Tag Archives: Amazon

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Reload your Amazon Gift Card Balance with Amazon Cash (+ $10 Promo Credit)

(Hat Tip to Doctor of Credit’s post: Free $10 Amazon Credit with $20 Amazon Cash Reload)

Good morning everyone!  A few days ago, Amazon introduced a new way to reload your Amazon gift card balance, called Amazon Cash.  Instead of buying an Amazon gift card in store, scratching off the code, and entering the code into your Amazon account, you can now create a specific barcode that will load money directly to your Amazon account.  Just show the barcode at the register of qualifying stores, pay for your purchase, and your gift card balance will be instantly updated.

If you act before July 31, 2017, you can get a $10 promo credit (that must be used before August 31, 2017) if you use your Amazon Cash barcode to load $20 or more.  One of the qualifying stores that accepts Amazon Cash is CVS, so I went to my local CVS and tried it out.  Here are the promo terms:

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My Hotel Pet Peeve: Bathrooms with no Towel Hooks/Racks (and my Simple Solution)

As I take a look at what I pack each time I take a trip, I realize that one item in particular is pretty weird. I figure if I take weird items when I travel, others must do the same thing. Grant isn’t very weird, so maybe I’m the weirdest member on the TWG team! The expression “misery loves company” doesn’t apply here, because after all, with the advantages we miles and points people have, what’s to feel miserable about? But it sure would help me feel better if I knew you all took some weird necessary items along with you when you travel :)

So I’ll start by telling you mine. For a while now, I’ve been mystified and frustrated by the bathroom designs I see in some hotels. It’s not one particular chain, and I even see this in boutique and one-off hotels. Why don’t they give us towel hooks in the bathrooms? Maybe even towel racks? Am I asking for too much here? What are they thinking I should do with my towels?

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USPS Lost my VirtualPostMail Package Full of Gift Cards & Credit Cards

Buenos dias everyone.  A few months ago, I wrote about VirtualPostMail, the service I use to receive, scan, and forward my physical mail. I typically have them collect items for me over the course of a few weeks, and then I select the items I want to keep and have them shipped to wherever I’m going next. Since I was heading to Washington, DC for work last week, I asked VPM to mail a package to my post office box in Washington, DC a few days before I was going to arrive. This package included several important items:

  • My replacement AT&T Access More Credit Card (since someone tried to hack my account)
  • My new Discover It Credit Card in a different design
  • My Amazon Prime Store Credit Card
  • 1 $50 Hotels.com gift card from Amazon
  • 2 $50 Petco gift cards
  • 6 iTunes gift cards from Staples (3 x $100 and 3 x $50)
  • 2 sets of Cabela’s gift cards I purchased from SVM on eBay
  • My Hyatt Explorist welcome packet
  • My new Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance card
A screenshot of 12 envelopes of various sizes from my virtualpostmail dashboard

Will I ever see these envelopes?

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My Recent Citi Forward & Premier Credit Card Retention / Targeted Spending Offers

Good morning everyone, I hope you had a festive Drinko Cinco de Mayo yesterday.  A few weeks ago, I called Citi to convert my Citi Prestige Credit Card into a Citi Dividend Credit Card.  During that call, I asked the rep if it were possible to convert my Citi Forward Credit Card to another Citi Dividend Credit Card.  She checked the card’s offers and told me that no product change / conversion offers were available.  Undeterred, I asked if she saw any other offers on the credit card and she read off a few retention / targeted spending offers.  After going through all available offers, I accepted an offer for 3,000 bonus Citi Thank You Points after spending $300 in the next 30-90 days (I don’t remember the exact number of days, since I was planning on completing the spending requirement the following day).

To complete the spending requirement, I loaded / reloaded my Amazon gift card balance with $301 using my Citi Forward Credit Card.  A long time ago, the Citi Forward Credit Card used to offer 5x Citi Thank You Points at restaurants and bookstores (including Amazon).  But unfortunately, on June 4, 2016, Citi changed the earning rate of the Citi Forward Credit Card from 5x to 2x at restaurants and bookstores, thereby reducing my spending on the card from a lot to $0.

Fun fact: The rep mentioned that as long as there is a purchase once every 25 statement cycles (~2 years), Citi will not close the credit card for inactivity.

Reload Amazon Gift Card Balance

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My Blogiversary Amazon $10 eGift Card Giveaway Winners

Good morning everyone, happy Wednesday!  A few days ago, I held a giveaway for 10 $10 Amazon eGift Cards to celebrate Travel with Grant’s 4 year blogiversary.  I wanted to give a big thank you to everyone who read that post and left a comment.  Reading the comments brought a big smile to my face… then slowly disappeared as I started dreading the thought of picking just 10 winners.  Even though Travel with Grant is 4 years old and I have written close to 1,000 posts during that time, I was happy to see that some of my other writers (Shelli, Tonei, Whitney and Bill) wrote posts that you thought were really good.  In their honor, I picked 4 comments that related to their posts and I picked 6 comments that related to my posts.

Here are the winning comments (in no particular order) for my posts:

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