Don't sleep on the American Express Hilton Surpass $5,000 threshold bonuses through June 30, 2021

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For obvious reasons since early last year I’ve been focusing my manufactured spend on cards earning cash back or rewards easily converted to cash or paid travel, and slacking off on the few remaining co-branded credit cards I carry. That allowed it to completely slip my mind that the American Express Hilton Honors Surpass card has been running a fairly compelling deal, for 10,000 bonus Honors points each time you spend $5,000 on the card, up to 100,000 points when you spend $50,000. If all of your Surpass spend is in the card’s 6-points-per-dollar categories, that works out to 8 Honors points per dollar each time your cumulative spend reaches a $5,000 threshold.

The offer ends June 30, 2021, but it’s well worth checking how close you are to the next threshold and seeing if any additional local gas station or grocery store bonuses make it worth closing the gap. Speaking from personal experience, I received a “Thanks for using your Amex Offer” e-mail as soon as a purchase put me over the $5,000 threshold, so you shouldn’t need to wait or worry about whether your purchase has triggered the threshold bonus.

In my experience Hilton Honors points are consistently worth about half a cent each, which makes this a 4% rebate at gas stations and grocery stores, with the potential for outsized return at specific properties and when using the 5th-night-free benefit on award stays.

Finally, if you plan on meeting the $15,000 annual spend threshold to receive a free weekend night certificate (and if you aren’t planning on meeting the spend threshold you shouldn’t be carrying the card and paying its annual fee), then it’s obviously better to meet that spend threshold while the same spend also counts towards the extra bonus point threshold. Free night certificates and bonus points: two great tastes that taste great together.

Quick hit: easily adding all available Amex Offers (if you're an idiot, like me)

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Yesterday I was excited to see Danny the Deal Guru’s post about a simple technique to quickly add all your available Amex Offers to your cards with a simple click. It worked for him and some other people who commented, but it didn’t work for me. Since I’m computer illiterate, I assumed it had something to do with my ad blocker or privacy settings, or the fact that I use Apple hardware, or any one of a hundred other things.

This morning I caught my second wind and decided to try again. Upon closer inspection of the error message, I saw a string that looked familiar: “U+201C.” That looks like a unicode character. Some light googling revealed that it was, indeed, a unicode character, specifically the “left double quotation mark” character, like the ones on the left side of those quotes.

Turns out, JavaScript doesn’t like left (or right) double quotation marks. JavaScript likes upright double quotation marks, and after replacing the former with the later, the code sailed through.

It turns out, in the original Reddit thread, user blamsonyo had used upright quotation marks, and if I had bothered to click through and copy the original code I wouldn’t have had a problem. Lesson reinforced: when possible, go to the original source! Save the games of telephone for summer camp.

Deciding where to credit Alaska, American, and JetBlue flights

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A sort of interesting conundrum has arisen recently due to the coincidence of Alaska Airlines becoming a full member of the oneworld alliance, which American Airlines also belongs to, and American entering a codeshare agreement with JetBlue that allows reciprocal earning for paid flights on both airlines (redemptions are not yet available).

That means if you’re flying on any of the three carriers (except JetBlue’s transatlantic fares, which don’t earn American miles), you have between 2 and 3 reasonable programs to credit your flights to. Note that Hawaiian Airlines is another partner of American and JetBlue, but unless you’re a Hawaii resident it doesn’t seem like a particularly generous program so I’ll set it aside for now.

There’s no one right answer for everybody, so I want to lay out the general principles I’d use to decide where to credit my flights.

Value of points

This is the easiest calculation to make: how much do you value the points you’ll earn on a given flight if credited to each? Note the discussion below is based on having no elite status in any of the three programs. You’ll need to calculate your individual breakeven point based on your actual elite status in each program using the linked earning charts.

Flights operated by JetBlue

For flights operated by JetBlue, you’re comparing the value of the TrueBlue points you’d earn to the value of the American AAdvantage points you’d earn. For example, non-elites earn 6 TrueBlue points per dollar when booked through the JetBlue app and website or 5 AAdvantage miles. TrueBlue points are worth 1.4 cents when redeemed for most fares, so if you value AAdvantage miles at more than 1.68 cents, credit your JetBlue flights to American. The only additional consideration is if you typically redeem your JetBlue flights for flights in their Mint cabin, you’ll get less than 1.1 cent per point in value, so you only need to value AAdvantage points at 1.3 cents to break even with the lower earning rate when credited to American. Finally, Blue Basic fares earn just 2 TrueBlue points per dollar but 5 AAdvantage miles per dollar, so in most cases you’ll want to credit them to American.

Here are the relevant earning charts for JetBlue flights:

Flights operated by Alaska

For flights operated by Alaska, we need to look not at the revenue-based earning of JetBlue flights, but the distance-based computations of Alaska Mileage Plan and American AAdvantage. For example, when an Alaska flight booked into a first class “J” fare is credited to Mileage Plan, non-elites earn 100% of the miles flown and a 100% bonus, while the same flight credited to AAdvantage earns just a 75% bonus. If value is your only consideration, you’d need to value AAdvantage miles at more than 14% above Mileage Plan miles to choose to credit that flight to American.

Even the cheapest Alaska flights still earn 100% of the distance flown with a 500-mile minimum, while the cheapest X-class Alaska fares earn just 25% of the distance flown when credit to American, so if you’re booking into cheap fare classes you’d need to consider American miles two to four times more valuable than Mileage Plan miles to choose to credit your flights to AAdvantage based on value alone.

Here are the relevant earning charts for flights operated by Alaska:

Flights operated by American

Finally, American Airlines-operated flights pose the biggest challenge, since they can now be credited to Alaska, American, or JetBlue. When credited to American or JetBlue, they are revenue based, but when credited to Alaska, earning remains distance based. In other words, the optimal airline to credit American flights to depends on the cost, distance, and fare class of the flight. Cheap premium fares might earn many more points in Mileage Plan, while expensive economy fares earn more in AAdvantage.

Take for instance the flight I take a few times a year to visit my partner’s family in Indiana. This Thanksgiving, that 500-mile American flight in their “M” fare class costs $249, and would earn a non-elite 1,245 AAdvantage miles, 500 Alaska miles, or 1,494 TrueBlue points. Since I have MVP status with Alaska, I’d earn a 50% bonus for a total of 750 Mileage Plan miles. Since I don’t fly JetBlue, and pay with cash when I fly American for these short holiday flights, I find the 750 Mileage Plan miles the most appealing and credit my American flights there. An exception would be if the only flights available were very expensive economy fares, since Alaska awards a maximum of 110% for American economy fares, while you can earn up to 75,000 miles per ticket in American’s revenue-based scheme.

Here are the relevant earning charts for flights operated by American:

Elite status

Obviously many travel hackers pursue elite status in one or more program, whether it’s to earn miles at an accelerated rate or to take advantage of other benefits like free upgrades, changes and cancellations, lounge access, etc.

Elite status in one program

I imagine this is the most common case: if you live in a city served by two or more of these airlines but book exclusively based on price, you might fly too few miles to earn status in any of the three programs if you credit each flight to the carrier’s program, but enough miles to earn status if you credit all your flights to one of them.

An obvious example is someone living in Boston, a city that’s served by American, Alaska, and JetBlue, who splits their flights between the three carriers, but doesn’t fly enough on any one of them to earn elite status. In this case, there are three natural possibilities:

  1. Credit all flights to American. For many people this is the obvious solution, especially since someone who books exclusively on price is by definition going to struggle to meet the Elite Qualifying Dollar and Segment requirements for AAdvantage elite status. JetBlue flights (except Blue Basic) earn full EQM, EQD and EQS credit, while Alaska flights earn them based on fare class and distance flown.

  2. Credit Alaska and American to Mileage Plan, JetBlue to TrueBlue. The appeal here is that Alaska Airlines doesn’t have a spending requirement for elite status and has a somewhat lower mileage requirement than other carriers, combining Alaska and American flights might get you to their mid-tier MVP Gold status, which translates to oneworld Sapphire status and free access to those lounges when traveling internationally. There is downside in the possibility of orphaning your TrueBlue points, but since JetBlue allows you to book with both points and cash, they’re actually relatively difficult to orphan compared to most loyalty schemes.

  3. Credit American and JetBlue to TrueBlue, Alaska to Mileage Plan. The TrueBlue program only has a single elite status level, called Mosaic, which you achieve when you earn 15,000 base points, i.e. when you spend $5,000 on JetBlue or their partners. I consider Mosaic the least valuable of the three, especially for casual flyers, but there are those who swear by it. The main quantifiable benefits are free checked bags, changes, and cancellations, and the secondary benefits are free (albeit space-available) upgrades their extended legroom seats and free booze. This strategy has the downside of orphaning your Mileage Plan miles, but for a casual traveler that may not be a big deal, for instance if your Alaska Airlines flights are all paid companion fare tickets (as 90% of mine are), you may not have any plans to redeem Mileage Plan miles and have no particular interest in the program.

Elite status in multiple programs

It’s worth mentioning the opposite situation: someone who flies enough on one or more of the carriers to earn elite status in two or more of these programs. Should they spread their flight credit around, or concentrate their fire on just one (or two) programs as described above?

Let’s take an extreme example: someone who each year flies 75,000 miles on Alaska, spends $15,000 and flies 100,000 miles on American, and spends $5,000 on JetBlue. If each flight was credited to the carrier’s loyalty program, the flyer would earn MVP Gold 75K with Alaska, AAdvantage Executive Platinum, and TrueBlue Mosaic. They’d also earn the following redeemable miles:

  • 218,000 Mileage Plan (125% bonus miles plus 50,000 miles on MVP Gold 75K qualification);

  • 235,000 AAdvantage (11 miles per dollar plus 20,000 miles on Platinum Pro qualification and 50,000 on Executive Platinum qualification);

  • 150,000 TrueBlue (9 points per dollar plus 15,000 points on Mosaic qualification. Add 12,000 points if you also fly 7 round-trip flights).

Here are those same values in each of the three crediting scenarios I described above (assuming an average earning rate of 50% when crediting Alaska flights to AAdvantage and vice versa, and an average earning rate of 7.5 points per dollar when crediting American flights to TrueBlue, since non-codeshare flights can’t be booked through JetBlue):

  1. 372,500 AAdvantage (82,000 from Alaska flights and 55,000 from JetBlue flights);

  2. 330,500 Mileage Plan (112,500 from American flights), 150,000 TrueBlue;

  3. 262,000 TrueBlue (112,500 from American flights), 218,000 Mileage Plan.

An actual flyer’s experience would vary based on the exact Alaska fare classes and exact American flights they took, but this should be the result you expected: since airlines naturally reward their own passengers more generously than those of their partners, concentrating your fire does increase your total earning in your focus program, but not by as much as it reduces your earning in your distributed programs. In a sense this functions the same way as a points transfer from Marriott to United: you’ll never get as many miles into United as you got out of Marriott. It may still be worth it depending on your plans and corresponding needs, but only after careful scrutiny and exploring other alternatives.

Conclusion

If you made it this far, congratulations! If you found this analysis useful, even better. If you found this analysis mindlessly boring, well, send it to someone you want to annoy.

I personally plan to bookmark the post for my own convenience just to have those earning links in one place, since I find it irritating to track down cross-airline earning rates every time I fly and need to decide where to credit flights based on fare class, elite status, and partner programs.

The most valuable travel hacking resources today

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Reader crispy left a very kind comment on one of my posts the other day and asked a very thought-provoking question, and instead of replying in the comments there I thought I’d break out my answer here. The reader’s question was:

“With so many blogs out there that don't benefit their readers by pushing certain credit cards, do you have some blogs that you actually recommend? Any other underrated bloggers who you think actually provide value in the frequent flyer game?”

I’ve answered this question a couple times in the past, and my answer is constantly changing: some resources get better, some get worse, new ones pop up, and old ones go away (pour one out for the Saverocity Observation Deck).

In that way, the travel hacking community is a lot like travel hacking itself. There’s no reason to believe the amazing technique that works today (3 Flexpoints per dollar spent on Kiva loans) or loyalty program sweet spot (Boston to Dublin using Avios) will continue to work tomorrow. We learn, experiment, and share what we know so as many people as possible can take advantage before the window inevitably closes.

Paid communities and resources

These are options that someone new to travel hacking shouldn’t consider. Paid communities are primarily for folks who know what they’re doing and want or need to share new information in real time. If you’re just getting started there are plenty of free resources to learn the ropes, and you’ll just waste people’s time asking questions with easy answers. For example, the occasional Newsletters I send to paying subscribers are mostly the results of my own esoteric experimentation, and each Newsletter is only useful to a tiny minority of subscribers.

  • Straight to the Points. Spencer Howard has a newsletter where he sends out high-value award redemptions and cheap fares to paying subscribers as he finds them. A limited free version is sent out a few days later, so the conceit is his paying members have first dibs on the seats and fares.

  • Miles Per Day. An absolute legend in the community, Vinh runs a private Slack channel that I think operates on something of a “one-in-one-out” basis: somebody has to leave the group before he’ll allow another person in. I believe it’s currently closed to new members, but it’s worth following Vinh on Twitter anyway as he periodically announces new spaces are available.

  • Milenomics. The only paid resource I personally rely on is the Milenomics Podcast Network, which covers a huge range of topics and hosts an extremely active and valuable Slack channel. I’m a paid contributor to the network and I am extremely sensitive to the fact that there are no benign conflicts of interest so I won’t say anything except that I happily pay for my subscription and they don’t even give me a discount.

“Static” websites

These are my go-to destinations when I just need to know a single fact. They can be slightly out-of-date, but they’re still the best resources I know of.

  • DepositAccounts.com. When you have extra cash, need somewhere to put it, and want to earn as much interest as possible, this is the best resource I’ve found. It’s a bit difficult to navigate and tries to steer you towards their paid advertisers, but the information itself is accessible and pretty reliable.

  • Frequent Miler’s “Best Offers” page. While the blog itself seems to have been taken over by search engine-driven dynamics and “pivoted to video,” the best credit card offers page has remained extremely useful, and is always the first place I visit to check how a sign-up bonus offer compares to recent offers.

Twitter feeds

It’s a cliche that all the big blogs dump out identical content whenever there’s the slightest amount of travel-related news, or even a travel angle on unrelated news, but Twitter is still where I find out a lot of information first, and there are a few Twitter feeds that do a great job getting me the exact information I need when I need it.

  • Danny the Deal Guru. Danny (no idea if that’s his real name) has somehow dialed in to posting the precise deals that appeal to me, personally, and deals that would appeal to me if I were you. I don’t take advantage of them all (I enjoyed Burger King growing up; now, not so much), but he doesn’t miss.

  • Doctor of Credit. I follow Doctor of Credit and find it useful to keep track of the atmosphere, but the thing to know in advance is that it’s a lot, and it’s totally indiscriminate. Discount codes, coupon codes, signup bonuses, promotional gimmicks, all thrown together without rhyme or reason.

Conclusion

There are two ways to look at this list. On the one hand, you could see it as a kind of flattening in the general travel hacking space: the biggest public blogs have hired mechanical Turks to pump out near-identical content of no use to anyone, while the information people actually want and need has increasingly vanished behind paywalls.

On the other hand, there’s been a florescence of resources for individual communities. If “your thing” is Disney, then you have more resources than ever to choose from, with small blogs, forums, and podcasts with different voices and values sharing their own techniques to save money or get more value for it. For all I know this may be the inevitable consequence of a community growing larger than it can easily accommodate, and generalists becoming specialists who serve smaller and smaller slices of the group.

Sound off in the comments if you have any more recommendations for crispy.

Safeway versus Giant: Value, Scale, and Timing

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As so often happens in the grocery store rewards game, when it rains it pours, with both Safeway and Giant currently offering big bonuses on the purchase of “Happy” brand gift cards. This family of gift cards can be loaded with up to $500, and each sub-brand can only be used at specific merchants, where they are processed as credit cards. They can be easy or difficult to turn into more universally accepted prepaid debit cards depending on the merchants you have convenient.

Safeway versus Giant: Value

Through April 10, 2021, the purchase of Happy gift cards at Safeway will earn 8 Just4U points, while their purchase at Giant/Stop&Shop/Martin’s stores will earn 8 Flexible Rewards points. As the name suggests, Flexible Rewards points are more flexible than Just4U points, since they can be redeemed down to the penny for almost anything in the store. If you’re able to redeem them at scale, however, Just4U points are somewhat more valuable: if you can redeem your entire balance of Just4U Rewards for their maximum value you can get over 1.3 cents per point, or a 10.56% rebate on the purchase of Happy gift cards (plus any credit card rewards earned on the purchase), and you can take advantage of the Just4U double dip to even redeem some of them against otherwise-forbidden goods like liquid dairy products.

In other words, if you have equally convenient access to both stores, and can maximize the value of your points in either program, you should treat 8 Just4U points as “somewhat” more valuable than the same number of Flexible Rewards points.

Safeway versus Giant: Scale

If you don’t have the time or inclination to maximize the value of Just4U points, then Flexible Rewards are clearly superior. Capped monthly rewards redemptions and quick expiration make it pointless to earn more than a few thousand Just4U points. You could easily maximize the value of the entire Safeway promotion in a single trip and just one or two Happy gift cards. Exploiting the higher value of Just4U points requires a disproportionate level of planning, networking and attention to detail, while maximizing the value of Flexible Rewards points requires nothing more than doing your shopping as usual, scanning your card, and walking out with free groceries.

Safeway versus Giant: Timing

The two factors above should do 100% of the work for 90% of listeners. Do you have access to both Safeway and Giant stores? If not, your decision has been made for you. Are you a detail-oriented control freak or do you just want to score some free groceries? If the former, Safeway’s your store; if the latter, Giant’s for you.

There’s one final consideration I want to put out for the remaining 10%: even if you are comfortable maximizing the value of Just4U points, you may want to consider hitting Giant first, and waiting until May 1 to take advantage of Safeway’s offer.

That’s for two reasons. First, Giant’s offer ends earlier, on Thursday, April 29, while Safeway’s runs through May 10, 2021 (as long as you add the offer to your Just4U accounts while it’s still available in the app and online).

The second reason is more pedantic: Just4U points expire at the end of the month in which they’re earned. That means points earned between now and April 30 will expire at the end of May, while points earned between May 1 and May 10 will expire at the end of June (for the clipping of rewards that will themselves expire at the end of July). Especially if you’re already exhausted your April redemption opportunities, waiting until May 1 to begin refilling your Just4U balance will give you a lot more time to ultimately redeem your points.

Conclusion

Obviously if you don’t drive much or spend much on groceries there’s not necessarily any reason to try to maximize both of these promotions, and it’s perfectly reasonable to keep life simple by focusing on just one (or neither). But these are at least some of the factors you should consider when weighing grocery store bonus rewards against one another.

Maximize just 4 U points by pulling forward redemptions across regions

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A couple weeks ago I wrote about my first experiences redeeming Safeway’s just 4 U rewards points and described how by triggering more than one reward with the same purchase, you can create a negative balance that can be spent on items that aren’t normally eligible for redemption.

That’s a great way to increase the value of just 4 U points by making them more flexible, but it doesn’t help with the program’s biggest shortcomings: limited redemption opportunities and quickly expiring points. For example, in March the most rewards I could redeem on groceries was 43 (representing 4,300 just 4 U points). Before this month I didn’t look at the program very closely, but assuming that’s standard, it means there’s never any reason for an account to earn more than 4,300 points, on average, each month.

When big earning opportunities come along, like the current offer for 8 points per dollar spent on Happy gift cards, you might almost reach that threshold with just a single purchase! Furthermore, not all redemptions are created equal. If you’re trying to redeem a full 43 rewards per month, you’re probably going to end up with stuff you don’t want or can’t use.

Fortunately, there is a workaround that allows you to redeem more of the highest-value rewards each month. The technique is relatively simple, but the underlying logic is a bit strange.

Albertsons is a sprawling behemoth

You probably know that as a grocery store conglomerate, Albertsons was stitched together over decades from over a dozen regional chains. In many places this was an extremely disruptive process; in my hometown when Albertsons acquired Safeway they were required to spin off our existing Safeway stores into a new local “chain,” a process I’m sure was repeated countless times across the country.

Albertsons retained many of the regional brands they acquired, presumably because they have some nostalgia value for local customers, but eventually rolled out the just 4 U program to most of them. So there’s an Albertsons just 4 U, a Jewel Osco just 4 U, a Safeway just 4 U, etc.

Here’s where it starts to get tricky: instead of consolidating all their stores into a single program, or consolidating each brand’s just 4 U program into its own rewards silo, Albertsons consolidated stores by region. Here’s a somewhat outdated regional map posted by user diburning on FlyerTalk in January, 2020:

Many, but not all, of these regions and brands are inter-operable, but in a very peculiar way. What Albertsons seems to have done is, for every inter-operable store region, create a dummy rewards account corresponding to each inter-operable customer account. There’s nothing unusual about this from a programming point of view: they don’t want two people to be able to enroll with the same login credentials, or list the same telephone number, in two different regions sharing the same backend, and they don’t want users to have to delete one account and create another when they move from one region to another.

As a result, if you have a “Seattle” Safeway just 4 U account, you also have a “Nor Cal” Safeway just 4 U account, and an “United” Albertsons account, and a “Houston” Randall’s account. The most important thing to remember at this point is that these accounts exist simultaneously. You don’t close one and create another when you change your preferred store location.

However, when you change your preferred store location between regions, you are “logging out” of one region’s program and “logging into” the other region’s. When you do this, two things will happen:

  • all of your clipped just 4 U earning coupons will appear unclipped.

  • all of your clipped just 4 U rewards will disappear.

But this is only because you are looking at your account in a different region. Switch back to your original store location and your coupons will still be clipped and your rewards will be safe and sound. Needless to say, this can be quite scary the first time it happens to you, so I encourage you to try it yourself to make sure you believe me.

However, one thing will not happen when you switch between regions: your just 4 U points balance and unredeemed rewards will still be available for redemption in the new region.

Multiply your monthly high-value redemptions by shopping in different regions

What this means is that you can redeem “excess” just 4 U rewards by shopping in different regions the same month. For example, if I earn 4,400 just 4 U points in March, I would ordinarily only be able to redeem 22 rewards in March for $29 off groceries, then 22 more rewards in April. But if I am able to shop in another inter-operable region in March, I can redeem those 22 April rewards again for another $29 discount. Scaling this technique allows you to vastly increase the number of just 4 U points you can redeem each month, reduces the risk of them expiring unredeemed, and therefore mechanically increases their value.

Obviously to a certain extent this depends on the accessibility of different regions. The more you travel to different regions, the more opportunities you have to redeem your points for the highest-value rewards. Note, however, that you can also “redeem at a distance” by clipping rewards in other regions and then simply sharing the phone number linked to your account with anyone you want to give free groceries to, or “earn at a distance” by having other people enter your phone number after you’ve clipped a coupon in their region.

Conclusion

To the extent that you’re able to scale this technique in order to drain your just 4 U rewards exclusively for the most valuable “basket” rewards, the cash value of just 4 U points asymptotically rises towards 1.32 cents each. This is good to know not because it’s a particularly high value, but because it allows you to quickly and easily evaluate the attractiveness of any given just 4 U deal. Earning 8 just 4 U points on $413.90 in Happy gift cards, for instance, yields approximately $43.71 in rewards, and you can simply compare that return against your liquidation costs to determine if the deal is worth pursuing.

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

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

What’s a double dip?

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

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

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

What’s the just 4 U double dip?

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

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

How does the double dip work?

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

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

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

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

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

Disappointed by Alaska Airlines IT, satisfied by their customer service

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I wrote a few weeks back about the maze of rules relating to the elimination of change fees by most US carriers. My basic conclusion was that eliminating fees is better than keeping them, but that if you’re trying to claim a credit for a fall in price you should anticipate having to put some work in.

That turned out to be prophetic in my own case, rebooking a 3-week trip out West in July. But while I didn’t run into any problems with Alaska’s change fees, I am now 3 weeks into an IT saga.

My reservation was complicated, but uneventful

For my summer trip, I booked a fairly straightforward multi-city itinerary, with stops in California, Oregon, and Montana. I was able to book the itinerary entirely online, and I didn’t violate any of Alaska’s rudimentary routing rules. However, I did pay for it in a modestly complicated way:

  • I made the reservation logged into another person’s account, using their companion fare;

  • I paid for part of the fare using their Wallet funds;

  • and I paid for the rest using their Alaska Airlines credit card.

Obviously there are a lot of moving pieces here, but the reservation itself was made online with no hiccups.

Changing the reservation was straightforward

In my original post, I wrote that Alaska “offers two methods of changing an existing itinerary.” It turns out that’s not right. You can also “Deposit a ticket” through the “Wallet” tab in your account, which offers three additional options:

In hindsight, I wish I’d chosen one of those options! Instead, I called in, had my ticket re-priced, and was told I’d receive a certificate by e-mail I could deposit to my Wallet.

But, the certificate never came.

A “known issue,” but nobody knows what it is

When I called back last week to follow up, the rep made me walk through the entire story from scratch, researched the history of the ticket, put me on hold while she called accounting, and then confirmed that I was due the $720 certificate, which I would receive by e-mail.

Yet again, the certificate never came.

When I called in again today, I decided to be a bit more straightforward: they had screwed up, I was sick of being given the runaround, and I needed to know what they were doing to fix it. This elicited a slightly more effective reaction, and the phone rep contacted the most knowledgable person in accounting she knew (“I’ve been working here for 29 years and Carrie’s been here even longer than me”).

This time, I got what seems like a sensible answer: “there’s a known IT issue, accounting is making great strides to fix it, and it will hopefully be resolved soon.” She even threw in that “Carrie” had recognized my name and knew I was one of the “handful” of people affected by the issue.

She also offered me a $100 discount code, bringing the total gross value of the rebooking to $783. I don’t believe I’ll be able to use the discount code since (unlike Wallet funds) I don’t think discount codes can be combined with companion tickets. Still, someone will surely use it.

Conclusion

I don’t know exactly which piece of my booking broke Alaska’s IT, so there’s nothing I can recommend to avoid running into the same problem until it’s finally resolved. I suspect it has something to do with how their change fee waiver populated across various systems, since I was using a companion fare, Wallet funds, and a non-traveler’s credit card.

But despite the incomplete and inadequate information they’ve given me since the beginning, I came away impressed with their overall customer service. Even as an entry-level MVP elite, I never had to wait more than a few minutes on hold. Every rep I spoke to confirmed that I was owed the fare difference, so there was no need to recite terms and conditions to them at any point. And when the problem continued far too long I was even offered a fare discount as a goodwill gesture.

It’s not like people have much of a choice in carrier these days, but I’m frankly thrilled Alaska's doing their best to keep up their customer service standards.

What I learned in a week messing around with MGM's fake online slots

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On last week’s episode of the Manifesto, I spoke with Justin Vacula of the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast about a suite of browser and mobile apps you can use to accumulate (I hesitate to say “earn”) a loyalty currency that can be redeemed for free nights, food and drink credits, or slot play at MGM casinos and entertainment companies in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and elsewhere.

It was an incredibly informative discussion but I knew from the outset that Justin is something of a “power user” of these MGM products, so I wanted to get a sense of how easy it is in practice to scale these apps up from scratch. So I did!

The three easily-automated MGM fake slot products

For simplicity’s sake, there are three of these products of real interest:

  • myVEGAS Slots, a Facebook app

  • myVEGAS Slots, a mobile app for iPhone and Android

  • my KONAMI Slots, a unified app that works across Facebook, iPhone, and Android.

Confused yet? You should be, because it’s very confusing. The only thing you need to take away at this point is that these three products have two different currencies:

  • each of the three products allows you to accumulate and spend in-game “chips,” which are not synced across the three products;

  • and each of the three products allows you to accumulate “Loyalty Points,” which are synced across all three products, and are the currency you actually want to accumulate for real-world reward redemptions.

The reason I stress this is because you can have all three products running simultaneously, and your Loyalty Points, the ones you actually want to accumulate for eventual redemption, will not appear to sync in real time. But once you move to a different screen in any of the three products, your Loyalty Points will update to reflect those you’ve earned in the other products.

This is just a simple software design decision, but if you don’t know it in advance, I guarantee you will be concerned that your Loyalty Points aren’t being counted properly. They are, at least in my experience.

Scaling up each product is fairly time-consuming

The first and foremost obstacle to scaling up these products enough to be useful is the first 3-4 hours, since each product also assigns you a “level,” which you increase through the amount of time spent in the product. These “levels” have no other in-product function, except that they require you to periodically interact with the product in order to dismiss the notification that you have “leveled up.” You don’t have to do it all at once, but there’s no way around periodically checking in to dismiss these notifications until you get to a high enough level that the notifications become relatively infrequent.

Now, remember those worthless “chips” I mentioned above? They do have one important in-product function: the more of them you have, the faster you can speed-run the leveling-up process, and there’s a Facebook group where they post links for free chips every day. You want to click on all the “myVEGAS Facebook,” “Mobile” and “Konami” links. You can click on them all in the same browser window and all the “chips” will populate to the correct products (i.e., “Facebook” chips will go to the Facebook app, “Mobile” chips will go to your “myVEGAS Slots” mobile app, “Konami” chips will go to your “my Konami” app, even if you open them in a desktop browser).

I don’t mind the excess time I spent on it since I was doing research for this post, but if you’re interested in starting from scratch, my recommendation would be to simply accumulate 30-50 million free chips through those links for a month or so, and then allocate an afternoon to leveling up all your products so you can start automating the process.

Earning rewards isn’t “fun” but it’s not painful

Once you’ve wasted a few hours unlocking all the stupid features of each product, the entire ecosystem basically takes 2-3 minutes a day to “automate,” as long as you’re disciplined. That morning routine for me is:

  • open the Myvegasadvisor Facebook group and claim all the free “chips.”

  • open the myVEGAS Slots Facebook app and turn on autospin.

  • open the my Konami mobile app and turn on autospin.

  • open the myVEGAS Slots mobile app and turn on autospin.

What do I mean by “disciplined?” Well, it only takes 2-3 minutes a day if you don’t check on it. If you check on it, it’s going to take more time, and the more you check on it, the more time it’s going to take. But if you are able to commit to not checking on it, ever, then you don’t have to do anything else.

“Coin-in” is the only mechanism that matters

As I said above, Justin is a power user and I don’t doubt his knowledge of the mechanics of these products. But I do disagree with one part of his strategy for playing these games: he recommends betting the minimum in order to preserve your chip balance as long as possible. I recommend betting the maximum in order to both reduce your time in-game and maximum your Loyalty Point earning, since larger “bets” earn Loyalty Points more quickly. Each strategy has pros and cons, but since these games are not “fun” my goal is to maximize the Loyalty Points I earn per second of interaction I have with each product.

Since talking to Justin last week, I’ve accumulated about 48,000 of the “Loyalty Points” you can redeem for real-world rewards. As we discussed on the episode, a full set of rewards at the Borgata in Atlantic City costs 115,000 Loyalty Points, and can only be redeemed roughly once per quarter, so once you’ve “leveled up” your accounts there’s no point in spending more time than you have to for the rewards you want to redeem.

Rewards at MGM properties in Las Vegas seem to be somewhat more expensive and somewhat more restrictive, but if you’re going to Vegas anyway, there’s no reason not to tack on some free treats, if you can earn them easily enough.

BlueStacks is a very cool program

Folks in the travel hacking community have been talking about BlueStacks for a while since there were circumstances in which using it could lower the cost of liquidating certain prepaid debit cards, but I never paid it much attention, simply because I didn’t particularly need new liquidation channels. Justin finally got me off my butt and I installed BlueStacks in order to run the myVEGAS Mobile and My Konami apps on my desktop instead of tying up my phone with useless spinning dials.

And it’s great! As a 90’s kid I remember emulators as being fairly kludgy attempts to replicate decades-old hardware in order to play Nintendo games. But BlueStacks appears able to emulate up-to-date Android phone hardware on a (now fairly old) MacBook. And I’m here for it.

Conclusion

The MGM suite of fake slots apps is not for everyone. In fact, it’s for virtually no one! But if you’re the kind of person who pops over to Atlantic City or Las Vegas once a quarter or so, I don’t see any earthly reason not to season your account in advance and spend a few minutes each morning racking up some free dining and gambling credits to spend when you get there.