IHG Rewards Club has their new promotion available starting May 1st 2019 for stays from May 1st 2019 to Aug 31st 2019. They are again naming this as Accelerate promotion and It is similar to their past promotion where they have targeted stay offers to various individual based on their past stay with IHG Rewards Club program. The terms of this promotion can be found here. 
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Do note that some of the folks (including myself) are getting error message when trying to register for this promotion. It could either be some glitch in the roll out of the promotion or IHG has come up with new way of targeting this promotion :(. I was able to register one other family member account which I manage and below are the bonus offers on that account. 

Since the offers are targeted they would be different for different folks (Some might have less stay requirement which others might have more and would get different total amount of points). Based on the past promotions if your stay satisfies more than one task requirements you would earn points for both of them based on the total requirement.

For e.g. from above staying 4 separate nights where 3 nights are with different brands and 2 of those nights being booked with "bonus points package" would satisfy all the requirements of the offers for the targeted bonus promotion and can earn 30,800 IHG Rewards Points!! Also these points are in addition to the base points and any other promotions points which you would have registered for.

The points can be used for one of the well known PointBreaks promotion where you can stay at participating hotels for either 5k, 10k or 15k IHG Rewards Points.  You can read more of the regular PointBreaks promotion here. So if you have upcoming plans to stay with IHG Hotels do make sure you register for this promotion. 

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AwardWallet is a great tool if you have rewards account with multiple airlines and hotel loyalty program. It allows you to track the mileage for different programs from single page and thus enable any changes to your account. It lists the account balances along with expiration dates for this rewards account. It also emails at set interval to notify of the account mileage expiration. AwardWallet has a free version as well as a paid version called "AwardWallet Plus" which has annual fees of $30. Below are the features which are available for both free and paid version of AwardWallet.

The best part of AwardWallet is that the most important features are available on the free version as well. One of the important feature is "Track rewards for your family members".  This feature allows to track mileage of multiple people from single login and thereby avoiding the hassle of maintaining separate logins for different members. This is very useful if only one member manages all the accounts and thereby can look up balances for the members added to the account.

​You can either access their AwardWallet account by either "connect with another person" or directly add their airline/hotel accounts to your AwardWallet by using "Add a new person" to your account. Since it's useful to only have one AwardWallet account it is better to "Add a new person" to AwardWallet. Below are the steps in pictures on how to add someone to your account without they having their separate AwardWallet account.

Once you add the person to your profile you can add the select program from "Account" tab, select the reward program and add the owner with their reward program login details. AwardWallet provides with an option to store the passwords either with AwardWallet or locally on your computer. You can thus repeat the process to all multiple people to your account and then easily update the balances along with any expiration from single page. 

So, if you are looking to simplify your Airlines/Hotels rewards program tracking then AwardWallet is your answer.

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TURO is a platform to provide peer to peer car rental service. It is a car rental platform similar to Airbnb for house rentals. The cars are listed by local folks through the platform and can be either brought to the local airport (sometimes for a fee) or picked up at a local address in the city.

Below is the gist of the process. You can look up here for more details:

• You look up the car's available on TURO based on your date, location and budget.
• Select if you want the the car to be delivered to you or if you can pick it up.
• The owner confirms your reservation within 8 hours.
• Pick up at designated duration of time.
• Return it back to the same location with gas being filled up.

Below is the snapshot of the search on TURO.

Since TURO is peer to peer car rental, it is recommended to purchase the insurance directly from TURO (Liberty Mutual is the underwriter) as damages will not be covered by the credit cards which usually provides CDW (Collision Damage Waiver) coverage. Alternatively if you rent from commercial hosts they would provide their own insurance and the additional payment for that would be directly assessed by the hosts. You can decline the insurance coverage but if you chose to take it there are 3 different kind of insurance coverage provided by TURO as shown below. The protection price calculation is shown in the article here.

The total rental cost presented by TURO consists of car rental charge along with various fees. The breakdown of the major total cost consists of below:

• Trip Price - Per day car rental charge.
• Trip fee - A variable component based on the host and car with maximum of 25% of the Trip price.
• Protection Fee - Depending on the protection plan chosen this fee can be as high as 60% of trip price . You can decline to take the protection if you wish.
• Delivery Fee - Variable amount charge by host if they provide delivery of the vehicle.

There might be other fees assessed such as young driver fee, cleaning fee or taxes/fees assessed by certain locations. All the fees details can be found here.

TURO is available in the United States, Canada, Germany and U.K. at this time. The car's available through TURO vary but you can get a pretty good deal at a lower price than what the Car Rental companies would charge otherwise. So, next time you are looking for Car Rental do remember to check out TURO.

Referral - At this time TURO does offer a referral program where you get $25 in credit for referring someone to TURO. Here is our referral link (Thanks if you decide to use it).

​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 has lot of cards with no annual fee. Couple of popular no annual fee cards are Amex Everyday card and Amex Blue Cash Card which earns Membership rewards points and cashback respectively. American Express also has annual fee option available for these same cards and they usually differ in the earning's in categories.
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​For e.g. the Blue Cash Card earns 3% cashback at U.S. Supermarkets whereas the Blue Cash Preferred would earn 6% cash back (On up to $6,000 in purchases per year). So, although the annual fee for the preferred version is $95 you do get 3% additional earning and so if you reach the max spend cap for the year, you would earn additional $180 which would easily cover the $95 fees.

Interestingly American Express is known to provide upgrade offers usually in 2nd year of card membership. Depending on the type of card (Cash back or Membership rewards) you would either earn certain amount of points (for e.g. 10,000) or cashback (for e.g. $100) when you upgrade and spend certain amount on the upgraded card with 3 months or so. The good part is that these offers would show up on your American Express account and these is no hard credit pull or inquiry. Also since this is an upgrade offer they usually do not come with "once a lifetime bonus restriction".  

For e.g. one of our account has an offer of earning $150 by upgrading to Blue Cash Preferred and spending $1,000 with new card within first 3 months after the upgrade. 

Similarly if you have other partner cards such as no fee Hilton Honors card or Marriott card it might be worth checking if there are any targeted upgrade offer available. So, login to your American Express accounts and check for your targeted offer. Do note that if you never had the "premium" version of the card before you might be excluded to get the bonus again in future if you decide to apply for that premium card directly. 

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Lot of Airlines where you accrue miles have different mileage expiration policies. American Airlines miles expire after 18 months if there is no accrual or redemption activity on the mileage account. There are many ways on extending the expiration of American Airlines miles and you can see most of the partners here. But most of activity requires you to make some purchase either through ​AA Shopping mall or perform donation to participating partner non-profit.  

You only need to earn 1 mile to extend the validity of your American Airlines miles by another 18 months and there is an easier way to do just that. You can register for AwardWallet service for tracking your miles (If you are not register, It is free to join with option of upgrade for a free. You can use my referral here) . After registering you can add your American Airlines account to your AwardWallet account (You can also add other users whose account you manage and whose American Airlines miles you wish to extend to this AwardWallet account).

Once registered if you visit any of the blog posts they publish and comment you will earn 5 American Airline miles for 1 or more comment on unique blog posts published by them (Once the comment is approved and once per day). You need to be logged in your AwardWallet account and just before you submit the comment you can select the American Airlines (AA) account you wish to credit 5 miles.  The miles usually gets deposited within 5 business days once the comment is approved. You can read more about this feature here.

So, next time if you have American Airlines (AA) miles expiring and you want to extend them quickly you have AwardWallet to your rescue!

​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.

Hilton Honors points expire after 12 months of inactivity (either earning or redeeming). To avoid the expiration you need to have activity on your account. There are many available ways to extend that expiration for another 12 months, but here we want to list the quick and easy ways to keep those points alive.

Shop with points with Amazon:
Hilton provides an ability to redeem your points at Amazon. You can redeem 500 points for $1 spent on Amazon (which is a poor value if your sole purpose to use it for spending on Amazon). The good news is you can use this way to extend the expiration of your points. The best way is to purchase a $1 Amazon e-gift card sent to yourself or anyone you want to. Although Hilton advertises that you need to use minimum of 500 points, at the time of this writing you can pay partially as well by redeeming just 5 points for $0.01 on that purchase. The remaining $0.99 can be paid with any of your credit card. Hilton provides more details on this partnership here.

Transfer points to your friends or family:
Hilton allows points transfer free of cost. You can transfer up-to 500,000 points in a year to a single person in a year. That's a good amount of transfer without any cost. You can transfer the points to a person who has any recent Hilton Honors account activity (In last 12 months) or has various Amex Hilton Cards. More details can be found here.
 
Transfer American Express Membership Reward Points:
If you have any Amex Membership Reward Points earning card then you can use that to transfer 1,000 Membership Reward Points to 2,000 Hilton Honors points. This will extend your Hilton Honors points for another 12 months. Also, American Express occasionally has transfer bonuses as well such as current targeted bonus of 10% to 50% for points transfer to Hilton, but in any case you will need to transfer minimum of 1,000 Membership Reward points. You can begin your transfer here.

So, above 3 are the quick ways to get your Hilton Honors points secured for another 12 months.

​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.

IHG published the PointBreaks list on Feb 25th, 2019 for hotel reservations valid till May 31st, 2019. As IHG have moved from 1 tier of PointBreaks bookable at 5k points to 3 tier of PointBreaks bookable for 5k, 10k and 15k points there are more opportunity of getting discounted award at more participating hotels albeit at lesser percentage discount.

The issue with the PointBreaks list is that the participating hotels make available limited number of nights in this promotion which can get filled up pretty quickly if those are tourist destinations. So what's the best bet to get on this discount? The answer is speculative reward booking if you have available points and know the approximate dates you might use those reward nights.  

For e.g. below is current list of worldwide hotels (excluding United States) as of this writing which can be booked for 10,000 IHG reward points.

ONTARIO, CANADA
Holiday Inn & Suites Oakville @ Bronte

SASKATCHEWAN, CANADA
Holiday Inn Express & Suites Regina Downtown
Holiday Inn Express & Suites Saskatoon Centre
Staybridge Suites Saskatoon - University

COAHUILA, MEXICO
Holiday Inn Express Torreon

GUANAJUATO, MEXICO
Holiday Inn & Suites Leon Plaza Mayor
Holiday Inn Express & Suites Silao Aeropuerto - Terminal

GUERRERO, MEXICO
Holiday Inn Chilpancingo

JALISCO, MEXICO
Staybridge Suites Guadalajara Expo

NUEVO LEÓN, MEXICO
Crowne Plaza Monterrey Aeropuerto

PUEBLA, MEXICO
InterContinental Presidente Puebla

QUERETARO, MEXICO
Crowne Plaza Queretaro

SAN LUIS POTOSI , MEXICO
Staybridge Suites San Luis Potosi

VERACRUZ, MEXICO
Crowne Plaza Tuxpan

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Crowne Plaza Santo Domingo

EL SALVADOR
InterContinental San Salvador-Metrocentro Mall

BELGIUM
Holiday Inn Express Gent

ITALY
Holiday Inn Express Rome - East

RUSSIA
Holiday Inn Express Moscow - Khovrino

TURKEY
Holiday Inn Bursa - City Centre
Holiday Inn Istanbul - Tuzla Bay

ALGERIA
Holiday Inn Algiers - Cheraga Tower

LEBANON
Crowne Plaza Beirut

INDIA
Crowne Plaza New Delhi Rohini

PHILIPPINES
Holiday Inn Baguio City Centre

As you can see there are quite a few hotels outside of United States as of this writing but the list dwindles down as more and more folks book these hotel reward nights.  So, if you have any dates where you can potentially stay at these hotels, book the reward nights NOW!!

Most of these hotels allow cancellation without penalty for reward night's if cancelled before 48 hours of intended stay date (do check the terms for the property as some of them might require earlier cancellation). If your plans change and you can no longer stay on those dates you can easily cancel your reservation without penalty but at the same time you can speculatively guarantee that those hotels are booked at PointBreaks reward rate. (Tip - If you do not know the exact dates, you can make separate 1 night reservation's so you can cancel the one's you don't need at the future date thus giving you some flexibility).

So, go ahead and book the discounted reward nights at participating IHG hotels while available and use it hopefully!

​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.

Wells Fargo does not get lot of attraction in miles and points world but they do have various cards with $0 annual fee which earn cash back and reward points (Although the reward points cannot be transferred to any airlines or hotels). 

As you can see from above the correct option is hidden, but it would correctly transfer the points from one user account to other user account rather than going as a cashback gift.

The interesting part is Wells Fargo has a new $0 annual fee Wells Fargo Propel American Express card which earn's 30k points after $3k spend in 3 months and which earn 3x points on Travel, Dining and Streaming services. Since Propel card is an American Express card, it also has option to enroll in Amex Offers here (usually these are the less popular one's though). You can essentially make this 30k points a $450 airfare redemption by moving the points to Wells Fargo Rewards Card account.
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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.

Wyndham Rewards Program allows you to redeem for free night at any of their hotels, homes and condo worldwide for just 15,000 points with their "Go Free Reward". This enables you to get a great redemption value when you redeem your free night at high end Wyndham Hotel or Resort, but what if you are looking for low to mid tier redemption? Wyndham does allow you to use 3,000 points + Cash for redemption using their "Go Fast Reward". The bad news is that not all hotels have "Go Fast Reward" available. You can also top up your account by purchasing up to maximum of 10,000 points per year at the rate of $13 per 1,000 points.

The bad news is that Wyndham Reward Points expire after 18 months unless you have any earning, redeeming or transfer activity. You can easily get pass this by either donating as low as 50 Wyndham Reward Points, or by earning points doing survey with their partner "Opinion Rewards Panel". Although you can get past this they have another layer of hard point expiration where the points expire 4 years after they are earn regardless of your activity with Wyndham Rewards.

So, what happens when your points are reaching the 4 year hard expiration limit? One of the option which use to exist earlier was to redeem Wyndham Reward points for magazines but that option is no longer available with Wyndham Rewards. The other option is to redeem for gift card, but the gift card redemption starts at 7,500 points for $25 in value (Except the Restaurant.com gift card which you can get for 2,200 points and a worst value to begin with).

Here is the good news though. Wyndham Hotels acquired La Quinta brand of hotels in 2018 and they allow 1:1 transfer of points between Wyndham Rewards and La Quinta Rewards. Although you can transfer in the increments of 1,000 points with a maximum of 24,000 points in single transaction, this transfer allows to move out the points which have 4 years hard expiration with Wyndham Rewards.

La Quinta Returns allows you to use these points for hotel redemption with reward night starting at just 6,000 points only or you can redeem them for magazine subscription starting at just 300 points. Alternatively one of the best option would be to transfer these points back to Wyndham Rewards and they should get new expiration date! Do note that Wyndham Rewards is known to be notorious for changing the terms overnight and might take away or devalue this option at any time. 

So, hopefully the above technique (while it lasts) will allow you to get past the 4 year hard expiration limit that Wyndham Rewards has on its 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.

While we all like to collect miles and points to get great redemption or travel at discounted rate, what should we consider the real value in terms of time and effort?

The traditional way of collecting miles/points is through airline travel and hotel stays but due to deluge of credit card's which earn miles or points (flexible currency) and have various partners where you can transfer your earned miles/points, it is important to understand the difference between the real and the perceived value. Let's get this straight with few popular credit card examples. 

Chase Sapphire Reserve card enables points to be redeemed for travel at fix value of 50% more when you redeem through their travel portal. So, each Ultimate Reward Point can be redeemed for real value of 1.5 cent/$ but "only" when redeeming for travel through their travel portal. The annual fee for this card is $450 although you get $300 in travel credits each year.

Amex Platinum for Schwab Card allows you to redeem your American Express Membership Reward Points for "cash" at real value of 1.25 cent/$. The annual fee for this card is $550 although you get $200 airline travel incidental (in your pre-selected choice of airline), Total of $180 in Uber credits (distributed over 12 months) and $100 in credits on Saks purchase ($50 each every 6 months).

U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve card is similar to Chase Sapphire Reserve where you get fix value of 50% more when redeemed for travel through their travel portal but it does have an option of redeeming for travel directly through airlines, hotel, car rental companies using their real time reward option and get a redemption value of 1.5 cent/$ for each point. The annual fee for this card is $400 although you get $325 in travel credits each year.

As you can see from above that although the fixed value of redemption for Chase Sapphire Reserve and U.S. Bank Altitude Reserve looks same the perceived value is different. At 1.25 cent/$ the Amex Platinum for Schwab might look weaker but do note this is hard "cash" redemption. So just looking at redemption value is not enough. All the above credit cards have different annual fees and provide different benefits. When you consider that into account the above real redemption rates becomes perceived value. This is because each person would have different valuation of those benefits based on the usage of the card and its benefits. 

So, always consider the total benefits of the card before you decide which of the card would be a long term keeper for you.

​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.