What I learned attending the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (twice)

I’ve been out of the country for a few weeks visiting the Czech Republic, building the trip around attending the 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. This was my second time at KVIFF; we had such a great time attending just a few days of the festival back in 2018 that we decided to spend a full week this time. That’s not ultimately how it worked out, for reasons that had (almost) nothing to do with the festival itself.

Since I knew nothing about international film festivals until I started going to Karlovy Vary, I want to share some lessons that I’ve learned. I hope some of these will be even be applicable to other major film festivals, since I think they’re all more or less run by the same people.

Scheduling and transportation

Film festivals are great to plan travel around, because they’re scheduled long in advance and they’re always in the same locations, so you can start looking for award flights and hotel stays far in advance. Next year’s KVIFF is July 4-12.

I did not start looking very far in advance, but was still able to book economy award seats to Prague on Icelandair using 35,000 Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles and $228.15 in cash, and return flights from Prague in Aer Lingus business class for 55,000 Mileage Plan miles and $57.90.

Since we were flying in the first day of the festival, we walked to the public bus stop at Prague’s Ruzyně and took the 100 bus to the Zličin metro stop about 20 minutes away, then got on the 305 bus to Karlovy Vary’s Tržnice bus station, which took a little over 2 hours. You can tap to pay on both busses (and indeed, every form of transit we took), so we didn’t need to futz with the ticket machines. There’s a zone-based system outside of Prague proper, and Karlovy Vary is in zone 13, so the bus from Zličin cost 140 CZK, or about $6.

I know Europeans love taking busses everywhere, but we’re not Europeans, so we took the train back, departing from Karlovy Vary’s Horní train station (the Dolní station closer to the center of town runs a service train up to the Horní station but we just took a 5 minute bus ride from the city center). The train takes a much more circuitous path than the bus, so the return trip took about 3 hours and 15 minutes, and cost 498 CZK, or $21.31. If you’re going straight back to the airport from Karlovy Vary, then taking the reverse of our bus route would almost certainly be more convenient.

Where to stay

Our first trip to Karlovy Vary in 2018 was a bit spur of the moment, so finding decent hotels was a struggle. We ended up staying at a kind of quaint converted mansion or palace some ways up one of the hills surrounding the festival area. The hill ended up being an annoyance, since every trip back to the room would leave us soaked in sweat (KVIFF is in July, after all).

So this time, I focused on hotels directly along the river Teplá, which runs through the festival area. I found what seemed like a terrific deal at the Park Spa Hotel Sirius (you can read my 2/10 review there): $1422.78 for 7 nights, with full board and a spa package. The rate was so low I assumed they didn’t realize the film festival was taking place or they would have hiked the rate, since the front door practically opens onto the main festival grounds, with a great view from the windows.

Well, it turns out this was a huge mistake. Not because of anything the hotel did or didn’t do, but because every single night of the festival there was a DJ spinning in the center of the main festival grounds until 3 am. The ones right outside the windows of our room. We tolerated this for 5 nights, but at that point had slept so little and seen so many movies we decided to pack it in and head to Prague.

In short, my solemn recommendation is to not stay at any hotel or apartment facing the river during the festival. Either go a little up the hill from the river like we did on our first trip, or stay outside the resort area in the more commercial or residential parts of town a block or two from the river.

Paid tickets

It is possible to just show up to the festival and buy movie tickets, and I suspect that there are people who take day trips from Prague just to experience the atmosphere and see whichever movie they can get tickets to. I’m not sure how far in advance paid tickets can be purchased, since we’ve never gotten tickets that way. Paid tickets can be purchsaed from box offices scattered around the festival grounds.

Festival passes (1)

For both of our trips, we bought festival passes, which give you a little more control over which films you get to see, although not all that much more.

Festival passes can only be purchased in-person once you arrive in Karlovy Vary. There’s no way to buy them online or in advance. We arrived in the early afternoon and bought our passes immediately, although I had them activated for the day after we arrived, so we did not end up seeing any movies on the day of arrival. This was revealed to be a minor error, because of the way passes are used to reserve tickets.

Once you have one or more active passes, you can load them into the KVIFF smartphone app. I recommend downloading the app in advance and creating your account, but my partner and I both had to delete and reinstall the app for it to function properly (a belated realization that led to another missed half-day). Importantly, you can load more than one pass into the app, so you can reserve multiple seats for the same movie. For showings with assigned seating, I believe the app tries to find seats together when you do this.

Each day at 7 am, reservations become available for films showing the following day. It’s worth describing the rhythm of how this works: before you go to bed on Monday, you look at the schedule for Wednesday for every movie you’d even slightly be interested in seeing. Then you set an alarm for 6:55 am. At 7 am Tuesday morning, you open the app and request 3 reservations for those Wednesday movies. Then, you wait, because everyone else in Karlovy Vary is doing the exact same thing. As the server resolves each request, you’ll be told whether your reservation was successful. If not, you can put in another request, although by 7:30 or so most in-demand reservations will have been taken.

Each pass allows you to hold 3 successful reservations per day, and you can make as many requests as you want until you reach that limit. It was unclear to me from the instructions whether a canceled reservation would “free up” that slot or if once a request was successful that slot was permanently used up.

Let me be clear: you will not get your top three choices every day. If you are lucky, you’ll get one of your top three choices every day. More people want to see each film than there are reservations available, and this is the way those reservations are rationed.

Once you’ve successfully made a reservation, you can pick up the paper tickets from any box office using your physical festival pass.

Festival passes (2)

A second way to get tickets using your festival pass is to go to the box office and see what they have available for sale. Your pass gets you unlimited free tickets from the box offices for showings each day and the following day. Lines are often very, very long when the box offices open at 7 am, but if you’re up at 6:55 anyway in order to make reservations, you may as well be standing in line too. We did not try to get tickets this way at 7 am, but after the lines died down we did check whether there were any more tickets available, and there always were, although again, not to the most in-demand showings.

Festival passes (3)

Finally, there is yet another way to use festival passes to see films (and attend other events, like press conferences): outside each theater and event space there is a roped off line or holding area, where passholders who don’t have tickets can wait until 5-10 minutes before the event starts, when enough people are admitted to fill the empty seats.

For major movie premiers, this is likely the only way you will be able to attend, so if there’s one movie you absolutely have to see during the festival, plan on staking out a place in line at least an hour or so before it’s scheduled to begin.

Disneyworld for adults

Those are the logistics. What is the festival actually like? It’s an amusement park built into a fully functioning city. The main attractions are the rides — the films being shown all around town. There are screenings in huge corporate auditoriums, stately imperial opera houses, hotel ballrooms, and medium-sized side rooms (the main building of the festival is a hotel and conference center the rest of the year).

Besides the rides, there are also meet-and-greets: press briefings and panel discussions about the films being screened.

There’s a fair amount of amusement park food being sold from kiosks around the festival, all of which I tasted was excellent. There are also beer and cocktail kiosks. Everything was reasonably priced, presumably because the rest of the city was operating as usual so there weren’t any obvious price-gouging opportunities, except the gift shop, where we happily spent money restocking our dated KVIFF gear.

This analogy kept returning to me over the 5 days we were there, spurred by something I remember a Disney hacker saying years ago: people who go to Disneyworld without putting in the work to plan their stay get frustrated, but what other trip would you spend $10,000 on and just show up for a week hoping everything will work out?

There were some genuine pain points at KVIFF. The fact that the app needed to be reinstalled wasn’t something we could have predicted in advance and put a real cramp on our first 24 hours in town. The fact that our hotel was so incompatible with sleep that we had to leave early is something we can account for in the future by staying further from the main drag.

But a lot of the annoyances are just how the festival works, and if you want to see any films at the festival, you have to adjust to the requirements, primarily waking up in time to put in your reservation requests, and having an open mind about which films you’re willing to watch. Once we got the hang of it, we didn’t have any trouble seeing 2-3 films each remaining day we were in town.

Conclusion

I think part of the glamour of the film festival circuit is the overwhelming feeling that it’s not about you, the public, and the festival does a good job playing up this feeling. Before each film there’s a brief spot highlighting an event from the previous day, like a movie premier or a gala event, lifetime achievement awards, things of that nature, and all the footage is shot right where you’re sitting, or where you’ll be sitting tomorrow, which gives a sense of proximity to fame and power.

These festivals are, after all, basically trade shows where venders show off their latest projects hoping for bids from investors and distributors, but the venders and investors are household names, at least to people who follow the film industry enough to go to a film festival. The fact that they let the public in at all is a kind of cross-subsidy to get the movers and shakers in the same place, while the real action takes place in the suites upstairs.

Like if Disney’s corporate headquarters were underneath Splash Mountain and they used ticket revenue to pay their power bill.

"How do we scale this?"

One of my favorite questions travel hackers ask is “how do we scale this?” The implicit answer is, usually, “we don’t.” Contrary to what economists pretend to believe, the world is in fact chock-full of arbitrage opportunities. What is true is that most of those opportunities are difficult or impossible to scale.

Here’s my personal breakdown of techniques used to increase scale, and the obstacles to doing so.

Brute force and constant returns to scale

The most obvious scaling strategy is to multiply your own effort. If you have a technique that generates a known amount of value per hour you spend on it, then you can get twice as much value by spending twice as much time, usually up to some limit. In a simple example, if it takes you an hour to manufacture $10,000 in in-person spend at one grocery store, and you have identical access to five grocery stores, then you can spend 5 hours and manufacture $50,000.

Automation and transformations

A lot of high-volume travel hackers focus on automation as a way to scale their techniques, and automation is one of the many tools I put in the broad category of “transformations.” Transformations are when the design of programs can be understood differently by the customer than by the business in order to scale techniques, either to get a higher return from the same amount of time or money, or to reduce the time or money needed to get the maximum return.

To give a classic example from my own practice, for many years the US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards Visa offered 3 points per dollar spent on charity, worth up to 6% when redeemed through their travel portal. They also coded Kiva, the microlending website, as charity. People were thus able to earn as much as 6% in travel on loans of as little as a few months, and many of us did, transforming a modest discount on charitable giving into an extremely high-yield investment vehicle.

A more contemporary example is the rewards (often branded as “Kasasa”) checking accounts that offer some of the highest-earning, most liquid savings vehicles. They typically require 12-15 debit card transactions along with a direct deposit in order to earn their advertised rates. Meeting these requirements as they intend would seem to require, as they intend, reorienting your entire financial life around doing so. But when you’ve broken down the requirements to their individual parts, you can transform meeting them into a matter of a few minutes per month.

American Express cards have acquired a reputation of being “coupon books,” but a lot of the pain of redeeming those coupons (and getting back the value of your annual fee) can be transformed into painless routines:

• American Express Hilton Honors Surpass cards can be used to buy $50 in physical gift cards on the first day of each quarter to trigger the quarterly statement credit;

• Monthly statement credits for Resy and rideshare services or Shake Shack and Grubhub can be triggered by gift cards or subscription services.

All these are transformations: the company wants them to dominate your thoughts, but a few simple calendar reminders can guarantee you maximize the value of each credit without having to keep track of any of them individually.

Teammates, comparative advantage, and the benefits of trade

I call teammates everyone you partner with in order to take advantage of different circumstances, what economists call your “comparative advantage.” These can take all sorts of forms: some people have access to grocery store manufactured spend while other people have access to gas stations. Some people have more Chase cards than they’ll ever be able to maximize the value of, while others pile into American Express cards and are blocked from signing up for new Chase cards.

A lot of bloggers have a kind of “view from nowhere,” where every person has access to every credit card and each can follow prescribed steps from scratch, but it takes almost no experience to know that’s absurd. Every individual travel hacker’s situation is different, and it takes only a little more experience to identify which parts of the game you’re interested in pursuing most intensively. Finding other people with complementary interests is a way to scale each of your efforts by getting the most value from the parts of the game you’re most interested in.

The most obvious candidates for teammates are family members, precisely because there’s usually not any need to “divide” effort or results at all: everyone gets to go on the family trip, regardless of whether they made a “fair” contribution to paying for it at all. Some bloggers have affected to call these teammates “Player 1,” “Player 2,” and so on.

Employees

One of the most common questions people ask when they find out about the existence of travel hacking is, “that sounds great, but I don’t want to do it, can I just pay you to do it for me?”

There are people and situations that make this possible, but fewer than people wish or expect. The main problem is that almost anything you can train people to do on your behalf, they can do on their own behalf. You are the middle man, and unless you have both knowledge and money that are impossible to steal, your employee will quickly get the drift and go to work for themself.

The Verge had a humorous story about this very phenomenon in my home state of Montana, where resellers would continuously set up drop-shipping warehouses only to find their employees, having mastered the skill of packing and unpacking Amazon shipments after a few months simply set up their own tax-free reselling businesses.

Readers as force-multipliers

Another way to scale a technique is simply to share it. This has all the advantages of the techniques above.

Brute force techniques will have more people applying more brute force and yielding more benefits.

If you know how to transform a technique from difficult to hard, then more people will save more time and effort.

If you know how to trade personal or regional advantages with other people, then telling them how will result in more benefits for everyone in those situations.

And if you tell people how to hire employees to solve their problems, then more people will have their problems solved and more people will be employed.

The problem, of course, is that you don’t get a cut. What’s up to you is how big of a problem that is.

How does Hilton price 5th-night-free awards?

I manufacture a lot of Hilton Honors points with the American Express Surpass co-branded credit card, and I redeem almost as many. The Surpass earns a free night certificate that can be used worldwide after spending $15,000 per year and Diamond status after $40,000 in spend, but I am perfectly happy earning 6 points per dollar spent at grocery stores all year.

I try to redeem points for at least 0.5 cents each, and do not have any difficulty finding opportunities to do so, although as always you have to be careful that you’re comparing redemptions against the money you would spend instead, not the cash value of the room you redeem points for.

For example, I stayed at the Conrad Hilton Midtown last weekend for 95,000 points per night (plus two of those free night certificates), which translates to something like 0.7 cents in value, but of course I wouldn’t spend $675 to spend the night in New York City, so it would be absurd to say I earned 4.2% in value on my grocery store spend.

One way to maximize the value of that spend is by using the fifth-night-free benefit on award stays whenever possible. Fourth- and fifth-night-free offers are pretty common across the industry, and Hilton’s is one of the most straightforward: to trigger the benefit, all you have to do is book a standard room for 5 or more nights entirely with points.

That’s how the benefit is triggered. Understanding how it’s calculated is trickier.

There are lots of ways to calculate the value of a night

I mention that other programs have free-night benefits for stays of a certain length because they illustrate how a simple-sounding benefit can have both opportunities and perils. Most importantly, how does the value of a fifth-night-free benefit change when the nightly rate varies over the course of the stay?

Chase IHG Rewards credit cardholders get a “true” fourth-night-free: the point cost of the specific night which happens to be fourth is zeroed out. This creates opportunities to stage your reservations so that the most expensive nights of your stay are the fourth ones and increasing the potential value of the boost to your points’ value over 33%, and the risk of “wasting” the benefit on a cheap fourth night..

The Citi Prestige card offered what they called a fourth-night-free benefit, but it was calculated as just 25% off the (apparently-inflated) prepaid cash rates offered through their travel portal. This meant the maximum value of the benefit was capped at 33%, with higher portal rates grinding down the value of the benefit from that theoretical cap.

Marriott Rewards’ version stretches the concept to the breaking point: on 5-night stays, the lowest-priced night is deemed to be the “fifth,” so on stays with varying rates you will never capture the full 25% boost boost in value; only on five-night stays where each night is priced equally do you get the maximum value from the benefit.

Hilton seems to use a “trimmed” fifth-night-free calculation

Since I have a fair amount of experience redeeming Hilton points, I’ve had the chance to observe how Hilton handles this inevitable question: how many points should you expect to save when using a fifth-night-free benefit?

First, to trigger the benefit, the same room type has to be available for the entirety of your stay. That means you need to go further than the Hilton award calendar, since you might see lower rates for one-night stay in a room type that isn’t available for all five nights.

Second, if the room type you’re booking has no change in price over your stay, then it’s as irrelevant as you’d expect: you save 20%, getting a 25% boost to the value of your points.

When the points rate varies over the course of your stay, then things get interesting. On the checkout screen, you’ll see a rate listed for each of the first four nights and “5th Night Free” listed next to the last night. But those first four rates are not necessarily the rates you’d pay if you were booking each night individually. Instead, Hilton sometimes “trims” those, slightly increasing or decreasing the price of each night.

Usually, but not always, this is done in Hilton’s favor: the first four nights will cost more as part of a five-night reservation than as four one-night reservations.

At this point, I would like to be able to pull off the napkin and reveal that I’ve reverse-engineered the precise formula Hilton uses to make these trims, but that’s not true. I spent the morning poking around the website and running experiments, and concluded that sometimes Hilton does this, sometimes it doesn’t, and when they do it’s usually against the customer’s interests.

Here’s a screenshot of the basic principle at work:

To walk through what you’re seeing there, a five-night stay starting on May 4 costs 199,000 Honors points, while the same five nights priced individually cost 248,000 points. In this case, the night of the 6th is “trimmed down” to 48,000 points, so the reservation costs 1,000 points less than it would if Hilton offered a true fifth-night-free, like IHG.

Meanwhile, a five-night stay starting on the 5th costs 196,0000 Honors points, while the same five nights would cost 253,000 points on their own. In this case, the nights of the 5th, 7th, and 8th are “trimmed up” to 49,000 points each, so the stay costs 3,000 points more than it would if the nightly rates were used. But because the night of the 9th costs so much more, the total cost of the stay is still less than the previous example.

Why does Hilton use this hybrid model?

The truth is, I’m not sure why Hilton has adopted this pricing model. And in fact, I’m not even certain that they did it deliberately. It’s perfectly believable that they price five-night reservations this way for reasons totally unrelated to the fifth-night-free benefit. Perhaps another day I’ll try searching for five-night stays in a new account without elite status to see if the pricing change is function of stay length and not trying to nickle and dime points redemptions after all.

If I did have to guess (we’ve now entered the reckless speculation portion of the post) I’d say that this was probably not actually designed to rob a few thousand points from their most loyal customers here and there, but rather to “simplify” the pricing page. The main visual effect of Hilton’s “trims” is to bring each of the four remaining nights closer together in price.

Here’s another set of examples where rates are trimmed up (against the customer):

And here are some dates and room types where rates are left as is, giving the customer the “full” 60,000-point credit for the last night:

In other words, what looks to us like a pricing decision engineered to get one over on us may have been as simple as a developer trying to think of a kludge that would make all the numbers look more or less the same.

Why it matters

While I’m sure there are folks as interested in the minutiae of pricing decisions as I am, the concrete reason this practice matters is that Hilton frequently sells points for “a bit less” than 0.5 cents if you first click through an online shopping portal to Points.com.

This isn’t usually an especially good deal, since Hilton points are also worth about 0.5 cents, and it doesn’t make any sense to buy anything for what it’s worth; keep your money.

Buying points for an immediate fifth-night-free redemption is an obvious exception. If you can buy $1.25 for a dollar, then the proposition becomes a lot more interesting, but only if you know how many points to buy.

And this is, sure enough, exactly how I got interested: I bought points for a five-night reservation, and once the points had hit my account discovered I didn’t have enough, because the Hilton website will not show you the total cost of an award stay unless you have enough points to book it (the iPhone app will if you click on “rate details”). Hilton had “trimmed up” the cost of my stay, and I had to buy a few thousand more points at a penny each to get over the top.

My successful experience replacing an Incomm Visa prepaid card

There is, by all accounts, an epidemic of fraud striking prepaid debit card retailers across the Western United States. I’ve had the remarkable good fortune of never encountering a tampered prepaid debit card in the wild. So when I needed an Incomm prepaid debit card replaced this month, I jumped at the opportunity to find out how the process works in practice.

Fraud has become a huge problem, but not my problem

If you visit manufactured spend forums you quickly find an ocean of complaints about gift card fraud. Not the “elder abuse” fraud that newspapers love to write about, but genuine larceny: card packaging is opened, the details of the card are swiped, then the card is repackaged so that when an unsuspecting customer activates the card, the balance is quickly drained by the fraudsters. I don’t have a representative sample but it sounds like there are at least some stores on the West Coast where almost every card seems to have been tampered with.

This was not my problem. My problem was that I messed up the magnetic stripe on a card. In other words, user error. Since the balance was still there and I had the card details, I could have liquidated the card online for a tax payment, or to reload my Amazon balance, but instead I called up Incomm to see what the process was to replace the card.

Incomm prepaid card Replacement process

When I realized my error, I first called the number on the back of my Visa prepaid card (833-322-6760). During that call, which according to my phone lasted 17 minutes, I provided the usual card information, as well as the prepaid card’s “serial number,” which is located on the bottom right quadrant of the back of the card, as well as on the card packaging. The phone representative also asked for my name and address. Finally, he asked me to send “copies” of the receipt, the front and back of the prepaid card, as well as my government ID, to “consumed@incomm.com”. I took photos of the documents using my phone on my dining room table.

I first sent the documents on Friday, December 1, 2023, and on Monday, December 4, I received an e-mail from the same address asking for copies of the front of the card and the receipt again. I immediately submitted new pictures.

On Monday, December 11, I received a new card via USPS first class mail. That card had to be activated over the phone, which according to my phone records took 1 minute. I had the option to set a PIN over the phone or use any 4 digits on the new card’s first use, like a normal Incomm prepaid debit card. The card could be and was immediately liquidated through one of my usual in-person channels.

Conclusion

Obviously I wasn’t going to freak out over holding a card for 10 days instead of my usual 90 minutes, but despite my story being anti-climactic there are some obvious lessons you may need a refresher on if you’ve gotten lazy in your manufactured spend routine:

1. Keep your cards, receipts and packaging together. You can use filing cabinets, ziplock bags (guilty) or anything else you like, but if you get a fradulent or defective card you will want to be able to pull everything out at once without having to triple check card numbers and your purchase dates and times. Any unforced errors you make are going to slow down the replacement process.

2. Act quickly. In the case of tampered cards this is more important, but even if you mess up your own card, Incomm isn’t going to replace it until you contact them. Set aside 20 minutes and pick up the phone.

3. Don’t float more than you can afford to. I got stuck with $500 in the ether for 10 days, which didn’t bother me because it was a short period and a reasonable amount. If I’d just bought $10,000 worth of cards and needed them all replaced before my next credit card bill was due, I’d have been sweating a lot harder!

Gift of Choice, the new (to me) restricted gift card product

Last week I had the opportunity to try a brand of “merchant-restricted” gift cards I hadn’t used before: the “Gift of Choice” cards sold by Safeway and “powered” by The Gift Card Shop. This gimmick, the merchant-restricted gift card, is has come around repeatedly over the years.

Five Back Visa gift cards are a way to earn a 5% rebate at certain merchants, including at Bed Bath & Beyond, a formerly-ubiquitous shopping mall staple that used to sell a variety of home goods, but also PIN-enabled Visa prepaid debit cards, leading to a negative-cost manufactured spend technique.

Happy Cards used to be physical gift cards that were (supposedly) limited to use at the merchants specified on the card. Judging by the website they seem to have mostly abandoned that model and now sell codes you exchange online for merchant gift cards.

That’s precisely the model used by Gift of Choice: you buy some flimsy cardboard packaging, scratch off some codes on the back, and redeem them for the digital gift card of your choice.

The Deal: 10 Just4U points per dollar

During the promotion last week, you would earn 10 Safeway Just4U points per dollar spent on Gift of Choice gift card codes, obviously in addition to any rewards you normally earn on grocery store purchases.

I normally value Just4U Rewards (100 points) at “about” $2.78 each (my valuation has increased since I wrote this post for a variety of reasons), so on a $500 Gift of Choice purchase (50 Rewards) I earn a rebate of about $139. I also save the $5.95 I’d pay to activate a $500 Visa prepaid debit card, while earning the same credit card rewards (minus the rewards on the $5.95 activation fee, natch).

Gift of Choice sells their redemption codes with a variety of merchants listed on the front, although I believe you can redeem the cards for any of their supported merchants regardless of the specific version you buy (I can’t check anymore because I’ve already fully redeemed all the cards I purchased, which deactivates their numbers). You can also split the value of the Gift of Choice code into multiple different merchant gift cards, and you don’t need to redeem the full value all at once, so you can spend it down over time.

The gift cards you receive after redeeming Gift of Choice codes are “real” electronic gift cards: you can check their balance online and spend the cards directly at the merchant, and gift card resellers shouldn’t have a problem with them, as long as they accept electronic gift cards.

I bought a Gift of Choice version listing Lowe’s as a redemption option, and redeemed my $500 codes for $500 Lowe’s gift cards. CardCash offers $412.50 in cash for $500 Lowe’s gift cards, or $457.88 in Hotels.com gift cards. Since I book most of my non-points stays through Hotels.com, those gift cards are worth almost the same as cash to me, and that’s how I liquidated the cards, paying $42.12 for at least 9,100 Alaska Airlines miles, or a maximum of 0.46 cents per mile.

Obviously, if you can actually use a gift card at a participating merchant, then your value proposition will look even better, and there are some moderately useful merchants in the system. If you grab fast food regularly, you can stock up on Taco Bell, Domino’s, and Subway gift cards. If you are in the market for athletic wear, Columbia, Under Armor, and Athleta are options; they sell some expensive stuff, and a 28% discount is nothing to sneeze at.

An intriguing possibility is to redeem your Gift of Choice codes for Xbox gift cards. My understanding is that these cards, in addition to games and loot crates and whatnot, can also be spent on Microsoft devices. I have no idea what the current state of the market is, but when consoles were in short supply ambitious resellers spent a lot of time buying and selling them, which may be a way to liquidate Gift of Choice cards at face value or for a profit.

The curious case of the code format

If and when this deal returns and you decide to pursue it, you’ll notice something right away I may as well mention now. I’ve been referring to Gift of Choice redemption “codes” throughout this post, because that’s how the system is supposed to work: you scratch off a little aluminum panel to reveal a series of numbers you redeem online.

But those numbers are actually formatted as a 16-digit “card number” starting with 4, a 3-digit CVV code, and a 4-digit expiration date. In other words, they’re formatted as a Visa card, and the card number satisfies the Luhn algorithm. The specific 6-digit BIN identifier (465568), according to numerous free and disreputable online services, is registered to a Swiss private bank, for whatever that’s worth.

What does this mean? I have no idea — I already explained how I liquidated my cards. But if someone is out there liquidating Gift of Choice cards online at face value as Visa cards, they’re not shouting it from the rooftops. The funniest possible case would be if they can be used as Visa cards, but only within Switzerland. Still, I have no reason to believe they can be used as Visa cards at all.

Successfully liquidating 3rd-party gift cards with CardCash

Gift card reselling is a manufactured spend technique that sees periodic surges in interest. At its base, it’s is as simple as any technique: buy gift cards at a big enough discount, or with enough of an earning bonus, and sell them at a small enough discount to make the points you walk away with worth the difference.

Players cycle in and out of this space with some regularity, and then are inevitably washed out by the inherent precarity of this line of business: a single batch of compromised gift cards can wipe out the usually-slim margins and cause an entire enterprise to tip into insolvency.

Revisiting CardCash

Checking back through my e-mail, it looks like I first used CardCash to liquidate Hewlett Packard gift cards back in 2016 when it was possible to generate unlimited points and cash by recycling them. I hadn’t used CardCash since, and while I didn’t remember having any problems with them back then, I didn’t even know if the site was still around.

Fortunately, it still is, and I was able to successfully use them to liquidate some Adidas gift cards I purchased during a recent promotion.

Bonus Safeway 4 U points on Adidas gift cards

Most weeks, the grocery stores around me run promotions for discounts or bonus points on gift card purchases. The promotions are usually for third-party gift cards, although last week Giant ran a formerly-common, now-rare promotion for bonus points on Visa prepaid debit cards.

Last week, Safeway ran a global promotion for 10 bonus Safeway for U points per dollar spent on Adidas gift cards. Since third-party gift cards usually earn one Safeway for U point per dollar, this meant you could earn 5500 points (55 Rewards) for each $500 Adidas gift card you purchased, plus any credit card rewards you earned on the purchase.

This was a nice combination of a big mainstream retailer (rather than a niche merchant like Top Golf) and a substantial bonus, so I decided to pencil out whether it made sense as a gift card reselling play.

Putting CardCash through its paces

Since it had been so long since I used CardCash, and the promotion lasted all week, I decided to run a few experiments before going all in. Fortunately, CardCash offers the same payout rate on all card denominations, so I first bought two $75 Adidas gift cards (the minimum to trigger the Safeway promotion), and submitted one to CardCash on Wednesday requesting a PayPal payout, and one on Thursday requesting an ACH payout. Both orders were immediately “confirmed” by e-mail, and both were “accepted” on Friday. I received the PayPal payment Friday afternoon and the ACH payment on Monday. The cash payout rate was identical at 80.5%, or $60.38.

With those experiments successfully completed, I was then confident enough to buy three more Adidas gift cards for $500 each.

Alternative redemption options

While CardCash will pay out cash, they also allow you to exchange third-party gift cards for other cards at a higher value. The highest redemption rate available was (and still is as of this writing) Hotels.com gift cards at $446.78, or 89.36% of face value.

I don’t have any special love for Hotels.com, but I do use them periodically when they have competitive rates or cancellation conditions for stays I don’t want to use points on. In fact, I have already booked two upcoming trips that added up to almost exactly the $1340.34 I’d get from swapping out Adidas gift cards. In my case, the Hotels.com gift cards were literally as good as cash to me.

Request for Proof of Purchase/Origin

I submitted my first two $500 cards on Friday and Sunday, and on Monday received an e-mail with the subject line “Request for Proof of Purchase/Origin” and the order number for my Friday order. The e-mail read:

“Thank you for choosing CardCash to sell your gift cards.

“To ensure secure transactions, please reply to this email with proof of purchase/origin for the gift cards you intend to sell. Please choose from the suggested examples or attach any other applicable documentation when replying to this email:

1. “Purchase receipts or invoices with transaction details.

2. “Documentation supporting their legitimacy, such as proof of employee incentives, loyalty rewards, or other valid sources.

3. “Additional details or explanations that provide clarity on how the gift cards were obtained.

“Upon receiving the requested information, our team will review it promptly.

“Providing this information is crucial in maintaining our commitment to a safe and trustworthy platform.”

I e-mail a photo of the card packaging, the back of the gift card, and the Safeway receipt showing the purchase details a little before noon and a little before 1 pm I received both a polite e-mail back and two e-mails with links to my newly-minted Hotels.com gift cards.

My third order was accepted without any additional verification.

Doing the math

I value Safeway Rewards in volume at about $2.39 each. They are only worth this much in volume, because more expensive awards also give better value. A single Reward is worth at most a dollar or two, while 7 Rewards are worth around $19.50. The 55 Rewards earned on a $500 Adidas gift card were therefore worth about $131.45 to me.

Selling Adidas gift cards for 80.5% of face value ($402.50) would still be slightly profitable, especially if you have a particularly high-value redemption in mind. But if you value Hotels.com gift cards the same as cash, as I did, then the value proposition becomes much more attractive, as I paid just $53.22 for what I conservatively value at $131.45 in Alaska Airlines miles.

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!

Hotels.com exemplifies the importance of redeemable intervals

Affiliate bloggers (and Secretaries of Transportation) love assigning a dollar value to miles and points, which makes it easy for them to compare the value of signup bonuses across currencies and manipulate their valuations when a particularly large referral bonus comes along.

There are naturally people for whom this approach makes sense, like mileage brokers who sell award tickets and hotel stays to folks who don’t know or care where they come from: selling a hotel stay that might cost $10,000 in cash for $5,000 can be a good deal for all involved if you only paid $1,000 for the points.

But this approach has never made any sense to me, since miles and points aren’t fungible. I can’t opportunistically earn 20,000 American miles, 20,000 Delta miles, and 20,000 Spirit miles and redeem them for a 60,000-mile United flight. If the United flight is the one I need to take, my other three currencies aren’t worth 2 cents each, or even one cent each: they’re worthless.

This is one reason I work to keep many of my balances as low as possible. I only have 797 Mileage Plus miles in my United account, and have no intention of earning more any time soon (despite having flown United last month and flying them again next week!). If any potential use does come up, I can transfer the precise number of United miles I need from Ultimate Rewards, and then draw my balance back down into the 3 digits, just where I want it to be.

There’s no better way to illustrate this than with the example of Hotels.com.

Stamps, rewards, and the importance of thinking in tens

To refresh readers’ memory, Hotels.com has an extremely simple rewards program: when you book a night through them, you receive a “reward stamp.” Collect 10 stamps, and you receive a “reward night.” You can then redeem reward nights at virtually all the properties on their platform for the average nightly rate you paid for your 10 reward stamps.

Importantly, however, if the stay you’re trying to book costs more than the value of your reward nights, you can simply pay the difference in cash to “top up” the value of the night. This makes the risk of breakage single-tailed: you can lose some of the value when booking a room cheaper than the value of your reward night, but you’re not penalized for booking a room that’s more expensive (although you won’t earn a stamp on those “top-up” nights).

There are therefore two ways of thinking about the value proposition of the Hotels.com rewards program:

• it offers a 10% rebate on each paid night you book through the platform;

• after the 10th night you book through the platform, you receive a voucher worth up to the average value of your last 10 nights.

Regardless of the approach, the value of the voucher doesn’t change. What changes is the value assigned to each night you book through Hotels.com. If you take the first approach, then when you book through Hotels.com you can mentally multiply the cost of your stay by 90% to reflect the 10% rebate the program offers. If you take the second approach, the first 9 nights you book through Hotels.com generate no value whatsoever — only the 10th night you stay generates any value at all.

I prefer the second approach, because focusing on redemption thresholds makes it easier to compare the relative value earned by booking through different channels, as a recent experience illustrates.

Last month we visited the Midwest for a week to see some friends and family, and the best price I found was, as usual, at a centrally located Hyatt Place downtown. The lowest rate I could find was $136.85 per night, plus tax, which is irrelevant regardless of the booking channel.

Where the booking channel comes in is that $958 spent on a paid Hyatt rate would earn me 4,790 base World of Hyatt points, and 958 bonus points as an Explorist member, for a total of 5,748 points.

Now look at this through the same two lenses as above. On the one hand, since I redeem World of Hyatt points I’ve transferred from Ultimate Rewards fairly regularly, the points I’d earn on this stay could be valued at a minimum of $71.85 — the value of the same Ultimate Rewards points when redeemed for paid airfare.

Through the second, redemption-focused perspective, 5,748 World of Hyatt points are essentially worthless, since 5,000 points is just barely enough to book a Category 1 property, and only during off-peak and standard pricing periods! That story would be completely different if I had an upcoming high-value Hyatt stay and insufficient points to book it. In fact, I have plenty of Hyatt points and free night certificates, so the additional points would simply sit in my account growing stale.

That may well have still been my best option. After all, 7 Hotels.com reward stamps are just as worthless as 5,000 World of Hyatt points. What changed the calculus is that I already had 4 Hotels.com reward stamps in my account that had been rolled over all the way from 2019! That meant “crediting” my Hyatt Place stay to Hotels.com would put me over the redemption threshold and earn me a reward night, in my case worth $141.88, which I promptly redeemed with a small top-up for a night on our upcoming trip to the UK.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed one small but potentially critical error I committed: I was sitting on 4 existing reward stamps and then credited another 7 nights to Hotels.com — leaving me with a worthless “leftover” reward stamp! It may have been strictly superior to credit 6 nights to Hotels.com (securing my reward night) and the cheapest of the 7 nights to World of Hyatt (to save future Ultimate Rewards points). I say “may” have been because I didn’t bother checking the rates for individual nights, and it may have turned out the one-night rate was substantially higher than the longer-term stay rate I ultimately booked, erasing the value of the additional World of Hyatt points.

Two additional considerations: cashback portals and the Hotels.com credit card

Just as I set aside taxes and fees above, since as far as I know they are not included in the earning calculation with any loyalty program, I also skipped over cashback portals, which typically offer 1-4% cashback on hotel bookings (including Hotels.com bookings), although with periodic outsized offers, like the current 9% cashback rate at IHG properties offered by TopCashBack. Since those offers are for cashback, and have relatively low cashout requirements, you should always check where your total rewards (loyalty program + cashback + credit card earnings) offer you the most redeemable value.

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Finally, it’s worth mentioning the no-annual-fee Hotels.com credit card. The card has a paltry signup bonus (three $125 reward nights after spending $5,000, which can’t be stacked but can be topped up), but the earning structure does offer one interesting opportunity: for every $500 spent on the card, you receive one Hotels.com reward stamp. As mentioned above, each reward stamp has an assigned value which is averaged into the value of your reward night. Hotels.com assigns these credit card reward stamps the value of $110, so if you put exactly $5,000 on the card (for example, to meet the signup bonus), you’d end up with a fourth reward night worth exactly $110.

If you squint at it just right, that means someone trying to sell you this card could in principle convince you the card has a $485 signup bonus and earns 2.2% on ongoing spend (a $110 reward night for every $5000 in purchases). But that’s not the interesting opportunity offered by the card. Instead, since you earn a $110 reward stamp every time you spend $500 on the card, it’s ideal for topping up your reward stamp balance when your existing stamps have a relatively high average value (and you don’t have upcoming Hotels.com stays booked).

To give a simple example, if you have 9 reward stamps with an average value of $250 each, manufacturing $500 in spend on the Hotels.com credit card doesn’t yield $11 in rewards (2.2%). Instead, it yields a reward night worth $236 ($2250 plus $110 divided by 10).

I wouldn’t say this “supercharges” the Hotels.com rewards program. What it does do is reduce the downside risk of orphaned reward stamps, so at the margin makes it more appealing to book hotels based on price through Hotels.com, knowing that every time you accumulate 6 or 7 reward stamps through stays you can easily calculate the final value of the resulting reward night you manufacture with the credit card.

And if, like me, you have no interest in active participation in loyalty programs like Marriott or IHG, but notice that their properties are occasionally attractive in terms of price, location, or amenities, especially outside of big cities, it may be worth taking a look.

Conclusion

I tailored this post to Hotels.com rewards but hopefully I’ve made clear the point is universal, and not just for people who keep their balances as low as possible like me. If you’re saving up points for a week-long stay at the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island you might well need 600,000 points and a free night certificate, for example. But you don’t need 610,000 points and a free night certificate — only the points you redeem have value, the 10,000 leftover points are just gonna sit there, getting stale.

Double booking into the same Delta award space

So-called “fare buckets” are a curious feature of the airline ecosystem. For the overwhelming majority of flyers, even frequent travelers, the wide-ranging alphabet of letters, usually shown in parentheses after the class of carriage, is simply irrelevant: most people book on some combination of convenience and price, or have little or no choice if they’re required to fly on tickets booked by their corporate travel office.

So fare buckets don’t matter at all — until they’re the only thing that matters. For example, American Express Delta Platinum companion tickets can only be used to book into the L, U, T, X, and V fare classes. If those fare classes aren’t available for the flight you want, you simply cannot use the companion ticket on that flight.

The other important use of fare buckets is for finding award space on foreign carriers, especially ones that won’t show you availability unless you have sufficient miles in your account. Expert Flyer has a paid service that allows you to see the inventory available in each fare bucket for hundreds of airlines.

It’s important to note that there’s nothing magical about fare buckets. There’s not a “fixed” inventory in each fare bucket that never changes. While I assume most if not all airlines assign inventory to fare buckets algorithmically, the algorithms were still written by humans. An algorithm might say, “if there are 6 or more seats available in First Class, make one available for awards.” If that award seat is then booked, the algorithm might run again and make another single award seat available. One of the Japanese airlines is famous for doing exactly this.

Double booking the last available seat on Delta

As I wrote last month, although I’d finally booked my outbound tickets to England with SkyMiles, the price in Mileage Plus miles had ticked back down to 30,000, and I hoped to cancel the Delta award ticket and rebook using worthless-to-me United miles.

Having successfully completed that switcheroo, and with my Delta award ticket instantly refunded, I turned to booking flights to Wisconsin for a June wedding. There’s a single nonstop flight per day, and I found a ticket available for 26,000 SkyMiles. Almost like the good old days! But when I confirmed the dates with my partner and started booking seats for two, the price had jumped to 28,000 SkyMiles each! A 4,000-mile penalty just for waiting a day to book?

You probably see where this is going: the lower-priced ticket was still available, but there was just one seat available in that fare bucket. When I searched for two tickets on a single search, I was shown the lowest fare bucket with two seats in it.

What to do? Well, as Derek Trotter would say, “he who dares, wins!” So I had my partner fire up her laptop and log into her own Delta account. With both of us searching for a single seat, we both saw the 26,000-mile award available.

We each selected a seat, plugged in our payment information, and gave it a dramatic countdown: 3, 2, 1, click!

And we both got the last 26,000-mile seat.

This is obviously, in one sense, an almost trivial anecdote. We both had 28,000 SkyMiles in our accounts so if either of our purchases had errored out with “this fare is no longer available” whoever lost would have restarted the search and forked over the extra 2,000 SkyMiles.

But upon a moment’s reflection, the opportunities begin to come into view.

First, there are lots of tickets that cost more than 26,000 SkyMiles! For example, a one-way flight to Maui from Los Angeles in First Class costs 66,000 SkyMiles on December 3, 9, and 10. But on December 9, only one seat is available for 66,000 SkyMiles — try to book two, and the price jumps to 85,000 SkyMiles each. More realistically for a travel hacker, that means 66,000 SkyMiles for the first and 85,000 SkyMiles for the second, still a difference of 19,000 SkyMiles.

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Second, lots of people travel in groups of more than two passengers. If scalable, for groups of 3 or more the savings start to look astronomical. A family of four might save 57,000 SkyMiles flying in First Class to Hawaii; almost the cost of the first ticket!

I think this is a pretty neat trick, but to bring down the temperature let me state the obvious caveats.

First, to simultaneously book awards you need multiple accounts with sufficient miles in each. For a lot of people in “two-player” mode that’s not a big deal, but if you’re trying to book your kids or parents who don’t play the game, you will quickly struggle to find enough miles in enough separate accounts. If you have friends or colleagues in the travel hacking community that’s a good option, although it will likely involve at least some Zooming and screen-sharing to make sure all the booking details are right for each passenger, plus getting the timing exactly right.

Second, I don’t know how scalable this is: maybe it works for two passengers but not three, maybe for three but not four. Presumably at some point when the cabin is actually full Delta will reject issuing the ticket, so it’s essential to select your seats (different seats!) during the checkout process to make sure there’s room in the cabin for everyone.

Finally, I have no idea if this works on partner or international awards. I was booking nonstop, Delta-operated domestic flights. Would connections break it? Would partner award availability break it? I simply don’t know.

Conclusion

Like everything in the travel hacking game, your mileage will vary. If anything comes from this post, let it be the recommendation to search for individual seats before you search for seats for your whole family, since whether or not this trick works for you, securing one or two low-level seats before paying more for more expensive seats is an easy way of saving miles anyone can enjoy.

While this trick almost won’t certainly work for everyone, on every flight, in every class of service, I wanted to pass it along because it worked for me.

More point transfer hijinx and England trip finally booked

Last month I wrote about my experience combining Chase Ultimate Rewards points between my partner’s non-flexible Freedom account and my own flexible Ink Plus account. In order to finish booking our award tickets to the UK, I needed to shuffle around a few more points and want to share that experience as well since I wasn’t able to find any accurate or recent information online.

Failure #1: transferring Ink Ultimate Rewards point to another person’s travel program

Low-level award availability was wide open on United non-stops to London, so my plan was to book one-way awards on United for a total of 60,000 MileagePlus miles. The catch is, I had 30,000 miles in my account and my partner had 25,000. I could have transferred 30,000 Ultimate Rewards points into my account, but this would have painful in two ways:

• First, I loathe United, and it would have been painful to convert valuable Ultimate Rewards points into worthless United miles when the same points could be redeemed for multiple nights at Hyatt properties.

• Second, and even more importantly, this would have created a new problem — my partner would still have 25,000 stranded United miles! That would have kept me on the United treadmill even longer, since even if we wanted to book a 25,000-mile domestic round trip on United (we don’t), I’ve have to transfer another 25,000 Ultimate Rewards points to my account.

My plan, then, was to transfer just 5,000 Ultimate Rewards points directly into my partner’s account. This, gentle reader, proved to be impossible. While my partner’s name appeared in the United dropdown box, the site simply errored out when I attempted to submit the 5,000-point transfer. Since we had to call to set up the “link” between our Ultimate Rewards accounts, I assumed something similar was happening and called the number on my Ink card.

After connecting to the Ultimate Rewards center, I explained the problem and the agent at first seemed eager to help, although she didn’t know how. After putting me on several “brief holds” to talk to her coworkers and consult her manual, she finally came back and said it was impossible to transfer points to my partner’s account because she’s not an “owner” of the company, just an “employee.” I pressed her on this but she insisted (“helpfully” suggesting that I can just transfer the points to my own United account and book both tickets from there).

So it was back to the drawing board for me.

Success #1: transferring Marriott points between members

Thinking through my options, I remembered that Marriott Bonvoy points can be transferred to airline partners (as can most hotel points, although at uniformly terrible rates. Thanks to Marriott’s loose alliance with United, there’s even a 10% bonus when transferring points to MileagePlus, so the 5,000 points we needed would only cost 14,000 Bonvoy points. Logging into my Marriott account, I was relieved to see that I somehow had earned 20,000 points over the years. Since I hate Marriott just as much as United, and had no plans to ever redeem Bonvoy points for a hotel stay, draining my account swapping one out for the other was a win-win opportunity.

However, the Marriott transfer page provides the ominous warning: “For most airline partners, your Member name on the frequent flyer program account must match your Marriott Bonvoy first and last name.” I wasn’t able to find any information online about whether this restriction is enforced, or for which airline partners, but since time was of the essence I couldn’t afford to have the points locked up in transfer purgatory.

Fortunately, Marriott also allows you to transfer Bonvoy points between members. There are a few restrictions on the number of points you can transfer out and receive per year that weren’t relevant, but there’s one restriction that had me worrying: “Both Accounts must be in good-standing and have each been open for at least thirty (30) days with Qualifying Activity, ninety (90) days without Qualifying Activity.”

The problem is, I had no idea whether my partner had a Marriott account! If not, there was no way we could trigger her eligibility in time to book our tickets. A few minutes of frantic searching through e-mails later, we discovered she did have an e-mail welcoming her to Marriott — but plugging the information into Bonvoy to retrieve her username and password had no effect. It turned out she had a Bonvoy account but had never set up online access to it! I assume this means she enrolled in-person at a conference hotel or something years ago and ignored the follow-up e-mail to set up her account.

This obviously raised the question: does the Bonvoy account need to be open for 90 days, or does online access to the account need to be set up for 90 days?

The answer is, it turned out to be fine. After configuring her online account, I called Marriott’s US number (800-627-7468) and requested the transfer. One interesting issue did come up: when the agent looked up my account, it wasn’t registered to my name. After confirming my identity in other ways, she asked for the details of the receiving account, and when I gave my partner’s name, the agent replied, “that’s the name I was seeing on your account.” I assume this is some kind of duplication check on their system’s backend; since we share an address, their algorithm might have linked our accounts automatically. Artificial intelligence, it ain’t!

While the point transfer wasn’t “immediate” (we tried logging out and back in, clearing cookies, using a different browser, etc.) the points had already arrived in my partner’s account the next morning, so I’d generously give yourself 24 hours before you start worrying your points are missing.

Success #2: Transferring Marriott points to United

This part was thankfully easy, since it can be completed entirely online. However, while I saw some old posts suggesting transfers were immediate, or at least fast, that was not our experience. The transfer was submitted on March 24, and while we didn’t check every day (I hate pestering my partner about this stuff) it didn’t finally post until a week or so later. The delay may be a “first-time” transfer issue to verify the name on your transfer partner matches the name on your Bonvoy account, or it may be a recurring “batch” process so your own delay time may depend on when you submit your request.

In any case, this isn’t very long in the grand scheme of things if you’re regularly emptying your Marriott balance into a partner airline program after every stay, but it’s something to be aware of if you need miles for a time-sensitive booking.

Failure #2/Success #3: booking tickets to England

Naturally, by the time the transfer to United did go through, my award availability was gone. Well, not quite gone: the price had ticked up by 2,000 miles, to 32,000. If I were flying alone I wouldn’t have minded the extra 2,000 miles, but there was no way I was going through that rigamarole again. It turned out Virgin Atlantic also had great partner award availability for 35,000 Delta SkyMiles, and we each had enough miles in our respective accounts, so we simply locked that in instead.

This is not ideal since SkyMiles are worth more to me than Mileage Plus miles (as they can be redeemed on Delta as well as partner airlines), and today I noticed United awards have ticked back down to 30,000 miles, so I may end up cancelling the SkyMiles tickets and rebooking on United after all.

Maybe next time my partner’s in a good mood.