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!

My experience using Fluz as intended

Gift card arbitrage occupies an odd position between “pure” travel hacking and extreme couponing: it’s lucrative enough that most travel hackers do it at least occasionally, but close enough to extreme couponing that they have the dignity to be a little embarassed about it. Over the years a few businesses have sprung up to smooth that embarrassment.

Raise acts as an intermediary or marketplace for folks who want to buy and sell unneeded gift cards at a fraction of their face value. Because they’re buying and selling gift cards that have already been issued, and often have had part of their balance spent down, you can find cards in a wide range of values and at various discount rates there.

The United MileagePlus X app sells newly-issued gift cards in the exact denomination you need for a given purchase. Instead of offering discounts off face value, they pay you in United MileagePlus miles. Depending on how highly you value MileagePlus miles, their payout rates can be competitive with the rewards you’d earn on a credit card.

Note that whenever you pay with a gift card instead of a credit card, you’re naturally sacrificing the purchase protections offered by most credit cards. That may be fine when you’re ordering a pizza, but probably not when you’re buying expensive, durable goods.

How Fluz is supposed to work

All of this is by way of introduction to Fluz, a gift card merchant with what I would call a “hybrid” approach. Signing up for Fluz comes with a seemingly-unbeatable offer: 3 “vouchers” worth up to 35% of your first three gift card purchases. The person who refers you also receives a voucher after you complete your first purchase (my referral code is “FREEQUENT” if you feel like signing up after reading this post).

The first thing you need to know is that the service is “app-only:” there’s no way to use it from a desktop without using a smartphone emulator like BlueStacks. This will become relevant shortly.

The second thing you need to know is that unless you build your life around it, you’ll never get any value from Fluz. That’s because unlike Raise, which sells gift cards at an upfront discount to their face value, and MileagePlus X, which awards miles based on the value of the gift card you purchase, Fluz “vouchers” don’t discount the price of the gift cards you buy with them. Instead, you earn a “Rewards Balance” that you can redeem against the future purchase of a gift card, but only once you’ve reached $26 in earnings.

Confused yet? Wait — it gets worse. The 3 vouchers you get for signing up are also capped, at $3.50 in value each. So ordering 3 $10 Domino’s pizzas will only earn you $11.40 in rewards ($3.50 plus the “base” earning of 3% on each transaction), leaving you less than halfway to the $26 threshold for actually redeeming them.

Still with me? One final point. Earnings are also based on payment method. Paying with an ACH debit earns the highest rewards, a debit card somewhat less, and a credit card or PayPal least of all.

One thing I will say in Fluz’s favor is that their “voucher merchants” include most of the food delivery services I’ve heard of: Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, Caviar, and Seamless. I don’t use those services, but if you do, you could conceivably hit the earnings threshold relatively quickly and then redeem your rewards for additional free food deliveries.

My mixed experience using Fluz as intended

I’ve completed two transactions at “voucher merchants,” one entirely successfully and one completely disastrously.

My first purchase was for a $15 CVS gift card, while I was standing in line at CVS. This was how I, naively, believed the app was supposed to work: figure out how much your items cost, then buy a gift card in the closest possible denomination without going over. I paid for the gift card, generated the bar code, and then spent 10 minutes at the register trying to get the cashier to accept it, before ultimately failing. A bit flustered by this ordeal, it was only when I got home that I realized Fluz had attached an elaborate set of instructions to the gift card, including printing it out at home to ensure the barcode was scaled correctly for CVS’s scanners, and with the final addendum, “if none of these instructions work, ask to speak to a manager.” An app-only service that requires you to haul around a portable printer? Is this what Silicon Valley calls “disruptive?”

Thus began my first Fluz adventure: getting a refund. That process began with an e-mail I sent through the app saying I’d been unable to use the gift card. That led to this bizarre veiled threat from them:

“CVS not accepting it could be a cashier issue, which we find is what usually happens.

We can process a refund for you. I would discourage filing a chargeback as our process will involve locking your account until the chargeback has been processed with the bank.”

From my perspective this was absurd: why would I care if my account was locked with a company that couldn’t deliver a working product? A month later, I’ve now had my refund “approved” twice, although the fifteen bucks is still noticeably missing from my account.

My second transaction went much smoother, buying a $17.46 Domino’s gift card that I was able to immediately enter into the Domino’s order page to cover the exact amount of my order, earning $4.02 in rewards (which, again, I’ll never be able to redeem).

The lesson, such as it is, was simple: buy digital gift cards and use them online.

A new life awaits you in the Fluz colonies

At the end of the day Fluz is a fairly primitive data-mining gimmick dressed up in a multi-level marketing ballgown. But even I can admit it’s a handsome gown: gift card purchases are passed through Fluz while retaining the underlying merchant’s categorization, so while you may lose out on credit card protections, you’ll still usually earn bonus points when buying gift cards to restaurants, grocery stores, or gas stations with the relevant credit cards.

So what would it look like to really maximize the value of the Fluz app? First, you’d have to be absolutely insufferable in referring your friends and family. Obviously there are times we do this (you can find my personal referral links right here!), but for sane people there’s a natural limit on how many people you’re willing to pester to do what. In order to maximize the value of the data they harvest, Fluz is relatively strict about account creation and identifying details, so it’s not like a grocery store where you can spin up an unlimited number of rewards accounts by tinkering with your e-mail address.

Second, you’d need to get used to building your life around “voucher stores” in order to maximize the value of the vouchers you earn from your referrals. Dunkin’ instead of Starbucks for your coffee, CVS instead of Walgreens for your prescriptions, Burger King instead of McDonald’s for your fast food, etc. Depending on your geography you may find those restrictions somewhat onerous or not at all.

But finally, to get the most value using Fluz as intended, you’ve got to lean into the data harvesting business model and link a checking account in order to maximize your earnings. That means no credit card rewards, no credit card protections, and no chargebacks. For civilians who have one or zero checking accounts, this should be the highest bar, but in reality is probably the lowest. For travel hackers with dozens of checking accounts sitting around, it’s trivial to leave $50 in one of them in order to pay for the occasional meal at Applebee’s.

To be clear: I don’t think you should use Fluz as intended, but if you do, you’ve got to go all-in if you want to wring any value at all out of the system.