Category: hacks

Some Tips for Saving Money on Airfare

February 8, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Recently, a co-worker of mine asked for help booking his family’s summer travel to London. Searching for himself, his wife, and three kids, the price he had found (despite building in flexibility on both ends of the trip) was $14,000 for 5 people.

….for economy.

Summer travel to Europe is expensive. London travel is even worse, because it always has a steady flow of business travelers.

Given that my co-worker had a fairly tight set of constraints on his trip, the traditional sources of flexibility we look for — changing dates, changing locations — weren’t going to be sufficient in this situation. Add to that the fact that he needs five tickets, and we had a challenge on our hands. Continue reading →

The Most You Should Pay for a Hotel: Choice Hotels

January 23, 2016 / / 1 Comment

This is the sixth in a series of posts on how to save money on hotel bookings by purchasing rewards points. For a more detailed explanation and walk-through of the theory, see the first post on Hyatt hotels.

Choice Hotels wasn’t in my initial list of chains to review because of how weird and restrictive their loyalty program is, but given their large footprint and a few requests for a writeup, I realized it would probably be useful to look at. So, without further ado… Continue reading →

The Most You Should Pay for a Hotel: Starwood

January 21, 2016 / / 1 Comment

This is the last in a series of posts on how to save money on hotel bookings by purchasing rewards points. For a more detailed explanation and walk-through of the theory, see the first post on Hyatt hotels.

Today we will be looking at the last major hotel rewards program, Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG), which will hopefully remain in tact through the end of 2016 but may not be long for this world due to the merger finalized earlier this year. Continue reading →

The Most You Should Pay for a Hotel: Marriott

January 20, 2016 / / 3 Comments

This is the fourth in a series of posts on how to save money on hotel bookings by purchasing rewards points. For a more detailed explanation and walk-through of the theory, see the first post on Hyatt hotels.

The Details

Marriott Rewards is actually two programs in disguise, offering rewards for both the standard set of Marriott branded properties as well as the hyper-luxurious Ritz Carlton portfolio. Because of this, it has fourteen separate categories for its hotels — nine for Marriott and five for Ritz Carlton. It’s award charts are as follows: Continue reading →

The Most You Should Pay for a Hotel: Hilton

January 19, 2016 / / 1 Comment

This is the third in a series of posts on how to save money on hotel bookings by purchasing rewards points. For a more detailed explanation and walk-through of the theory, see the first post on Hyatt hotels.

The Nuts and Bolts

Disclaimer: This is a big fat dud. Tomorrow’s on Marriott should be interesting, though, as there are a couple of angles from which to approach the hack.

I’m somewhat loathe to talk about Hilton hotels, since their HHonors program is one of the worst around in terms of redemption rates, and that’s if you can actually find award availability in the first place. That said, it is one of the largest chains in the world, and there is some value to be had if you look hard enough, so here it is. Continue reading →

The Most You Should Pay for a Hotel: IHG

January 17, 2016 / / 3 Comments

This is the second in a series of posts on how to save money on hotel bookings by purchasing rewards points. For a more detailed explanation and walk-through of the theory, see the first post on Hyatt hotels.

The Nuts and Bolts

IHG Rewards Club is a slightly special snowflake since they offer two ways of buy points from them. Since there have been plenty of posts giving detailed explanations (see here for a good one), I won’t go into detail on how to purchase the points, other than to say that that the second method utilizes the points and cash option on bookings and IHG’s unique mechanism of refunding the total points cost if you cancel your booking. In practice, the purchase costs are: Continue reading →

The Most You Should Pay for a Hotel: Hyatt

January 15, 2016 / / 13 Comments

Generating miles and points at low cost takes time and organization, and most people have neither the time nor ability to juggle tens of credit cards. Unfortunately, a lot of travel hacking is targeted at the minority who can, leaving behind those who are just looking to save money on their twice-a-year family vacations.

So, what about those casual travelers? Can you still use miles and points to your advantage? Or more generally, when your points balances are limited, can you still save money without compromising on comfort? Continue reading →

The JCPenney Amex Offer

December 30, 2015 / / 6 Comments

I Have Spent More Time Inside a JCPenney This Month Than I Have My Entire Lifetime

I’m writing this post because today, I spent a total of 5 hours after work running around town chasing various deals (many were Amex Offers – Best Buy, Staples, Babies R Us, etc), and while that may sound like a lot of time, much of it was wasted at JCPenney. I want to try to save you some time the next time you’re trying to maximize one of those $X off $X coupons (the most popular one being the $10 off $10 that I seem to get in the mail at least quarterly for no apparent reason). Continue reading →

Is Gogo onto the free wifi trick?

December 4, 2015 / / 1 Comment

After learning about the trick to get free wifi with Gogo on board a few months ago, I’ve been using WiFi happily on most of my flights, both on my iPhone as well as on my laptop  (that is pretending to be an iPhone/iPad)

On my last flight on American recently, after doing the trick 2 times, I was hit with this screen when I tried to download the Gogo app again!

I tried disconnecting and connecting again, as well as clearing my cookies and that didn’t do anything. Only by waiting for a day to pass did I seem to be able to download the app again. There doesn’t seem to be a way around this on mobile, but I did see the CAPTCHA screen flash before I saw this screen, so it may be possible to get around this screen on a laptop. I will investigate further on my next flight, but possible courses of action are: Continue reading →

This hack was made by you and me…

November 29, 2015 / / 1 Comment

For my flight home for Thanksgiving, I booked an award flight on Virgin America (VX). As I had just completed the Membership Rewards 80,000 point transfer promotion, it would be my first flight as a VX Elevate Gold member. Although the benefits of Gold status aren’t the most amazing (since VX doesn’t offer complimentary F upgrades), I was able to take advantage of the free award cancellations to save $65 in points when three days before my flight the price randomly fell to $173 (the price jumped to $349 after immediately after I made my booking). Continue reading →

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