Advantages to getting more involved in the travel hacking community

A few weeks back I wrote about some reasons why most people don’t have much interest in the travel hacking game, and why they’re mostly right: if you don’t have the bug, then it’s mind-bendingly boring to keep track of dozens of credit cards, loyalty programs, booking tricks, routing rules, etc.

Nevertheless, I’m quite involved, and if you’re reading this you probably are as well, so I thought I’d explore some of the obvious advantages of not just playing the game, but getting involved in one or more groups, following folks you respect on Twitter (or Instagram or Facebook, if you’re one of those people), and in general building relationships with other people who share your passion.

The most obvious advantage of making friends with other folks in the community is that it allows you to optimize your earning and redemptions over time. This can sometimes be purely transactional, and there’s nothing wrong with that: when I won a Bose sound system through an IHG sweepstakes, I sold it to a reader for a few hundred bucks lower than the list price, so he got a cheap sound system and I didn’t have to go to the trouble of listing it on Amazon or eBay, or dealing with a stranger through Craigslist or Facebook.

Folks like Vinh at Miles per Day have scaled this up a huge degree, going so far as to connect buyers and sellers of in-demand US Mint coins, but you don’t need to go that far to simply get to know people who might have miles and points you need, or might need the miles and points you have but don’t have immediate plans for.

Swapping referrals and signup bonuses

This option is talked about enough that I don’t think I need to go into it at any length, but when large credit card offers come around you may find that you’re not eligible (for example due to Chase’s 5/24 rule or Bank of America’s 2/3/4 rule) but someone else you know in the community is. Instead of sitting on the sidelines, you can ask your friends if they’d like to swap signup bonuses — maybe they’ve been banned from Citi for money order shenanigans and you haven’t, but you’re over 5/24 and they aren’t.

Expiring or useless free nights

Most folks don’t have too much trouble redeeming the free anniversary night that comes with the Chase World of Hyatt or American Express Hilton Honors Aspire credit cards, but might run into a problem when it comes to free night certificates with worse loyalty programs:

The IHG Rewards Club Premier Credit Card comes with a free reward night (at properties costing up to 40,000 points) on every anniversary, which is certainly worth more than the $89 annual fee to someone, but it might not be worth it to you because of how much more valuable the required Ultimate Rewards points to “fill out” an IHG award redemption would be if transferred to a different partner. Cancelling the card saves you $89, but it also means that no one gets to use the award, while you may be able to sell or trade it to someone who can get hundreds of dollars in value from it.

Likewise the Marriott Bonvoy Boundless (Chase) and Brilliant (American Express) cards come with annual free nights worth up to 35,000 and 50,000 points, respectively. Those aren’t worth their $95 and $450 annual fees to me, but especially in the case of the Brilliant card, you could easily wipe out your annual fee by selling or trading those rewards, when combined with the $300 property credit (Marriott properties used to sell physical gift cards you could resell or trade, although it’s been too long for me to know whether they still do).

Companion tickets

Another annual benefit you might not be able to personally use is airline companion tickets, like those offered by the Bank of America Alaska Airlines credit cards and the American Express Delta Platinum and Reserve cards.

The Alaska Airlines companion fare is the easiest to exchange with comrades because of a curious feature: when booking the companion ticket, any cash component of the reservation has to be paid for with an Alaska Airlines credit card, unless it is covered by funds you already have in your “Wallet.” This provides a simple way to book companion tickets without needing any information from the cardholder: just book a ticket that costs slightly more than the companion ticket, refund it to your Wallet, then pay with that balance.

Meanwhile, the Delta companion tickets have to be paid for in full with the credit card that generated the companion ticket (previously, any American Express card could be used, but that’s now changed in my experience). This makes the ticket slightly less transferable, since you need to place more trust in the person booking the ticket, which is another way of saying it’s good to make friends and connections in the community!

Transferable points and status

Another advantage of having friends in the community, especially ones that do things slightly differently than you, is the ability to pool points and status between programs. My two favorite examples of this are World of Hyatt and Hilton Honors.

World of Hyatt members can send and receive points by filling out the “Point combining request form,” which allows you to make award reservations out of the most advantageous account, and without contaminating either person’s relationship with Chase (there are strict limits on the number and frequency of Ultimate Rewards point transfers to non-household-members). Besides topping up a low balance, the main reason to do this is to make a Guest of Honor booking from an account with Globalist status, giving the guest the potentially valuable benefits like complimentary breakfast, lounge access, and waived parking fees, plus late checkout.

Hilton Honors has an even more streamlined system, with (in my experience) instant transfers after completing the online "transfer points” form. Their terminology is a little bit curious, but you “gift” points when you want to buy someone points with cash, and “transfer” points when you want to reduce your balance and increase their balance. Besides sharing Hilton’s fairly limited status benefits like potential upgrades, late checkout, and the dining credit that replaced their breakfast benefit, combining points in a single account allows you to take advantage of the very valuable 5th-night-free benefit on award stays (for elite members, including Silver elites, so pretty much everybody). This technique recently helped me book 7 nights in Hawaii for the price of 5 by combining 6 award nights and an annual American Express Surpass free night certificate.

Conclusion

Like any community, we’ve got our fair share of jerks, creeps, and affiliate bloggers, but overall I’ve been impressed by how warm and welcoming I’ve found the community to be, both at in-person events and online. There are obvious exceptions to be avoided, but if you’ve got the travel hacking bug, I think the advantages of getting more involved in the community swamp the pain of talking to the occasional jerk. And it always helps to remember that however small fry you think you are (and they don’t get much smaller than me), there’s almost certainly something you know that almost nobody else does, whether it’s a merchant coding error or a bank error in your favor: almost everybody has something to contribute.

The strangest thing about losing your appetite

As long-time fans of the Free-quent Flyer extended universe know, I got pretty sick last year and was diagnosed with “community-acquired pneumonia,” treated with some kind of breathing mask, and sent home with a week’s supply of antibiotics. Then I got fired. I’m fine, I recovered, this isn’t a GoFundMe post or something. But of all the lingering symptoms I’ve had since then, the strangest one is loss of appetite.

A well-known symptom of COVID-19 is loss of smell and taste. But I only briefly lost my sense of smell and taste. I can smell scented candles, food tastes more or less like food again. But what never came back was my appetite. I think of myself as a big eater, always happy to finish somebody else’s plate if they leave anything on it, things of that nature. But since my bout with pneumonia I haven’t had a desire to eat. I put it off as long as possible, then eat as quickly as possible so it’s over as soon as possible.

Loss of appetite is different from hunger in a curious way. I know when I’m hungry; I just don’t want to eat. Of course, our tech overlords call this “intermittent fasting,” which I suppose it is, but I don’t do it in order to perfect my body’s rhythms or whatever they’re aiming for. I’m just annoyed and disgusted by the concept of eating, however hungry I am.

But the strangest thing about losing your appetite is the odd, intermittent bursts of desire. What made me even think of writing this post was that I was walking back home the other day, not having eaten in 16 hours or so, and was suddenly struck by the desire for a cheeseburger from Shake Shack. I headed straight there, with my order entirely planned out, and there was a customer fighting with the cashier about how many burgers she had ordered, how many she paid for, how many she received.

And I immediately lost my appetite.

Get vaccinated, stay safe, don’t get COVID-19.

The history and present of the au pair scam

On this week’s episode of The Manifesto I had a long conversation with a reader who has a decade or so of experience legally bringing in au pairs from abroad to care for his children (who sound delightful, although thanks to the magic of editing software you don’t get to hear their cheerful babble in the background of the episode).

I’ll let the episode stand on its own with respect to the mechanics and economics of hiring au pairs, which we cover in great depth and detail, but throughout the episode I kept coming back to the same question: how is this legal?

After all, every day the newspapers are full of stories about shortages of foreign workers, leaving meat unpacked, fruit unpicked, and lawns unmown. But there’s one weird trick to bring in an unlimited number of workers to care for the children of our economic elite?

There sure is.

The origins of the scam

The year is 1986. Ronald Reagan has swept to re-election, Mike Ditka’s Chicago Bears have crushed the New England Patriots in Superbowl XX, and just a few years earlier women’s formal labor force participation edged past 50% for the first time (male labor force participation was 76% the same year). It would continue to soar until topping out above 60% in the final years of the Clinton boom.

Two-earner households provided desperately-needed labor to firms anxious to expand as interest rates fell from their Volcker highs (for the purposes of this story you have to understand that a 7% risk-free interest rate was considered low in 1986). Just a few years later, Blondie Bumstead would enter the workforce after 58 years as a homemaker.

Of course I’m being a bit droll, but the point of this frame story is to express a genuine change in material circumstances experienced by an increasing number of Americans. Adding a second wage-earner to the household made up in part for falling unionization rates and the end of the “family wage” earned by the (stereotypically) male “breadwinner.”

This tidy solution came with its own complications. As Baumol taught us, rising productivity and incomes in one area of the economy increases the wages that have to be paid in sectors with stagnant or falling productivity as long as workers are free to move between low-productivity and high-productivity sectors.

But what if, you ask, for some reason workers weren’t free to move between jobs or sectors?

Congratulations, you just invented the au pair scam. In 1986, the United States Information Agency approved the creation of a “cultural exchange” program to bring in an initial 1,000 childcare workers on non-immigrant J-1 visas. The initial program, with its tight cap on entrants and limited geographical scope, cost families $149 per week, of which $100 went to the au pair, which is both insultingly and truthfully referred to as “pocket money.”

I suggest considering these figures in 3 distinct ways:

• Using the Department of Health and Human Services guideline that childcare is considered “affordable” when it costs less than 7% of household income (no one bothers to specify whether this is gross or after-tax income), $7,748 would be “affordable” to a family making $110,685 per year in 1986 (277,000 2021 dollars).

• $5,200 in annual income is roughly 75% of the 1986 minimum wage of $3.35 per hour, calculated on a 40-hour, 52-week basis (au pairs are in fact expected to work slightly longer hours than this).

• But both of these figures need to be adjusted by an essential consideration: au pairs receive room and board, which both increases the cost for host families, primarily by requiring them to own or rent slightly more “house” than they might otherwise (e.g. 3 bedrooms instead of 2), and decreases the out-of-pocket expenses of the au pairs.

Everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing

It’s difficult, living through an era of bipartisan political amateurism, to examine periods of American history when politicians knew what they were doing. If the au pair scam were invented today, you’d say it was just an unfortunate accident, some sloppy wording in a hastily-written statute that was passed through a special budget procedure in the middle of the night.

Not so, as these hilariously prescient quotes show.

In February, 1986:

Some experts said the plan was likely to cause controversy. ''This could be a terrific program for the students,'' said Eugene Goldstein, a Manhattan lawyer who takes many immigration cases. ''But it could sound like a highly imaginative subterfuge, in bringing someone to work as a baby sitter under an educational program.''

He added that it may be criticized as a way to import ''cheap labor under the guise of an educational exchange'' or be faulted by those ''who don't think it complies with the spirit or purpose of the exchange visit program.''

In June, the first au pairs arrived:

Yesterday, some of the au pairs met their host families. ''We vowed we'd never have an illegal au pair, even though it's so difficult to find child care in our area,'' said Susan Garthwaite of Stamford, Conn. She, her husband, Richard, and their children, Craig and Dina, were introduced to their au pair, Nicola Adams, 22, from Hampshire, England.

The next year:

''You can't get Americans for $150 a week,'' said Betty Richardson, proprietor of Betty's Nannies, a Houston-based recruitment agency that places au pairs nationwide. ''If they took all the unauthorized nannies away we'd all come to a screeching halt.''

…

Many of the au pair agencies and parents are resentful over a special new program under which 3,100 foreign au pairs are legally brought to this country each year by a private company, the American Institute for Foreign Study, under a cultural exchange program sponsored by the United States Information Agency and the Experiment in International Living.

The au pair scam today

If you were paying attention, you might have noticed something jarring in the above quotes. The au pair J-1 visa was introduced in 1986 with a hard cap of 1,000 entrants, but by May of 1987, less than a year later, there were 3,100 being admitted “each year?”

With all the clues in hand, you already see where this is going: in 2019 (the fairest “pre-pandemic” comparison year), 21,551 au pairs were admitted on J-1 visas!

What’s remarkable is that if the working conditions of these au pairs has changed in the last 35 years, it’s only been for the worse. The $100 the first au pairs received weekly in 1986 is worth about $250 on a CPI-adjusted basis today, while au pairs today receive just $196 in 2021 dollars! This despite the increased share of women’s labor force participation and corresponding demand for childcare, and the galloping productivity gains of the intervening 1990’s.

The wealthy got their special pleading; now what?

If you’re thinking of commenting that I’m being too harsh on the au pair scam, and that it’s “all perfectly legal,” save your keystrokes. I know it’s perfectly legal; I’m the one who did the research.

The point is to invite you to consider the consequences when the economic elite are allowed to buy their way out of the constraints everyone else in society faces. Not enough childcare centers? Hire an in-home nanny. Not enough American nannies? Bring in a foreigner. Not enough visas? Create a special visa program just for in-home nannies. This is the logic of a class that simply considers itself removed from the obligation to participate in the shared obligations of society.

Of course it’s all perfectly legal. They wrote the laws. What about the rest of us?

Can you win playing by the rules?

Last month I spent a lovely Saturday afternoon in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport conference center for the long, long, long-delayed Milenomics Second Planned (MSP, get it?) Meetup. Sam and Robert, the brainiacs over there, did a lovely job and I got to kick back and relax all day with a few dozen members of their Patreon community, and see some old friends from all around the country for the first time in much too long.

Over the years I’ve attended quite a few gatherings like this (and hosted a fair share of my own), and my overwhelming impression is simply how different they all are. All the way back in 2014 I covered the gauzy Frequent Traveler University event in Seattle and came away equal parts bored and annoyed. When Saverocity was more active, I found their Phoenix and Charlotte events were well-run and great opportunities to meet more like-minded members of the community. I haven’t made it to the Chicago Seminars or Ann Arbor Art Fair meetups, but have heard rave reviews of them from their own diehard fans.

The point of all this is not to recommend or even criticize one sliver of the travel hacking community over another, but rather to point out that different slivers are different! If you don’t fit in in the first group you join, that doesn’t mean everybody else in the community is a boring loser and you’re the only one who really gets it. It means you had bad luck — that group wasn’t right for you, but it might be perfect for people who aren’t like you.

What I found most interesting about the Milenomics meetup was not how similar everyone was, but how different they were, and I’ve been turning over how to express what, if anything, passionate travel hackers have in common.

The rules describe everything that has already been thought of

Like lots of kids, I grew up playing the board game “Monopoly,” with its iconic instructions:

“GO TO JAIL.
“Go Directly to Jail
”DO NOT PASS GO
“DO NOT COLLECT $200.”

This is a wonderful manifestation of the general principle that you can only write rules around situations that have already occurred to you. Monopoly is a game of randomized clockwise movement around a rectangular board. If the Jail square is between your token and the GO square, there’s no question that you have to move your token there without passing GO. But if the GO square is between your token and Jail, what are you to do? You are to go “directly” to Jail, without passing GO, violating the game’s main rule of one-directional, clockwise movement.

Playing by, around, and against the rules

The question, then, is do the rules describe every possible situation? Of course not. A few years back IHG Rewards ran a promotion that allowed you to enter into a sweepstakes up to 94 times by mailing hand-printed pieces of paper to some P.O. Box in Kalamazoo. But the rules didn’t say who had to hand-print the pieces of paper, so there was nothing in the rules against enlisting some kids with neat penmanship to fill out your 94 entries for you.

And this, I think, constitutes one of the many divides in the travel hacking community:

• Should you play by the rules, and only do the things explicitly laid out by the companies we interact with;

• Should you play around the rules, identifying the “Air Bud” holes where some action is neither explicitly permitted nor explicitly prohibited;

• Or should you break the rules, counting on sloppy implementation or enforcement?

Most people do some of each, and that goes beyond the specific domain of travel hacking. Take the case of vaccine mandates:

• the overwhelming majority of people subject to vaccine mandates simply comply and receive the mandated vaccines;

• some people observe the possibility of “religious exemptions” or “conscientious objection” to vaccine mandates and fabricate those exemptions or objections;

• and some people go further and fabricate the documents themselves in order to violate vaccination requirements.

The scarcest resource is not time, but focus and attention

One of the strangest arguments in the travel hacking community is about the “value” of your “time.” It’s certainly true that hourly workers are compensated for their time on an hourly basis, and that a small subset of salaried workers are paid overtime when they work more than 40 hours per week, but my extremely literal viewpoint is that when you’re not being paid for your time, it’s yours. It’s free, God-given, to do with what you please.

The manufactured spending I don’t do online, I do on foot. In other words, I go for a walk. In every other context, “going for a walk” is treated as a leisure activity. In my case, I also make money doing it. But the time is free: I exchange pleasantries with my neighbors, breathe fresh air, and enjoy all the benefits of daily light cardiovascular exercise.

Where I see the biggest divide between affiliate bloggers and travel hackers is in how seriously they take the shortage of focus and attention, not time. Participating in a buyers group doesn’t take much time at all, compared to going for a long walk. But keeping track of shipments, deliveries, and payments requires focus and attention that could be used elsewhere, even if it consumes just a minute or two per day. This is not a criticism: if you find participating in buyers groups fun, then that’s what you should do. But don’t make the mistake of thinking the resource you’re expending is your time.

If you want to play by the rules you have to stay even more focused

The error I see affiliate bloggers promoting most consistently is that it’s worth playing by the rules (the only rules affiliate bloggers are allowed to tell you about) and getting dragged deeper and deeper into the travel hacking community. To me, that’s an either/or proposition.

A perfectly reasonable way to go through life is to sign up for a Chase Sapphire Preferred card, put all your purchases on it, and each month transfer your entire balance of Ultimate Rewards points to World of Hyatt. Then whenever you need a hotel stay, see if there’s Hyatt award availability. If there is, book the Hyatt. If not, pay cash. The same logic applies to an American Express Gold card with transfers to Delta.

Likewise, I’ve happily written about a basic credit card strategy consisting exclusively of cards with annual companion tickets (Alaska and Delta) and hotel nights (Hilton and Hyatt).

But if that’s your strategy then you need to log off, not read any blogs at all, not follow any travel hackers on Twitter, and not listen to any travel hacking podcasts. Not because they’re a waste of time, but because they’re a waste of focus and attention.

The reason to get engaged in the community is to find out what rules can be bent and broken

The rewards of getting involved in the travel hacking community can be enormous, but they’re not free. Learning how to search for partner award availability across multiple airline alliances is a huge undertaking. Tracking signup bonuses and transfer partners isn’t particularly time-consuming, but it does consume focus and attention that you’re otherwise free to expend elsewhere.

Fortunately, travel hacking has the same safety valve built into it that all hobbies do: if you don’t find it fun, you don’t have to do it! Whenever my friends or family approach me to ask how to get started I tell them the same thing: do one thing, anything, and see if you enjoy it. See if it captures your imagination. See if you want to do more, faster, more aggressively. And the simple fact is, no one has ever taken me up on it, because the overwhelming majority of people find it mind-bendingly boring.

The real deal behind the Bilt Rewards reboot

[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?

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:

• Short rentals and airline elites: Delta SkyMiles, United Mileage Plus, or Marriott Bonvoy (500 miles or points per rental, more for Delta and United elites)

• Long rentals: Alaska Mileage Plan (500 miles for rentals over 5 days)

• Expensive rentals: American AAdvantage (1 mile per dollar spent)

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:

• Short rentals: World of Hyatt or American AAdvantage (500 miles or points per rental)

• Long rentals: Alaska Mileage Plan (500 miles for rentals over 5 days)

• Expensive rentals: British Airways Avios (3 avios per dollar spent)

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:

• Short rentals: Delta SkyMiles (500 miles per rental)

• Medium rentals: United Mileage Plus (500 miles per rental over 5 days)

• 10-day+ rentals: Alaska Mileage Plan (50 miles per rental day, up to 30 days) or American AAdvantage (50 miles per rental day, up to 28 days)

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.

• Short rentals: National Emerald Club or Delta SkyMiles (500 miles per rental)

• Long rentals: National Emerald Club, Alaska Mileage Plan, or American AAdvantage (50 miles per day)

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

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

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)

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

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:

• JetBlue TrueBlue

• American AAdvantage

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:

• Alaska Mileage Plan

• American AAdvantage

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:

• American AAdvantage

• Alaska Mileage Plan

• JetBlue TrueBlue

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.