Good afternoon everyone. I will be flying down to Orange County this weekend to watch the Super Bowl with my family, so I decided to do a travel hackers meetup on Saturday afternoon. If you are free this Saturday, I would love to meet you and talk travel, miles and points, MS, and politics blogging.
Good morning everyone, I hope you all had a great weekend. Chase and Visa have created a new program called Chase Offers that is currently available to all Chase Marriott Rewards Credit Cardholders and all Chase Slate Credit Cardholders. The Chase Offers program was rolled out in mid November, but since I recently converted my JPMorgan Chase Ritz Carlton Credit Card to the Chase Marriott Rewards Credit Card, I am now eligible to signup, view, and activate Chase Offers.
Chase Offers are very simple. Sign into your Chase Offers account, link merchant specific offers to your credit card, make a qualifying purchase at that specific merchant, and receive cash back as a statement credit to your credit card. Creating a Chase Offers account is free and easy, just click here to get started. If you have the Chase Slate Credit Card, the steps will be the same, but you can click here.
Good morning everyone, happy Friday! After a quick stop in Guatemala City with a 1 night stay at the Courtyard Marriott Guatemala City and a fun afternoon trip to the Guatemala City Zoo, we flew from Guatemala City (GUA) to San Salvador (SAL), the capital of El Salvador. We stayed at the Sheraton Presidente San Salvador Hotel using 4,000 SPG Points (it would have been only 3,000 SPG Points if we stayed on the weekend).
The property is beautiful, with lots of palm trees and country flags near the hotel entrance. The hotel is ~45 minutes away from the airport, so we asked the hotel to organize a taxi for us (cost was $30). After we checked out, we used Uber to get back to the airport for ~$21. Checking into the hotel was easy and we were upgraded to a nice room on the club floor thanks to my friend’s SPG Platinum Elite Status. We had access to the Club Lounge (great food and snacks) and free breakfast in the restaurant.
Sheraton Presidente San Salvador Exterior. Image source: https://www.starwoodhotels.com/sheraton/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=1597&language=en_US
Updated 5:15am PT on 1/29: I uploaded an image of the letter I received from my retention call to Barclays. Scroll down to the bottom of the post for more info.
Good morning everyone, another day, another blog post about free money from Barclays. On Monday, I wrote a blog post regarding a $10 statement credit I received from Barclays for adding an authorized user to my Barclays Arrival Plus Credit Card. Yesterday, I called Barclays about my Barclays JetBlue Plus Credit Card. The $99 annual fee posted a few days ago, so I called Barclays to see if there were any retention offers available. I haven’t put much spend on the credit card since meeting the minimum spend but I have racked up thousands of JetBlue TrueBlue points with Amazon.
The first offer I received was for half the annual fee to be waived ($49.50). That was pretty good, but then I asked if there were any other offers available. Yes, she could also tack on a targeted spending offer to get 5,000 bonus JetBlue TrueBlue points for spending $1,000 in the next 90 days. Sold! I accepted that offer. The $49.50 statement credit posted to my account the next day.
Recently, I had one of those “the devil’s in the details” experiences I want to share with you because as we all know, details are important, especially with credit card benefits! I’ve had the JPMorgan Chase Ritz Carlton Credit Card for quite a few years already, and for the first time this past year, I just couldn’t use the full $300 worth of travel reimbursement credit. The benefits I receive from other credit cards mean I don’t pay for checked bags. I had no flights where I could pay for a seat upgrade, and how many fruit and cheese plates can one eat? So I only spent about $100 of the $300 travel credit. This made me wonder if maybe it was time to let go of this credit card.
Similar to Grant, I inquired and asked Chase which credit cards I could get to replace my JPMorgan Chase Ritz Carlton Credit Card. I was still in decision-making mode when I read a comment on Grant’s post. This reader is a huge fan of the JPMorgan Chase Ritz Carlton Credit Card. He laid out his formula for how he gets so much benefit from the credit card. He feels people are short sighted when it comes to the benefits of the card, and cancel it in haste. Hmm, was I missing something?