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Pleasantly surprised by Cathay Pacific's service for oneworld emerald customers even in economy. Middle seat was automatically blocked off, multiple FAs came by to greet me, was given a bottle of water and a blanket / pillow
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Apparently in Germany, if your DB train arrives at your destination between 1 hour and up to 2 hours late, you get 25% compensation, and if 2 hours or more, 50% compensation.
Had a crazy delay going from Berlin to Munich where our train arrived 2.5 hours late 🥲
First published 4/6/2016. Last updated 5/2/21: Some devaluations this year, like IKEA.
Hi everyone! It’s been awhile since you last heard from me, due to all my traveling recently. Unlike Daniel and Michael, I have a hard time keeping up with computer-related stuff while traveling. But I am back now, and have a lot of things to catch up on and things I want to share with you! I seem to have a ton of friends with birthdays in the spring, so hope this is timely for some of you.
Hello everyone! I’m probably 3 years behind on reviewing things but I really wanted to get this one done asap before I forget any details since there are probably people out there who are trying to decide between W Maldives and St. Regis Maldives and I hope this post will help. Prior to my stay, I couldn’t find very many thorough reviews on the W Maldives, which made it very difficult to choose between them for my stay during the small window of opportunity in August 2018 when overwater villas at both properties were booking at 340k points for 5 nights. Due to booking a ton of travel packages, I was just shy of being able to book both to decide later. I booked W Maldives first and unfortunately the opportunity passed before I had enough points to book St. Regis also. I wish I had booked both back to back and stayed at both. 😉
With that out of the way, onto the main event…
Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but it isn’t that far off.
Being good at anything, be it a job or a hobby, is all about having a set of tools that you know inside and out. As a software engineer, it matters less how many programming languages I know so much as having a set that covers a sufficiently diverse functionality and knowing that set very well.
Travel hacking — and for the purposes of discussion, I’m going to limit the scope of discussion to redeeming airline miles — is no different. As great as it is to know the ins and outs of 20 different programs, fragmentation (i.e. maintaining balances across all those programs) is expensive both mentally (you have to remember what program is good for what redemptions) and financially (since you’re likely to have orphan balances). That is to say, having a few programs that you accrue balances in and making active choices to invest in those programs is far more beneficial for the average person than a shotgun approach.
I’ll use myself as an example. Although I have access to pretty much every frequent flyer program on the planet (through transferrable currencies like Chase Ultimate Rewards, American Express Membership Rewards, and Starwood Preferred Guest), and although I know some international programs have some really nice redemption opportunities, I generally stick to the following six: Alaska, United, Air Canada, Virgin America, Southwest, and you guessed it, Delta.
Admittedly, six is still a lot, but the choice of those six were very intentional:
This is nominally a post about Delta, so let’s talk about it. Why are Delta Skymiles in my Swiss-army knife of airline miles, and why do I like them so much?
For starters, they transfer from Membership Rewards, so I have very easy access to them. But more importantly, you can pretty much always book an award flight on any route Delta flies. This is made possible by the fact that they have five different levels of award pricing for each route, and although it’s primarily a ploy to reduce the value of your miles (to closer to 1 cent a piece on Economy class redemptions), I actually appreciate the opportunity to be given a choice whether to use miles or points irrespective of the cash price. I can always decide that the “value” is too low, but that’s a decision for me, not for the airline.
To be clear, it annoys me to no end that they got rid of their award chart, and I find it insulting. Restricting access to information is one of the most in-your-face power plays you can make. But consider the purpose the Skymiles serve for me. If I’m flying somewhere domestically (for which United and Alaska typically offer poor redemptions, if there’s even availability) in Economy, and neither Southwest nor Virgin America fly to my chosen destination, I can always fall back to flying Delta, since I know that there will be availability. My redemption value (cents per point) might be something like 1.2, but if you consider the fact that it costs me between 0.3 and 0.5 cents to earn a single Skymile (via Membership Rewards), that’s pretty much a no-brainer versus paying cash (this is separate from the argument of whether to use a cash back card or a points-earning card because we’re talking about redemption, not accrual).
Moreover, I’ve found Skymiles to be the most consistently useful currency for my parents, who fly mostly domestically out of New York and (almost) always together. Delta covers most of the map, and if their cash prices out of New York are competitive (which they almost always are), then I can pretty reliably save them money by using Skymiles, not to mention the fact that the multiple tiers of awards makes it far more likely that there is award space available for two. Given that my dad basically wants to avoid paying cash (i.e. retail price) at all costs, Delta offers me an unbeatable value proposition.
The only reason I am able to speak this positively about Delta is that I never bet the house on them. I didn’t pour all my loyalty into its arms (whether miles or status), and as a result, I was well positioned to adapt to the changes in their loyalty program. This is true of every program in my toolkit. I keep as many points as possible in transferrable currencies, and when changes do occur (inside or outside my toolkit), I constantly re-evaluate the role the program in question can play in my overall strategy.
It also pays to re-evaluate your strategies even in absence of program changes. For example, my parents recently got a Chase Sapphire Preferred card, which gives them access to 1.25 cent per point redemptions on flights through the Chase portal. Although historically they’ve put their spending on the U.S. Bank Flexperks card (between 1.3 cents and 2.0 cents per point) at 1 point per dollar, if they instead put their daily spending on the Chase Freedom Unlimited card (1.5 points per dollar), they can both take advantage of Chase Ultimate Rewards transfers when beneficial or get a guaranteed 1.875 cents per point on their spending (1.5 * 1.25) when redeeming for flights (I actually like this strategy better than a 2% cash back card, although the 2% card is strictly better than the FlexPerks strategy).
The original idea for the post was to talk about the strategy of combining refundable awards bookings with revenue-based airlines (Southwest by default and JetBlue/Virgin America if you have status) with good last-minute award availability on more traditional chart-based programs, but this was a bit more spicy and it’s something I’ve been thinking about more and more as I scale up my miles earning to a point where my balances are hitting six and seven figures.
So what about you? What are your go-to programs? What do you use each program for?
Happy hacking!
Related Reading
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!
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.
After some research, Esther settled on the Intercontinental Fiji, and it’s not too hard to see why:
However, we were faced with a complication: having redeemed 120,000 points for Sydney, I was out of IHG points, and Esther had no balance to begin with. So even though 30,000 points/night is a great deal for what would have otherwise been a $500/night hotel, we didn’t really have a way to make the redemption.
Luckily, Esther has gobs of Ultimate Rewards (UR), so she suggested transferring them to IHG so that she would have enough of a balance to make the redemption we wanted. That seemed reasonable to me, too.
Except….Nominally, UR transfer to IHG at a ratio of 1:1. I say nominally because that’s only what Chase tells you. In actuality, you can get 1.43 IHG points for every UR you’re willing to part with.
I’m not going to go into the mechanics of the hack (you can see posts here and here if you want to learn more), but suffice it to say that at any point in time, you can buy 10,000 IHG points at a cost of $70, which is 0.7 cents per point. How does this help us? Well, if we redeem, say 7,000 of our UR points as cash, we can then go buy 10,000 IHG points. Working out the math, 10,000/7,000 = 1.43, giving us the ‘transfer’ ratio I promised.
But you knew this. It’s just a reformulation of a hack that you’ve already seen, with a photo of a nice hotel thrown it. What’s the point?
The point has nothing really to do with IHG. The example above was just a conceit to show how one thing (UR) could be strictly better than another (cash). It is strictly better because all of the advantages of a penny can be had by an Ultimate Reward point, and an Ultimate Reward point has advantages that a penny does not, namely, the ability to get outsized value for nice hotels (Hyatt) or flights (Singapore first class suites).
Can we think of other examples? Here are a few.
Via Mommy Points, you can earn 500 IHG points just for changing your default payment method to a MasterCard credit credit. I received an email titled “Faster bookings & 500 points when you load your MasterCard” but it doesn’t seem to be a targeted promotion, so it’s worth a try even if you didn’t get an email.
Just change your billing preferences and you should get the extra 500 points.
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?
I wanted to share my experiences so people can take advantage themselves. The process is not always simple, but with perseverance and attention to detail, you should be successful. Some 3rd party hotel booking websites also have best rate guarantee programs, such as Orbitz, but that will be a topic of a different post.
In order to take advantage of these guarantees, generally you must:
Find a better rate on a 3rd party site for the same hotel, dates, room type, number of rooms, number of people, currency, cancellation policy, etc. Basically, everything must match. Sometimes 3rd party websites will have minor differences in the room type name, or will say twin bed versus double bed, but if the room type is still obviously the same, I’ve found that it doesn’t matter.
Some details on whether a better rate qualifies or not:
