My favorite Just4U gift card promotion is back

The only grocery store loyalty scheme I pay any attention to is the Safeway/Albertsons/etc. Just4U program, which periodically offers bonus points on the purchase of gift cards. When the bonus is high enough, it can be worthwhile to buy gift cards and resell them at a loss, making back more than the difference in value in Just4U points.

Through October 12, Just4U is running my favorite version of the promotion: 10 points per dollar spent on “Online Exchange” gift cards. These cards are actually just codes you enter online to redeem the value on the card for virtual gift cards at a variety of merchants. If you’re reselling the gift card, be sure the reseller you use accepts virtual gift card codes, since you won’t get a physical gift card to mail in.

Is it worth it?

Keep in mind, this manufactured spend technique is quite expensive: if you redeem an Online Exchange card for a Lowe’s gift card, for example, and sell it to CardCash for $402.50, you’re out $98.50. That’s either a lot of money or a little money, depending on what you get for it.

During the current promotion, a $500 Online Exchange card would earn 5,000 Just4U points. In order to break even, you need to value those 5,000 points at 1.97 cents each: if you valued 5,000 Just4U points at exactly $98.50, then this would be a way to manufacture “free” spend, since you’ll earn (hopefully bonused) credit card rewards on the purchase as well.

Another way of looking at it is in terms of revealed preferences. I happily manufacture spend at grocery stores year-round at a cost of 1.4%, so I don’t need to make back the entire $500 in order to get the same value I’m already happy getting; I’ll break even valuing Just4U points at just 1.8 cents each.

Check for a stack on Saturday

For many months Just4U has offered bonus points on gift card purchases almost every weekend. They don’t award those points for prepaid debit card purchases, but the promotion does stack with their other brand-specific gift cards, and should stack with Online Exchange. That means this deal could be even sweeter on Saturday, October 12, the last day of the Online Exchange promotion. I don’t see any reason not to wait until then, unless you’re worried about folks cleaning out the shelves in your area while you wait.

Delta and American Express: break-even changes to break-even cards

If you have a Delta co-branded American Express card, then you might have gotten an e-mail or read elsewhere (Frequent Miler, Danny Deal Guru, Doctor of Credit) about increases to the annual fee and changes to some of the cards’ other benefits.

I’ve had the Platinum Business version for years now, and Delta is still my favorite domestic airline to fly, but I haven’t had any strong feelings about it since I drastically reduced my Delta flying and stopped pursuing their Medallion elite status. Since the card had a $250 annual fee, my only goal was to use the companion ticket for a flight that cost at least that much, so I wouldn’t just be throwing the money away.

Fortunately, Delta has nonstop flights from my preferred local airport to Madison, Wisconsin, and Lexington, KY, so I’m able to use the companion ticket almost every year to visit friends there.

The annual fee on the Platinum personal and business cards is going up to $350 per year, and the Reserve personal and business cards will cost $650, in both cases on your first cardmember anniversary after May 1, 2024 (the higher annual fees are already in effect for new applicants). Even taking the increased annual fee into account, the value proposition of the card after this month’s changes has actually moved slightly in my favor. Here are the major changes and my impressions of them.

Improved companion ticket

The most attention has rightly been paid to the improved companion ticket, which now can be used for flights from the continental United States to “Hawaii, Alaska, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America.” Platinum companion tickets can only be used for economy, while the Reserve tickets can be used to book first class (but not Delta One, the even fancier first class cabin).

As I mentioned, I’m not inclined to use a Delta companion ticket for domestic connections if a non-stop flight is available on another carrier. Since my preferred local airport doesn’t have international flights, when traveling abroad a connection or a worse airport is a given, so expanding the number of destinations makes me much more likely to successfully use the ticket each year.

Note that “success” in this case depends not just on your destination and the price of the ticket (at least $350 before taxes and fees), but on the eligible fare classes. While more destinations are eligible for the ticket, the same (L, U, T, X, and V) economy fare classes have to be available, which can deeply constrain your options, especially during more popular windows for air travel.

Rideshare credits

The updated Platinum and Reserve cards now have a $10 per calendar month rideshare credit. Ordinarily I’d consider this a distracting gimmick, but I happen to have a specific use for these credits: I have a $5 per month subscription to Lyft’s “community pass,” which gives me unlimited access to free 30-minute dockless scooter rides.

I switched my recurring payment over to my Delta Platinum card and can already confirm it triggers the rideshare credit. When I occasionally trigger small overage fees for rides over 30 minutes, the credits also pay for those, although that’s worth less than face value to me since I would be more vigilant about ending my rides on time if I didn’t have the credits to cover them.

Since this is a “real” expense I’m currently paying with cash, I consider this $60 per year to be worth a full $60 to me.

Who or what is an “eligible Resy purchase?”

Another statement credit added to the cards is a $10 (Platinum personal and business) or $20 (Reserve personal and business) monthly credit for “eligible Resy purchases.” Since I’d never heard of Resy, I hopped over to their website to see what they sold and whether I wanted any of it.

In case you’re as clueless as I was, it turns out to be a restaurant reservation management platform owned by American Express. Discovering this didn’t shed much light on the situation: I still needed to know what a “Resy purchase” was and what would make it “eligible.” Would I need to make a reservation? Is there such a thing as a prepaid restaurant reservation?

Fortunately, it turns out virtually every restaurant I could think of is on the Resy platform, so I headed to a cool café nearby to see what the deal was. They sell gift cards, so I bought $10 worth and waited. Two days later, I received an e-mail from American Express that I’d earned a Resy credit, and it has already posted to my account (the credit is backdated to the day of the purchase so I’m not sure when it actually appeared on my transaction record).

Given my experience, I believe the credit is applied by American Express based on their own record of participating Resy restaurants and not by the restaurant processing the transaction in a specifically “Resy way” (the payment terminal was “toast”-branded, a popular restaurant point-of-sale system in my city).

The gift card I bought is reloadable, so my current plan is simply to load another $10 to it on the first of each month. I don’t value the credit at a full $120 (since I have never and would never spend $10 a month at this café), but it’s certainly worth something.

Prepaid Delta Stays, large-transaction and high-spend bonuses

There are a few more odds and ends on the cards that you should be aware of but won’t be relevant to everyone.

All the Delta co-branded American Express cards cards have an annual Delta Stays credit of between $100 (Gold personal) and $250 (Reserve Business). Delta Stays is powered by Expedia and appears to have the same prices you’d find booking directly through Expedia or Hotels.com. I often use Hotels.com to book paid stays on non-chain properties, so I’m very likely to use my entire $200 credit each year.

The Platinum Business card is unique (Doctor of Credit incorrectly says that the Reserve Business has this feature as well) in offering 1.5 SkyMiles per dollar on otherwise-unbonused (i.e., excluding “transit,” “U.S. shipping,” “Delta flights,” and “hotels”) individual transactions over $5,000, on up to $100,000 in such purchases per year.

Finally, the Platinum and Reserve cards give you 2,500 Medallion Qualifying Dollars at the beginning of each year, and you can earn 1 Medallion Qualifying dollar for every $20 (Platinum) or $10 (Reserve) spent with the card.

The last two benefits create an interesting opportunity and tradeoff. The Platinum Business card alone allows you to spend $50,000 per year in transactions of $5,000 or more to earn 75,000 SkyMiles and Silver Medallion status, while the Reserve cards allow you to earn 25,000 Skymiles and Silver Medallion status with $25,000 in spend (in transactions of any size) or 75,000 SkyMiles and Gold Medallion status with $75,000 in spend.

I don’t think either of these are particularly good value propositions in a vacuum, since I don’t think either Medallion status or SkyMiles are very valuable anymore, but it’s worth mentioning if you need to top up your MQD’s to reach the next Medallion tier: doing so in $5,000 or larger transactions on the Platinum Business card improves the value by giving you 50% more redeemable SkyMiles.

Conclusion

You can see why I view these changes as modest improvements to a set of cards that were already pretty unremarkable. After deducting the $60 in cash-like rideshare credits, I’ll be paying $290 for:

• a slightly-improved economy companion ticket;

• $120 in café gift cards;

• and $200 in prepaid hotel stays.

That’s not a card I’d move to the top of my applications pile on its own, but it’s a card I’m fine keeping for another year. There are currently signup bonuses of 100,000 SkyMiles for the Platinum Business and 110,000 SkyMiles for the Reserve Business, which might make one of those worth signing up for if you already have a valuable use for the miles in mind. Since the companion ticket is only awarded after the first anniversary, you do have to hold onto the card for at least a year to even begin to get value out of your annual fee, which is not waived for the first year on any of the cards.

Barclaycard gutting Arrival+ travel benefits November 1

I’m not sure how old this news is since I rarely log into my credit card accounts on my desktop, but when I logged into my Barclaycard account the other day I was greeted by a foreboding message:

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Never a message you want to see from your primary credit card, and sure enough, a quick comparison of the old (current) and new Cardholder Guide to Benefits reveals the damage is near-total. Here’s are some of the most important changes.

Trip Delay

Most travel hackers prefer the more generous trip delay insurance provided by the Chase Sapphire family of cards, but since I don’t have one of those (I use a legacy Ink Plus to make my Ultimate Rewards points transferrable), I put most of my travel charges on my Arrival+ card, which currently offers a benefit of up to $300 for delays of 6 hours or more.

I can’t say that I “rely” on Barclay’s trip delay coverage since I’ve never actually used it (my only experience was using the Sapphire Preferred trip delay coverage), but the ability to earn some points, and possibly trigger a hotel promotion, on someone else’s dime at least partly makes up for the inconvenience of a long flight delay.

On November 1, the benefit disappears (it’s possible trips purchased before November 1 will still be covered, but I wouldn’t rely on that possibility).

Purchase Protection Benefits

I don’t know what else to call the suite of current benefits, which include “Extended Warranty,” “Price Protection,” “Purchase Assurance” (goods stolen or damaged within 90 days of purchase), and “Satisfaction Guarantee” (the ability to return items that the retailer refuses to refund).

These benefits all disappear November 1, and are replaced with “Cellular Telephone Protection.” Besides the obvious requirement you charge your monthly bill to the credit card in order to qualify, there are a number of additional requirements that I think would make my phone ineligible, particularly the exclusion of “Eligible Cellular Wireless Telephone(s) purchased from anyone other than a cellular service provider’s retail or internet store that has the ability to initiate activation with the cellular service provider.”

Since I bought my iPhone directly from Apple, which is not a cellular service provider, the question of whether my phone would be covered depends on precisely what work the word “or” is doing. In other words, is a phone eligible if it is purchased from a cellular service provider’s retail store or a cellular service provider’s internet store (the obvious grammatical reading), or is it eligible as long as it is purchased from a cellular service provider’s retail store, or from any internet store that has the ability to initiate activation with the cellular service provider?

Phones purchased directly from Apple would be excluded under the first reading but covered under the second.

The maximum benefit is $800 per claim and $1,000 per 12-month period, after a $50 deductible per claim, and you can make a maximum of 2 claims per 12-month period.

Unchanged Benefits

The card will continue to offer “Baggage Delay,” “Trip Cancellation and Interruption,” and “Travel Accident Insurance” (this is not medical insurance — it’s basically an accidental death and dismemberment policy that only applies during your trip), although there may be some changes to the coverage terms and amounts. The rental car collision damage waiver benefit also remains, and is still secondary to your primary auto insurance policy.

Conclusion

Obviously the loss of the trip delay benefit is the worst of these changes, and if you’re the kind of person who relies on trip delay reimbursement, you’re going to need to find another card. Besides the Sapphire family of cards, there are several more cards from Chase (United Explorer and Club, Marriott Bonvoy Bold and Boundless), US Bank (Altitude Reserve), that offer a trip delay benefit and that you might already carry for one reason or another. Additionally, American Express is reported to be adding a trip delay benefit to certain cards beginning January 1, 2020.

I don’t think it is reasonable for most people to pay an annual fee on a credit card they wouldn’t otherwise carry exclusively for the trip delay benefit, but if you’re already paying for it, you had better be using it!

Bank of America's disappearing ShopSafe benefit

So-called “virtual credit card numbers” were widely adopted in the early days of online shopping to give consumers confidence when placing orders online. The logic was simple: by allowing customers to create a single-use, time-and-balance-limited credit card number for a single purchase, banks eased customer’s fears of their payment information being compromised, making them more likely to use their credit card online rather than, heavens forfend, using cash at a physical retailer. Between interchange fees and interest charges, issuers calculated they could easily afford the additional overhead if virtual credit card numbers were able to drive increased credit card usage.

That calculus changed over the years as card issuers eliminated liability for unauthorized purchases, cardholders became more accustomed to disputing purchases, and 24/7 access to transaction history became near-universal. Few people today need to pore over their paper statements each month matching receipts to transactions in order to detect fraud, and disputing transactions has become a matter of a few mouse clicks with most of the major card issuers.

Consequently, over the years most banks stopped offering virtual credit card numbers, and newer banks never started. That left Bank of America, Citi, and Capital One as the three major card issuers that still offered them with all their credit card products.

But on September 5, 2019, Bank of America announced they would retire their virtual credit card number system “ShopSafe” two weeks later, on September 20.

Why I love virtual credit card numbers

Like a normal person, I don’t use virtual credit card numbers for “online shopping.” Instead, I’ve found them most useful for subscriptions to services that are cumbersome to cancel. The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s periodically offer increased portal bonuses for creating a digital subscription, and you can earn the bonus for each subscription through each shopping portal, making for a cheap 10,000+ miles and points, albeit spread across multiple programs. And of course spouses, kids, and pets are also welcome to participate.

So far so good. The problem is that these subscriptions can only be cancelled over the phone, and these calls can last for a very long time as you try to communicate your subscription information to the underpaid call center employee on the other side of the world.

The solution, for me, is virtual credit card numbers. Create a number with $10 or so on it, pay for all the subscriptions you need (they cost me about $1.06 each with tax), then delete the number. No muss, no fuss.

Unfortunately, my Citi accounts were closed last year, and I’ve never had a Capital One credit card, so Bank of America was my go-to source of free virtual credit card numbers.

Virtual credit card workarounds

Obviously the most straightforward solution if you’re in my position is to open a Capital One credit card, which I suppose I’ll do when the right signup bonus comes along, although I don’t spend very much time chasing signup bonuses in general. If you still have Citi credit cards, then nothing at all will change for you for now. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to believe those products aren’t on borrowed time as well.

A more straightforward option is to use prepaid debit cards. You may have to register the card online to use it to create subscriptions (although you may not), but once the initial transaction has been processed you can empty the remaining balance through your normal liquidation channels.

Conclusion

The loss of Bank of America ShopSafe virtual credit card numbers isn’t the end of the world, but it’s as good an opportunity as any to remind readers that Wall Street Journal and Barron’s subscriptions are great opportunities to score plenty of miles from home on the cheap — as long as you can get around calling in to cancel your subscription.

Everyone's a Radisson thinkfluencer now

Radisson Rewards seems to have hired a new marketing agency, and they’re trying to make a splash. Last week I got a funny e-mail from an “Associate” at Wye Communications, that began:

“I’ve been keeping up with your [coverage / blog posts / updates] and thought you’d be interested in sharing a new rewards offer from Radisson Rewards with your readers.”

I’m not sure if the Associate was supposed to pick just one of the three options in square brackets or if she was supposed to send out the e-mail as is.

Then just yesterday I got another e-mail from a “Manager” at Wye addressed, “Hi Points Chasers!” about an increased signup bonus which promptly made its way to all the mainstream blogs. I guess I’m flattered to be included?

Double elite stay credit when booking “premium” rooms

The first thinkfluencer e-mail I got was about an elite status promotion Radisson is running through December 28. The offer is for double points (base points, I assume) and double elite-qualifying stays and nights when you book a paid, premium room using the promotion code “RRDBLDBL.”

There are three moving pieces to elite status with Radisson Rewards:

• if you hold the US Bank Radisson Rewards Premier Visa Signature Card ($75 annual fee) or Radisson Rewards Business Visa Card ($60 annual fee) you get automatic Gold status, which offers no benefits (besides a higher earning rate on paid stays);

• Points + Cash and Award Nights both count towards elite status qualification;

• Platinum status requires 60 elite qualifying nights or 30 elite qualifying stays, and gets you a limited breakfast benefit.

Since award stays count towards elite status qualification, if Radisson Rewards is your primary hotel loyalty program, you might have accumulated quite a few elite qualifying stays and nights, so you might be within striking distance of Platinum status if you have some more paid travel before December 28.

So if you do have paid travel, and are within striking distance of Platinum status, would it be worth booking a premium room in order to trigger this promotion? The good news here is that you don’t need to book a very premium room. As long as the property considers it a premium room, it qualifies. For example, at the Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel in Chicago I found a “2 Beds-Balcony” premium room for $159 before taxes, the same price as a $159 “King Bed” standard room.

However, Radisson properties are also always offering a range of booking discounts, especially in low business travel seasons like December, so you can probably find discounted prices too low to justify booking a full-price premium room. For example, the Radisson Blu Aqua is currently running a “flash sale” with rooms starting at $119 before taxes.

Thinkfluencers-only increased signup bonus for Radisson Rewards Premier Visa Signature Card

The second e-mail I got was for an increased signup bonus for the US Bank Radisson Rewards Premier Visa Signature Card. It’s a publicly available offer, but you do have to apply through a special URL, since it won’t show up if you navigate to the application through either US Bank’s or Radisson’s website.

The offer’s for 100,000 Radisson Rewards points after spending $2,500 on the card within 3 months (50,000 points after first purchase, which is the same as the standard offer).

For me, Radisson Rewards has a bit of neither-fish-nor-fowl character to it. Their credit cards make it easy to earn huge numbers of points, and their Category 7 properties still cost just 70,000 points per night (105,000 points for premium room awards), or $14,000 in unbonused credit card spend. You can earn an additional 3 nights at any Radisson Rewards property in the United States per cardmember year by spending $30,000 on the card, and you get 40,000 anniversary points with the Premier and Business credit cards.

But then you have to stay at Radisson Rewards properties, and that’s where the going gets tough. If you want to spend 5 nights at the Category 7 Radisson Blu Aqua in Chicago or Cassa Hotel NY 45th Street in Manhattan, then $30,000 in spend and a $75 annual fee works out to something like $135 per night. If you stay at lower-category properties, then of course your points go further, but your free night certificates are worth correspondingly less.

That’s why ultimately Radisson Rewards feels like a bit of a stunt. If you travel enough that you’re guaranteed to redeem your points and certificates each year, then it’s a perfectly fine addition to a credit card portfolio: get your $30,000 in spend done at the beginning of each year and then stick it in the sock drawer until your next anniversary. Likewise if you’ve been banned from American Express and Chase, you might not have many great opportunities to earn hotel points, so the fact that the card is issued by US Bank is a concrete material advantage.

But unless you find yourself consistently visiting places where Radisson Rewards offer a superior value to Hilton or Hyatt, or on the flip side if you travel so much that those balances need to be preserved for their highest and best redemptions, I don’t see any compelling reason to add Radisson Rewards to a travel hacking practice.

How bad would a Hyatt devaluation need to be?

I’ve been following with interest the changes Hyatt has made to certain types of award reservations. To roughly summarize the changes:

• points can now be redeemed for “premium” suite award nights;

• Points + Cash can now be redeemed for standard and premium suites;

• qualifying paid stays can now be upgraded to premium suites with points;

• the cash co-pay on Points + Cash stays is now 50% of the “standard” room rate for the room type you’re booking instead of a fixed amount based on hotel category;

• a new 40,000-point redemption tier will be introduced to cover certain newly-acquired luxury properties.

I’m frankly not sure if it was part of this update or not, but I also noticed recently that award nights at Hyatt Ziva and Zilara all-inclusive properties can now be booked online (you used to have to call to book).

Hyatt is a competitive program for travel hackers

If you earn miles and points mostly or exclusively through manufactured spend this shouldn’t come as surprise, but to break it down simply:

• a Category 1 Hyatt property costs 5,000 points per night, or $3,333 in spend on a Chase Freedom Unlimited or $1,000 on a Chase Ink Cash or Ink Plus at office supply stores;

• a Category 4 Hyatt property costs 15,000 points per night, or $10,000 in spend on a Freedom Unlimited or $3,000 in spend on Ink Cash or Plus;

• a top-tier Category 7 property costs 30,000 points per night, or $20,000 on Freedom Unlimited or $6,000 on Ink Cash or Plus.

We can break down Hilton’s award chart in the same way:

• a bottom-tier Hilton property costs 5,000 points per night, or $833 in grocery store or gas station spend on an American Express Ascend card;

• a mid-tier Hilton property costs 50,000 points per night, or $8,333 in bonused spend;

• and a top-tier Hilton property costs 95,000 points, or $15,833 in bonused spend.

(Note that since grocery store spend costs about 50% more than in-person unbonused spend, the out-of-pocket costs for the same spot on the Hilton award chart end up being somewhat more expensive than Hyatt).

This is what I mean by a “competitive” program: Hyatt properties won’t always be cheaper than Hilton properties in a specific city or on particular dates, but having access to both programs gives you a better chance of paying as little as possible for the trips you want to take than relying solely on one program or the other and being stuck paying cash when it fails you.

Likewise, having credit cards that are useful for unbonused spend, office supply store spend, and grocery store spend means you’re able to take advantage of more promotions and opportunities, instead of relying on a single merchant or bonus category.

That brings me to today’s topic.

How bad would a Hyatt devaluation need to be to make the program uncompetitive?

I think it’s useful to think through questions like this ahead of time, so you don’t fall into the trap of motivated reasoning once a devaluation actually happens (something credit card affiliate bloggers are especially vulnerable to, but a risk for anyone).

You can imagine multiple forms a Hyatt devaluation might take:

• Hyatt could change or end their transfer relationship with Chase. This is the least likely situation in the short term since Chase loudly promotes its uniform transfer ratio, but there’s no natural law that says Hyatt will remain a Chase partner forever, or that Chase will never revamp the Ultimate Rewards program.

• Hyatt could introduce higher award categories and steadily shift properties upwards. Hyatt told Pizza in Motion that they have “no plans for any Hyatt-branded hotels or resorts to move to a new Category 8,” but all that wording requires is that the Park Hyatt sign come down and be replaced with a Small Luxury Hotels of the World or Joie de Vivre sign. No Hyatt branding? No problem.

• Hyatt could restrict award space or introduce dynamic pricing. This is in many ways the most likely or even inevitable form a devaluation will take, since Hilton has had dynamic pricing for years and Marriott will launch it in 2019. 30,000-point properties might limit their availability to a few low-season weeks per year, while mid-tier properties might cost a few thousand points less for part of the year and tens of thousands of points more when people actually want to visit.

A change to the relationship with Chase would be the most catastrophic from a travel hacker’s point of view. Changing the transfer ratio or perhaps capping annual points transfers would make Hyatt a truly niche program, still worthwhile under specific conditions but uncompetitive with Hilton or even Radisson Rewards, which has US Bank co-branded credit cards that still earn 5 points per dollar on unbonused spend and a much larger footprint than Hyatt.

Meanwhile, category inflation isn’t the end of the world as long as the Chase relationship remains the same, although eventually you might see your favorite properties inflated out of eligibility for annual credit card free night certificates (currently good at Category 1-4 properties).

Conclusion

There should be no question in your mind that something will eventually give in the World of Hyatt program, and this post isn’t about predicting whether or not it will happen — it definitely will. There has to be enough money to go around between Chase, Hyatt, and Hyatt’s owner-operators, and a fixed credit card earning ratio and fixed award chart are simply incompatible with that. I don’t know which piece will buckle first under the pressure, but the transmission mechanism between Chase Ultimate Rewards, World of Hyatt, and award availability and price will change because it has to change.

The point of this post is to encourage you to think in advance about what kinds of changes would make you walk away from the program, or at least radically reduce your dependence on it. How bad would the transfer ratio have to become? How hard would it have to be to find award availability? How low would your typical redemption value have to fall?

If you don’t think about it in advance, then when the devaluations do start to roll in and you’re bombarded with affiliate bloggers explaining how “it’s not really that bad,” you’re not going to be ready to tell if they’re right or not.

Two takeaways from Starwood Preferred Guest merger announcement

Since blog subscribers already knew about the changes coming to Marriott's elite status qualification in August, I want to highlight two additional takeaways from the details released Monday about the new program.

Starwood Preferred Guest cardholders see a 33% devaluation

Right now Starwood Preferred Guest cardholders earn 1 Starpoint per dollar spent on purchases, and can transfer 20,000 Starpoints to 25,000 airline miles with most of their partner airlines.

After August, they'll earn 2 Marriott Rewards points per dollar spent, and be able to transfer 60,000 Marriott Rewards points to 25,000 airline miles.

The same $20,000 in spend will only get you two-thirds of the way to the same number of airline miles, meaning that on a per-dollar-spent basis, you'll see a 33% devaluation.

Ultimate Rewards transfers look a little better for certain Starwood stays booked in 2018

Currently, flexible Chase Ultimate Rewards points transfer on a one-to-one basis to Marriott Rewards, where they can be transferred on a three-to-one basis to Starwood Preferred Guest. Since Starwood properties top out at 35,000 points, they require up to 105,000 Ultimate Rewards points per night (84,000 Ultimate Rewards points per night on a fifth-night-free award stay).

In August, standard awards will top out at 60,000 Marriott Rewards points, or 43% less than top-tier, peak-season Starwood stays cost today.

"Starting in 2019," standard awards will top out at 100,000 Marriott Rewards points during peak season, bringing the 2019 award chart basically in line with where it is today, although 70,000-point off-peak Category 8 awards will still look better than the 90,000 points they cost today.

Annoyingly, Marriott did not include information one way or the other about whether the new program will continue to offer the fifth night free on award stays. I feel like they could have cut 7 seconds off one of their garbage promotional videos to mention that important piece of information (note that embargoed-for-your-protection Gary Leff says the feature will remain).

Conclusion

Both these observations point in the same direction: if you have a Starwood Preferred Guest credit card today, you have up to 4 more statement closing dates before the changes go into effect. While the Starwood Preferred Guest American Express cards have always been decent for unbonused manufactured spend, especially if you had a particularly lucrative hotel stay or airline transfer partner in mind, all your spend that posts by your July statement closing date will be grandfathered in at the current airline transfer rate and benefit from lower point requirements at Starwood Preferred Guest Category 6 and 7 properties after August 1.

In other words, it's a uniquely auspicious time to pivot away from your other unbonused manufactured spend credit cards and towards your Starwood Preferred Guest, especially if you primarily redeem your Starpoints for Category 6 and 7 redemptions.

This post is focused on Starwood Preferred Guest members because Marriott Rewards members have been so screwed for so long I don't think it's worth dwelling on the fact that the beatings will continue for the foreseeable future.

It's true that the creation of three additional Marriott Rewards redemption tiers above the current maximum redemption rate of 45,000 points will create additional headroom for Marriott to inflate properties into more expensive categories, punishing people who earn Marriott Rewards points through paid stays (and certainly make the 25,000-point and 35,000-point free night certificates just as worthless as they are today). But my working assumption is that anyone who has been earning Marriott Rewards points through paid stays is already so thoroughly downtrodden they'll scarcely notice that the beatings have slightly accelerated.

Assorted 2018 hotel news and program updates

Quite a few changes have been reported to hotel loyalty programs in 2018, so here are a few brief thoughts in case you're wondering what to make of them.

70,000-point IHG Rewards Club properties

IHG Rewards Club has announced the following hotels will cost 70,000 points per night in 2018:

• InterContinental Paris - Le Grand
• InterContinental Bora Bora Resort Thalasso Spa
• InterContinental Le Moana Bora Bora
• InterContinental Hong Kong
• InterContinental - ANA Manza Beach Resort
• InterContinental London Park Lane
• InterContinental The Clement Monterey (California)
• InterContinental San Francisco
• InterContinental Mark Hopkins San Francisco
• InterContinental The Willard Washington D.C.
• InterContinental Boston
• InterContinental New York Barclay
• InterContinental New York Times Square

I did some award searches and where I found availability, these hotels are still pricing at 60,000 points per night, so the pricing changes seem not to have gone into effect yet.

Using the Points + Cash trick (book then refund Points + Cash reservations until you have enough points for an all-points reservation) you can buy IHG Rewards Club points for 0.575 cents each year-round (and often somewhat cheaper than that), so a 70,000-point property costs roughly $402 per night. The only properties on this list where I'd even consider spending that much money are the French Polynesian resorts in Bora Bora. If you and a partner each had a $49-annual-fee Chase IHG Rewards Club credit card free night certificate, you could combine those with a couple free nights at $402 each and get a 4-night stay, for example, for a total of $902, or $225 per night, which compares favorably to the cost of an award night at the Conrad Bora Bora Nui (without drawing any conclusions about the respective quality of the properties).

Note that award space at those properties can be very difficult to find.

Improved transfer ratio from Membership Rewards to Hilton Honors

Also widely reported has been a permanently improved transfer ratio from flexible American Express Membership Rewards accounts to Hilton Honors, up from 1:1.5 to 1:2. Judging by the complaints I hear from readers, Membership Rewards points are the most difficult flexible points for non-expert users to redeem, so increasing their value when transferred to one of their simplest transfer partners is obviously an unalloyed good.

I don't think Membership Rewards points should be earned speculatively with the intent to transfer them to Hilton (if for no other reason than Hilton Honors points are easier and cheaper to earn with a Surpass/Ascend card), but I also don't think anyone should pay cash for a hotel stay while they have access to cheap and plentiful Hilton Honors points, since the least valuable point is always the one you don't redeem.

Award nights now count towards World of Hyatt elite status

Historically, Hyatt Gold Passport and World of Hyatt elite status could only be earned with nights (and until last year, stays) that had a cash component: only cash and Points + Cash stays earned elite-qualifying credit.

That changed this year, so award nights will also count towards elite status qualification. Unfortunately, it takes 60 nights to qualify for Globalist status, so I doubt this will have much effect except on the margin. An average of 5 nights per month doesn't seem unreasonable in general, but an average of 5 nights per month at Hyatt properties would require booking away from cheaper or better properties, which is a funny way to save money.

Of course, it's easier for some people than others.

Continental breakfast for Gold and Diamond elites at Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts

Hilton has updated their "My Way" choice of benefits for Gold and Diamond elites at Waldorf Astoria properties to include the option of "a daily complimentary continental breakfast in the hotel's designated restaurant for you and up to one additional guest registered to the same room each day of your stay."

Interestingly, they have updated the elite benefits page to reflect the change but have not yet updated the actual My Way options in the app or online, presumably because the only guy who knows how to do so hasn't worked there for years. Hopefully Waldorf Astoria staff have been notified of the change, but I expect elites will have to do some haggling until the system is fully updated.

There are some cool Waldorf Astoria properties but the only ones I can see an obvious reason to choose are the Hawaiian, Caribbean, and Park City locations. Does anybody have a favorite Waldorf Astoria property?

American Express's new co-branded Hilton credit cards

I've been reading with interest this morning about the revamped lineup of co-branded Hilton Honors credit cards American Express will be launching soon. Since I earn a lot of Hilton Honors points with my current Surpass card (and I stay at a lot of Hiltons), I have some quick reactions to share (all of this is based on reported details; I haven't seen an official announcement from American Express yet).

Aspire for high-spending reimbursed business travelers

Note that I always differentiate mere business travelers from reimbursed business travelers. The former can still earn lots of points and elite status benefits on their employers' dime, but it's the later that are truly fortunate since they're also able to maximize the value of their personal credit card rewards with purchases that are later reimbursed by their employers.

For high-spending reimbursed business travelers, I think the Hilton Honors Aspire card may be a pretty good deal. If you spend $60,000 during the calendar year on reimbursed meals (in the US) and flights, you'll receive:

• two free weekend nights at any Hilton property in the world;
• 420,000 Hilton Honors points (good for at least 4 nights at any Hilton property in the world);
• a $250 Hilton resort statement credit;
• a $250 airline incidental fee credit;
• unlimited Priority Pass lounge access.

Of course you can't analyze the Aspire card in a vacuum; you have to compare it to your next best option to identify the opportunity cost of putting that much spend on it instead of a rival card. The obvious candidate is the Chase Sapphire Reserve, which also has a $450 annual fee, and also earns bonus points on travel and dining (worldwide, not just in the United States). It also offers a $300 travel statement credit instead of a $250 airline fee credit.

So, how do they compare? A reimbursed business traveler who spent $60,000 on the Chase Sapphire Reserve in bonus categories would earn 180,000 Ultimate Rewards points, worth $1,800 in cash, $2,700 in paid travel through the Ultimate Rewards portal, and potentially much more than that if transferred to a partner program.

420,000 Hilton Honors points, meanwhile, are worth perhaps $2,100 if you're able to get half a cent in value per point. Assuming you use your two annual free weekend night certificates at mid-tier 45,000-point properties, and get the equivalent of half a cent per point in value, that adds another $450 in value, for roughly $2,550 total stay value. Assuming you can use the $250 Hilton resort statement credit on award stays, I don't see any reason not to value that close to face value. If you have to use it on paid stays, of course, you should assign it no value at all because you'll never use it.

So I think a fair prospective estimate of the value of the Aspire card to a high-spending reimbursed business traveler would be between $2,550 and $2,800, basically within a margin of error of the value of Chase Sapphire Reserve Ultimate Rewards points used to book paid travel.

That being the case, I think the strongest argument for picking the Aspire card over the Sapphire Reserve is not strictly the value of the points, but rather the value of diversifying into a rewards currency besides Ultimate Rewards. That's because there are other ways to earn Ultimate Rewards points (Chase Freedom and legacy Ink Plus cards spring to mind), so you may already be earning enough Ultimate Rewards points to meet the travel needs they're best suited for. In that case, earning Hilton Honors points instead may reduce your dependence on Chase's travel partners.

Anyway, I don't pay $450 annual fees, so I won't be getting an Aspire card anytime soon.

Business card for resellers?

American Express is also adding a business credit card to the Hilton Honors lineup that will offer 6 Honors points at a variety of merchants, including "wireless telephone services purchased directly from U.S. service producers." The card will offer a free weekend night after spending $15,000 and $60,000 each calendar year.

Some reseller may have to jump into the comments to correct me on this, but I think the obvious brute force way to maximize this card would be to buy $60,000 in iPhones from one of the mobile phone companies and resell them for as small a loss as possible.

I don't know if that would successfully earn 6 Honors points per dollar, and I don't know how much would be lost in transaction costs, but you'd get 360,000 Hilton Honors points and two free weekend nights, worth $2,250 using the same math as above. That means you'd need to keep your reselling transaction costs below 3.75% to break even (of course it would be even better if you turned a profit). You'd also receive Diamond elite status and 10 Priority Pass passes each year.

Rebranded Surpass: still good for manufactured spend

I put a lot of spend on my current Hilton Honors Surpass card, which I gather will become an "Ascend" card sometime in the next few quarters. I'll keep doing so, earning 6 Honors points per dollar spent at grocery stores and receiving Diamond status after spending $40,000 during the calendar year, but now I'll also get a free weekend night once I hit $15,000.

Unfortunately, after the transition I'll also have to pay $20 more per year for the privilege. As far as I'm concerned, that's a small price to pay for the free weekend night and 10 Priority Pass lounge passes.

If you want to lock in the $75 annual fee on the Surpass card I have a personal referral link on my Support the Site! page (shameless, I know).

Reported Flexperks changes and two kinds of breakage

As I first saw reported at Doctor of Credit, people are saying that Flexpoints earned with the US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards credit cards will be redeemable for 1.5 cents each beginning on January 1, 2018. They're currently worth as much as 2 cents each for paid airline tickets at the top of their redemption bands, and as little as 1.33 cents at the bottom of a redemption band.

I don't have any insight into whether these reports are true, not having seen any communications from US Bank about any upcoming changes. However, since I seem to have a reputation as the biggest booster of Flexpoints in the travel hacking community, I certainly have been thinking about it.

People are anxious to make definitive declarations about whether the change would be an improvement or a devaluation. That judgment comes down to the intersection of two kinds of breakage.

Breakage as unredeemed value

This is the form of breakage that most immediately leaps to mind when you hear about a change like this. If you are able to consistently redeem your Flexpoints for flights at or close to the top of US Bank's redemption bands, then the value you would receive on redemptions after January first will drop by 25%. The further your actual redemptions are from that ideal redemption, the less the effect the change in redemption value will affect you: you can easily imagine someone who typically books $300 flights or $450 flights with Flexpoints and won't suffer at all from reducing their "maximum" value from 2 cents to 1.5 cents: they'll redeem the same number of points for their typical flight.

More than that, the current system of redemption bands creates an anxiety over unredeemed value. The difference between the $600 maximum value of 30,000 Flexpoints and the actual value you receive creates a disincentive to redeem points at all. Earning points and not redeeming them because of anxiety over getting a "good" redemption value means you might find yourself redeeming other potentially more valuable miles, or even cash, in order to "save" your Flexpoints for a more valuable redemption. You can be disciplined and always "redeem points and miles first," as I do, but that doesn't eliminate the fear of missing out that can be genuinely frustrating.

In other words, a fixed value for redemptions up and down the price scale has the advantage of consistency, even if it removes the ability to swing for the redemption fences.

Breakage as unredeemed points

A different kind of breakage is stranded or unredeemed points. If you're a Flexperks aficionado you may be familiar with ending a statement cycle with 19,000, 39,000, or 99,000 Flexpoints. In the first case your points are worth $190 in cash, in the second case they're worth up to $400 in flights plus $190 in cash, and in the last case they're worth up to $1,600 in flights and $190 in cash. In other words, "odd lot" Flexpoint balances are worth 1 cent each, 1.51 cents each, or 1.81 cents each, not the 2 cents each that you are hoping for.

The more difficult it is to redeem points (e.g. requiring a minimum of 20,000 points), the more points are likely to be stranded in your account at any one time. Stranded and unredeemable points balances are worth nothing (or one cent each, which is close enough). They're not even worth the 1.5 cents each posited under the new redemption regime!

Conclusion

The important thing to understand is not that the changes being reported are "good" or "bad."

In many ways they tug in different directions: the breakage of unredeemed value will be eliminated, but the amount of value locked in will be lower than the value many, if not most, Flexperks cardholders are currently receiving.

On the other hand, if the changes also inaugurate an elimination of minimum redemption amounts, the number of Flexpoints stranded will be reduced by creating more flexibility in award construction, with one-way flights and flights in different classes of service such that you're able to spend down as much of your Flexpoints balance as possible with each redemption. Fewer stranded Flexpoints is an unalloyed good, just as lower maximum redemption value is, for most customers in most circumstances, a devaluation.

That leaves one question which only the individual cardholder can answer: will you get more value from your formerly-stranded, newly-redeemable rump Flexpoint balances, or less value from knocking down the maximum value of points you planned to redeem for flights at the top of the current redemption bands?

Neither I nor any other blogger, thought leader, or guru can answer that question for you.