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.

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.

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.

Monitoring prices and rebooking can be one of the highest-return plays

/

For experienced travel hackers, the game can sometimes feel a bit mechanical: you earn the most valuable points you can at the lowest cost you can, and periodically re-evaluate which points are the most valuable, and how to earn them at the lowest cost. This doesn’t necessarily make it easy (electrical engineering is also “mechanical” — but it’s still hard!), since earning and redemption opportunities are constantly changing, but when you have a framework in mind it makes it relatively simple to calculate which miles and points are worth earning and when.

But travel hacking isn’t just about earning miles and points efficiently; it’s about paying as little as possible for the trips you want to take. When business class awards are available, or hotel rooms during peak demand periods like the Kentucky Derby are bookable with points, that can often mean saving hundreds or thousands of dollars booking awards. But the cheapest way to book a room, flight, or rental car may well be with cash, and monitoring those prices can save you with a few clicks hundreds of dollars that would take hours of manufactured spend to earn.

The bad old days: Southwest, hotels, and car rentals

These are the three buckets I put the best-behaved companies from the pre-pandemic days into.

  • Southwest Airlines would allow you to change or refund Rapid Rewards points into your account up until your flight’s departure, so monitoring the price of your flights from the time you book up until your flight time would allow you to shave down the price a few hundred or thousand points at a time. Paid flights were slightly more restrictive, since any price difference would be deposited in an eventually-expiring travel bank account that could only be used by the original ticketed passenger, which created some urgency to plug more money into the Southwest Airlines ecosystem.

  • Hotels have long had flexible rates which require no upfront payment and cancellation policies between 1 and 5 days before arrival. This creates an obvious incentive to immediately book every hotel you’re even considering staying at. If prices fall, rebook at the lower price, and if prices rise, cancel the more expensive reservations and keep the cheapest. If you have high-level status in multiple hotel loyalty programs, this also allows you to monitor for upgrades as you approach your travel date: at the same price point, you might prefer a Globalist suite upgrade at the Park Hyatt Vienna over a standard room at the Hilton Vienna Park, but access to the Hilton executive lounge over a standard room at the Park Hyatt. Booking both in advance lets you pick the one you end up wanting more. And no, I’m not comparing the two hotels in terms of price or quality, but if a family of 4 is deciding whether to book one room at the Park Hyatt (hoping for a suite upgrade that accommodates them all) or two rooms at the Hilton, the prices can sometimes end up fairly close.

  • Rental cars are even better, since they don’t even require billing information to book most rates, and Autoslash exists to both find the cheapest rates and monitor existing reservations to alert you when rates fall and you should rebook. Purely as a courtesy to the overworked rental car company staff I usually cancel my prior reservations when I rebook, but it’s not strictly necessary.

Other than those obvious examples, before the pandemic opportunities to rebook and save money were fairly limited. Mid-level airline elite status usually allowed you to redeposit awards tickets for a full refund, so if flights were expensive enough to meet whatever your threshold is to book using airline miles (and everyone’s threshold is different!), but subsequently dropped below that threshold, you could cancel your award tickets and rebook using cash.

Likewise, schedule changes that move your departure or arrival by more than an hour could be refunded to the original form of payment, so if you booked your flights far enough in advance you had a good chance of having an opportunity to request a penalty-free refund, as I did in May, 2020.

The opportunity set has greatly expanded

All of the tools I described above still exist, but the new “permanent” (where I have I heard that before?) policies adopted by US airlines have increased the number of opportunities to save money by booking early and continuing to monitor prices afterwards. However, while they sound similar and were announced around the same time frame, to take advantage of them you need to understand the key differences between airline policies.

  1. Which fares are eligible? United, American, and Delta exempt Basic Economy fares from their no-change-fee policy, as Alaska does with its Saver fares and JetBlue with its Blue Basic fares. If you’re trying to play fares against each other, be sure not to book a fare that’s non-changeable and non-refundable! Note that these non-changeable fares are still eligible for refund under Department of Transportation rules if there’s a significant schedule change.

  2. What happens when you cancel? For paid fares, unless you’re eligible for a refund due to a schedule change, or booked into a refundable fare class, you’ll usually be given a “flight credit” (United), “travel credit” (American, JetBlue), “eCredit” (Delta) or “Wallet” (Alaska). These funds expire, so it’s important to keep a close eye on them.

  3. Who can use the ticket value? I believe (but correct me in the comments if I’m wrong) Alaska is the only airline that allows you to deposit “Wallet” funds into your own Wallet or, by requesting a voucher be e-mailed to you, any other Mileage Plan account. This is notably a way to share Companion Fares without sharing the cardholder’s credit card information, since Companion Fares can be paid for in full using Wallet funds, even if the person booking the ticket is not an Alaska Airlines credit cardholder (if Wallet funds don’t cover the full cost, any residual must be paid for with an Alaska Airlines credit card).

  4. What are your expected flight needs? This is a highly individualized calculation. For example, my partner and I fly to the Pacific Northwest on Alaska and the Midwest on American and Delta at least once or twice per year, so any travel credit, eCredit, or Wallet funds I receive by cancelling a flight on those airlines is absolutely certain to be used. Conversely, it appears I have not flown on United since October, 2017 (although I may be breaking that streak this summer!), so I would never book a paid United flight as a “backup” since there’s virtually no chance I would ever use the flight credit.

Conclusion: use flexibility to your advantage, but don’t get too clever

Especially with respect to hotels and rental cars, making multiple reservations as far in advance as possible and then monitoring prices for opportunities to rebook has always made sense. But the added flexibility of pandemic airline policies makes this is a meaningful way to save money on all the main components of travel planning.

Still, as the voice of caution, I have to remind my beloved readers not to bite off more than they can chew. While rental cars don’t typically charge no-show fees, airlines and hotels absolutely do, so if you don’t trust yourself to keep a close eye on all your reservations as your travel date approaches, don’t bother, since a single no-show penalty is going to wipe out any savings you may have been counting on in advance.

Advantages to getting more involved in the travel hacking community

/

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

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

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

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

Swapping referrals and signup bonuses

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

Expiring or useless free nights

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

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

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

Companion tickets

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

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

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

Transferable points and status

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

More Delta Platinum and refund hijinx

/

Right now all travelers, but especially travel hackers, are juggling even more decisions than usual. In the before time, we might make speculative bookings far in the future as soon as award space opened up for trips we weren’t sure we’d be able to take. Now even a last-minute trip is “speculative,” depending on constantly changing infection numbers and quarantine restrictions, not to mention our own health conditions.

Back in May I wrote a couple posts about cancelling airline tickets for a refund instead of store credit and my plan to use Delta’s COVID-19 flight change policy to lock in a low-cost companion ticket that I hoped could then be used on other, more expensive dates.

As a reminder, the key to that second trick was that travel to any destination, booked before May 31 for travel before September 30, 2020, could be changed to any dates before September 30 with no difference in fare charged. The policy’s intention was obvious: they wanted people to be comfortable booking flights with the knowledge that if they need to postpone their trip they won’t be on the hook for more money. But taken literally, it also meant you could search the schedule for the cheapest available travel dates, then change your flights to any desired dates before September 30, as long as the destination remained the same.

Of course, back in May there was still hope the country would pull together and defeat the virus. Once it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, my focus shifted from getting a deal on a New Orleans trip to getting a refund.

Fortunately, as early as June my outbound 10:14 am flight was cancelled and I was rebooked on a 8:20 am flight, so I knew I was entitled to a refund. With the original reservation dates finally approaching, last week I pulled the trigger.

Don’t cancel your flight, apply for a refund

In the e-mail notifying me of the schedule change, Delta wrote:

“We also understand that your new itinerary may not be best suited for your travel needs and we have the following options to give you flexibility.

  • “If you prefer to change your trip from the itinerary listed below, please visit My Trips on delta.com or follow the step-by-step instructions here. If you need additional assistance, please contact us at 1-800-221-1212.

  • “If you would like to cancel your flight, the value of your ticket will become an eCredit, and you can find more details available here. You'll be able to use your original ticket number as the eCredit number when you are ready to redeem it by following the step-by-step directions here.”

As you can see, Delta doesn’t even mention the possibility of a refund, despite knowing perfectly well I’m entitled to one. My main concern was that if I canceled my reservation and received an eCredit, that might break the link in their system showing that I experienced a schedule change as well. So instead, I applied for a refund without canceling my reservation. Fortunately, Delta lets you apply for a refund online.

Redeposited companion ticket

My secondary worry about canceling my flight was that the terms and conditions of the companion ticket are crystal clear:

“Cancellations/Ticket Changes/Reissuance: If the primary ticket or the Companion ticket is cancelled, both tickets will be cancelled and the Companion ticket will not be reissued. Subject to the fare rules of the primary ticket, the value of the primary ticket, less a $200 administrative service charge and any fare difference, may be applied to future travel. Cancellations are subject to the rules of the fare purchased. Neither a new Companion Certificate nor Companion ticket will be issued upon a cancellation.“

If I canceled my ticket, I thought there was a good chance I’d be both stuck with store credit and out a perfectly good companion ticket, the worst of both worlds.

Thankfully, a few days after my refund was processed, I logged into Delta and saw my previously “closed” companion certificate had been restored with a reassuring checkbox next to it, ready for use. I recalled that when I submitted my refund request, the confirmation page mentioned in passing that companion tickets would not be reissued “unless they are subject to our COVID-19 cancellation policies.” But of course I didn’t request a refund under their COVID-19 cancellation policy, I requested a refund under longstanding Department of Transportation guidance on flight cancellations!

A classic case of good execution but poor communication.

Conclusion

Obviously we play a lot of games with loyalty programs, so I try to stay philosophical about the games travel providers play with us. Turnabout is fair play and so on, after all. If they think they can get a few bucks more from customers by charging for seat assignments or priority boarding, I’m inclined to say more power to them.

Refunds on the other hand are a real opportunity to put companies’ values (if any) on display, since it’s a situation where they’re the ones in a position of power: they already have your money, you want it back, and there’s no particular reason to believe you’ll spend it with them in the future once you have it back. No one expects a company to be exactly eager to issue refunds, but especially under conditions when customers are clearly entitled to them, I have a lot more respect for companies that issue them gracefully rather than belligerently.

Although Delta could have been more proactive about alerting me to my right to a refund, their simple online form and reissuance of a companion ticket they weren’t strictly speaking required to offer left a much better taste in my mouth than the lecture I got from my Alaska Airlines representative.

Once (if) we get out from under COVID-19, I’ll be interested to see whether Delta continues to reissue companion certificates on refunded tickets. It’s a small gesture, but given the importance of their relationship with American Express, I think it would behoove them to adopt a single policy on companion ticket cancellations — and follow it.

My COVID-19 Delta companion ticket experiment (and one weird datapoint)

/

Most people aren’t in a position to plan travel these days, but like me, you might be in a position where you need to book travel. In my case, that meant making a companion ticket reservation using a card I plan to cancel.

News to me: Delta companion tickets are linked to your co-branded credit card, not your Skymiles account

I only have one Delta Platinum Business credit card, so I only get one companion ticket a year, which means it takes some time to collect datapoints (and they’re stale by the time the next one comes around). For that reason, I was not aware of a curious development: Delta companion tickets are now automatically charged to your co-branded Delta credit card.

This may not seem like a big deal at first glance, since if you have a Delta co-branded credit card in the first place you’re probably fine earning bonus Skymiles on your purchase, and you might even be working your way towards a $25,000 or $30,000 high spend threshold anyway. Otherwise, why have the card?

It is, however, a change: in the past, Delta companion tickets could be booked with any American Express card, even cards that weren’t issued by American Express, like the Fidelity 2% cash back card, which used the American Express payment network before eventually moving over to Visa.

I wasn’t trying to be that clever, however. I simply wanted to pay with my American Express Hilton Honors Surpass card, since I plan to cancel my Delta card in the next few days. The payment was accepted, and my e-mailed receipt shows the last four digits of my Hilton card.

But the charge was put on my Delta card anyway, even though my Delta card isn’t even saved to my Delta wallet! I hope you’re as astonished as I am: not only did they charge a card I didn’t authorize them to charge, they charged a card that wasn’t saved to my account.

In my case this didn’t end up mattering, but do keep it in mind if you are planning to put a Delta companion ticket on a different American Express card, for example to meet a minimum spending requirement, high spend bonus, or to trigger an Amex Offer.

Book Delta speculatively by May 31 for travel before September 30

There are two slightly different rules on the Delta website that I’m hoping to take advantage of which led me to make this reservation the way I did:

  • “Tickets originally purchased between March 1 and May 31, 2020, can be changed without a change fee for up to a year from the date you purchased it.”

  • “for travel within the United States originally scheduled to depart March through September 30, 2020, all change fees are waived; You can rebook your trip to the same destination for travel departing before September 30, 2020, with no difference in fare applied."

Since, if epidemiologically possible, we’re hoping to take a trip to New Orleans in the fall, the way I read this is that I could book the cheapest possible flight to New Orleans departing anytime before September 30 and be able to change it to any date before September 30, at any price, while paying no change fees and no difference in fare.

By booking before May 31, I also have the backup option of using the price of the ticket towards any other Delta ticket up to a year after the date of purchase.

So, it is worth it?

In my case, I had the icing of being able to redeem a companion ticket that would otherwise be lost when I close my Delta card, but it’s worth considering who else might want to take advantage of this opportunity.

The clearest case is if you have a trip you know you need take on Delta before September 30, since according to my reading of these rules you can book the cheapest dates on the calendar, then simply change your flights to the correct dates without paying any fees or difference in fare. Delta appears to be saying all flights between two given airports, departing before September 30, are now priced at the lowest fare available anytime before September 30 between those same airports. Nice of them!

Another option is using the pre-May 31 change fee waiver as a kind of travel bank to liquidate fixed-value points on cards you plan to cancel, or to trigger airline fee credits. For example, the American Express Platinum cards offer a 35% rebate when you redeem Membership Rewards points for certain premium cabin tickets. Booking an expensive first class Delta flight, receiving the rebated points, and then using the value towards flights you actually plan to take might be one way to lock in that increased value.

I don’t carry any cards that offer annual airline fee credits so it’s not a sub-field I follow particularly closely, but if you can find some sub-$50 Delta fares, they might automatically trigger credits on cards like the American Express Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve.

Conclusion

Let me close with a word of (gentle) warning. The actual financial mechanism here is that you, the passenger, are making an unsecured loan to Delta, a troubled airline. That doesn’t mean you don’t have rights: you have a lot of rights! But if the pandemic lasts longer than expected, or Delta manages the aftermath worse than expected, then your rights are going to have to get in line along with everyone else’s rights: employees, bondholders, shareholders, airports, suppliers, etc.

I don’t mean to come across as pessimistic. I think Delta is an unusually well-managed airline! I just mean to say that, as in all these games we play, this is not a case of “pulling one over” on Delta, it’s a case of making a calculated bet, and your calculation may well end up being different than mine.

Two great, one good, and one marginal grocery store earning boost

/

By now you may have heard that starting May 1, 2020, Chase and American Express have enhanced the rate that several of their cards earn miles and points at grocery stores. I was notified by American Express by e-mail on May 1 (subject line “FQF, your Amex Card Member benefits just got better”), but I still haven’t actually received any official communication from Chase.

Here are the four most attractive offers I see, from the no-brainers to the tough call.

12 Hilton Honors points with Surpass and Aspire, plus a lifetime status angle

The American Express Surpass card usually earns 6 Hilton Honors points per dollar spent at grocery stores, and the Aspire card just an unbonused 3 points. Through July, both cards will earn 12 Honors points per dollar spent, with no maximum.

Hilton Honors points are worth about half a cent each, and normally cost about half a cent each when manufactured at grocery stores (since the same spend could be put on a card that earns 3% rewards). During this period, the card earns the equivalent of 6% cash back, which is essentially unheard of for an offer with no limit on the bonused amount.

Additionally, if your travel hacking strategy includes hitting the $15,000 spend threshold for a free weekend night with the Surpass card, or the $60,000 threshold for a second free weekend night with the Aspire, you obviously want to earn as many points as possible along the way, and the next 3 months are going to be a great opportunity to do so. American Express is also extending the expiration date of all certificates earned after May 1 and allowing them to be redeemed any night of the week.

Finally, I want to mention — without putting too much emphasis on it — that there’s a lifetime status angle here as well: all points earned with the Surpass and Aspire cards through December 31, 2020, will be treated as “base points.” Base points are a legacy feature of the Hilton Honors program from when it was a hotel loyalty scheme instead of a credit card loyalty scheme, and are (normally) earned only on your room rate and room charges. If you receive Diamond status by holding the Aspire card or by spending $40,000 on the Surpass, then you have probably never had any reason to think about base points.

The reason you might care about base points now is that Hilton has a “lifetime” elite status program: if you earn 2,000,000 base points, and maintain Diamond status for a total of 10 years (they don’t have to be consecutive), you are awarded “lifetime” Diamond elite status. For those with access to especially plentiful and socially-distanced grocery store spend, this is an opportunity to earn a phenomenal number of base points towards that 2-million-point goal.

If, like me, you believe every deal dies eventually, then you can treat lifetime Diamond status as a kind of long-term insurance policy: American Express can fire you as a customer, grocery stores can refuse to serve you, but Hilton will be stuck honoring your status for years to come.

If you do decide to pursue this angle, contact Hilton and ask them what your current lifetime base point total is and the number of years of Diamond status they’ve credited you with. I don’t know of any way to look up this information online (leave a comment if you do!).

3 and 5 Ultimate Rewards points with Chase Sapphire Preferred and Reserve

Over time every travel hacker should be diligently accumulating as many Chase Freedom cards as possible, which in the second quarter of 2020 are already earning 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent at grocery stores, on up to $1,500 per card in spend. I personally only have 2, but I know others have many more.

In May and June, 2020, Chase has increased the earning rate on their premium Sapphire Preferred and Reserve cards to 3 and 5 Ultimate Rewards points, respectively, on up to $1,500 per month in grocery store spend. That means after you’ve exhausted your quarterly Freedom bonus categories, you have another $3,000 in bonused grocery store spend to go.

Points earned with the Sapphire Reserve are worth a minimum of 1.5 cents each (when redeemed for paid travel), which makes the spend a no-brainer, but even if you only have the Sapphire Preferred I think the flexibility of Ultimate Rewards points, compared to the relative restrictiveness of Hilton points, suggests you should knock out your capped spend on these cards before going all-in on the Surpass or Aspire cards.

3 World of Hyatt points with Chase Hyatt cards

The two offers above are great, in the sense that my recommendation is: if you have the cards, take advantage of them. The Chase World of Hyatt earning boost is attractive, but doesn’t quite fall into that category: in May and June, 2020, you’ll earn 3 World of Hyatt points per dollar spent at grocery stores, on up to $1,500 per month in grocery store spend.

My perspective here is that if you plan to transfer 9,000 Ultimate Rewards points to Hyatt any time in the near future, these 9,000 World of Hyatt points should be valued the same as Ultimate Rewards points: every point you earn in World of Hyatt is a point you don’t have to transfer from Ultimate Rewards.

But whatever your plans and your level of confidence in those plans, you should almost certainly value World of Hyatt points “somewhat” less than Ultimate Rewards points, which is to say, maximize your Ultimate Rewards earnings first before turning to World of Hyatt.

4 Delta SkyMiles with American Express consumer credit cards

I no longer have an American Express Delta co-branded consumer credit card, having swapped my personal Delta Platinum card out for the business version several years ago (a card I’m planning to cancel, if the increased $250 annual fee ever hits). That means I’m not personally affected by American Express raising the earning rate on consumer cards to 4 Delta SkyMiles per dollar spent at grocery stores through July, 2020.

Let me get the obvious out of the way first: if you value and chase elite status with Delta through the Medallion Qualification Dollar waiver (spending $25,000 per calendar year) and Status Boost (bonus Medallion Qualification Miles when spending $25,000 or $30,000 on the Platinum and Reserve cards, respectively), then you should certainly try to earn as many redeemable miles as possible while doing so! A high, uncapped earning rate at grocery stores makes the next few months a great opportunity to sprint towards those goals.

Likewise, if Delta American Express consumer cards are the only cards you have featuring enhanced earning at grocery stores, they’re the only ones you can use: play the hand you’ve dealt yourself.

But as much as I enjoy the experience of flying on Delta, there’s no escaping the fact that SkyMiles are simply hard to use for high-value redemptions, and I hesitate to value them at more than 1 cent each (their value when used on “Pay with Miles” redemptions). The risk of unredeemed balances, or low-value redemptions, is much higher even than with a program like Hilton, where even break-even redemptions come with a 5th night free, for instance.

That’s what makes this earning boost a “marginal” play: a 4% earning rate in normal circumstances would be great, especially with the potential of accelerated elite status with a good airline. But given the other possibilities available, I would turn to Delta only after meeting Chase’s earning caps and satisfying my need for Hilton points.

Bonus tip: free manufactured spend at Safeway & Co.

I’d been noodling this post for a day or two when I saw Doctor of Credit share a new Safeway deal for $10 off $100 in MasterCard gift cards. The discount reduces the cost of each card below face value, making it a great opportunity to score some early wins this month.

The offer runs through May 16, 2020, but in my experience these offers must be added to your Safeway accounts during the week they launch (after which they remain linked until expiry).

So, get cracking!