What the Times got right and wrong about travel hacking
/The New York Times Magazine had an article in yesterday’s paper issue (although, confusingly, it’s been available online since last week) about travel hacking. I spoke to the author for about an hour all the way back in April, 2020, when the article was still taking shape, which was its own interesting experience. I tried to put the writer on the right track, which comes across a little bit in the piece (“Pretty much every player at this level disliked Brian Kelly and The Points Guy for one reason or another”), and I truly hope my input made the piece a little less cringe-worthy than it would otherwise have been.
But, there’s still plenty to cringe about.
What the Times got right
Besides “everybody hates Brian Kelly,” the article does capture a few important insights.
First, rewards are paid for by people who don’t collect or redeem them, and this is mechanically true of all rewards of all kinds. When the grocery store offers $20 in free goods each time you buy a $5.95 gift card (whether you use a credit card or pay with cash), the money has to come from somewhere. You can split it up any way you like: some of it as a kickback from the gift card issuer, some of it from the payment processor, some of it from the shareholders, and some of it from higher prices, but every penny has to come from somewhere.
Second, I appreciate that the author gave Jimmy Carter the credit he deserves for airline deregulation. Carter has been maligned for decades because he didn’t get along very well with congressional Democrats and he once gave a speech that made your parents feel bad, but he was a great president so I always like to see him recognized, whether it’s for his achievements in the field of aviation, or for the legalization and proliferation of microbreweries.
What the Times got wrong
The sad thing about the Times article is that it misses the point I tried to make to the author in our brief conversation: Brian Kelly doesn’t matter. He, Gary Leff, Ben Schlappig, and whoever else you want to throw in may be revolting little gremlins, but that’s all they are. They are not members, in any meaningful way, of any community I’m a part of. And that’s the mistake the Times author keeps making: swapping in and out anecdotes about clowns like them, Randy Petersen, or Stefan Krasowski, with the experiences of actual travel hackers.
These are two separate stories. If you want to write an expose about the credit card sales grift, then you need some information about the credit card sales grift (the author quotes Kelly simply saying “I don’t like talking about numbers.” Well, what are we talking about then?). If you want to write about travel hacking, then you can write about travel hacking, if you can find anyone willing to talk to you about it. The author tried something that couldn’t be done: turning credit card salesmen themselves into avatars of travel hacking.
And that’s ultimately the most frustrating thing about the article. It could have been either of two kinds of service journalism:
tell people how to watch out for online credit card grifters;
or tell people how to maximize the value of loyalty programs.
Either project would have been perfectly worthy. Indeed, I make my living helping people do both! But instead it settled into the one place that does no service to anyone: claiming that online credit card grifters are, in fact, helping people maximize the value of loyalty programs. The one thing they are absolutely, positively, resolutely, not doing!
Conclusion
There are lots of sloppy little errors in the piece, and like everything in this world, it’s hard to tell how much people were deliberately misleading an outsider and how much the author simply didn’t understand what they were being told.
For example, the Times wrote that you could manufacture spend by “driving between Walmart locations to buy money orders at a discount” — if anyone knows how to buy money orders at a discount, let me know!
Likewise it’s certainly possible to “resell your points in secret online markets,” but if you’re earning that many points, why would you need to resell them? Just earn more valuable points instead!
Unlike some folks in the community, I don’t have any particular compulsion to keep travel hacking “secret,” for the simple reason that there’s no need to. Most people don’t care, and don’t want to care. The very small number of things that I think widespread publicity will end, I write about in my Subscribers-only Newsletters, but the main thing keeping travel hacking not just alive, but thriving, isn’t secrecy. Rather, it’s the complete lack of interest most people have in travel hacking.
Good for them, and good for us.
