DoorDash (my referral link) recently put out this promo to encourage people to text receipt photos in exchange for 25% back in DoorDash credits. I don’t think it’s targeted, but some people don’t seem to have received the email. I thought I’d put out a blog post since DoorDash sent another few marketing emails saying “We didn’t get much interest.” Surprising to me since it’s so easy to do! 😅
Category: promotions
Get Asian groceries delivered with Weee! Part 2: Bundles! Plus a review of competitors, Yamibuy and Yamimeal
Update 5/4/21: There is currently an Amex offer for Yamibuy for $10 off $50 in one or more transactions, expiring 6/3/21! I appreciate it if you use my referral link for $5 off. 🙂 Please also check out my Pro Tips for Weee! post.
This is a follow up to M’s post about Weee! (my referral for $20 bonus) back in December. Weee! is an Asian grocery delivery service similar to Instacart and Amazon Whole Foods/Fresh currently serving the SF Bay Area and Seattle. I started using it at the beginning of Shelter In Place since I craved Asian groceries, but the lines at 99 Ranch were sometimes pretty daunting. I’ll also talk about some similar alternatives to Weee!, Yamibuy and Yamimeal in this post.
JetBlue Points Match Promotion: Is It Worth It?
NOTE: Please read comments about potential eligibility requirements that are not officially listed on the promotion site. As with everything YMMV.
For any of you who follow the major blogs, you’ve heard by now that JetBlue is running a promotion where they will ‘match’ your Virgin America points balances after you send them an email with a screenshot of your Virgin America balance and fly a single round-trip flight with them by August 31.
It’s not quite a ‘match’ as the bonuses are tiered, but the ratios are all greater than 1:1:
If you already have the points, shoot an email to pointsmatch@jetblue.com and get on your way (and do it stat because hordes of others will get in line soon)! But if you don’t, then what?
Well, because Virgin America recently became a 1:1 transfer partner of SPG, things are much more interesting, as you can transfer SPG points in order to pad your VX balance before sending a request off to JetBlue. Unfortunately, the requests do take a bit of time to process, but assuming that goes through and then JetBlue acknowledges your registration, is it worth it?
Let’s do some math.
For each tier, here are the number of SPG points (assuming don’t have any Virgin America miles already) you’d need to transfer to hit that tier (remember that for every increment of 20,000 SPG points you transfer, you get an extra 5,000 miles).
| Promo Tier | SPG Points |
| 500-5000 | 0/1500/2500 (depending on SPG status) |
| 5001-10000 | 5001 |
| 10001-30000 | 10001 |
| 30001-50000 | 25001 (+5000 from bonus) |
| 50001+ | 40001 (+10000 from bonus) |
Virgin American points are worth about 2.1-2.3 cents when redeemed towards their flights, but VX happens to be a bit marked up relative to other airlines, so let’s conservatively (and arbitrarily) say you’ll get about 1.7 cents of value. JetBlue points are good for 1.4 cents towards flights, and they are generally price competitive, so we’ll leave it there.
Since there’s also a required flight component, let’s also assume you live in a JetBlue (B6) serviced-area and can get a round trip flight for either $100 or $200 (both are reasonable from quick glances).
How good a deal is this? Well, here’s the value you get:
| Promo Tier | B6 Points | VX Points | Value (minus $100) | Value (minus $200) |
| 500-5000 | 5000 | 2500* | $12.50 | -$87.50 |
| 5001-10000 | 10000 | 5001 | $225 | $125 |
| 10001-30000 | 30000 | 10001 | $590 | $490 |
| 30001-50000 | 50000 | 30001 | $1210 | $1110 |
| 50001+ | 75000 | 50001 | $1900 | $1800 |
But this excludes the SPG points you had to give up. Combining the above two tables, we can calculate a breakeven point for how much you have to value your SPG points at for it to be a good deal (breakeven = value / # points). If you value them below the breakeven point, go for it. Above, don’t:
| Promo Tier | SPG Points | Value (minus $100) | Breakeven | Value (minus $200) | Breakeven |
| 500-5000 | 2500* | $12.50 | .50 cpp | -$87.50 | -3.50 cpp |
| 5001-10000 | 5001 | $225 | 4.50 cpp | $125 | 2.50 cpp |
| 10001-30000 | 10001 | $590 | 5.90 cpp | $490 | 4.90 cpp |
| 30001-50000 | 25001 | $1210 | 4.84 cpp | $1110 | 4.44 cpp |
| 50001+ | 40001 | $1900 | 4.75 cpp | $1800 | 4.50 cpp |
Simply put, this promotion offers some mammoth value if you have more than 10,000 SPG to spare. I’m already game because I actually have enough VX points to qualify for the top tier, and Michael just sent off a 20,000 point transfer. Esther also had enough points to qualify for the top tier from MSing on the VX card. What about you? Are you in?
Happy hacking!
Daily Getaways 2016: Should You Buy?
If you follow any of the major blogs, you’ll know that U.S. Travel Association’s Daily Getaways are just around the corner. Daily Getaways is an annual event offering discounted rates on a variety of travel (typically hotels/attractions) related packages. I typically write these sorts of deals off because generally speaking, if there’s something that looks like a good deal, it either carries lots of weird restrictions, is overly specific (e.g. for a place I wouldn’t go), or is likely to go unused.
That said, I figured it would be worth doing a more objective pass over this year’s Daily Getaways to see if there was any value, and to my surprise, I found a couple of offers that might be worth going for. The other ones probably fall into one of the above three buckets, although if you were already planning on traveling to any of the specified destinations or had specific plans to use the packages, they could be worth purchasing.
Here are the highlights.
Week 1 (April 4-8)
Good Deals
- Cambria Hotels & Suites (2 nights for $160): Just a points package masquerading as free night certificates. This amounts to buying 40,000 Choice Privileges points at a price of 0.4 cents each, which is about 60% off the normal purchase price and 45% off the points and cash price. Choice Hotels has a huge footprint, and most of its hotels fall within the 10,000-25,000 points/night bands, so this means you get to lock in a few nights at between $40 and $100/night. Even with how inexpensive Choice Hotels properties tend to be, this is a great deal, and I’m going to jump on it.
- Comfort Inn (3 nights for $155): Same as the Cambria deal, except you get 36,000 points at a price of 0.43 cents each. The math is similar. One fun note with Choice is that you can transfer to Southwest points at 3.33:1 (in 6,000 point increments), so you can actually get about halfway to a Companion Pass by buying two each (the maximum you can buy) of this and the Cambria package. Doing so would net you 45,600 Southwest points for a price of $630. Couple that with a single Chase Southwest card (50,000 point bonus plus some spending), and you’re pretty much all the way there. It could be a good play to hold the points and do the transfer at the beginning of the calendar year to maximize the length of the Companion Pass.
Bad Deals
- IHG (e.g. 100,000 points for $565): IHG frequently has points purchasing sales that allow you to buy points at below 0.6 cents a piece, and these are only marginally (if at all) better than that mark.
- Best Western (10,000 points for $55): I tried finding even a backdoor way (e.g. transferring to airline points, buying gift cards) to get value out of it, but considering that the award tiers are 8,000, 12,000, 16,000….all the way to 36,000, unless you have some Best Western stays coming up, I’d be wary of having your points stranded.
Circumstantial Deals
- Las Vegas (e.g. Aria for $1700): If you’re already planning on going, it’s probably worth pricing out your initial plans and comparing to the cost of these (mostly) all-inclusive packages.
Week 2 (April 11-15)
Good Deals
- Nada 🙁
Bad Deals
- Nothing bad enough to write about.
Circumstantial Deals
Wyndham (1 night for $150)
Quick news you can use: TopCashback bonus, Alitalia status match, Shyp + eBay and American award availability
TopCashback is offering bonus cashback on your next purchase by 2/5/2016, with minimum purchase of the bonus cashback amount. eBay is included. I’m personally going to buy some AirBnB gift cards through PayPal Digital Gifts as that’s a great way to get a discount on AirBnB stays. This offer is targeted and may vary by person. I personally was offered $10 cashback.
Via The Points Guy, Alitalia is currently offering a status match from Oneworld, Star Alliance, and other carriers like Alaska through January 31, 2016. Just send an email to StatusMatchMilleMiglia@alitalia.com with your full name, MilleMiglia number and a copy of your frequent flyer card that you are matching from. Your new status will be active until March 31, 2016, unless your status was valid through then, then your status will be valid until March 31, 2017.Unfortunately, I seem to be unable to register a MilleMiglia account right now as their site is erroring out.
Shyp is offering free packing and waived fees for eBay shipments until January 31, n2016. They will charge you the amount that you listed as your shipping cost and cover the rest. Good way to get rid of all the paper I just bought…
Via View From the Wing, an interesting article about premium cabin award availability on American. Seems like on many routes, American is releasing space on Wednesdays.
Before you go off writing 94 postcards…
Read this.
As many of you know, IHG just launched a sweepstakes that stacks on top of their Accelerate promotion. The sweepstakes offers 1,000 points after your first stay, and then a mystery prize for each subsequent stay. There have been plenty of posts on the promo, so I won’t go into detail about the prizes, but for more information, you can read here.
Now, because its a sweepstakes, IHG is legally required to offer a method of entry that doesn’t require a purchase (otherwise it would be considered gambling). Deals We Like scoured the fine print and found that this method of entry involved—surprise, surprise—writing postcards*. 94 of them in fact. And under the assumption that you win at least 500 points per entry, you’d come out with 47,000 IHG points after spending $46.06 in postage and a lot of time writing. Not bad.
But wait. My friend Shane pointed out to me that odds are not the same thing as probability. Probability is a fraction of successes to total possible outcomes, whereas odds are a fraction of successes to failures. This is a subtle difference but makes what otherwise seems like a sure thing — 1:1.18 odds for the lowest prize of 500 points — not 85% likely (1/1.18) but 46% likely (1/(1+1.18)).
Where does that leave us? Well, as I explained in a post a couple of months back as to whether or not the SPG Open the World promo was worth your time, you need to calculate the expected value of your entries to determine whether or not they are worth your time. As before, I’m going to exclude the grand prizes since the probability of winning is so small as to be negligible.
In that case, given the following odds (reproduced from the official terms):
| Points Prize | Odds |
| 5000 | 1:42.86 |
| 2000 | 1:28.57 |
| 1000 | 1:14.29 |
| 500 | 1:1.18 |
Your expected value per postcard is:
EV = 5000 * 1/43.86 + 2000 * 1/29.57 + 1000 * 1/15.29 + 500 * 1/2.18
476.4 points. Incidentally, this isn’t too far off from the stated assumption of 500 points per play.
However, given that the payout isn’t guaranteed, we’re better off looking at the range of possible payouts and their probabilities. Mathematically, this can be summarized by the standard deviation, which describes how far off most results are from the average. A lower standard deviation corresponds to more of a ‘sure thing’ and therefore something that is low-risk, whereas a higher standard deviation corresponds to a very risky proposition.
For our odds above, the standard deviation is a whopping 811 (for how to compute the value, see this handy explanation), which is huge given that it’s twice the average payout. The problem, therefore, is that this doesn’t give us a real intuition (or practical information for that matter) about how well we’re expected to perform over 94 postcards.
Thankfully, 94 postcards is enough for the law of large numbers to start to come into play (the law of large numbers basically states there will be less variation in our payoffs over many plays than a single one). I’ll spare you the math (given that there are research papers about it since it’s a hard problem), but my friend Nick was kind enough to write a program to compute the aggregate outcomes over 94 entries**. I’ve graphed them below (you can find a link to an interactive version here; I’ve also included the generated data and the program to compute the probabilities here and here respectively):
Basically, you can expect to win between 30,000 and 50,000 points with reasonable probability. Not a sure thing by any means, but if you value 30,000 points at more than the amount of time it will take you to crank out 94 letters, then by all means, go for it.
As for me, I’m actually going to participate, because it makes for a good story, and I enjoy doing ridiculous things***, but it’s not necessarily as good a deal as it looks at first brush.
* As tokyohyattfan points out, technically you have to put a 3×5 card inside an envelope.
** We ignored the 5 prize cap on the 5,000, 2,000, and 1,000 point prizes to simplify the analysis, although it lowers the expected payout by a bit (i.e. shifts the graph left).
*** Case in point:
Free return shipping through Paypal – up to 4 times
Via Slickdeals and h/t to mastermind85, activate free return shipping (up to $30 per claim) for up to 4 items purchased on Paypal until 1/31/2016.
https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/returns
Must activate the benefit first via this link.
Consider the Lobster: Huge value from Orbitz Rewards Dining on your first dine
Just to get it out of the way: I promise that I’m not in any way compensated by Orbitz. I just think their program offers huge value and is a fairly easy entry into travel hacking. In about 10 months, I’ve managed to rack up about $1,000 in Orbucks (their rewards currency) as well as their Platinum status, which actually provides tangible benefits in two checked bag reimbursements (well, back in Orbucks) as well as a TSA Precheck voucher code. It only requires 12 nights (not stays!), and Orbucks-paid stays count towards that requirement, so it’s fairly easy to reach.
Anyway, last night I finally caved and signed up for the Orbitz Rewards Visa to see what sort of value I could get out of it and what other avenues it opens up. The card has a sign-up bonus of a $50 statement credit after $200 spend and earns 2% in Orbucks on every day spending. Most importantly for me, it has no annual fee, no foreign transaction fees, and is Comenity-issued (which means it’s an Equifax pull). Obviously that set alone is a terrible deal, since I’d be better off just taking the 2% in cash with my FIA Amex.
However, where the card provides value to someone like me is that not only does it offer 5% Orbucks on Orbitz hotel bookings (on top of the 3 or 5% you already earn), but also it offers the same extra 5% on all flights booked with Orbitz. Considering I aggressively pursue rewards from Orbitz’s best price guarantee on my cash bookings, this can offer me tremendous value. Having the card also keeps rewards from expiring, which is really nice considering Orbucks expire either 180 or 360 days after earning independently of stay activity.
You may be wondering what the heck this post has to do with the Orbitz Rewards Dining program. Honestly, thus far, nothing. Let’s change that.
One of the listed ‘benefits’ of the cards is:
7% back in Orbucks at qualifying restaurants with the new Orbitz Rewards Dining program
Naturally, I asked myself, “What is this dining program, and how does it work?” As you might expect, it’s a perfect clone of all the other rewards dining programs as it too is run by the Rewards Network. You earn 5% on all restaurants participating in the program plus the 2% for everyday spend on the Orbitz card, for a total of 7%.
The next logical question is, “What’s the first dine bonus?” For other programs, it’s typically 1000 or 2000 airline miles, but that doesn’t make sense here. So what is it?
As a welcome gift to newly enrolled Orbitz Rewards® Dining members, we want to offer you a fantastic new member bonus. Earn an additional 15% in bonus Orbucks® – on top of your regular 5% – when you dine and spend $30!
SPG’s ‘Open the World’ promo: Is it worth your time?
Last week, SPG announced their ‘Open the World’ promotion, which offers a grand prize of a week-long vacation at one of their exclusive resorts, as well as free night certificates, Amazon and Amex gift cards, and SPG points. You can play twice a day by entering your SPG number and email address here.
Like all of my friends, I’ve been dutifully playing twice a day, although my efforts thus far have been to no avail. Which begs the question, is this really worth my time?