How much is World of Hyatt credit card spend towards Globalist status worth?

It sounds like a cliche because it is, but World of Hyatt points are virtually the only loyalty currency to have retained a large part of their value in the years since I started travel hacking. This only sounds controversial because they have, in fact, lost so much value, especially at the very highest end: the most expensive stays at the top 10 or 15 properties have increased in price from 22,000 World of Hyatt points to 45,000 points during their “peak” booking windows.

That still consistently makes Hyatt stays the most valuable redemptions almost everywhere they operate, and I rarely see redemptions worth less than 3 or 4 cents per point.

This is, however, not a ringing endorsement of putting unbonused spend on Chase’s co-branded World of Hyatt credit cards, because those cards are not the best method of earning World of Hyatt points on unbonused spend.

Chase offers the same or higher Hyatt earning in all spending categories

The Chase World of Hyatt personal and business cards offer 2 World of Hyatt points per dollar spent on a range of categories:

• Restaurants

• Airline tickets

• Transit and commuting

• Fitness clubs and gym memberships

• Shipping

• Car rentals

• Gas stations

• Internet, cable, and phone bills

Unfortunately, Chase also offers cards that earn bonus Ultimate Rewards points in each of these categories, points that can be instantly transferred to Hyatt. In other words, no matter how highly you value World of Hyatt points, it’s extremely unlikely that one of their co-branded credit cards is worth carrying purely for the earning opportunities in any of the bonus categories.

Even on unbonused spend, the Chase Freedom Unlimited and Ink Unlimited cards earn 50% more points than the same spend put on a World of Hyatt credit card.

What is unbonused spend towards Hyatt milestones and status worth?

The World of Hyatt credit card comes with 5 qualifying night credits every year, and earns an additional 2 qualifying nights for each $5,000 spent on the card (regardless of category), and those qualifying nights count towards “Milestone Rewards.” Here’s a simplified breakdown of the results of your spending at different levels on the personal card (the business card has a slightly more generous status earning structure but does not offer the 5 free qualifying nights):

• $40,000 (20 qualifying nights): 2,000 bonus points

• $65,000 (30 nights): Category 1-4 award (up to 18,000 points) and 2,000 bonus points

• $90,000 (40 nights): 5,000 bonus points

• $115,000 (50 nights): 5,000 bonus points

• $140,000 (60 nights): Category 1-7 award (up to 35,000 points)

• $165,000 (70 nights): 10,000 bonus points

• $190,000 (80 nights): 10,000 bonus points

• $215,000 (90 nights): 10,000 bonus points

• $240,000 (100 nights): Category 1-7 award and 10,000 bonus points

As you can see, there are basically only 2 relevant “hinge points" (in addition to the Category 1-4 award granted at $15,000 in annual spend): at $65,000 in spend you get a boost of up to 18,000 points, and at $140,000 in spend you get an additional boost of up to 35,000 points. Combined with the earlier milestone awards, at exactly $140,000 in unbonused spend you will earn a total of up to 207,000 points in value, or 1.48 points per dollar.

This is, of course, virtually identical to the 210,000 Ultimate Rewards points that you’d earn putting the same spend on a Freedom Unlimited or Ink Unlimited card, which could be transferred instantly to World of Hyatt, with the added caveat that the value of the 30-night and 60-night bonuses is contingent on redeeming the awards at the most expensive eligible properties.

Note that milestone rewards continue after 60 nights, all the way up to 150 nights. At $240,000 in spend, you’ll earn up to 417,000 points in value, or 1.74 points per dollar.

How valuable is Globalist status?

Even if the marginal unbonused dollar is better spent on a card earning 1.5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar than 1 World of Hyatt point per dollar, it would still be possible to get enough value from reaching spend thresholds on the World of Hyatt card to justify allocating the spend there instead, if you valued Globalist status highly enough and were confident enough that you’d reach it, or wanted to use the goal of Globalist status as a kind of commitment device.

Like all elite status, Globalist status is more valuable the more you stay with Hyatt, and it also requires fewer shenanigans like this the more you stay with them. If you stayed 25 nights per year with Hyatt, then the 5 free nights that come with the personal card would get you to 30-night Explorist status, and the $15,000 in spend to trigger the annual free night certificate would get you to 36 nights. After that, just $60,000 in additional spend ($75,000 in total spend) would result in Globalist status, 10,000 bonus points, and a free night certificate worth up to 35,000 points, a total of roughly 1.75 points per dollar on unbonused spend.

The most frequently cited benefits of Globalist status are free breakfast or club access and suite upgrade awards, although the latter is no longer strictly a benefit for Globalists, since you can request them instead of points at the 40-night and 50-night milestones.

I’ve had some awe-inspiring buffets at Park Hyatts and some soggy eggs at Hyatt Regencies, so for simplicity I consider your average hotel breakfast to be worth about $15-20. Over the 25 nights our hypothetical travel hacker actually spends with Hyatt, I’d call that around $400, multiplied by the number of people you usually travel with.

Suite upgrade awards can be terrific, but only if you can use them, which is notoriously difficult. Part of that is the games properties play to restrict availability, but I don’t doubt that elites really are trying to use them at the same properties at the same times. I’ve used suite upgrade awards for wonderful suites at superb properties but I would still not put a speculative value on them. My usual advice is simply to try to use them on every stay, in case you get lucky and there’s space, instead of hanging on to them for the perfect situation. If that situation does come along and you’re out of awards, you can probably just buy, borrow, or beg for somebody else’s.

In other words, Globalist status itself, excluding the awards that are easily convertible into points values, is only worth $400-$1,600 to someone spending 25 nights a year at Hyatts.

Conclusion

The reason I started by talking about bonused spend is that I don’t want to give the impression that you should begin thinking about travel hacking with unbonused spend. On the contrary, I’m fond of saying that actual purchases, many of which will inevitably be unbonused, should be a rounding error in your miles and points earning strategy.

On the other hand, large unbonused spend opportunities do come along in everyday life: some schools and coaches accept credit cards for tuition and fees, car dealers may allow you to pay for part of your down payment with a credit card, etc. When it comes to a $2 cup of coffee I couldn’t care less what card I pay with. But a $60,000 tuition bill is a valuable enough situation to take seriously as an earning opportunity.

If it can get you most or all of the way to Globalist status, the World of Hyatt credit card might be competitive with a Freedom Unlimited or 2% cash back card. I tell most people the best choice for unbonused spend is a 2.625% cash back card with Bank of America Preferred Rewards Platinum Honors status, but the fact is that combination isn’t available to very many people, either because they don’t have $100,000 in liquid assets or they have a more valuable use for it than parking it at Bank of America for three months.

Seven of my favorite travel hacks for people of all skill levels

I was impressed by Greg’s post at The Frequent Miler yesterday, although I was a bit worried since I’d been planning my own post about my favorite still-working travel hacking tips. Fortunately, his list didn’t end up overlapping with mine much at all. Still I thought I should get this post up before anybody else had the same idea.

The list below runs the gamut from “using the program as intended” to “highly illegal” so as always apply your own judgment and discretion when deciding which of these are right for you.

Nesting Alaska Airlines companion tickets

One of the posts I’m most often asked about gives some examples of the zany routes you can book with the companion tickets you get when signing up for Bank of America Alaska Airlines co-branded credit cards and on your account anniversary. It’s such a good deal (a $95 annual fee and a $99 fare (plus taxes!) for any Alaska-operated flight in any economy fare bucket) that almost anyone who lives in or near a city served by Alaska and flies with a companion once a year is virtually certain to come out ahead.

The example I gave in that post is booking a flight from Washington National Airport to Los Angeles, then a roundtrip between LAX and Maui, then a flight back from LAX to DCA. Since you can spend an unlimited amount of time in both Los Angeles and Maui, that’s functionally two itineraries: one between DCA and LAX, and one between LAX and OGG — and the second passenger gets to take both while paying for a single companion ticket (a little over $170 in that example).

If you’re able to “nest” companion tickets on routes you fly regularly you can get even more value from multiple companion tickets. To continue the example above, say you want to return home to DC from LA before your trip to Hawaii. You could of course find that another airline has better timing or prices, but if Alaska is the best carrier for you, you can also book a second companion ticket partially “nested” inside the first one by booking a flight from DCA to LAX that meets up with your existing LAX-OGG itinerary. That gets you to LAX, but remember you already have your return flight from LAX to DCA from the first companion ticket. That means you can use the “return” portion of your second companion ticket to book any “reasonable” routing (see the original post for additional details on routing rules). For example, it’s perfectly legal to use a companion ticket to fly from DCA to LAX, then from Portland, OR to Missoula, MT, then from MSO to DCA.

Thus from two companion tickets we’ve built 3.5 round trips: DCA-LAX, LAX-OGG, PDX-MSO, and then a one-way ticket PDX-DCA.

Using closed or drained debit cards to pay for in-flight food and drinks

This trick has been around since the invention of the inflight credit card reader, but still works almost everywhere. For whatever reason (presumably so the flight attendants don’t screw around on Twitter while they’re working) the handheld readers flight attendants use to charge for in-flight food and drinks aren’t connected to the internet, or at least aren’t connected to a payment server. They apparently dump all the card data when they land, or at the end of the day. That means in flight, you can order whatever you like for free, as long as you have a card that will decline the charge once you land.

Obviously this doesn’t work on cash-only carriers (mostly regional flights these days), and some international carriers verify card data in real time as well. This also does not work for in-flight internet charges in my experience.

Earning free night certificates at hotels you stay at

A lot of people are paid to inflate the value of the free night certificates that come with many credit cards. I’m not, so I take a much more skeptical approach to them. One heuristic I like to use is: “would I use this certificate to extend a stay I’m willing to pay for?” For example, I used a Hilton free night certificate for a sixth night at the Grand Wailea resort in Hawaii, after paying for 5 nights with points (and getting the fifth night free).

On the other hand, in most cities I visit, Marriott properties are either non-existent or not competitive on price with Hilton or Hyatt, so I would never use a free night certificate if it meant locking in a higher daily rate on the remaining paid nights.

Of course, for road warriors who pay for their own expenses, having a trove of free night certificates in case of bad weather or other travel emergencies can save a ton of money on last-minute expenses. I think that’s perfectly reasonable — but it’s also not very many people.

Using Fluz as intended

I wrote about my first experiments using Fluz as intended back in 2021, and while I wouldn’t say I use it often, it’s become a resource I check at least a few times a week. Most travel hackers use Fluz to manufacture spend, but they do also sell gift cards to a range of merchants with automatic cash back (redeemable for cash once you hit a pesky one-time $26 payment threshold).

The basic premise of Fluz is that you can buy exact-denomination gift cards to a surprising range of merchants. Presumably Fluz buys this credit in bulk, then splits the discount with its customers. The value-add of Fluz is that it passes along not just the merchant category but the actual merchant for every card I’ve ordered. For my sins I occasionally order Domino’s pizza from around the corner, and I often have Chase offers on my credit cards for some percentage rebate on Domino’s orders. Since Fluz passes through the merchant to Chase, I can stack my 10% rebate through Chase with my 4% rebate through Fluz (after clicking through shopping portals and applying coupons).

Obviously, this isn’t a great idea at merchants you rarely shop at or are trying for the first time, since if you’re disappointed your payment will be refunded to a gift card you’ll never use. But for picking up a pizza or a burger, or at a store you shop at regularly, it’s a no-brainer.

Registering for hotel promotions

While this may sound like table stakes, I doubt there’s a person in the game who hasn’t gotten home from a trip before realizing that they could have earned a few thousand or more points on their hotel stays if they’d registered for an ongoing promotion in advance. It’s a bad feeling, so avoid it whenever you can!

I try to keep my Hotel Promotions page up-to-date with all currently ongoing and announced promotions, but I’m not always on the ball, so if the chain you’re staying with doesn’t have a promotion listed there, it’s a good idea to search Frequent Miler or go to the hotel promo page at Loyalty Lobby. Note that Loyalty Lobby publishes every promotion, even targeted and regional ones, for every chain so their site is incredibly cluttered, albeit comprehensive.

Using Hotels.com at non-chain hotels (or chains you don’t value)

For the most part, you’re better off booking chain hotels directly if you value the chain’s rewards currency or elite status benefits, since you won’t earn points and may not get elite benefits if you book through a third party like Hotels.com (or Priceline, Expedia, etc).

On the other hand, if you don’t value a chain’s loyalty program, or for stays at non-chain hotels, you can use Hotels.com to “lump” those stays together into Hotels.com’s rewards program. Plus you don’t need their co-branded credit card to participate, although it may help.

Hotels.com also appears in most shopping portals and in Fluz, so you can save money on hotel stays 3 times: clicking through a shopping portal, selecting your stay details, then going to Fluz and buying an exact-denomination gift card for the total amount. Credit cards periodically offer rebates on gift card purchases as well (American Express, Citi).

Knowing the difference between calendar year and cardmember year benefits

This one’s essential to maximizing the value of your credit card benefits, and if you’re paying an annual fee for a credit card, losing out on a benefit you’ve paid for is the worst case scenario. Take the Chase World of Hyatt credit card for instance: it offers a Category 1-4 free night award on every cardmember anniversary, and a second free night award when you spend $15,000 in a calendar year. That means you can get 3 free night awards during your first cardmember year, depending on your anniversary date. If you get the card in July, then you have until December 31 to spend $15,000 on the card to earn the first award, and until June 30 to spend another $15,000 to earn the second, before you even have to decide whether to renew the card for a second year (personally I value the free award nights so highly I plan to keep the card forever, but that may change down the road if my taste in travel evolves).

Other examples of calendar year benefits include most Global Entry and Precheck reimbursements, most airline fee reimbursements, and bonuses for hitting high annual spend thresholds.

Conclusion

My posts normally focus on one topic at a time so it was fun exercise to take a 30,000-foot view of the techniques I actually use to save money on my travel. I manufacture spend to earn the points and miles I need to pay for the outstanding cost of my travel, which makes it even more important to make those outstanding costs as low as possible by double and triple dipping my credit card rewards, portal cashback, and any other discounts I’m able to scrape together, since it means I don’t have to work as hard manufacturing spend!

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

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

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

The three easily-automated MGM fake slot products

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

• myVEGAS Slots, a Facebook app

• myVEGAS Slots, a mobile app for iPhone and Android

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scaling up each product is fairly time-consuming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Coin-in” is the only mechanism that matters

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

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

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

BlueStacks is a very cool program

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

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

Conclusion

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

When better-than-free grocery store manufactured spend pours

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we’re in a kind of golden moment for grocery store manufactured spend, with widely-held credit cards like the Chase Sapphire Preferred and Reserve, the Chase Hyatt cards, and the American Express Hilton Honors Surpass and Aspire cards all offering increased earning at grocery stores (in the last case until the end of July), while grocery stores have been sending out volley after volley of negative-cost manufactured spend opportunities.

The fact that, yet again, two of my local chains are offering bonuses on the purchase of prepaid debit cards nudged me to think a little more deliberately about the various shapes these bonuses take.

Cash, groceries, or gas

In my neighborhood, I basically have two equally-distant grocery stores: one, a Safeway, participates in the “just for U” (alternately spelled “Just For You”) rewards program, along with Vons, Randall’s, Albertsons, Tom Thumb, Acme, Jewel, and Shaw’s. The other, Giant, belongs to the same corporate structure and shares a similar loyalty program with Stop&Shop and Martin’s, although there are sometimes-significant regional differences. Of course, other folks have access to different chains and loyalty programs, with Hy-Vee, Kroger, and HEB being important regional grocery chains with their own loyalty programs.

Currently, both Safeway and Giant are offering incentives to purchase MasterCard prepaid debit cards:

• Safeway: “Save $10 when you buy $100 or more in Mastercard gift cards.”

• Giant: “Earn 2x points when you purchase any Mastercard gift card with your Giant card.”

Normally these deals hopscotch around each other, so it’s rare (though not unheard of) to see virtually identical deals running simultaneously. The basic value proposition is, you can either save $10 up front (buying a $500 MasterCard gift card for $495.95 at Safeway), or you can earn 1,012 points to redeem later (buying a $500 MasterCard gift card for $505.95 at Giant). Since my market is a “Flexible Rewards” region, those 1,012 points can be redeemed for $10 off my next grocery purchase. In other words, as long as I’m sure to use my discount before it expires, and as long as I’m willing to shop at the Giant, the two promotions should be more or less identical. When they’re offered simultaneously I’ll still prefer Safeway’s upfront cash discount (money can be exchanged for goods and services), but Giant’s grocery discount works for me too.

The wrinkle is, those Giant/Stop&Shop/Martin’s points can also be redeem for per-gallon discounts on gas, and if you drive, you might have a strong reason to favor Giant promotions over Safeway. That’s because, even in markets where gas discounts are capped at $1.50 per gallon (1,500 points), you only need to buy a little under 7 gallons to come out ahead compared to a $10 grocery or upfront discount.

This creates a kind of charming game of rock-paper-scissors:

• A cash discount from Safeway beats a grocery discount from Giant;

• A grocery discount from Giant beats a gas discount if you buy less than 6.66 gallons at a time;

• And a gas discount beats a cash discount — but only if your gas savings are higher than your cash savings.

Of course, this is another way of saying, “the more money you save, the more money you save.” If Giant is already your lowest-cost grocer, then every dollar you save there is worth a dollar. If Shell is already your lowest-cost gas station, then every dollar you save on gas is worth a dollar.

If the need to redeem your savings drives you to a higher-cost grocery store or gas station, that won’t eliminate all your savings, but remember to keep in mind it does reduce them.

Conclusion

Grocery store manufactured spend is one of the most geographically varied techniques out there, with the same corporate parent sometimes having different policies between brands and stores in different regions. For folks with unlimited liquidation capacity, the purchasing side might pose the biggest hurdle to scaling up, while folks with limited (or extremely limited) liquidation capacity may need to carefully select only the highest-earning purchase and redemption opportunities.

In either case, make sure that when you make or refine a manufactured spend strategy you’re comparing apples to apples.

Interest rates on rewards credit cards are all over the place — act accordingly

In the range of hobbies between croquet and wingsuiting, most people recognize that travel hacking is on the more dangerous end of the spectrum. Not because you’re likely to be turned into a red blotch on the side of a mountain, but because signing up for credit cards, manufacturing spend, or buying and reselling merchandise or giftcards can expose you to substantial financial risk.

Of course, some commonsense advice helps to mitigate those risks: start slow, make sure you understand a technique from beginning to end, don’t be afraid to lose small amounts of money while you get familiar with a new area, location, or technique.

And one of the most common pieces of advice is, “never carry a balance,” since the interest charged on a single month’s balance can easily exceed an entire year’s rewards. This is good advice, until it isn’t: I’m a big fan of the Chase Slate $0 balance transfer fee and 15-month 0% APR signup offer, particularly since at the end of the promotional period you can request a product change to another valuable Chase product like the Freedom or Freedom Unlimited (note that the Slate seems to be currently unavailable for new applications). The Discover it currently has a slightly less generous 14-month 0% APR balance transfer rate, with a 3% balance transfer fee.

If it’s a cliche that more valuable rewards credit cards have higher interest rates than other credit cards, I got to wondering: just how high are the interest rates? And it turns out, they’re all over the place, so I thought it might be interesting to compile all the interest rates on my credit cards in one place. Note that these rates are based on “creditworthiness,” so they’re purely illustrative: your interest rates will certainly be different on the exact same cards. These are also variable rates, so they’ll change along with the prime rate.

My credit card purchase interest rates, from high to low

• Chase Slate: 20.74%

• Discover it: 19.99%

• American Express Delta Platinum Business: 19.24%

• Barclaycard Arrival Plus: 18.99%

• Citi Double Cash: 18.99%

• Chase Freedom(1): 17.24%

• Chase Hyatt: 15.99%

• Chase Freedom(2): 15.24%

• Chase Ink Plus: 15.24%

• American Express Hilton Honors Surpass: 15.24%

• US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards: 14.99%

• Fidelity Rewards: 13.99%

• Bank of America Better Balance Rewards: 13.24%

• Chase Freedom Unlimited: 12.99%

Four observations on my credit card interest rates

I’d never laid out my interest rates like this before, but once I did, I immediately noticed four things.

First, the Chase Slate and Discover it, the two cards I had singled out above as low-cost balance transfer cards, ended up with the highest interest rates after their promotional periods elapse. This is strong evidence (although I don’t know why you would need evidence) that Chase and Discover use those low-interest introductory periods to encourage customers to incur high balances they’ll have difficulty paying off in time. That highlights the need to have a plan to pay off your entire balance before your introductory period expires.

Second, the same banks, and even the same products, offer different interest rates. For example, I have two Chase Freedom cards, one of which was a product change from a Slate card, and the other from a Sapphire Preferred. I believe each Freedom “inherited” the interest rate terms from the previous card, and my previous Sapphire Preferred account inherited a higher interest rate than my previous Slate card.

Third, there’s no obvious connection between the value of a credit card’s rewards and its interest rate. My Freedom Unlimited, which I consider one of the most valuable workhorse cards for unbonused manufactured spend, charges the lowest interest rate, while my Delta Platinum Business card, which is barely worth its annual fee, charges the third highest.

Finally, the difference between the highest interest rate and the lowest interest rate charged by my cards is enormous. In the personal finance world there’s a somewhat pedantic controversy over whether it’s better to pay off your highest-interest debt first (saving the most on interest) or your lowest balances first (in order to “generate momentum”). In my opinion, for people with low balances and relatively similar interest rates, it simply doesn’t matter much. If you want to “optimize” your repayment, pay off high-interest debt first. If you want the psychological satisfaction of zeroing out balances, pay off low balances first. Who cares? But as the interest rate spread above shows, if you’re carrying balances on multiple credit cards and you see a spread like the one illustrated above — almost 8 percentage points — then the decision becomes a lot simpler: the higher-interest balances have got to go first.

Conclusion

Every dollar you pay in interest is a cost incurred against the profit of your travel hacking strategy. The less interest you pay, the more profitable your strategy is. But (especially during a global pandemic and economic crisis!) I’m not going to shame anyone who needs or wants to carry a balance on their credit cards. Fortunately, travel hacking also gives you the tools to easily (and even profitably) move balances from one card to another. So if you do find yourself carrying a balance on one more credit cards, it’s worth going through the above exercise and making sure you’re paying as little interest as possible on those balances.

Manufactured spend with and without promotions and bonuses

On my way to the store the other day I realized that we hadn’t seen a really good grocery store promotion in a while. The beginning of December featured a Safeway deal for $10 off $100 in Visa gift cards, and Giant offered gas points on Visa gift cards during a similar period, but it’s been a slow couple months since then.

It occurred to me that it might be useful to write up a list of the most common promotions we see come up repeatedly, and why they’re worth watching for. These aren’t secrets, in fact the public travel hacking blogosphere and Twitter typically blow up each time they come around, but rather a sort of index of the most valuable promotions so less-experienced folks might learn what to watch for.

Grocery Stores

Grocery stores are one of the most widely, albeit not universally, available merchants for manufactured spend, since they’re present in most larger communities and typically sell one or more brand of PIN-enabled prepaid debit cards.

Without promotions, manufacturing grocery store spend depends in large part on the cards you have available. I think of grocery store spend as giving me “about” a 50% discount off paid travel, with the US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards earning 2 Flexpoints per dollar (worth 1.5 cents each), and the American Express Hilton Surpass earning 6 Honors points per dollar (worth “about” 0.5 cents each, albeit with the possibility of much higher value redemptions at top-tier properties and on 5-night award stays). The American Express EveryDay Preferred and Gold cards offer 4.5 and 4 Membership Rewards points per dollar, respectively, although with certain additional restrictions (I do not currently carry either card).

That’s a solid core savings on paid travel, and these days it represents the majority of my day-to-day manufactured spend.

During promotions, grocery store manufactured spend can be profitable even if you don’t hold those cards (and even more profitable if you do). The three main types of grocery store promotions are cash discounts, grocery discounts, and gas discounts.

A cash discount is the best form any promotion can take, and you should always be on the lookout for them. Here are some recent examples, and what to watch for:

• Safeway: $10 off $100 in prepaid debit cards. For all such promotions, always pay attention to whether the terms apply to “$100 gift cards” or to “$100 in gift cards.” The former language may mean the promotion requires you to buy lower-denomination, fixed-value cards, while the latter language means you can apply the promotion to higher-denomination, variable-value cards. The “good” version of this promotion was available in September (Visa), October (MasterCard), and November (Visa and MasterCard) of last year. An example of the “bad” version was offered in September on MasterCard gift cards.

• Giant Eagle: $10 off $100 or $150 in prepaid debit cards. This deal was offered in June and November (Visa) of last year, and in December of 2018 (MasterCard).

A grocery discount is a promotion that requires you to buy “something” in addition to a prepaid debit card in order to realize your savings. It’s not quite as valuable as a cash discount, because it virtually guarantees “breakage:” buying items in excess of the required amount in order to trigger the discount. If a promotion gives $15 off $15 in grocery purchases, you’re likely to grab items costing $16 or $17 in order to make sure you’re over the threshold to trigger the discount. Some recent examples:

• Giant: $15 off $15 in groceries when you buy $250 or more in Visa gift cards (June) and $10 off $10 in groceries when you buy $100 in Visa gift cards (July).

• Hy-Vee: $10 Hy-Vee gift card when you spend $125 on Visa gift cards (December, 2016). This form of promotion is actually slightly more flexible than a grocery discount since Hy-Vee gift cards can be spent on a wider range of items.

The final form of grocery store promotion, gas discounts, is the least valuable. I don’t say that because I don’t own a car, but rather because unless you literally drive for a living it’s virtually impossible to redeem as many gas points as you can earn during a single week’s promotion.

Take for example a typical promotion offering 3 fuel points per dollar spend on Visa gift cards at Giant. The first $500 Visa gift card you buy earns you $1.50 per gallon off your next tank of gas, worth $15 on a 10-gallon tank of gas, or $30 on a 20-gallon tank of gas. That’s a good deal, better even than the fixed cash or grocery discounts discussed above.

The trouble is, unlike cash or groceries (at least the canned, paper, and cleaning goods I typically buy), gas points both expire and are worth less, the more of them you earn. Filling up a 20-gallon tank twice in a month might be reasonable. Filling it up 4 times in a month is possible if your commute is long enough and your fuel efficiency low enough. But at that point you’ve only accounted for four $500 prepaid debit cards, $2,000 in spend, and perhaps $60 in credit card rewards. That lack of scalability is why I consider gas promotions to be the lowest-value grocery store promotions.

Office Supply Stores

Like grocery store manufactured spend, office supply store manufactured spend has the feature of being worthwhile all the time on cards that bonus office supply store spend, but much more broadly profitable during periodic promotions.

Without promotions, someone with a Chase ink Plus, Bold, or Cash card can simply buy $300 Visa gift cards from Staples.com, paying an $8.95 shipping fee and earning 1,545 Ultimate Rewards points per card. At 1.25 cents per point this is again a minimum discount of “about” 50% off paid travel booked through the Ultimate Rewards portal, with an even higher discount if you also carry the Chase Sapphire Reserve and redeem points for 1.5 cents each.

But during promotions, even unbonused office supply store spend may be worthwhile. When Staples waives activation fees on Visa or MasterCard gift cards, your only cost is your time and liquidation fees. Earning 300 Ultimate Rewards points with a Chase Freedom Unlimited while paying $1 in liquidation fees sounds to me like a good deal. At that point, the question simply comes down to whether or not you can scale the deal.

Likewise, when Office Depot and OfficeMax offer $15 off $300 in gift cards, as they did in December, it doesn’t really matter what credit card you use to earn rewards, since you’re virtually guaranteed to come out ahead no matter what.

Conclusion: promoted, unpromoted, or unbonused?

There are, of course, unbonused manufactured spend opportunities available year-round, like the Vanilla prepaid debit cards available at many drug stores, the Metabank cards available at Simon Mall locations, or the lower-denomination fixed-value cards available at stores like Bed Bath & Beyond.

The interesting question is: what is going to make you spring into action? if you’re grinding it out, manufacturing spend all day every day, then any given promotion on any given day is just icing on the cake, perhaps encouraging you to free up some credit limit headroom to maximize it on your most valuable credit cards, but nothing more.

On the other hand, even if your time is too valuable to justify manufacturing spend on a day-to-day basis, there may be promotions that come around every month, quarter, or year that motivate you to wring every last dollar, roll of toilet paper, or tank of gas out of them.

The calculation is up to you, but hopefully the suggestions above help get you on the right track.

The travel hacking resources I rely on today

Sorry to regular readers for the shortage of posts lately, I’ve been suffering from a combination of computer trouble (nothing new there) and website trouble (my Google ads started breaking the site) which together made it increasingly frustrating to do anything but basic maintenance.

But I appear to have rendered the website usable again, so hopefully it will get a little livelier around here!

Today I thought I’d share some the travel hacking resources I get the most value out of. This list has changed a lot over time. When I first got into the game, my primary resources were other blogs and the FlyerTalk forums. That’s changed for two reasons: the FlyerTalk forums were redesigned and are now agonizing to navigate, which drove away users and reduced their value further, sending the site into a kind of death spiral; I haven’t visited FlyerTalk in months, if not years.

Meanwhile, I’ve mostly stopped visiting even the high-quality blogs I used to rely on, since they’ve all undergone a kind of homogenization. My working theory is that all the bloggers read the same “how-to” guide on building a reputation as an influencer, and they all adopted the exact same techniques. The most obvious example is the difference between a blog that posts when the author has something to say, and a blog that posts whether or not the author has anything to say. Worse, when a blog goes on to hire two or three additional writers it will inevitably end up with page after page of clutter before you’re able to find any useful information.

Anyway, enough grousing. While I don’t read many blogs anymore, I still consume a lot of travel hacking content. This is where I get it.

Static pages

Fresh content can be overrated; I created a lot of static pages around here (sadly, now mostly out-of-date) because I wanted to be able to easily find the exact information I needed. I still rely on two static resources all the time:

• My Hotel Promotions page is the first place I go when I’m planning a hotel stay. I try to keep it up-to-date, and briefly describe each promotion with a link directly to the registration page. There are a few other sites that try to do something similar, like Loyalty Lobby, but their formatting drives me nuts, and they include targeted and hyper-specific promotions (earn 500 points when you stay at a Holiday Inn Express in Mainland China!), and usually link to their own blog posts about each promotion instead of directly to the registration site itself.

• Frequent Miler’s best credit card offers. The page has gotten somewhat more annoying to use over the years, but he still does a good job keeping it up-to-date, so when I just want to find out what the highest current sign-up offer is for a given credit card is, I almost always start here. Once you know the offer, if you don’t want to use an affiliate link you can usually just Google the offer terms and find a direct link to the application.

Podcasts

They’re not for everyone, but if you’re a podcast addict like me these are no-brainers:

• Dots, Lines & Destinations. Not strictly speaking focused on travel hacking, but travel-hacking adjacent, with coverage of loyalty programs, aircraft interiors, and aviation news, along with trip reports and interviews. It’s been around at least as long as I’ve been travel hacking, and the hosts’ experience and comfort shows.

• Saverocity Observation Deck. More focused on travel hacking, credit cards, reselling, and family travel (Joe also hosts a Disney-specific podcast, Disney Deciphered, for the Mouse-lovers out there). Patreon subscribers get bonus content at the end of most episodes.

• Milenomics Squared. From the brains behind the Milenomics blog, this has quickly become one of my favorite travel hacking resources, as it’s focused almost entirely on earning and redeeming points. Patreon subscriptions are fairly expensive, but the additional podcast content is simply indispensable and you get access to their lively Slack channel which is a great source of datapoints for all things miles-and-points. Let me put it this way: I’m cheap, and I’m still happy to pay for this subscription.

Twitter accounts

The flip side of blogs becoming less valuable as resources is that Twitter has become much more valuable, since most bloggers tweet out a headline and a link to each new post, letting you quickly identify the ones worth reading and acting on, and the ones you can skip. I find this infinitely more convenient than subscribing to each blog in an RSS reader, which quickly fills up with all the clutter big blogs pump out these days (“The Pan Am Flight Attendant Who Gave Her Life Saving Passengers on a Hijacked Flight 33 Years Ago”).

There is a lot of repetition and clout-chasing on Twitter, so you should be sure to follow sparingly and unfollow easily. Trust me, as long as you follow 5-6 accounts, you’re not going to miss anything. With that said, here’s a starter kit for travel hacking Twitter:

• @FrequentMiler. Of the biggest travel hacking blogs, still the most narrowly focused on miles and points, with very few breathless headlines about people taking their shoes off on planes or whatever. The blog is cluttered but the Twitter feed lets you focus on the deals relevant to you.

• @milestomemories. Coverage of broader travel deals and news.

• @Drofcredit. Covers absolutely everything, which makes the blog unusable (he posts dozens of things each day) but makes the Twitter feed a great one-stop resource to keep track of current and upcoming deals. Follow @Chucksth for bonus Doctor of Credit content.

• @dannydealguru. I’m not an extreme couponer but I’ve come to really appreciate Danny’s laser focus on discounts. I don’t use his deals very often, but I’m always glad to know about them.

• Finally, if you end up liking the podcasts I recommended above, you should follow the hosts: @WandrMe, @ssegraves and @fozzm for Dots, Lines & Destinations, @asthejoeflies and @tmount for the Saverocity Observation Deck, and @Milenomics and @RobertDwyer for Milenomics Squared.

You are also free to follow me on Twitter, but about 2% of my tweets have anything remotely to do with travel hacking, so you probably have better things to do.

Quick hit: Ultimate Rewards points transfers are available instantly when you add an authorized user

This isn’t exactly news, but since I encountered it for the first time the other day, I wanted to pass it along to anyone else who might find themselves in the same situation I was in.

Expiring points are a constant nuisance if you have a lot of loyalty accounts

In general there’s no rhyme or reason to points expiration policies, with some being based on periods of inactivity, some being based on calendar years, some on program years, and some points coded to expire a fixed number of months or years after being earned. There are services that promise to track your expiring points, AwardWallet being the most prominent because they offer an affiliate program, but at the end of the day you’re responsible for your own points.

My biggest expiring-point mishap was with my HawaiianMiles account, where I had earned a sizable balance during a short-lived period when a mainland grocery store was both selling high-denomination prepaid Visa debit cards and participating in HawaiianMiles in-store mileage earning. After the grocery store withdrew from the program and stopped selling high-denomination cards, I lost interest and eventually forfeited almost 25,000 HawaiianMiles simply through years of inattention.

Ultimate Rewards transfers reset inactivity periods

If you see an expiration coming a long way off, there are plenty of ways to trigger activity. Buying a $1 Wall Street Journal subscription through a shopping portal would be enough to save your points, as long as you did it far enough in advance.

If you put it off, or don’t notice an upcoming expiration until it’s close at hand, you’ve got a different problem. Points purchases and transfers will usually reset expiration dates, but they’re preposterously expensive. For example, buying United Mileage Plus miles costs a minimum of $70, plus tax, for 2,000 miles, and transferring miles is almost as expensive.

Fortunately, transfers from Ultimate Rewards to their travel partners are free and instantaneous, starting at 1,000 points, and those transfers also reset expiration due to inactivity.

Ultimate Rewards transfers are available immediately after adding an authorized user

There’s a catch, however: you can only transfer Ultimate Rewards points to the travel partner loyalty account of an authorized user on your own flexible Ultimate Rewards-earning account, whether that’s a Sapphire Preferred, Sapphire Reserve, Ink Preferred, Ink Plus, or Ink Bold.

With my partner’s Mileage Plus balance expiring in just a few days, that got me worried. Would she be added as an eligible recipient in time for the transfer to go through before her balance expired?

Fortunately, after just a few clicks adding her as an authorized user on my Ink Plus account, she immediately appeared in the list of eligible transfer recipients, and I was able to instantly transfer 1,000 Ultimate Rewards points into her Mileage Plus account, pushing the expiration of her miles back another few years.

Conclusion

As I said up top, this won’t be news to heads of household that diligently manage their entire family’s travel finances. But if your family members maintain separate loyalty accounts and don’t carefully follow each other’s expiration dates, it’s good to know that Ultimate Rewards can serve as a quick and easy solution for some soon-to-expire miles and points.

Success removing a disputed item from my Experian credit report

Last month I explained the process I followed to dispute a derogatory remark on my Experian credit report. Experian told me it would take a month to resolve, and sure enough, when I logged on exactly a month later, I saw two alerts, that my dispute had been “updated” and that it had been “resolved.”

Commenters had me convinced I didn’t stand a chance

I encourage readers to go back and read the comments to my earlier post, because there’s some valuable information there about best practices in pursuing a dispute. The basic idea seems to be that as easy as it is to dispute items online, it’s just as easy for creditors to certify their original submissions are accurate, leaving you right back where you started, while if you want to make a creditor actually document their claim, you need to resort to an exchange of hand-written, certified letters. One commenter even suggested using non-white paper to get a better result!

But my dispute was resolved frictionlessly

Fortunately, in my case it didn’t come to that. My assumption is that the small credit union in question either didn’t know how or didn’t care enough to respond at all, so I won the dispute by default, the two sweetest words in the English language.

The status of the dispute now simply says, “This item was removed from your credit report.” Experian also allows me to view how the derogatory item was reported before being removed, which is a nice touch.

Conclusion

Disputing derogatory items online with Experian is so easy that I think it’s probably worth doing even for disputes you think will probably be rejected, but it’s obviously worth doing for well-founded claims and those against smaller creditors that may not have the willingness or sophistication to follow through with the process.

But be aware of the two-track online and snail-mail processes, since if the first doesn’t work, you may need to resort to the other.

Disputing derogatory remarks with Experian, a developing story

If you entered the travel hacking game through the big credit card affiliate bloggers, you probably know that folks who rely on credit card signup bonuses to build their points balances closely monitor and protect their credit reports, sometimes going to outlandish lengths like paying off credit card balances before their statements close, hoping that low reported balances will make them ever more creditworthy, eligible for more exclusive cards and higher credit limits.

Since I earn the overwhelming majority of my miles and points through manufactured spend, I find these antics to be mostly amusing (and mostly harmless). Indeed, since I aggressively take advantage of offers like the Chase Slate introductory $0 balance transfer fee and 0% APR on balance transfers, my credit utilization rate is often at or above 90% on one or more of my open credit cards.

That doesn’t mean I don’t really screw up sometimes: I recently discovered Barclaycard doesn’t allow you to make same-day payments after 8 pm Eastern time, which left me paying my balance off a day “late,” with Barclay’s cheerfully chalking a late payment up on my credit report.

However, I recently found a much more serious derogatory remark on one of my credit reports, which I decided to dispute.

Reminder: which credit cards monitor which credit reports?

There are three major credit bureaux, and each calculates a separate FICO score based solely on the information reported to that bureau. While a number of banks and credit cards now offer free access to your FICO score, each typically partners with only a single bureau. That means to get free access to all your FICO scores, you need to know which credit cards track which bureaux:

• Experian: Chase Slate (FICO)

• TransUnion: Chase Slate (VantageScore), American Express (VantageScore), Discover (FICO), Bank of America (FICO), Barclaycard (FICO)

• Equifax: Citi (FICO)

As a victim of the Chinese cyberattack on the Office of Management and Budget, I also have free access to MyIDCare, which monitors all three credit bureaux and alerts me to any changes on my reports (and a bunch of sillier stuff like when sex offenders move into my neighborhood).

The credit union, the negative balance, and the charge-off

Back in November or December of 2018, I started getting automated calls from a credit union I had experimented with for a manufactured spend liquidation strategy, telling me my account had a negative balance and asking that I call back immediately.

When I did, the young man on the other end told me a complicated story about my account being mistakenly credited multiple times for the same transaction, all the way back in the summer of 2018. Since I had withdrawn the money already, when the credit union discovered the “error” and debited my account, it created a negative balance they were now trying to collect.

This all seemed quite plausible. The only problem was, the young man was unwilling to provide any documentation of this curious series of events. The amount of money involved wasn’t enormous, but I have a general principle to not give people money unless they can have some sort of evidence that they’re actually owed it, the subject of a delightful book about the financial crisis by the journalist David Dayen, “Chain of Title.”

Disputing Experian derogatory remarks is fast and easy

That brings me to this February, when MyIDCare reported that a new derogatory remark had appeared on my Experian credit report: the credit union had charged off my negative balance. Interestingly, so far the charge-off has been reported only to Experian, and my other scores haven’t been affected (keep in mind they were nothing special to begin with).

Since the credit union had never been able to provide any documentation, I decided this would be an interesting opportunity to learn how to dispute credit information. And it turned out to be a breeze!

A simple Google search took me to Experian’s main dispute page. At this point, you have the option of creating a “free” account or a “limited” account. This is a little bit confusing because neither account costs any money. The difference is the “free” account is used to upsell you additional Experian services, while a “limited” account is used only to dispute items on your Experian record. I created a limited account.

This took me directly to the Experian Online Dispute Center, and my new charge-off was sitting right at the top of the page. After selecting it, I was given five dispute options:

• "Payment never late”

• “Not mine or No knowledge of account”

• “Account paid in full”

• “Account closed”

• “Unauthorized charges”

I thought “Unauthorized charges” most closely resembled my complaint (since I’d never authorized the debit), so I selected that. On the next page, a comment box let me explain what happened in a few words, and then I submitted the dispute. The whole process took perhaps 10 minutes.

Conclusion

I’ve heard horror stories about how difficult it is to remove false information from a credit report, and indeed I’m not particularly optimistic that I’ll succeed in having the charge-off removed. On the other hand, I’m fairly impressed with how streamlined Experian’s dispute process is, so if you’ve been dreading figuring out how to dispute derogatory or incorrect information on your credit report, take heed: it’s easier than you think.

Experian estimated the dispute would take about a month to resolve, and I’ll keep readers updated as the situation develops.