The real deal behind the Bilt Rewards reboot

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[Update 9/21/2021: Listen to the free episode of the Manifesto here]

Like most folks who take travel hacking seriously, I was a bit bemused by the wave of coverage Bilt Rewards received back in June from Thought Followers in Travel and The Cocaine Guy alike. I didn’t write about it at the time, because it frankly didn’t look that interesting.

At launch, the basic conceit of the program was that you could pay your rent with a co-branded credit card. Then if you also hit other spend thresholds with that credit card, you would earn points on your rent payments as well as on those other purchases. You can check out the above-linked posts if you’re interested in the original program, but basically the whole thing was a mess.

When I saw on Twitter that Richard Kerr, a personal acquaintance and recently of Red Ventures, was involved, I decided to reach out and ask him to come on my podcast to talk about the program. He said he’d be happy to, but that he wanted to wait a month since they were rebooting the entire program in September. Well, it’s September, he came on the Manifesto, and he gave me the lowdown on the entirely-revamped program.

Bilt Rewards, Redux

The most important thing to get your head around with Bilt Rewards is that it’s not a credit card loyalty program. They want you to get their co-branded credit card, and the program isn’t particularly interesting unless you do, but in principle you can sign up for Bilt Rewards, plug in your landlord’s payment information, and pay through ACH from your checking account every month. They have a bunch of major residential real estate companies they can pay electronically but they’ll also cut a check if your landlord isn’t in their database, just like payment services like Plastiq. You’ll earn 250 Bilt Rewards points per month you pay your rent this way, and the whole thing is free.

Their credit card, a white-label World Elite MasterCard issued by Evolve Bank & Trust, is how you unlock the program’s potential value. It’s a no-annual-fee credit card that earns 2 points per dollar on travel and 3 points per dollar on dining, and 1 point per dollar everywhere else.

Oddly for a card designed to pay rent with, rent is the only category with capped earning, at 50,000 points per year, which works out to $4,167 in monthly rent. I assume that’s some kind of anti-abuse provision, so your spouse doesn’t write you a “lease” for $10,000 a month to live in your own home.

So what’s a Bilt Rewards point?

The whole point of this scheme is to rack up Bilt Rewards points, which can be transferred at a 1:1 ratio to their 9 travel partners:

  • American Airlines AAdvantage

  • Air Canada’s Aeroplan

  • Emirates Skywards

  • FlyingBlue

  • Turkish Miles & Smiles

  • Virgin Atlantic Flying Club

  • HawaiianMiles

  • World of Hyatt

  • IHG Rewards

American Airlines, Air Canada, and World of Hyatt are the most obviously valuable opportunities here, but there are sweet spots in each program that you might find personally appealing (and Richard was kind enough to list many of them on the Manifesto).

You can also redeem points for household stuff from their retail catalog or for money towards the down payment on a home.

Bilt Protect

One feature of the program so curious I had to send a follow-up e-mail to Richard about it after our interview is what they call “Bilt Protect.” This is a feature available to all Bilt Rewards credit cardholders, which allows rent payments to be debited from your linked checking account instead of charged to your credit card. According to my follow-up exchange with Richard, these transactions still earn 1 Bilt Rewards point per dollar, despite not flowing through the credit card at all.

If that’s correct, then anyone who rents can apply for a Bilt Rewards credit card, throw it in the sock drawer (although see below for transaction requirements), and still earn 1 point per dollar on their rent payments debited from their checking account.

As I said, I have this in writing from Richard, but if it is true the loophole seems yawning, if not cavernous.

Three more quibbles and quirks

There are a few more things to be aware of if you are at all interested in pursuing Bilt Rewards.

First, there’s a transaction requirement for credit cardholders. If you don’t make 5 transactions per statement cycle, you won’t earn any Bilt Rewards points at all. This is very dumb, but if you’re holding the credit card to earn points through Bilt Protect, be sure to throw 5 random charges on the credit card per month or you’ll earn nothing at all. Ideally, automate these through Plastiq, Amazon, or another recurring payment service.

Second, they have a funny “status” system which you should ignore completely. You can earn “interest” on your Bilt Rewards balance if you have “elite” status, but the interest rate is based on the national savings account interest rate, which is approximately 0.00%.

Finally, they’ve paid to upgrade the “basic” World Elite MasterCard with a suite of features I don’t know if I’ve seen recently on a no-annual-fee card, with trip delay protection and cell phone insurance being the two of most obvious interest.

Who is Bilt Rewards right for?

Let’s not mince words: these are very early days for the company, and we’re going to have to see how the program is managed, both on the outsourced credit card side and the in-house administrative side. They may burn through their venture capital quickly or slowly, they may attract a flood of customers or a trickle. In the startup world a surge of customers may make you a valuable acquisition target or unicorn IPO, or it may bankrupt you, so hopefully no readers will be building their travel strategy around Bilt Rewards any time soon.

But, there are obvious opportunities here. Since Citi fired me as a customer years ago, I don’t have any convenient method of earning American AAdvantage miles through credit card spend; if you’re in my position, this is a potential opening to transfer Bilt Rewards to AAdvantage. If you’re over the 5 cards per 24 month limit on Chase credit card approvals, you might not have easy access to World of Hyatt points — here’s a new one.

It also has a certain appeal as a “starter” card for folks renting their first apartment, with no annual fee and transfer partners in each alliance, plus Hyatt for hotel stays. Since Bilt Protect allows you to pay your rent from your checking account regardless of your credit limit, you could potentially run up a sizable rewards balance that way without paying any annual fees or risking falling into debt.

I work for you

As you know, nobody pays me for anything except my subscribers, Google Adsense, Amazon Associates, and the Milenomics Podcast Network, so you know Bilt Rewards didn’t pay me anything to write this. What they did do is give me a code to let you skip the “waiting list” and get instant access to the program. That code is: FQF4BILT. If you plug that in while signing up at biltrewards.com/waitlist, you should get instant access to the program. If not, let me know in the comments and I’ll bug Richard about fixing it, if he still talks to me after this post.

What travel partner should you credit car rentals to?

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I detest driving, so we haven’t owned a car in years, and I try my best to design vacations that don’t require a private vehicle. In recent years, that started to slip, and we started to rent cars 2-3 times a year. During the pandemic, the change accelerated when nearby driving vacations became the only ones available.

90% of the time we rent from Hertz simply because their nearby location typically offers the lowest prices on Autoslash, and I add my Hertz Gold Plus Rewards number to those reservations, but the main advantage seems to be saving my credit card, insurance, and fuel preferences: the program just isn’t that valuable.

In the last year, I’ve spent $936.64 on four Hertz rentals and earned a grand total of 737 points (one of the rentals didn’t credit to my account for some reason, either because Autoslash put me in an ineligible booking code or I forgot to re-add the reservation to my Hertz profile after booking through Priceline, a tedious necessity). That’s not quite enough points for a single day standard car rental subject to blackout dates, which costs 750 points.

It was only when I recently needed to make a reservation with Avis that I remembered it’s also possible to earn partner miles and points on these reservations. I had assumed that those partnerships were of trivial value, since the points you earn with a program are almost always more valuable than those earned with partners. That turned out to be exactly wrong: airline miles are almost always more valuable than points earned in rental car programs.

Since I wasn’t able to find any useful information about car rental programs on non-affiliate sites, I realized I needed to research and cover these programs more closely myself.

Hertz Gold Plus Rewards

The main problem with Hertz, and the reason it took me so long to figure out their rewards, is that their website is held together with twine. You can save partner loyalty account numbers to your Hertz account by navigating to “My Profile” and editing your “Membership Details” (don’t forget to hit “update” on the bottom of the page in order to save your accounts).

In principle, the terms of the program are clear that you must decide whether to earn Hertz Gold Plus Rewards points or partner loyalty points. In fact, I was able to submit a “Retroactive Credit Form” for two recent rentals and received an e-mail confirming two sets of 500 miles were headed to my Alaska Mileage Plan account. They haven’t arrived yet (they give themselves 4-6 weeks) and I don’t know if they ever will, but if so they represent a potential double dip opportunity.

Each partner loyalty program has its own earning rate, so the optimal choice depends on your precise rental:

Note that when crediting a rental to an airline partner, Hertz charges a surcharge to recover the excise tax; I’m not sure how or whether that surcharge is recovered when you request retroactive airline credit.

Avis

Avis’s website works a lot better than Hertz’s, and makes it easy to select an airline partner by navigating to “My Profile,” then “Rewards,” then editing your “Rewards Program.” You can select either “Avis Preferred Points,” or one of their partner loyalty programs.

As in the case of Hertz, earning rates vary by partner, so you’ll want to select a travel partner before each rental to maximize the value of your rewards. Here are my top choices:

Thrifty

I have my first Thrifty car rental coming up in December and while I’m not worried, I’m certainly frustrated by their primitive website; I haven’t even been able to create a “Blue Chip Rewards” account in order to save my partner loyalty programs and manage my reservation. Hopefully somebody else will notice and complain loud enough to get the site fixed by the time my reservation rolls around. In any case, as with the first two programs, you’ll want to choose which program to credit your rental to depending on its length:

National

Unlike the above three programs, National’s Emerald Club does earn rewards worth considering, especially if you make a lot of short rentals. Since you earn one “rental credit” for all rentals up to 7 days, and one free rental day for every 6 credits, the program can provide an outsized rebate value: 6 cheap one-day rentals earn you enough credits for an expensive one-day rental. If you find yourself spreading your car rentals across multiple companies, however, it may take you years to accumulate those 6 rental credits, and you’ll likely be better off crediting your rentals to one of their loyalty partners.

Conclusion

In my experience the price differences between rental car companies are so large, and the quality differences so small, that it would never make sense to be “loyal,” or even have a slight preference, for one rental car company over another. Your own situation may well differ, with the most obvious example being a company with a deeply discounted corporate rate that you can use on business and leisure trips alike. In that case, you might find rental car rewards worth earning on reimbursed travel and redeeming on your own vacations.

But unless you rent cars from the same company year-round, it’s likely worth tactically crediting your rentals to partner programs, based on their length, cost, and earning rate.

My experience using Fluz as intended

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Gift card arbitrage occupies an odd position between “pure” travel hacking and extreme couponing: it’s lucrative enough that most travel hackers do it at least occasionally, but close enough to extreme couponing that they have the dignity to be a little embarassed about it. Over the years a few businesses have sprung up to smooth that embarrassment.

Raise acts as an intermediary or marketplace for folks who want to buy and sell unneeded gift cards at a fraction of their face value. Because they’re buying and selling gift cards that have already been issued, and often have had part of their balance spent down, you can find cards in a wide range of values and at various discount rates there.

The United MileagePlus X app sells newly-issued gift cards in the exact denomination you need for a given purchase. Instead of offering discounts off face value, they pay you in United MileagePlus miles. Depending on how highly you value MileagePlus miles, their payout rates can be competitive with the rewards you’d earn on a credit card.

Note that whenever you pay with a gift card instead of a credit card, you’re naturally sacrificing the purchase protections offered by most credit cards. That may be fine when you’re ordering a pizza, but probably not when you’re buying expensive, durable goods.

How Fluz is supposed to work

All of this is by way of introduction to Fluz, a gift card merchant with what I would call a “hybrid” approach. Signing up for Fluz comes with a seemingly-unbeatable offer: 3 “vouchers” worth up to 35% of your first three gift card purchases. The person who refers you also receives a voucher after you complete your first purchase (my referral code is “FREEQUENT” if you feel like signing up after reading this post).

The first thing you need to know is that the service is “app-only:” there’s no way to use it from a desktop without using a smartphone emulator like BlueStacks. This will become relevant shortly.

The second thing you need to know is that unless you build your life around it, you’ll never get any value from Fluz. That’s because unlike Raise, which sells gift cards at an upfront discount to their face value, and MileagePlus X, which awards miles based on the value of the gift card you purchase, Fluz “vouchers” don’t discount the price of the gift cards you buy with them. Instead, you earn a “Rewards Balance” that you can redeem against the future purchase of a gift card, but only once you’ve reached $26 in earnings.

Confused yet? Wait — it gets worse. The 3 vouchers you get for signing up are also capped, at $3.50 in value each. So ordering 3 $10 Domino’s pizzas will only earn you $11.40 in rewards ($3.50 plus the “base” earning of 3% on each transaction), leaving you less than halfway to the $26 threshold for actually redeeming them.

Still with me? One final point. Earnings are also based on payment method. Paying with an ACH debit earns the highest rewards, a debit card somewhat less, and a credit card or PayPal least of all.

One thing I will say in Fluz’s favor is that their “voucher merchants” include most of the food delivery services I’ve heard of: Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, Caviar, and Seamless. I don’t use those services, but if you do, you could conceivably hit the earnings threshold relatively quickly and then redeem your rewards for additional free food deliveries.

My mixed experience using Fluz as intended

I’ve completed two transactions at “voucher merchants,” one entirely successfully and one completely disastrously.

My first purchase was for a $15 CVS gift card, while I was standing in line at CVS. This was how I, naively, believed the app was supposed to work: figure out how much your items cost, then buy a gift card in the closest possible denomination without going over. I paid for the gift card, generated the bar code, and then spent 10 minutes at the register trying to get the cashier to accept it, before ultimately failing. A bit flustered by this ordeal, it was only when I got home that I realized Fluz had attached an elaborate set of instructions to the gift card, including printing it out at home to ensure the barcode was scaled correctly for CVS’s scanners, and with the final addendum, “if none of these instructions work, ask to speak to a manager.” An app-only service that requires you to haul around a portable printer? Is this what Silicon Valley calls “disruptive?”

Thus began my first Fluz adventure: getting a refund. That process began with an e-mail I sent through the app saying I’d been unable to use the gift card. That led to this bizarre veiled threat from them:

“CVS not accepting it could be a cashier issue, which we find is what usually happens.

We can process a refund for you. I would discourage filing a chargeback as our process will involve locking your account until the chargeback has been processed with the bank.”

From my perspective this was absurd: why would I care if my account was locked with a company that couldn’t deliver a working product? A month later, I’ve now had my refund “approved” twice, although the fifteen bucks is still noticeably missing from my account.

My second transaction went much smoother, buying a $17.46 Domino’s gift card that I was able to immediately enter into the Domino’s order page to cover the exact amount of my order, earning $4.02 in rewards (which, again, I’ll never be able to redeem).

The lesson, such as it is, was simple: buy digital gift cards and use them online.

A new life awaits you in the Fluz colonies

At the end of the day Fluz is a fairly primitive data-mining gimmick dressed up in a multi-level marketing ballgown. But even I can admit it’s a handsome gown: gift card purchases are passed through Fluz while retaining the underlying merchant’s categorization, so while you may lose out on credit card protections, you’ll still usually earn bonus points when buying gift cards to restaurants, grocery stores, or gas stations with the relevant credit cards.

So what would it look like to really maximize the value of the Fluz app? First, you’d have to be absolutely insufferable in referring your friends and family. Obviously there are times we do this (you can find my personal referral links right here!), but for sane people there’s a natural limit on how many people you’re willing to pester to do what. In order to maximize the value of the data they harvest, Fluz is relatively strict about account creation and identifying details, so it’s not like a grocery store where you can spin up an unlimited number of rewards accounts by tinkering with your e-mail address.

Second, you’d need to get used to building your life around “voucher stores” in order to maximize the value of the vouchers you earn from your referrals. Dunkin’ instead of Starbucks for your coffee, CVS instead of Walgreens for your prescriptions, Burger King instead of McDonald’s for your fast food, etc. Depending on your geography you may find those restrictions somewhat onerous or not at all.

But finally, to get the most value using Fluz as intended, you’ve got to lean into the data harvesting business model and link a checking account in order to maximize your earnings. That means no credit card rewards, no credit card protections, and no chargebacks. For civilians who have one or zero checking accounts, this should be the highest bar, but in reality is probably the lowest. For travel hackers with dozens of checking accounts sitting around, it’s trivial to leave $50 in one of them in order to pay for the occasional meal at Applebee’s.

To be clear: I don’t think you should use Fluz as intended, but if you do, you’ve got to go all-in if you want to wring any value at all out of the system.

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.