conclusion

There are lots of sloppy little errors in the piece, and like everything in this world, it’s hard to tell how much people were deliberately misleading an outsider and how much the author simply didn’t understand what they were being told.

For example, the Times wrote that you could manufacture spend by “driving between Walmart locations to buy money orders at a discount” — if anyone knows how to buy money orders at a discount, let me know!

Likewise it’s certainly possible to “resell your points in secret online markets,” but if you’re earning that many points, why would you need to resell them? Just earn more valuable points instead!

Unlike some folks in the community, I don’t have any particular compulsion to keep travel hacking “secret,” for the simple reason that there’s no need to. Most people don’t care, and don’t want to care. The very small number of things that I think widespread publicity will end, I write about in my Subscribers-only Newsletters, but the main thing keeping travel hacking not just alive, but thriving, isn’t secrecy. Rather, it’s the complete lack of interest most people have in travel hacking.

Good for them, and good for us.

A tale of two Hyatts Place

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Last week I took a road trip to neighboring Delaware to check out some of the beach communities we missed on our trip to Exmore in August. It was a fun time, and since neither of us had ever been to Delaware before we built the trip around completing the Discover Delaware Trail. We saw a lot of Delaware, and got some great ideas for stuff we’d like to do next summer assuming the vaccination campaign is up to speed by then.

But I don’t want to talk about Delaware today, I want to talk about “brand standards.” Except when American Express is running offers that are only valid at specific property types, I’m basically indifferent to the sub-brands each hotel chain licenses, not because I don’t acknowledge there are differences, but because there are just too many for me to keep straight. At the low end who cares if it’s a Hyatt House or a Hyatt Place, in the middle can anyone keep straight the difference between a Hyatt, Grand Hyatt, or Hyatt Regency, and even at the most luxurious properties, how do you decide between a Waldorf Astoria and a Conrad (the Maldives is host to both)?

Like any sane person, I decide between hotels based on location and cost, taking into account any points balances, free award nights, and credit card promotions. Which is why I was so surprised by the totally different practices at the two Hyatts Place we stayed in the same state during the same week.

Hyatt Place Dewey Beach versus Hyatt Place Wilmington Riverfront

To get it out of the way: these are two different properties in different parts of the state, they opened 6 years apart, and they have different ownership groups. Obviously the properties are going to be different. Dewey Beach is a party town just south of Rehoboth Beach, and relies on summer vacationers and hard-partying future Supreme Court Justices. Wilmington is a financial center that brings in conventions and business travelers year-round (until this year).

The Hyatt Place Dewey Beach was happy to sell us some beers to take out back and watch the sunset over the bay, but they didn’t have a kitchen, instead offering a few packaged snacks next to the reception counter. The Wilmington Riverfront had a “grab and go” pantry, but also a bar and restaurant, which served both lunch and dinner until March (they now open at 4 pm and close at 9:30 pm for an extremely limited dinner menu only).

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the stuff that goes to the core of so-called “brand standards,” and three things stuck out to me:

  • Coffee. In Dewey Beach, the Hyatt Place had removed coffee makers from the rooms. This seemed perfectly reasonable: coffee makers are high-contact surfaces and relatively difficult to thoroughly clean (we occasionally run vinegar through our home coffee maker and it doesn’t work particularly well). Instead, they offered coffee all-day in the lobby, which worked fine for us. Imagine our surprise when we arrived in Wilmington and the coffee makers, difficult to clean and all, were still in the rooms.

  • Breakfast. Stays at Hyatts Place include breakfast, and when we checked in at Dewey Beach the receptionist informed us that they were offering one “hot item” and one “cold item.” The next morning I went down and discovered that the hot item was a Jimmy Dean sausage sandwich. Not a Jimmy Dean-style sausage sandwich — it was literally still in its microwaveable Jimmy Dean wrapping paper. When I mentioned this to the receptionist in Wilmington, she was shocked, since they have someone come in every morning exclusively to cook breakfast in order to meet “brand standards,” a rotating cycle of french toast sticks, oatmeal, and something else.

  • Toiletries. Another weird one: our bathroom in Dewey Beach was set up with shampoo and conditioner, but not skin lotion, which I’ve come to expect at even the most basic chain hotels. And sure enough, the Hyatt Place in Wilmington provided it.

None of this would have been of more than passing interest for me at all, except that while I was waiting to pick up a few things for dinner in Wilmington, the receptionist wandered over and I told her I was surprised by the difference between the two properties. She got more agitated than I was! They had worked so hard to meet “brand standards” since they opened in October, and this other property in the same chain 90 miles away was just phoning it in. I guess I’d be upset too.

Conclusion

Nothing on Earth could convince me to learn the differences between the 28 post-merger Marriott sub-brands, and in general I’m going to stick to booking the cheapest properties in the locations that best suit my needs. But the fact that two properties in the same sub-brand, in the same state, could have such different interpretations of “brand standards” has at least given me pause. Where prices and redemption costs are similar, I might start occasionally picking up the phone to find out in advance how individual properties are implementing them.

How I'm positioned going into 2021

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With the end of the year in sight and the possibility of travel again appearing on the horizon, I thought it would be unusually desirous to take stock of my current portfolio of rewards currencies, identify any strengths and shortcomings, and apply myself with renewed vigor as needed.

Bank Programs

The three bank-sponsored programs I participate in are Chase Ultimate Rewards, US Bank Flexperks, and Barclay’s Arrival+, and right now my Chase balance is the only one I feel good about. With four Freedom cards I can earn up to 120,000 Ultimate Rewards points per year depending on how the bonus categories fall, and my Ink Plus lets me earn 250,000 more points at office supply stores, preferably during negative cost promotions like the one currently running at Office Depot and OfficeMax.

US Bank Flexpoints are worth 1.5 cents each when redeemed through the US Bank travel portal or through Real-Time Rewards, which allows you to redeem points for their full value against purchases at many merchant categories. That means the Flexperks Travel Rewards card earns the equivalent of 3% cash back at grocery stores, and it’s typically one of my go-to cards for grocery store manufactured spend. However, times haven’t been typical, and it fell out of my rotation in favor of cards offering temporary benefits during the pandemic, like my Chase Hyatt card and American Express Delta Platinum card, which is earning the equivalent of 1.5 SkyMiles per dollar (at $1,000 thresholds), with bonus MQM’s along for the ride. I wouldn’t normally consider buying SkyMiles for 2 cents each, but the bonus MQM’s (and recent news that all 2020 MQM will roll over to 2021) and the time-limited nature of the deals ended up convincing me to put a fair amount of spend on the card this year.

Finally, I still have a Barclays Arrival+ card, which used to function as a decent 2%+ cash back card with a chip-and-PIN functionality for use abroad and a trip delay benefit, which made it my go-to card when booking paid flights. Effective November 1, 2019, the trip delay benefit was removed, so I can’t recommend anyone pay an annual fee on the card anymore, as long as they have access to 2% or higher cash back on unbonused spend with another card (Fidelity Rewards or Citi Double Cash, for example).

Airline Programs

From one perspective, my airline mile balances are even more dismal than my bank balances. My highest balance is with Delta, with about 40,000 miles, and my lowest with Alaska, at around 13,000, with American and United in between. In hindsight this ended up being the ideal way to go into the pandemic, since the balances that ended up stranded and unredeemable since March were so minuscule. Looking forward, of course, I’d ideally like to get at least some of those balances up in order to opportunistically redeem them in the summer and fall.

My United Mileage Plus balance is the easiest to address since it’s an Ultimate Rewards transfer partner, so my strategy for earning more Ultimate Rewards points works as a Mileage Plus strategy as well.

In 2021 I’ll have two Delta companion certificates: my 2020 companion certificate with its extended expiration date of December 31, 2021, and the new 2021 certificate I’ll receive in May. Those should cover all my domestic Delta travel in 2021.

With my family on the West Coast, my partner’s family easily accessible on American Airlines, and Alaska joining oneworld on March 31, 2021, I expect Mileage Plan miles will be one of the most valuable currencies for me for the next few years. Unfortunately, opportunities to earn them besides through flying are pretty limited. I have a good relationship with Bank of America, so I’ll keep an eye out for heightened credit card signup bonuses in 2021 (the current offer is for 40,000 miles with a waived annual fee the first year).

Another option for flights operated by Alaska and American will be to transfer Ultimate Rewards points to British Airways Avios, which should be redeemable for the lowest-priced award tickets on either carrier. Tickets to the Pacific Northwest cost the same with Avios as they do with Mileage Plan, and British Airways offers periodic bonuses when transferring points in. Unfortunately, those low-level award tickets are few and far between, so realistically Mileage Plan miles and companion fares will remain the best way to book Alaska Airlines flights. Flights to the Midwest on American cost just 15,000 Avios roundtrip, which would create a decent opportunity if flights weren’t already so cheap. Instead, I’ll likely just pay with Flexpoints or Arrival+ miles and credit the flights to Alaska.

Finally, my American balance, about 15,000 miles, is low enough that my two best options are to either spend it down entirely (for example on a 15,000-mile roundtrip redemption to the Midwest), or to aggressively boost it with a new credit card application. Since Citi doesn’t want my business anymore, that would mean a Barclays Aviator Red MasterCard (current signup bonus of 50,000 miles, $99 annual fee not waived). With no minimum spend requirement, that’s almost a tempting offer, but I don’t have a concrete enough redemption in mind to justify the application for now.

Hotel Programs

My two main hotel programs are Hilton and Hyatt, and here things are actually looking alright.

While my World of Hyatt points balance is low, I’m sitting on one Category 1-4 free night award from 2020 (extended until December 31, 2021), earning another by spending $4,000 on the card by December 31, 2020, and will receive a third when my card is renewed in April 2021. This is perfect as I already have (tentative, vaccine-dependent) plans for these awards in July, since a new Category 4 Hyatt opened in Portland in February, 2020. For additional Hyatt stays in 2021 I’ll be depending on Ultimate Rewards transfers.

My Hilton balance is in much sorrier shape. I actually went into the pandemic with a reasonable reserve, but it’s also the only hotel currency I’ve redeemed since March: two nights on the Eastern Shore in August and a 4-night stay in the Midwest in October. Without accelerated earning or definite plans, I simply stopped putting grocery store manufactured spend on my American Express Surpass card. Since American Express updated their website to show progress towards the $15,000 spend requirement to earn a free weekend night certificate, I realized there’s virtually no way I’ll spend that much on the card this year. Simply put, it was a wasted year not earning one of my favorite rewards currencies or the free night certificate that’s a main justification for keeping the card. In 2021, I’ll be ramping up spend again and getting ready for redemptions in the summer and fall.

Conclusion

I’ve gone into a lot of detail here because I think readers benefit more from knowing precise information they can compare against their own experience, rather than the idealized stories people are paid to sell. My situation is crystal clear: I try to earn the miles and points I need for the trips I want to take, and since March, I haven’t wanted to take any trips. On the contrary, I’ve wanted to keep my household safe, and keep my friends and family safe, so I pivoted my strategy towards earning cash back I can “redeem” today, rather than miles and points that I wouldn’t be able to use for 12-18 months.

As the vaccine enters widespread distribution, it’s time to start thinking about pivoting back. That means ramping up my most useful currency, Chase Ultimate Rewards, while also starting to pay renewed attention to Alaska Airlines, Hyatt, and Hilton earning opportunities.

Why are some Visa cards dropping collision damage waiver coverage?

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As I tweeted out on Friday, I was surprised to get an e-mail from US Bank telling me that my Flexperks Travel Rewards card would no longer have “Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver and Extended Warranty Protection” as of February 1, 2021. Today I saw Doctor of Credit report that several additional Visa cards will be dropping the same or related benefits.

All of which made me wonder, what the heck is going on?

Virtually all credit and debit cards include rental car collision damage waivers

I’ve written extensively about the nuances of rental car insurance in the past, since it’s a particularly complicated issue for folks who don’t own their own cars. That’s because car owners typically have liability insurance that covers them whether or not they’re driving their own cars, while non-car owners have to patch together liability (you hit somebody) and collision (you hit a tree, or an uninsured driver hits you) coverage.

Since most travel hackers are sufficiently well-to-do to own at least one vehicle, rental car insurance is typically put in terms of the collision damage waiver coverage when you pay for a rental car with your credit or debit card, and is framed in terms of “primary” versus “secondary” coverage, the difference being that secondary coverage kicks in after your car-owner insurance, leaving you potentially subject to penalty premia going forward, while primary coverage sidesteps your preexisting insurance.

This is all extremely boring, since virtually all credit and debit cards offer at least secondary rental car collision damage waivers. All you really need to know is to decline the collision damage waiver coverage offered by the rental car company when you check in.

Until February!

Rethinking value?

The main reason credit and debit cards offer collision damage waiver coverage is that it’s so cheap to provide: most people don’t get into rental car accidents most of the time, most people who do get into rental car accidents have their own insurance coverage, and most rental cars aren’t that expensive. It’s basically the Gerber Life Insurance of benefits: you make a lot of people feel good about their life decisions without ever having to pay out a claim. Paying out the occasional claim to replace a bare-bones Toyota Camry isn’t even a blip on Visa’s balance sheet.

Of course, the flip side is that people who never use a benefit are unlikely to appreciate it, no matter how cheap it is to provide. So theoretically the offer of “ID Navigator Powered by NortonLifeLock and Postmates benefits” to replace collision damage waiver coverage might be more immediately tangible to some current Visa cardholders.

But let’s not kid ourselves: that’s almost certainly not what’s going on.

Changing processors

The most obvious explanation for what’s going on is that US Bank and some related entities (e.g. “Elan Financial Services,” a wholly owned subsidiary of US Bank) are switching credit card processors. Unlike many banks, US Bank has continued to issue both Visa and American Express cards, so I assume that the current transitional period is going to be used to move some or all cardholders from Visa to American Express (or vice versa!).

If you rely on credit card collision damage waiver coverage, be careful!

By February 1 ,2021, we’ll have a much clearer view of the situation. Was the announcement of the discontinuation of rental car insurance benefits a holding pattern while the benefits for revamped cards are negotiated and rolled out, or a permanent devaluation? It’s an interesting question, but not an actionable one.

The actionable question is, what credit or debit card are you going to use to book your next car rental? If you rely on the collision damage waiver coverage provided by your bank, make sure your bank actually offers it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Giant versus Safeway (1): Giant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Safeway versus Giant (2): Safeway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Galveston Revisited: my interview with the head of Galveston Park Board

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Back in May, Sam and Robert of the Milenomics Squared podcast (and a slew of other activities in and around the world of travel hacking) invited me to join their network and record a biweekly podcast. As a reminder for folks who missed the initial announcement, there are two ways to get new and archived episodes of The Manifesto:

And of course you can sign up for both if you want to listen to all the shows on the network and receive my Newsletters: they’re two great tastes that taste great together!

Try before you buy: a free sample episode

Now that I’ve had a chance to get my sea legs as a podcaster, as a treat we’re making lucky episode 13 free for non-subscribers to listen to. This episode is an interview I recorded in September with Kelly de Schaun, the head of the Galveston Park Board. As long-time readers know, I have a somewhat fraught relationship with the island of Galveston, so one of my first ideas when the podcast launched was to hear the other side of the story: what do people who love Galveston love about it? The interview took a while to schedule, but Kelly did not disappoint and we had what turned out to be a fantastic conversation.

You can download or listen to the episode on the web on the Milenomics website, or find it through Apple Podcasts on the Milenomics Squared no-annual-fee feed. If you already subscribe to The Manifesto dedicated feed or Milenomics Squared premium feed, you should already be seeing it there.

I hope you enjoy listening to the episode as much as I did recording it. And if you aren’t a subscriber already, please consider subscribing to one (or both!) of our projects for more great content like this.