Good morning everyone. A few weeks ago, I was a guest on the Saverocity Observation Deck podcast. We talked about my Ireland trip (now cancelled), my British Airways / Match.com love story, and what’s in my iPhone wallet. The episode is ~40 mins for regular listeners or ~60 minutes if you are a Patreon paid subscriber (you will hear Laura make her podcast debut). Listen to the episode on your favorite podcasting app or listen online here. Have a great day everyone.
Good afternoon everyone. Yesterday, after hearing about the Europe travel ban, we decided to cancel our trip to Ireland. It’s disappointing but life is unpredictable right now. Thankfully, most of the trip was booked with miles and points, so cancelling was easy. I was able to cancel my Hyatt award stay and all 5 Radisson Blu award stays since I was outside the cancellation period and the hotel points were immediately redeposited to my accounts. I cancelled my rental car reservation booked through Priceline. I had purchased a few activities through Expedia and was able to cancel those as well. I should receive the credit card refund in a few days.
Lastly, I needed to cancel my round trip SFO-DUB Aer Lingus award ticket booked with British Airways Avios. Online, it shows a $55 cancellation fee per passenger. I called BA and asked if they could waive the cancellation fee but was told that the flight is still operating as scheduled and that if the phone agent cancelled the reservation, there would be an additional $25 fee. I decided to cancel the award ticket online and the BA Avios were immediately redeposited to my BA account. The cash refund should arrive in the next 1-2 weeks.
Good afternoon everyone. If you are working on your taxes this weekend and using TurboTax, don’t forget about the $5 TurboTax Chase Offer. $5 is not much, but it’s better than nothing. The Chase Offer expires on April 30, 2020, and should be triggered with any TurboTax purchase. I saw the same TurboTax offer on all my personal Chase credit cards but I decided to add and use the offer on my Chase Sapphire Reserve Credit Card since Chase Ultimate Reward Points are more valuable than Marriott, Hyatt, or IHG points.
Good morning everyone, I hope your weekend is going well (despite the daylight saving time change). Last week, I wrote Use American Express Chat to Change Airline Fee Credit Airline Choice (Almost 100% Automated). In that post, I showed you how you could easily change your airline choice for the American Express airline fee credit by using the AMEX chat feature. In today’s post, I will share my experience getting the airline fee credit for a few American Airlines seat upgrades. As you can see by this email from American Express, my airline choice was changed to American Airlines on 10:16am on February 29, 2020.
Good morning everyone, happy Friday! I just finished listening to the Miles to Memories podcast (latest episode) and enjoyed listening to them talk about Disney when they redeem miles vs. pay cash for flights. I don’t have a hard and fast rule that I live by, so I thought it would be fun to share my travel philosophy of when I redeem miles vs. pay cash for flights. I specifically mention flights because I plan to write a similar article about hotels and didn’t want to make this article too long. Lastly, when I use the word cash, that could mean paying for the flight with a credit card, or paying with an airline gift card, or using credit card rewards to pay for the flight – basically anything other than booking an award ticket with airline miles.
I also think it is important to share how many credit card reward points I have, since my thinking would be much different if I had 1,000 Chase Ultimate Reward Points vs. 1 million Chase Ultimate Reward Points. With that said, here are my transferable points balances, as of March 2020, from smallest to largest: