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There has been an American Airlines AAdvantage offer where you could earn 10k miles for making purchase at 4 partners which expires on 06/15/2017. There is no need to register and the details can be found here.
Below are the list of partners for this promotion:
The earning of miles is tiered as shown below:
The interesting part is you could easily earn 2000 to 5000 miles with minimal spend by doing below: Dine at AAdvantage dining participating restaurants for $25.00 in single transaction: Use your debit/credit card registered in AAdvantage Dining program for $25 dinning. There are many participating restaurants but assuming you do not have any plan of dining you can simply purchase a $25 gift card at one of your favorite participating restaurant or you can purchase $25 gift card for "Buca di Beppo" in-store which should trigger this activity. This gift card could be used for future dining or sold to gift card re-sellers for 70% of the face value. Spend $50 in single transaction at any AAdvantage e-shopping partners: Go through online AAdvantage shopping portal and make a purchase of $50 in single transaction. Ensure that the purchase you make at given merchant does qualify to earn miles. If you do not have any purchase planned you could simply purchase gift card at merchants where purchasing gift card earns AAdvantage miles or one of the easier option is to purchase $50+ gift card of various merchants at Raise.com through AAdvantage shopping portal. Purchase at 1800flowers.com for minimum amount possible using Code A49 and your AAdvantage membership number: This is little involved, but if you do this purchase it would be your 3rd partner purchase and you would earn 3k more AAdvantage miles under the AAdvantage partner promotion itself. You can search for minimum purchase amount item such as this for $14.99 and earn 20 miles/$ for this amount plus 3k bonus miles for AAdvantage promotion. As you can see there are easy ways of doing above 3 offers and earn 2k to 5k AAvantage miles even without doing the "Vinesse" offer. So, take advantage of these easy miles offer before it expires.
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 One of the often overlooked aspect of earning miles is through shopping. Various rebate/shopping portals offers miles, points or cashback when you click through their website. In addition to that there a various promotional offers usually from shopping portals affiliated with various airlines where in addition to advertised rate of earning miles for giving merchant you earn additional miles for spending specific total $ amount within given time frame. Since most of the merchants today participate with rebate/shopping portal sites, it is important to compare the miles, points or cashback you would receive going through a specific portal. The two good rate comparison meta-sites are Cashbackmonitor and Cashbackholic. When you search for a merchant; both of these websites list all the cashback portals and their rates for a given merchant (Do check the actual cashback, as in rare occasions the rates shown by meta-sites may be different then shown on the cashback portal). When selecting a particular portal it is important to know few things below:
 Cashbackmonitor rates for Ebags.com with top 2 portal earnings in each category As you can see from above that you can either earn 20% cashback from Topcashback or 24 points/$ from British Airways shopping portal. Assuming you assign a value of 1 cent/miles to British Airways miles and it is one of program where you actively collect miles you are essentially getting a value of 24% cashback at British Airways shopping portal. If you are not into British Airways miles (also known as BA Avios) then the second best offer is to go with 20% cashback.
You can also stack the shopping portal rebate when any other merchant discount codes (provided the rebate portal terms does not exclude it) as well as American Express Sync offers for the given merchant. So next time you shop make sure to go through these rebate portals to maximize your miles/points or cashback earnings.  As someone who would collect miles and points in various airlines and hotel reward programs it is inevitable that there are times when your miles/points are expiring and you want to extend it if possible. One of popular currency is Avianca Lifemiles. Lifemiles keeps having promotion every 3 months or so where you can buy miles cheaply for as low as 1.375 cents/mile when you buy 50k+ miles. But what if you have miles in your account but no travel plans and then the time comes when the miles are about to expire? The easiest way to extend the life of your expiring miles is to purchase miles at the cost of US $33 + tax per 1000 miles or to transfer small chunk of miles (Starting at 1000 miles) to friend or family account at a cost of US $15 + tax per 1000 miles. There is another option though where it does not have to cost you any money and that is by donating your miles. Most of the programs requires you to donate minimum of 1000 miles or more to participating charitable organization, but Lifemiles allows you to donate 1 mile and extend the life of your miles by ~24 months. You can go to the homepage here and go to "Donate Miles" as shown below or you can go to the Donate Miles link here.  You can go to the "Donate Miles" option to donate your miles So next time you are close to expiration of your Lifemiles just donate 1 mile and extend the life for 24 more months without buying or transferring any miles. If you are interested in subtle tips and value on lifemiles check out this flyertalk thread.
Disclosure: Miles And Money could earn referral bonus for sign up through some of the links above. Some of the links may or may not be publicly available links.  If you stay in the USA and can sign up for credit cards then the one card you should have in your wallet is the American Express Hilton Card. American Express has two variants of the card below: If you do not have Hilton HHonors card then it is better off to start with the $75 annual fee version as apart from better benefits it also has higher sign up bonus such as the current 100k Hilton Honors point for $3k spend in 3 months and a free weekend night earned after first anniversary of the card membership.
After first anniversary of the Hilton HHonors Surpass card once you receive the free weekend night certificate you can downgrade the card to No annual fee Hilton HHonors card. The Deal:
Disclosure: Miles And Money could earn referral bonus for sign up through some of the links above. Some of the links may or may not be publicly available links.  Update: You can now earn 1 Delta Skymiles per $1 spend on Lyft ride and till 08/31/2017 you can earn additional 2 Delta Skymiles per $1 on airport rides with Lyft. Link your accounts here. lyft is a ride-sharing service which is a smaller competitor of UBER. Lyft is competitively priced for rides compared to UBER. In the earlier post we discussed earning $2 in SYWR points for UBER rides. lyft also has partnership with jetBlue where you can earn jetBlue miles as a rider and if you drive with lyft you can also earn Shell Fuel discount. You can link your lyft account to earn the discount here. You can also find all the "riders" promotion here. Earning 1200 jetBlue points annually: You can earn 30 points with each of the ride with Lyft (except Line service). In total you can earn 1200 jetBlue points annually which although small it still is free and earned automatically. If you are new to lyft or jetBlue you could also earn bonus $20 for lyft ride or 750 points with jetBlue.  This is how the connect page for lyft looks like. Login from PC in your lyft account to link your jetBlue account. Above is how the connect page looks like at lyft. Just login to your lyft account and go here and link your jetBlue account number to start earning jetBlue miles/points. Although the amount of jetBlue miles/points you earn are limited they are still free.
 We are already done with Week 2 of Daily Getaways. I will list down the upcoming Week 3 and Week 4 deals which I feel could be a good value.
Week 3 (May 1 to May 5): May 4 - Marriott e-gift card at 20% off (Good Deal): You could use these gift cards at any of the Marriott properties worldwide except all the Starwood (SPG) properties, Protea Hotels by Marriott and Marriott Executive Apartments. Alternatively you can also re-sell it to certain Gift card re-seller if you have bulk relationship with them (But you wan't earn much on in here). These are available in $100, $250 and $500 value. You will need to present the e-gift card at the time of check-out so you would not be able to take advantage of prepaid rates. The good part is that you can register the card on your email address and protect it in case of any fraud. Week 4 (May 8 to May 10): May 9 - Hertz points at discounted rate from ~4.24 to ~5.09 cents/point (OK Deal): So you are essentially buying points which you can redeem at standard rewards rates or anytime rewards rates. So based on the type of redemption you can get a good deal or a raw deal. Also points expire in 24 months if there is no activity on your account. For e.g. 5500 points for $280 can be used for 1 week rental (anytime reward) with no black out dates which is roughly paying about $40 per day for standard vehicle which may or may not be a good deal based on where you can rent. The interesting part is you could redeem for the same weekly rental for 2750 points only by using "standard reward" rate which may not be available though on certain black out dates. Also you can transfer the points to your spouse or domestic partner. Do remember if you pay with points for your rental you would forego car rental protection provided by certain credit cards and might have to purchase CDW insurance from car rental company. So, depending on your plans it may or may not be for you. May 10 - Hyatt points from ~1.03 to ~1.1 cents/point (Good Deal): Hyatt points are valuable because you can use 30k points at high-end all inclusive properties. Also if you have upgrade certificates you can use them on award stays booked with points. With this deal they are selling 24,000 to 72,000 points and there is a limit of 1 package per person. Hyatt low-end redemption starts at only 5,000 points and they have pretty decent properties even at low end. Hyatt points packages sell out fast (within few minutes) as they are limited, so if you are eyeing one of them be there at 10 a.m. PST time to try your luck at it. There are other offers in daily getaways but you can do equally better going other routes rather than blocking your cash up-front. Be sure to perform your due diligence before your purchase any of the above package. Best of luck.  IHG PointBreaks hotel are once again here and they are live for your booking. You could book the hotels for just 5k points per night. You could easily buy points from ~0.6 cents/points or less by either going through Daily Getaways IHG Points purchase if you do not have any IHG Points or by booking and cancelling cash + points booking provided you have atleast 5k points in your IHG account. You can refer here on how to purchase IHG points using cash+points booking.
Although there are certain restrictions on how many nights per hotel each member can book, it is rarely enforced in practice. Below is the sample list of hotels in "United States of America" available for booking at 5k points per night and there are smaller lists for other countries. So go ahead and make your reservations NOW!! UNITED STATES AlabamaArkansasArizonaCalifornia
 This year Daily Getaways is already underway. As for any sale not all "sale-items are created equal and the same is true for the Daily Getaways. Below is the run down of deals which I think are good deals for each week and my brief take on which one are worth chasing. As with any deal, do your own analysis before you jump on to purchase the deal.
Week 0 (April 10 to April 14): April 10 - Alamo Car Rental Certificate (Good Deal): You get $50 Alamo Car Rental certificate for $25. Although it is 50% off the face value, in reality the certificate works like a coupon and thus would reduce the taxes as well. On top of it you could combine 3 certificates together to get a good discount for rentals of longer period. The only downside is the certificate does not work at all Car Rental locations (including some airports). April 12 - Priority Club IHG Points at ~0.589 to 0.6 cent/point (OK Deal): You can buy the IHG prioirity club points from ~0.589 to ~0.6 cent/point with this deal. Since you can always buy IHG points for 0.7 cent/point whenever you need as described in the linked article even without the daily getaway, this deal is only good if you have immediate use of it. Do note the IHG points now expire after 12 months if there is no activity on the account. Week 1 (April 17 to April 21): April 19 - Universal Studios Hollywood front of the line pass for $139 (OK Deal): This deal boasts of saving $61 off of 1 day admission pass which also gives you front of the line access. In reality this is "Non-peak" pass and you need to give 30 days of notice to book this. Alternatively if you have American Express card which keeps having Amex Sync offers at Undercover Tourist, you can do equally better rather than investing up-front in daily getaway deal. Week 2 (April 24 to April 28): April 25 - Avis One Day Car Rental for $30 (Good Deal?): This deal lies somewhere between OK and Good Deal. This is simply because the certificate expires in 1 year (May 15, 2018) and has restrictions of black out days while not exactly spelling out what all are the black out dates. The good part is you can rent up to "G class" of car and you can combine up to 7 certificates for up to 7 day of rental. It is a good deal only if you know you will be able to use it. April 28 - Choice Privilege points at 0.4 to 0.45 cent/point (Great Deal): This one is a great deal and you can bet it will be sold out in few minutes. Choice privileges sells points at a cost of 1.1 cent/point without any promotion. So getting more than 50% off the purchase price of points is great deal given that you can potentially use the points at a great redemption value in Europe. As I had pointed out in my article last year there have been positive changes around Choice privilege points expiration policy etc and this represents a really good deal if you travel to Europe and use your points for hotel redemption's even in the peak season. There are 4 different packages available with price ranging from 0.4 cent/point to 0.45 cent/point and they are limited. So get them before they sell out.  Uber is more and more used for transportation including commute from/to work. Along with increasing its presence it has also partnered with SPG to provide SPG Rewards points where you earn SPG points for each Uber ride. It also has partnered with Sears SYWR where you earn flat $2 SYWR Points in about ~25 markets in United States.
While the SPG partnership requires 1 qualifying stay each year before you start earning SPG points, the partnership with Sears SYWR does not have any such requirements. Also you earn $2 in SYWR points regardless of the ride cost. Although the SYWR points earned from UBER Ride expires within 30 days of earning, $2 in SYWR can potentially give you value of USD $2. The other interesting aspect of the SYWR partnership is that as of now you do earn SYWR points on UBEREATS as well. So, if you order your food often from UBEREATS then linking your Sears SYWR rewards account would easily get you $2 SYWR per order which you can redeem for anything Sears sells. Also UBER runs the "commuter" uberPOOL service where you can use your commuter benefits and get tax-free rides to your work while also earning $2 in SYWR points. So, next time you ride with UBER make sure you link your account to earn these benefits free of cost. Most of the folks who earn miles using credit card would have heard about the Alaska Airlines Visa Signature Card from Bank of America. You can check out the flyertalk thread here with an important must-know here. Below are the few reasons folks have keen interest on this card:
The issue though is that when you apply online for the Alaska Airlines Credit Card you could either get "Visa Signature" card or the "Platinum Plus" card based on your credit worthiness. You get "Visa Signature" credit card when you secure a credit limit of $5k or more otherwise "Platinum Plus" when you secure the credit limit of less than $5k. Only the "Visa Signature" version earns 25k to 30k bonus miles whereas the "Platinum Plus" card only earns 5k bonus miles. So, your goal is to always secure the "Visa Signature" card or in other words get approved with the credit limit of $5k or more. There are two approaches to make sure you get Visa Signature card or credit limit of $5k or more. The first one is more commonly known and used and the other one is lesser known:
Regardless of which approach you use, make sure that you have closed any of your previous opened Alaska Airlines Credit Card or do a product change to any other no-fee credit card few days before you roll in the new application. Also Bank of America combines the credit card hard-pull done on the same day most of the time, so you would (probably) not get hit with 2 credit card inquires. So, get the easy bonus miles while this last... |
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