Here’s your chance. I will my best to cover your questions. Please leave requests in the comments section.
As my boss once wrote making a similar request on his blog, “The only promise is that of weak monotonicity, namely that your mention won’t lower the chance of the topic being covered.”
In other words, I won’t promise to cover everything, though I’ll read and ponder everything that’s written here in the comments.
It may take me awhile to work through, goodness knows there are things I’m behind on (trip reports, cough, trip reports…).
But I’d love to hear from you!
Thanks for your advice brteacher- I was thinking it might be difficult. I’ll focus on Delta on the outbound and see if they have anything she can book.
KrisFlyer has two redemption charts, one for Singapore metal, and one for Star Alliance partners. For flights to Asia the Star Alliance chart appears better. How does one take advantage of this while trying to book a transpacific flight in Singapore business class?
I would like to know as soon as the info becomes available, what will be the changes, if any, to American’s program to qualify for Platinum Executive status.
If I were to down grade a Citi Prestige to a no fee card, how long would I have to wait to reupgrade it and would I be eligible for a 2nd flight reimbursement in the same year? I was thinking it would be a good idea to apply in 2015, pay annual fee, get sign-up bonus, get the 2015 flight credit, get the 2016 flight credit, and then when they asked for 2016 annual fee, downgrade to free card, then several months later in 2016 re-upgrade to the prestige and pay the fee. I know I wouldn’t get a sign-up bonus but maybe I would get a second flight reimbursement in 2016 to offset the cost of the annual fee and not have to have a second hard pull on my credit (plus the 2017 credit).
AA.com has a promotion codes blank when searching for revenue tickets. I have never heard of them offering these ie 10% off. How, when, and where do they release these, if ever?
Any Hints on amex purchases to accumulate totals towards 25k (Delta diamond waiver) Looked at a past article on stock purchases (Level3) and that does not appear to be available anymore.
Thank you
Tim
Can you recommend a reputable seller of discount international business class tickets?
@Vinhsynd- not sure where you are seeing the value in the KrisFlyer Star Alliance redemption chart. The SQ redemption award chart looks uniformly better, and also remember when you book an SQ redemption on-line on the SQ site, you get an additional 15% discount off the redemption rate.
Going back to your original question, which I believe is you want to book a Star Alliance redemption using KrisFlyer points- the only way to do that is to call the KrisFlyer center. Remember that KrisFlyer charges fuel surcharges on all redemptions if the airlines has fuel surcharges. I think the only KF *A redemption that makes sense is US domestic first class, but would be curious to see what other itineraries you thought provided good value.
If I spend $10,000 in the first year of card ownership on the Ritz-Carlton credit card, thus earning Gold status for an additional year with RC/Marriott, then cancel the card, will the gold status be canceled as well?
Assuming United allows stop overs on a one-way award, why do they insist you use multi-city, which then codes as two different flights for different award costs?
e.g. WAS – KUL 40K miles, has stops in Dubai and BKK.
I called to request a stop over in BKK and was told that I would have to get one flight from WAS to BKK at 40K miles plus another flight from BKK too KUL for another 17500 miles..
Does United allow a free stop over on one way award flights, and if so how do you get it and avoid the multi-city, higher point award conundrum?
Thanks!
A few questions:
1) What do you do with the cards after you have met the minimum requirement for earning the desired points? Do you keep them? Close/cancel them? Such that it won’t hurt your credit score.
2) Besides the usual ‘extra’ points rewarded to hotel/travel/airline, sometimes promotions for restaurants, etc, which cards do you put your ‘other’ spend on? I guess this is an indirect question of which program’s points are worth the most?
3) Since devaluations and programs are constantly changing, do you have an updates list of which programs points are worth the most?
4) Updated list of which credit card promotions are the best?
Thank you GARY!!
Gary, any strategy to fly from the east coast (BOS,NYC,BDL) to London I have 315K AA miles and started searching for First class tickets 330 days out for April May 2016. No AA or US flights are available, the only thing they show is BA which cost 125K round trip which I have no problem with but the $1200 each fuel surcharge is crazy. I also have Amex MR miles about 350K. Can suggest any other options I should be looking at..
Hi Gary,
One thing unique about citi cards signup bonus is that, as you described, “And now what’s typical is that you aren’t eligible for a bonus if you’ve had the given card product opened or closed in the past 18 months”, which is also the language I read on most of the offer pages.
Most bloggers (including yourself) explains that as “In other words, you can’t have had the card in 18 months (rather than not having received the bonus in 18 months).”
However, by literally reading the sentence–the word they used is “opened” rather than “open”–which to me refers to the action of opening an account, rather the state of keeping an account open. Therefore, my interpretation is that if one opened the same type of card account more than 18 months ago, but keeps it open (i.e., didn’t close it within the last 18 months), then one would qualify for the bonus again.
This interpretation certainly sounds interesting–not sure how you sees it, and if you have any know examples that would prove or disprove this. Thanks~
@Max I have read others suggesting that as well but I do not have a lot of data points
A question for you, triggered by the recent Chinese Yuan devaluation. I have a trip to various Asian countries booked for 9 months from now. A variety of their currencies are currently trading at their weakest values relative to the dollar in years (in some cases in a decade or more). While I know I’m going to lose some of that to whatever bank I use to exchange currency, and while currencies can certainly continue to weaken further, it is very tempting to exchange some of the money I know I’ll need for the trip now to lock in those rates. In my case I can afford to have that money sitting around for nine months doing very little for me but hedging against exchange rate fluctuations. Do you ever do anything like this for upcoming trips?