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MY ACTION AND BLOG BUZZING

Not posting much on Instagram and You Tube lately, I ain’t got the time. I did post some pics welcoming my new Sapphire Reserve for Business card in IG. I must admit Chase did a really good job with it and I love the tagline “For those who lead”…yeah at $795 a pop lol.

I continue to burn my miles & points stash for the two big family trips to Greece and Thailand.

I burned 100,000 United miles to fly Business Class from Detroit to Washington IAD and Frankfurt on United and then to Bangkok on Thai Airways. The flight to Frankfurt is on a United Polaris seat. Looks like I am going to be on a Polaris seat twice this year. Anyway, I love the dates/times. I don’t love the routing and the metal I am flying on. But every time I have tried to book me a United award on a better airline I get crickets. Anyway, I have it as a place holder for now and if something better comes along I may grab it. Love the free cancelations and redeposits of miles.

I burned 9,500 World of Hyatt points and booked a night at the same Hyatt Place Grand Rapids South as we are visiting friends at the excellent Ludington State Park the next day. Same as last year.

I burned 8,000 World of Hyatt points to book me yet another night at my favorite Thessaloniki Hyatt Regency to spend the night when I land in late August. To get me over the jet lag and, you know, one more night credit to requalify as Hyatt Globalist.

I am getting all of us to the island of Kefalonia (airport code: EFL) flying Aegean Airlines. I tried to use United or Aeroplan miles but no availability, at least at prices that made sense. Four one way tickets cost $946 USD and I am thinking about erasing this charge using up the rest of my Capital One miles. Because I can. I will think about it a little more while earning more of them.  So many more bookings to do on the trip to Greece. The most challenging is getting us all back to the US as my wife and daughter are not flexible. At all. I may get them to Athens on Aegean again and then book them to fly Athens to Seattle and Detroit. As Turkish Airlines flies direct to both cities from there. But no decent award availability is coming up yet and I sure don’t want to get them to fly Air Canada and connect twice for 70,000 miles in Economy, WTF! I wish I had more Capital One miles and could book decently priced Turkish Airlines flights. Which I still may do #developing. Are you starting to see a pattern that scoring decently valued award tickets is becoming harder? You are not wrong.

I did not have time to tell you about my horrific experience flying American Airlines from Detroit to La Guardia. I had burned 9,000 Alaska Airlines miles for two one way tickets. I have done this numerous times with British Airways Avios points over the years. Until British Airways killed that loophole by raising the prices three fold or higher, I lost count. But trusty Alaska Airlines allows us to book this for just 4, 500 miles per ticket. A hell of a deal.

And then…weather rolled in. Both in Detroit and New York. As we were eating way too much crappy food at the Detroit Lufthansa lounge we kept getting delay notices. But we had plenty of time so we continued eating lol. We head to the gate, another delay and then boom, it happened, canceled! This was on Wednesday evening, we had my birthday dinner reservations in an awesome Syrian restaurant in Brooklyn on Friday night before attending brother in law’s retirement party all day Saturday. So, we get on the phone and a very nice agent tried to reschedule us. She gave us a few options for next day Thursday with connections. But my wife did not want to take another day off work so we said how about the Friday 5 am flight?

So, we wake up super early Friday morning and then on the way to the airport, boom, CANCELED! F words were flying but not us lol. Another nice AA agent tried hard but she could not get us to New York earlier than 7 pm. American only has a few flights out of Detroit, so this is a warning. So I get on my laptop to work my magic and the only decent option was to take the plunge and pay for two tickets on Southwest for $688! It was down to Southwest and Delta to get us to New York in time for my birthday dinner so I did it. And then burned 68,836 Capital One points to make it free. Because this is what I do lol. Both birthday dinner and retirement party were well worth it by the way.

I am nearing 1,000,000 miles/points burned year to date, it is only a matter of time…And as of now, I am projected to hit 47 World of Hyatt elite night credits. I have four nights in Bangkok left to book. Do you think it is worth it to burn some points at the Park Hyatt with a confirmed Suite upgrade? Should I try one of them new Standard brands? Not sure about the locations of both of them, especially the StandardX one. And maybe we are way past too cool to stay there lol. Anyone know when the new Andaz will open?

I have several $50 Hilton gift cards from back when they were available online and used for the credits on both the Amex Hilton Surpass and Amex Business Platinum cards. I brought them with me to New York to use them but I never got around to it. I am going to use at least one next week for a business meeting in Lansing, Michigan. People are keeping data points on where these gift cards work HERE.

I much prefer the personal Chase Sapphire Reserve card. Because I can much easier use all the credits to offset the $795 annual fee. But I knew I would not be able to get approved for it. So, when I saw the 200,000 Signup Bonus for the Chase Sapphire Reserve Business card I could not stop myself. After receiving the card I sat down to make sure I am up to date and enrolled on all the benefits/credits. No problem using the very easy $300 travel credit. It is going to show up on our Bangkok-Koh Samui flights later this year I just used the card to pay for them. And so looking forward to finally fly Bangkok Airways!

This card has a $50 gift card benefit every six months. I was going to use it on a Panera card but I changed my mind and finally signed up for DoorDash. Which I guess comes with DoorPass. Anyway, this worked flawlessly and treated ourselves to a nice dinner from our favorite Indian restaurant in Ann Arbor. Still paid out of pocket about $9 for a nice meal for two and had leftovers for the next day. So, very easily I can get back $400 of the $795 annual fee. Between Lyft and Doordash small credits I think I can reach for maybe up to $100. So, this card will cost me about $300 going forward. Of course, the juice of the 200,000 points is, well, the juice lol. Fat signup bonuses always pay off the first year, always.

But then what do I do? I am not going to keep three premium cards, no way. I am leaning towards dropping my Amex Business Platinum when it comes up for renewal. It recently nerfed both Hilton and Dell credits. Yeah, ok we get the $200 airline credit. Oh, that reminds me I have several hundreds of dollars in my United Travel Bank I have not been able to use yet lol. Of course, no lounge guests when I get two free guests with my Sapphire Reserve card. Or maybe it is the crowds and the bad food, I mean, the chicken at the Amex Centurion La Guardia lounge last week was out of a horror movie. Really, it was that bad. I guess Amex can positively surprise us when it refreshes its Platinum cards. Yeah, right. You know, I transferred almost all of our Amex Membership Rewards points to Alaska Airlines anyway (via Hawaiian Airlines, this loophole ended June 30th).

Anyway, I need to focus on simplifying my travel hacking life a little bit. So, off I go with two messages from our online Barclay accounts to close our Hawaiian Airlines cards. And they said yes! Last time we did this the bank made us call. Progress and good riddance.

And as one Ink Business Preferred annual fee will hit next week I am going to call Chase and say I am going to make my new Sapphire Reserve the workhorse going forward and don’t need another annual fee on this card which I had for…one year. The same fate awaits the United Business card, especially now that I somehow managed to get over $10k spend year to date on the no annual fee United Gateway card. Which assures me the improved award availability for the rest of this year AND all of 2026 #winning. I have more to chop from the vault but maybe in early 2026 or as the annual fee renewals hit.

Maybe when the second year annual fee hits on my Sapphire Reserve Business card, I drop it while upgrading my old trust Chase Sapphire Preferred to a Chase Sapphire Reserve as I can use the credits so much easier. The thing is I have so many automatic payments going through that card, it has been the workhorse for years. I don’t usually do product changes. But maybe I should consider this one? We will see what happens a year from now I guess.

I did transfer some Chase Ultimate Rewards points to Air Canada Aeroplan, it came with a 20% transfer bonus. This transfer bonus expires July 17 by the way.

Oh wow, this blog post is now reaching ridiculous length, it could be the largest blog post ever? Since I am at it, let’s roll with it. The space changed when lucky The Points Guy was told how much money banks pay bloggers to sell their plastic merchandise. And he started it right when the first 100,000 Signup Bonus offer rolled out with the introduction of the Chase Sapphire Reserve. My memory may not serve me well but he sold for several million dollars. And he opened the way for numerous other content creators to get into the murky business of affiliate marketing. So, pure hobbyists for the love of travel hacking slowly were overpowered by business driven people which then became bigger and bigger and now are big companies. Nothing wrong with turning this into a business. If you do things right like the people over at Frequent Miler. So, let me start a new paragraph lol…

Over the years numerous creators (along with many charlatans) got into “the game” (lol) that they would have NEVER started in the first place. If it was not lucrative being paid by the banks directly for selling plastic. As all these sites grew and brought in numerous newbies (fresh meat, they were 0/24 and so excited to “fly for free” burning 50k Delta miles to fly to Orlando from the East Coast lol) the banks started responding restricting the damage. You know, adding fees, restricting elite status and, most importantly, adding restrictions in getting approved for cards and now finally restricting even personal referrals for credit cards. Along the way, many bloggers went to work for big companies that had the manpower and the sales volume. So, banks are tightening the screws even more lately and bodies are dropping. When you see a pretty good YouTuber with actually really good credit card content drop out with 20,000 subscribers (I have 67 subscribers on YT, LOL), you know, the pain is real. Another YTer with 10,000 subscribers lays out the screwing being doled out by the banks lately, sadly most of it from my favorite bank. Oh wait, one of my favorite YTbers has not posted in days, hope he did not give up too!

Let’s get something straight. What this blog brings in is immaterial, thanks to my day job that just had a record quarter by the way, not to brag. And no I am not accepting new clients since Covid entered our lives. If I devoted the time I spent blogging to make more money…This is not me, I am wired differently. I wish we could go back 25 years when we weirdo travel hackers knew each other in Flyertalk. Those days are long gone. I didn’t make a single penny for the first few years of blogging. Then I added an Amazon shopping link until a blogger I had pissed off got Amazon to ban me. Then I turned it into a tiny business so I can get paid applying for credit cards for all of my own family apps and even deducting some legitimate expenses (annual fees and award taxes, etc.), activities I was doing anyway.

Over the years it showed a small profit, thanks again to the banks mostly. But this year banks started pushing that knife deeper and deeper with no end in sight. Credit card sale revenue has taken a huge hit (50% – 60%) and this blog will turn a loss for the first time this year it appears. No worries, I can use the tax benefit but my psyche is damaged because, you know, I am not a loser lol. Please do not ask to translate how much this blog is costing me per hour, this is my little obsession that I just can not believe it exists for 12.5+ years you guys. Blog life this long is NOT normal. It kind of fits my personality I guess. But I must admit I am getting tired, maybe the time has come when I take my family back to Greece..and never return here. If I had a dollar for every time I had this thought smh.

Frankly, I can not believe my second credit card vendor has not dropped me yet due to low sales. When this happens I move on. Because 1 coffee sold in June (thanks Carl) and 10 coffees sold in July to date (thanks David) will make the official loss booked here high enough to shatter my ego woohoo. I am giving myself a challenge for the summer, average 5 credit card sales and 15 Buy Me a Coffee sales per month. We now have:

June:

Credit card sales: 4  Buy me a Coffee sales: 1

July to date:

Credit card sales: 1 Buy me a Coffee sales: 10

Also, credit card personal referrals have also dried up. And with Chase not doing them anymore starting in October unless you are a brand new customer (starting with the Ink cards and no doubt expanding to the rest of its credit card portfolio) I am not even mentioning them here.

With my wife retiring next year (along with most clients) I am thinking ahead too…

I saw F1 The Movie. I enjoyed it. Especially the racing. There was one scene at the end with Brad Pitt in the zone racing to finish first, something he had been working on for decades. And I could see myself blogging in the zone racing to…folding this “venture” with a loss this year, sad.

Stay healthy my friends…

 

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As of today, I have burned 915,865 miles/points year to date (2,027,816 in 2024) and have 4,221,052 miles/points in the bank.