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Just bought EQP to requalify for IHG Diamond through end of 2025! Since I usually buy miles for 0.5 cents, the $768 to buy 110,000 EQP was only a $218 premium, and I get Diamond again
Ran into the Mexican car insurance scam with Budget in Merida, Mexico 🇲🇽
Base rate was $18 USD a day, but if you didn't get the CDW costing minimum $85 USD a day, I had to put down a deposit of 330,000 MXN / $16,000 USD which obviously got rejected by all my credit cards.
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For those of you that have been following the blogosphere lately, you may have seen headlines like “Highest Offer I’ve Ever Seen” or “Best Amex Platinum Offer Ever.” When you click through, you are presented with the following (highly highly highly highly) targeted offer, first reported on r/churning on Reddit:
Yes, it is. But how does it actually work? There are two parts:
The second leg of my outbound to Europe was in Business class on American Airlines’s newly retrofitted 767-300s. It’s a two-class plane (i.e. no First class), with eight rows of seats in a 1-2-1, staggered configuration. Basically, this results in all the seats being forward-facing, with cut outs for your seat in the ottoman of the seat in front of you. My seat looked something like this:
Well, it looked exactly like that. I was seated in 4A, which is a window seat on the left aisle. This gave a really private feeling, as there was a table between me and the aisle which minimized disruption as the flight attendants walked up and down the aisle.
Hello from Milan!!! I’m here (well, in Europe) for a week visiting my sister, and for the first time, I booked all of my travel into premium cabins! I’m not usually one for trip reports (here was my first admittedly pathetic attempt at one), but I want to say that’s mostly because no one wants to hear me talk about how comfortable my economy class seat was or how the person next to me had bad body odor (hey, I call it as I smell it). Anyway, here goes:
Update: Many people are reporting offers for 10,000 MR after $500 spend. Share your data points in the comments!
Saw this come up on all of my Membership Rewards-earning cards in my Amex account:
Note that it can only be used for hotel bookings (Esther and I have made this mistake before), and, it excludes Fine Hotels & Resorts as well, but it’s a pretty sweet deal if you have cash bookings coming up.
By popular demand (well, like 2 people), I am starting a series of posts on my infamous (to like, 3 people) trip suggestion lists/guides. I’ve had various lists in my Dropbox that I send to people, and I want to clean them up, update them, and post them for the general public.
This may not be helpful to you now, but hopefully it will be at some point! When that point comes, I recommend going through the list, marking what sounds interesting to you, starring those favorites on Google Maps, and then planning an itinerary based on what’s close to each other. My friend Michelle calls this “trip tetris.” Or if you’re a P instead of a J, keep the list handy and see what you feel like doing when you wake up, and map it when you go out the door. 😉
There’s a new trick to recover lost Amex offers if you forgot to do the multi-tab / multi-browser method. I was adding the Staples $25 of $100 Amex Offer to one of my American Express cards, when I realized I forgot to open up new tabs for the rest of my cards.  I went to check the other cards, and indeed, the offer wasn’t there.
I was going to resign myself to missing out on the offer on my other cards, but then I noticed a comment from reader wwllmm on Doctor of Credit’s post, saying that you could get back offers you had lost with these steps:
I recently learned of a new tool by reddit user vcjohnson to view statistics on credit card application approvals, denials, and reconsideration attempts. Reddit has been keeping a spreadsheet of these statistics for a while, but this tool takes that spreadsheet and presents it in an easy to use, visually appealing way.
You select a specific bank and/or card, and you can view statistics for that specific bank or that specific card.
H/T to our friend Tonei, but Citi has majorly improved its travel and protection benefits on pretty much all of its cards.
Beginning on Friday, I started getting emails from Citi titled Important information about your card’s protection benefits on pretty much all of my Citi cards, stating increased and more flexible coverage, starting May 15, 2016.
You can find a more extensive summary on Tonei’s blog, as I don’t want to steal his fire, but basically the changes are:
On my most recent trip to Japan, Esther, her husband, and I stayed at the Conrad Tokyo for 2 nights, which I booked using the 2 free weekend night certificates from the signup bonus of the Citi Hilton Reserve card. Given the points rate of 95,000 HHonors points per night or the cash rate of ~Â¥100,000 a night during cherry blossom season, this was a great deal!
The Conrad is right at the Shiodome Tokyo Metro stop. If you have a JR Pass and don’t want to pay extra to take the subway, you can go to the JR Shinbashi station and take a short 5-8 minute walk on either the overhead sky bridges, or through several underground plazas. I recommend the overhead sky bridges, which you can access from the Karasumori exit, as they are less complicated and faster due to less staircases and people.
EDIT (4/20/2016): Hilton has updated the link to the status match page, the old one no longer works! You can access the new page here
EDIT:Â There seems to be more datapoints for successful matches from IHG Platinum vs. Hyatt Platinum. Please leave us your datapoints, either here or in the reddit thread!
Also, make sure you send in .JPG files for the match, otherwise Hilton will reject your request and you will have to followup to send it again, as the form won’t let you send another request.
