IHG Rewards club points use to never expire. But that has changed and now the points expire with 12 months of no activity. There are many usual ways to avoid the points expiration and few of them are listed below:

• Staying at any of the IHG brand hotels with direct booking done through IHG.
• Registering and dining with IHG Dining network.
• Renting car and crediting the partner points to IHG for the rental.
• Earning points through surveys from e-Rewards.
• Purchase IHG points.

The other two interesting ways to extend the life of your IHG points is to:

• Register for quarterly promotions for IHG such as the Q2-2017 accelerate promo and hope one of the task is to download IHG app and login to earn 500 bonus IHG points. This should show up as something like below.

• If you have atleast 5000 IHG points you can book one of the IHG PointBreaks participating hotel and cancel it after couple of days. This should reset your IHG Points expiration clock and thus extend your IHG points for 12 more months.

So if you are close to points expiration and do not have any upcoming stays but have at-least 5000 points in your account you can easily extend the life of your IHG points.

Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website.

American Express (AMEX) has a nice perk of Amex Offers which at time can be lucrative in earning miles/points or cashback. If you have cards which earns membership reward (MR) points then AMEX at times is targeting with Amex Offers that earns Membership reward points instead of Cash back rebate.
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For e.g. below is the offer where you earn 2000 MR points for $100 spent at Best Western Hotels.

As you can see from the above offer you would earn 2000 MR points instead of the usual offer which would be to earn $20 in rebate for the stay. Since Membership Rewards points can be transferred to myriad of travel partner airlines or use for redemption for airline revenue tickets (if you have  American Express Platinum Business card), the offer to earn Membership reward points would get you a better redemption value than earning the cash back outright. 

The only downside is that you need to be targeted for MR points offer as the usual Twitter hashtags for adding offers are always cashback offers. On the other hand if your Membership rewards earning credit card is targeted for an amex offer which earns MR points then all the other cards which do not earn MR points will not have the same offer at all. For e.g. none of your non-MR earning card will have the Best Western offer above.

So, look out for those targeted MR earning offer and hope you can maximize them depending on which offers you get.

Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website.

You can get free $10 in amazon credit if you have any Eligible Citi credit card by making it default payment for Amazon one click settings. Here is the link to the offer. This promo has been around for a while but if you have not taken advantage of it then you can register your Citi Credit Card on amazon.com for this promotion. The promotion is valid till Aug 15, 2017. If for some reason the offer page says that you are not eligible for the promotion you can remove all the Citi Credit card from your Amazon.com profile and try registering through the link after 24-48 hours of removing the Citi Credit card.

Below are terms from the offer page for your convenience:
TERMS AND CONDITIONS

• This promotional offer applies to the purchase of eligible items made with an eligible Citi credit card. The $10 credit may be redeemed on the purchase of physical products sold and shipped by Amazon.com and excludes gift cards, Kindle eBooks, instant videos, MP3s, and all other digital content and downloads.
  
  
• Offer available only to customers who were served an advertisement promoting the offer. To claim the offer, customer must first click through the ad and then complete the additional actions described. Eligible cards are only consumer branded Citi credit cards, except Costco Citi credit cards.
  
  
• An Amazon.com account with a valid Citi credit card is required to claim and redeem this credit. If, for any reason, your Citi credit card is inactive, denied, or ineligible, you will not be eligible to claim or redeem this credit. You are responsible for the final purchase price after the credit is applied, plus applicable taxes and shipping charges.
  
  
• This promotional offer is valid for a limited time only. Offer limited to one per customer and account. Amazon reserves the right to modify or cancel the offer at any time. If you violate any of these terms, the offer will be invalid, and the credit will not apply. This offer may not be resold, is nontransferable, not redeemable for cash, and is void where prohibited by law and in case of fraud. This offer may not be combined with other offers.
  
  
• Credit must be redeemed by 11:59 p.m. PT on August 15, 2017. Unredeemed credit will expire after that time. If any of the products purchased with the credit are returned, your refund will equal the amount you paid for the product, subject to applicable refund policies. Credit redeemed on a Kindle or Fire device will be applied to the Amazon.com account registered to the device.
  
  
• American Airlines, AAdvantage and the Flight Symbol logo are marks of American Airlines, Inc.

Hat-tip: [Doctor Of Credit]

Etihad miles have great value proposition for redeeming them on inspirational awards such as A380 First Apartments. Also there are great business class redemptions you can get on Czech Airlines and Brussels Airlines along with some Indian subcontinent domestic redemptions on Jet Airways. We talked about general details of the program a while ago which can be found here. Despite these great redemptions being there Etihad miles for lowest tier level member expires 2 years from the date they are earned regardless of any activity on the account. But the good part is you can still get reasonable value out of expiring miles if there are no travel trips where you can use those miles.

Most of the airlines have reward shop where you can redeem your miles for variety of merchandise. Etihad Airways also have similar reward shop which can be accessed here. But rather then spending miles on any over priced merchandise you can redeem your miles for two items at a redemption rate from 0.6 cent/miles to 0.66 cent/mile. Below are the two options: 

Amazon gift cards:
There are several denominations of gift card available starting from $5. Below are the links to few of those options:

• Amazon $5 gift card: You can redeem this gift card for just 900 Etihad miles.
• Amazon $50 gift card: You can redeem this gift card for 8200 Etihad miles.
• Amazon $100 gift card: You can redeem this gift card for 16500 Etihad miles.

Etihad Reward Card:
Etihad reward card comes in two flavors. Physical visa card and Electronic or virtual visa card. The Physical card has a one time cost of 2955 miles (so not worth it in my opinion) whereas the Electronic or virtual visa card has no upfront cost. There is 0.99 cent load fee which is included in the mileage redemption cost. These reward card's have validity of 72 hours and any unused funds are converted back to Etihad miles. These cards are like any other visa e-gift card and can be used at any online merchants (I have personally used it at Amazon.com and to pay Energy bills).

You can load these cards online at a redemption rate of ~0.66 cents/miles depending on how many miles you convert. The good news is you can load the reward card with $5 for just 880 Etihad miles. You need to provide the physical address and phone number the very first time you subscribe for the reward card and the verification can take 3 to 5 business days for processing. But once this processing is done the loading going forward is instantaneous. You can see below a snapshot of the interface where you can choose the amount to load.

As you can see this is not one of the best of redemption rates, but if you have those expiring miles; getting them to use at any online merchant of choice at ~0.66 cent/mile value is a great redemption option. Here is the direct link to the reward card page.

Hopefully this will help avoid those left over or expiring miles from going to waste!

Disclaimer: Some of the links used in the post may be referral links and earn referral to this site. We appreciate you supporting the website

There is the new app in the town called Drop which is currently in beta and where you would earn extra points for doing what you do regularly which is shopping at your favorite store. For most of us these are places that allows us to earn lot of miles and points.
To begin with you can select up to five brands/stores where you would like to earn extra points and link the credit/debit card which you want to track for earning points on to Drop app.  Apart from these there are on-going one time targeted offers from Drop where you can earn extra at either your selected earning store or any other store with certain amount fixed or variable points based on spend and have an expiration date. 

You can earn any where from 1% to 3% of your spend based on the store you are going to make your purchase from. The way Drop works is it earns you anywhere from 10 points/$ to 30 points/$ based on the store selected and every 1,000 Drop points are valued at $1 which can be redeemed for variety of gift cards. The gift card redemption starts from 5,000 points onward. 

Below are the few of the many available merchants where you can earn rebate at the time of this writing. The earning rate may change any time though:

• Amazon - Earn 20 points/$ (2%)
• Safeway - Earn 11 points/$ (1%)
• Walmart - Earn 10 points/$ (1%)
• Target - Earn 10 points/$ (1%)
• Uber - Earn 15 points/$ (1.5%)
• Whole Foods - Earn 10 points/$ (1%)
• Best Buy - Earn 10 points/$ (1%)
• 7-Eleven - Earn 10 points/$ (1%)

Apart from above the targeted offers could be for fixed amount of points. For e.g. below are couple of the recent targeted offers going around: