Stop It

I’ve become increasingly annoyed by an expression journalists and commentators use to describe public policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. It seems like every day I read or hear somewhere that there’s “no plan” to deal with the surge in cases and overwhelmed hospital ICU’s, there’s “no plan” to deal with the looming economic catastrophe when expanded unemployment benefits expire at the end of July and the nation is gripped by an unprecedented wave of evictions, there’s “no plan” to provide education or childcare when the school year is supposed to begin in August or September, and so on.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. There is a plan, and denying it won’t make it any less horrifying.

Stop saying there’s no plan just because the plan is horrifying

If you spend much time at all around poker players, you quickly learn to identify a kind of charming fatalism: obviously poker players prefer to win hands rather than lose them, but there’s no skill in being dealt winning or losing combinations of playing cards. What poker players take the most pride in is not winning, but correctly calculating their odds of winning, and then betting, calling, raising and folding accordingly.

Poker players, and occasionally economists, tend to assert that this attitude is natural, common and desirable: people do, and should, go through life making calculated bets on various outcomes, and those with better calculators see more success than those who calculate poorly, just as over the course of a week, year, or career poker players who are able to calculate their odds faster and better tend to win money from those who calculate poorly or slowly (or not at all, like most of us weekend poker warriors). The retired player Annie Duke wrote a whole book with this very premise.

There are two related problems with this idea: humans are exceptionally bad at calculating odds, and humans know they are exceptionally bad at calculating odds. If only one were true, there might still be hope: good calculators would rise over bad calculators, precisely as good poker players over time outperform bad poker players. But because people are self-aware enough to know they’re bad calculators, they largely refuse to participate. To put it slightly differently, getting to the final table at the World Series of Poker requires a tremendous amount of skill, but which of the nine highly-skilled players takes a ring home reverts to a matter of luck.

What are sometimes called cognitive “errors” are often adaptations to our self-conscious inadequacy as calculators. For example, “loss aversion” is sometimes used disparagingly to describe the willingness of people to “overpay” for products like life insurance or annuitized income compared to their actuarial value. But it’s at least equally true to say the so-called “error” is a recognition of the difficulty of quickly and accurately calculating the value of those products. Likewise, health insurance deductibles and cost sharing are supposed to encourage people to carefully calibrate the amount of care they need and are willing and able to pay for. Unsurprisingly, people hate them because they recognize the task is beyond their abilities.

For precisely the same reason, rich democratic societies implement income redistribution, old-age and disability pensions, and public service provision not as well-calibrated bets on their likely costs and benefits, but in acknowledgment of the uncertainty of those costs and benefits. It’s better to have SNAP benefits and not need them than to need them and not have them.

I say all this because it gets to the core of the public policy response to the pandemic. It is incorrect to say that there is “no plan” to respond to the wave of death, homelessness, and poverty about to sweep the country. The problem is that the nation’s governing party is attempting to follow Annie Duke’s advice and “think in bets,” perfectly sizing policy according to the weighted average of all the possible outcomes. As we saw in the example of poker, the fact that public policy has failed does not mean the calculation was wrong — even a perfectly sized bet will lose if the cards fall the wrong way. But that is why we do not ask and should not ask our politicians to think in bets: we know, as they should know, that it is not something we or they are capable of doing with any precision.

Over and over again the Republican Party has placed bets on the course of the virus, and over and over again the nation has lost those bets. This does not mean the bets were improperly sized, or the odds incorrectly calculated. But it does mean our leaders were attempting something they should have known they have no capacity to do, and so we pay the price for their hubris.

Stop saying schools can re-open

While the idea of the Senate going on a three-week holiday while the country braces for impact is revolting, I find the best illustration of this problem to be various states’ plans to begin the school year on schedule at the end of August or beginning of September (a bit less than two months away). Perhaps students will alternate weeks of in-person instruction in order to allow for social distancing, or perhaps they’ll attend on alternating days, or perhaps we’ll repurpose recreational facilities or football fields to allow mass instruction on Jumbotron screens.

This is fiction. By October 1, virtually every school in the country will be closed. I can say this with complete confidence not because I know anything about epidemiology, disease transmission, vaccine development, or the latest clinical trial results. Instead, I say it with complete confidence because it is an example of public officials doing something they cannot and should not try to do: perfectly calibrate a policy response so that the downside risks and harms are perfectly matched by the upside risks and benefits.

Again, if you don’t like the outcome of millions of parents forced to choose between working or childcare, paying rent or facing eviction, feeding themselves or feeding their children, living independently or moving in with friends or family, then say so. But don’t say there’s no plan. That is the plan.

Stop spreading the virus

Of course, we’ve known the solution to the pandemic for months, because it has worked everywhere it has been tried: stay at home whenever possible, practice social distancing, wear a face covering over your nose and mouth whenever possible, wash your hands with soap and warm water whenever possible, use a 60%+ alcohol hand sanitizer when soap and water aren’t available.

But note, this is the opposite of thinking in bets. Don’t go to bars or restaurants when they “aren’t too crowded.” Don’t hold parties with “just a few friends.” Don’t leave your face covering at home when you’re just running a “quick errand.” You aren’t capable of making those calculations, and you know it.

Of course, if our rulers knew it, we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.

The Plastiq website redesign and a "known issue" with recurring payments

Plastiq occupies a strange space in the world of travel hacking, since almost everyone seems to have strong feelings about it, but for a wide range of different reasons. When Five Back Visa Gift Cards could be used to manufacture spend at eligible merchants, you’d often be left with a “rump” balance on the cards once the cash back posted, which was easy and cheap to liquidate with Plastiq. When certain prepaid debit cards could be liquidated for a 1% fee, it was a convenient way to scale up your volume from home, albeit at a relatively high cost.

But my favorite use of Plastiq has nothing to do with manufactured spend. Rather, it’s been to automate transactions made with bank-issued debit cards, like the 12 monthly charges required to trigger an elevated interest rate on the Consumers Credit Union Free Rewards Checking account, or to maximize deposits to “round-up savings” accounts which can only be funded by making debit card transactions (ideally transactions ending with $0.01, so the maximum amount of $0.99 is transferred to your savings account).

Plastiq broke their website

The beauty of using Plastiq for these transactions is they require minimal maintenance: you can schedule monthly or weekly transactions far into the future, requiring upkeep only when a payment schedule is about to expire or a debit card needs to have its expiration date or CVV code updated.

What I found when I went to restart another 6 months or so of daily round-up transactions was that my Plastiq account had been “upgraded” to their new interface. Most or all of the same features were still there, but they were all a little more annoying to access. Instead of selecting your payment card at the beginning of a payment, you select it at the end. There’s an ambiguous prompt to upload a billing statement or invoice from your payee. But worst of all, when I went to set up more recurring payments, the website returned a generic message: “Sorry, an unexpected error occurred. Please try again.”

There were two odds things about this: I was able to schedule one-time payments for the future, and all my existing recurring payments (for my Consumers Credit Union account) were still active. I just couldn’t configure new recurring payments.

Fortunately, Plastiq has a pretty good live chat feature, so I hopped on the horn with one of their representatives and was told that:

“This is a known issue we are working on fixing. At this time, we recommend making single payments scheduled for future dates. I have escalated your case and will reach out to let you know when this issue is resolved.”

Obviously, not ideal, but presumably the scheduled payment feature with either get fixed or permanently removed eventually.

A “charitable” alternative

A reader e-mailed a few months back saying that he’d set up a public website to help automate transactions like these. This seemed like a pretty good idea (an idea so good long-time subscribers may remember I actually attempted something similar many years ago), but with Plastiq on the fritz, I thought I’d finally cruise over and check it out.

The website is called Automate To Donate, and as the name suggests, it configures repeating payments which go, not to your student loan, mortgage, or HELOC, but instead to a charity called “Giving to the Givers.” Now, this charity does not appear to have any public presence whatsoever, so this is absolutely not an endorsement of any kind, but it does at least appear to actually exist as a “DOMESTIC NOT-FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION” in New York State, and is listed by the IRS as a “Public Charity,” so let your tax preparer know if you’re eligible to deduct charitable contributions.

Conclusion

Hopefully Plastiq will work out the kinks in their new website soon, but in the meantime, if you have trouble setting up recurring payments, you should still be able to schedule one-time payments for the future. I’ll probably just set mine up a week at a time until the problem is resolved, which isn’t the end of the world. Alternately, you might try out Automate to Donate in order to configure recurring transactions in variable amounts. Just be sure that your transactions are actually counting towards your requirements; in the past, I’ve seen PayPal transactions processed as “PIN-less debit” and not count towards my 12-transaction requirement.

How I'm thinking about traveling safely

It has been interesting, to say the least, to see how the travel industry has responded to the present crisis so far.

Air travel, for example, never fully shut down as it did in the days after September 11, 2001. Routes were cut, which, perhaps counter-productively, meant the few remaining flights were fuller than they would otherwise have been, increasing passengers’ chance of exposure to the novel coronavirus.

Hotels in the most affected cities have been closed or converted into quarantine shelters for those without other options, as in Washington, DC, where residents of crowded group shelters that test positive or are exposed to coronavirus-positive individuals have been moved into private rooms at places like the Hotel Arboretum.

Likewise, Amtrak reduced the frequency of their most popular Northeast Regional service, and suspended some long-distance services, while reducing capacity to 50% on the remaining trains — quite a change from the typical procedure, where conductors frequently demand you move your bags off unoccupied seats because “every seat will be occupied.”

Finally, car rental companies have seen their own troubles, with Hertz already filing for Chapter 11 restructuring after finding itself unable to service its staggering $17 billion in debt, although it will continue to operate, at least for now.

From a traveler’s perspective, most of us are making the simplest, easiest decision to stay in place until the virus is in retreat. But there’s a lot of room between sheltering at home and flying to Missouri for a weekend pool party. Here’s how I’m thinking through the situation.

Are you the vector or the victim?

By now it seems most people have internalized that the reason we take precautions like social distancing, mask-wearing, hand-washing, and contact-free payment and delivery is not to protect ourselves, but to protect those we come into contact with. A highly contagious disease with a long, asymptomatic incubation period means once you’ve contracted the virus, you can easily transmit it to others whether or not you ever develop symptoms.

This provides a useful frame of reference: taking for granted that you’re following best practices, are you more likely to be exposing others to the virus or to be exposed yourself? To give the simplest example, someone traveling from Rhode Island or Massachusetts, which have high and rising case numbers, to Montana or Alaska, which have low and flat numbers, should consider themself a potential vector of the disease. They pose much more risk to the population in their destination than the destination population poses to them.

This principle works in reverse as well: if you’re traveling from a relatively unscathed area to a coronavirus hotspot, then you’re much more likely to contract the infection than spread it.

Again, obviously you should not be traveling long distances and you should certainly not be having close contact with strangers. But if you have to travel, this is one way of thinking about whether you pose a bigger risk to others, or they pose a bigger risk to you. Traveling from a coronavirus hotspot and visiting a crowded bar or restaurant that has remained open in an unaffected region is one way to make sure that region doesn’t stay unaffected for long.

One extreme version of this exists for folks who have already received a confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis, recovered, and received a serology test indicating the present of antibodies. Due to the possibility of false positives, I wouldn’t be confident that I’d had the disease and recovered unless I’d received at least two positive results (i.e., two positive coronavirus results, two positive antibody results, or ideally one of each).

I wrote about getting pneumonia in February, when COVID-19 was already present in the community but was still believed to be only affecting folks who had recent travel to Asia or who had come into contact with them, so I was never tested for the coronavirus (I was also uninsured, which didn’t help). To find out whether I had actually contracted COVID-19, I’d now need to get a serology test, but since I don’t have any symptoms (or travel plans) there’s no plausible medical reason to get one, although apparently there’s a clinic down in Virginia that will give one to anybody, if they’re willing to pay for it.

Safest: dispersed camping with your own gear

The safest way to take a trip while minimizing the risk to yourself and others is to avoid them, which is possible in large parts of the United States through what’s known as “dispersed camping.” Essentially, it is free and legal to camp for up to 21 consecutive days on National Forest land where there are no amenities and services. So-called “developed” National Forest recreation areas have their own rules.

Unfortunately, the National Forest website appears to have been designed in the early 1990’s and hasn’t been updated since, so it’s a bit of a struggle to navigate. To save you some trouble, this is the method I found to find nearby options:

1. First, visit the National Forest interactive map, and poke around to see what options might interest you. Don’t click on any of the camping icons, since those refer to developed campgrounds, not dispersed camping areas.

2. Once you’ve found some areas of interest, go to the Forest Service homepage and search for the National Forest you’re interest in using the dropdown boxes on the righthand side.

3. That will take you to the page for that specific forest, where you should be able to navigate to the “dispersed camping” page, like this one for the George Washington & Jefferson National Forests.

The term “dispersed camping” is a bit funny to me because it’s what I grew up calling “camping.” You go for a hike, set up a tent, cook some beans, and go to sleep. It usually rains. Only in adulthood did I realize that people in other places call it “camping” when you go to a big park with cleared ground, showers, toilets, and even firewood for sale. That’s not meant to disparage that experience (I had a great time on Madeline Island at a lovely campground), it just happens to be different than what I grew up doing.

Less safe: drive somewhere alone and maintain distance

Last year my partner and I rented a car and drove to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, which is a few hours drive from Washington, DC, depending on traffic. We stayed at a fairly rundown Quality Inn that appeared to only have a single employee, and spent most of our time wandering around the site of John Brown’s raid on the national armory and the West Virginian portion of the Appalachian Trail.

During the present crisis, this trip would obviously not be risk-free, for all the reasons discussed above. Renting the car and checking in and out of the hotel would present two obviously unnecessary interactions — unnecessary in the sense that if we didn’t take the trip, we wouldn’t have them. West Virginia has a much lower prevalence rate, for now, than the District does, so if we were asymptomatic carriers we might run the risk of introducing the virus there, while also running the somewhat smaller risk of contracting it there and introducing it to our building or neighborhood.

Riskiest: go somewhere safe, quarantine, and stay

Finally, on the other extreme, you might decide to relocate permanently or semi-permanently to a relatively safe destination. Here I am not talking about taking a vacation to Singapore just because Singapore has its outbreak under control. Doing that simply risks introducing the virus to Singapore anew. I mean that if you are retired, unemployed, or able to work remotely, you might consider relocating to a destination that has re-opened or is in the process of re-opening, taking into account the fact that you are a potential vector for the spread of the disease.

14 days in quarantine sounds like a lot, but if you’re already observing a stay-at-home order in the United States, then spending the same amount of time in a hotel with decent wi-fi might not seem like such a high price to pay, if at the other end you emerge into a society with the amenities or human contact you need to maintain your sanity.

Conclusion

Right now my household is staying on the side of extreme safety. Even if we both happened to be tested and discovered we had COVID-19 antibodies, flying across the country to visit our families is off the table for now, so short drives to isolated nearby locales are likely the extent of our travel for the next few months. This disease is a killer, and we don’t want to die or expose anyone else unnecessarily.

But I understand everyone’s risk calculus is different, so hopefully this helps you develop your own framework for when and how you’ll be traveling again.

Introducing the Manifesto, on the Milenomics Podcast Network

Today I get to share some exciting news about a project that’s been in the works for a few weeks: the Manifesto podcast, hosted by yours truly on the Milenomics Podcast Network.

Long-time readers know that the Milenomics Squared podcast is one my favorite travel hacking resources: it’s on the very short list of travel hacking resources I’m willing to pay for. The hosts reached out to me a few weeks ago to ask if I wanted to join them by hosting my own show on their feed. I obviously said yes (or I wouldn’t be writing this post and you wouldn’t be reading it).

Why a podcast?

I love writing, but it has some limits as a form of communication. I sit down at my desk, think through an issue or idea, then hit publish. Readers then pile into the comments telling me I’m an idiot. Sometimes they’re even right!

What I hope to achieve with the podcast is to replicate at least part of the experience of the subscribers-only meetups I organized once or twice a year back when travel was possible: more fluid conversations that can bring in different experiences and perspectives. People telling me I’m an idiot in real time!

As a jumping off point, the podcast will feature short conversations and interviews with friends, readers, and subscribers. I assume there’ll be some monologues and rants sprinkled in as well. Over time, hopefully we’ll figure out what people love and what they hate. The point of the podcast is for people to listen; I’m not doing it for my health!

How to get the podcast

The easiest way to get the podcast is to head over to the Milenomics Squared Patreon account and join the “Podcast Network & Slack Channel Access” tier, which costs $14.95 per month. That gives you access to all the podcasts on the network and their members-only Slack server, which, for the uninitiated, is like a bunch of chatrooms dedicated to different topics in the miles, points, and travel hacking world. Once you subscribe, you’ll receive an e-mail with a personalized podcast URL you can plug into any podcast player to see the entire library of past and current episodes of all the podcasts produced by Milenomics.

I thought the Patreon was worth paying for even before I joined the podcasting network. If you are able to use even one tip you learn there, the membership will more than pay for itself. If you can’t or won’t use any of the tips you learn there, then cancel your membership. Easy peasy.

On the other hand, $14.95 is a lot of money, and $15 also happen to be the amount I charge folks to subscribe to this blog. That’s why the folks at Milenomics agreed to create a separate podcast feed to host just episodes of my podcast. I’ll be sending that link out to my subscribers shortly.

So, put simply, there are two totally different products:

• Milenomics Podcast Network: all Milenomics podcasts and access to the Milenomics Slack channel.

• Blog subscription: support this blog, receive my occasional Subscribers-only Newsletters, and access to all episodes of my new podcast (but not other Milenomics content).

Two great tastes that taste great together.

Is anything else changing?

Nope! I’ll still be blogging here and at Saverocity, still be tweeting, and still be sending out occasional Subscribers-only Newsletters. If you don’t like podcasts, or you don’t like my podcasts, you don’t have to do anything. If you do like podcasts, or are at least podcast-curious, then you have the choice of receiving fresh new audio content every few weeks.

Mixed (overall negative) changes to Consumers Credit Union Rewards Checking

I wrote recently over at my personal finance blog about my favorite high-interest checking account, the Rewards Checking account offered by Consumers Credit Union. In case any readers are as big of fans of the account as I am, I wanted to discuss some upcoming changes, and my reaction to them.

The bad: rates are dropping

I’m putting this first because there’s no sugar-coating these changes: each interest rate tier is dropping by one percentage point: the lowest tier from 3.09% to 2.09% APY, the next from 4.09% to 3.09%, and the highest from 5.09% to 4.09%. For an account with a maxed out $10,000 balance, this will drop your annual interest income by $100.

If you only meet the lowest tier requirements each month (or have more than $10,000 in cash savings), then you should seriously consider moving your balance over to a competitor like Western Vista, which offers 4% interest on balances up to $15,000 (for now).

If you’re meeting the highest interest tier requirements, then while the reduction in rates is painful, there’s little you can do about it: 4.09% APY is still significantly higher than any other current offers I’m aware of.

The good: deposit and transaction requirements are changing

There are a couple moving pieces here but all three changes are positive:

1. in April and May, you need only make 6, instead of 12, signature debit transactions in order to meet your debit transaction requirement.

2. Beginning immediately and going forward, your total signature debit transactions do not need to add up to $100 per month.

3. Beginning immediately and going forward, you can meet the $500 monthly deposit requirement through mobile check deposit, in addition to direct deposit.

The 3.09% and 4.09% interest rate tiers will still require $500 and $1,000 in Consumers CU credit card spend, respectively.

Conclusion

On balance, these changes are negative: the reason to use a high-interest checking account is to earn as much interest as possible, so any reduction in the interest you earn is a negative change!

But they’re not entirely negative: I meet my debit transaction requirement using the Plastiq bill payment service, which previously meant making eleven $1 payments and one $89 payment to reach the $100 monthly transaction requirement. Starting in June I’ll be able to make twelve $1 payments, which will make both my Fee-Free Dollars and my student loan balances last longer.

I use my Consumers Rewards Checking account as my primary bank account since it offers unlimited ATM fee reimbursement in addition to the high interest rate, and I’ll probably continue to do so for now, although I’ll continue to re-evaluate as the situation evolves, and will of course keep my beloved readers updated.

Some personal news

Yesterday I lost my job, over what I would call a difference of opinion: I thought I was doing a good job, and my boss thought I was doing a bad job, and my boss had the tie-breaking vote.

Background

About 3 years ago I started working extremely part time in a remote “back-office” position. It was fun and I was learning a lot. Over time, the firm grew, and I got more hours. As I spent more time at that job, I had less and less time for my blogs (here and at Saverocity) and my readers. That felt bad, but I was making so much more money working than I ever did blogging that it seemed like the right trade-off. For the last few months I’ve been working full-time, and have barely had any time to write anything, and that felt really bad, but once again, the money was good so I felt ok about the trade-off.

And then I got fired, which obviously doesn’t make the trade-off look very good in hindsight.

Everything is fine for now

I’ve been incredibly fortunate that as my blogging has slowed down, and I only managed to get out a Subscribers-only Newsletter every month or two, a lot of subscribers stuck with me, so I still have a trickle of income coming in from my beloved readers.

After battling through 3 different broken IT systems, I have also put in my applications in for unemployment insurance, SNAP and Medicaid (after enjoying precisely one month of ACA exchange coverage), and while there will no doubt be lots of back and forth with those offices, now I have plenty of time to fill out paperwork, so I’m not terribly worried about paying the bills for the next few months.

All of which is to say, I’m not going to start a GoFundMe anytime soon. I’m not asking for charity — for now!

Going forward

On the other hand, now that blogging is going to be my only source of income for the time being, you should definitely subscribe to my blogs! To that end, I’m immediately reducing the price of a blog subscription from $25 to $15 per month. All subscribers with $20 and $25 subscriptions will see their recurring charge reduced to $15 (obviously readers with older subscriptions won’t see their rate increase).

Is this a bit counter-intuitive? It sure is! Reducing existing subscription rates will decrease my income from subscriptions by a couple hundred bucks a month, and needless to say, I’m not exactly thrilled about that. But the goal is to get my Newsletters and content in front of as many eyes as possible, to convince as many people as possible that my content is worth supporting. If the blog, my Subscribers-only Newsletters, and the (now vast) Newsletter Archive aren’t worth $15 per month, then so be it.

But I’d rather find out sooner than later!

Conclusion

If you like the blog, and it’s not going to break the bank, please subscribe! This site has always been a labor of love, and it’s an incredible feeling to make a living helping people pay as little as possible for the trips that they want to take. If you can’t afford a subscription for now, rest assured the blog itself will always be free (and hopefully a lot busier, now that I’ve got some free time on my hands).

The travel hacking resources I rely on today

Sorry to regular readers for the shortage of posts lately, I’ve been suffering from a combination of computer trouble (nothing new there) and website trouble (my Google ads started breaking the site) which together made it increasingly frustrating to do anything but basic maintenance.

But I appear to have rendered the website usable again, so hopefully it will get a little livelier around here!

Today I thought I’d share some the travel hacking resources I get the most value out of. This list has changed a lot over time. When I first got into the game, my primary resources were other blogs and the FlyerTalk forums. That’s changed for two reasons: the FlyerTalk forums were redesigned and are now agonizing to navigate, which drove away users and reduced their value further, sending the site into a kind of death spiral; I haven’t visited FlyerTalk in months, if not years.

Meanwhile, I’ve mostly stopped visiting even the high-quality blogs I used to rely on, since they’ve all undergone a kind of homogenization. My working theory is that all the bloggers read the same “how-to” guide on building a reputation as an influencer, and they all adopted the exact same techniques. The most obvious example is the difference between a blog that posts when the author has something to say, and a blog that posts whether or not the author has anything to say. Worse, when a blog goes on to hire two or three additional writers it will inevitably end up with page after page of clutter before you’re able to find any useful information.

Anyway, enough grousing. While I don’t read many blogs anymore, I still consume a lot of travel hacking content. This is where I get it.

Static pages

Fresh content can be overrated; I created a lot of static pages around here (sadly, now mostly out-of-date) because I wanted to be able to easily find the exact information I needed. I still rely on two static resources all the time:

• My Hotel Promotions page is the first place I go when I’m planning a hotel stay. I try to keep it up-to-date, and briefly describe each promotion with a link directly to the registration page. There are a few other sites that try to do something similar, like Loyalty Lobby, but their formatting drives me nuts, and they include targeted and hyper-specific promotions (earn 500 points when you stay at a Holiday Inn Express in Mainland China!), and usually link to their own blog posts about each promotion instead of directly to the registration site itself.

• Frequent Miler’s best credit card offers. The page has gotten somewhat more annoying to use over the years, but he still does a good job keeping it up-to-date, so when I just want to find out what the highest current sign-up offer is for a given credit card is, I almost always start here. Once you know the offer, if you don’t want to use an affiliate link you can usually just Google the offer terms and find a direct link to the application.

Podcasts

They’re not for everyone, but if you’re a podcast addict like me these are no-brainers:

• Dots, Lines & Destinations. Not strictly speaking focused on travel hacking, but travel-hacking adjacent, with coverage of loyalty programs, aircraft interiors, and aviation news, along with trip reports and interviews. It’s been around at least as long as I’ve been travel hacking, and the hosts’ experience and comfort shows.

• Saverocity Observation Deck. More focused on travel hacking, credit cards, reselling, and family travel (Joe also hosts a Disney-specific podcast, Disney Deciphered, for the Mouse-lovers out there). Patreon subscribers get bonus content at the end of most episodes.

• Milenomics Squared. From the brains behind the Milenomics blog, this has quickly become one of my favorite travel hacking resources, as it’s focused almost entirely on earning and redeeming points. Patreon subscriptions are fairly expensive, but the additional podcast content is simply indispensable and you get access to their lively Slack channel which is a great source of datapoints for all things miles-and-points. Let me put it this way: I’m cheap, and I’m still happy to pay for this subscription.

Twitter accounts

The flip side of blogs becoming less valuable as resources is that Twitter has become much more valuable, since most bloggers tweet out a headline and a link to each new post, letting you quickly identify the ones worth reading and acting on, and the ones you can skip. I find this infinitely more convenient than subscribing to each blog in an RSS reader, which quickly fills up with all the clutter big blogs pump out these days (“The Pan Am Flight Attendant Who Gave Her Life Saving Passengers on a Hijacked Flight 33 Years Ago”).

There is a lot of repetition and clout-chasing on Twitter, so you should be sure to follow sparingly and unfollow easily. Trust me, as long as you follow 5-6 accounts, you’re not going to miss anything. With that said, here’s a starter kit for travel hacking Twitter:

• @FrequentMiler. Of the biggest travel hacking blogs, still the most narrowly focused on miles and points, with very few breathless headlines about people taking their shoes off on planes or whatever. The blog is cluttered but the Twitter feed lets you focus on the deals relevant to you.

• @milestomemories. Coverage of broader travel deals and news.

• @Drofcredit. Covers absolutely everything, which makes the blog unusable (he posts dozens of things each day) but makes the Twitter feed a great one-stop resource to keep track of current and upcoming deals. Follow @Chucksth for bonus Doctor of Credit content.

• @dannydealguru. I’m not an extreme couponer but I’ve come to really appreciate Danny’s laser focus on discounts. I don’t use his deals very often, but I’m always glad to know about them.

• Finally, if you end up liking the podcasts I recommended above, you should follow the hosts: @WandrMe, @ssegraves and @fozzm for Dots, Lines & Destinations, @asthejoeflies and @tmount for the Saverocity Observation Deck, and @Milenomics and @RobertDwyer for Milenomics Squared.

You are also free to follow me on Twitter, but about 2% of my tweets have anything remotely to do with travel hacking, so you probably have better things to do.

Gary Leff is right that a ban on usury will make his scam harder to run. But should you care?

There was an interesting scrum this week as New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders introduced bills to place a cap on the interest rates charged by revolving credit facilities like credit cards and short-term “payday” loans.

Long-time reader and blog subscriber JC asked me to respond to Gary Leff’s take on the possible implications of such a law for travel hackers, and I’m happy to take the chance to revise and expand my response to him here.

Three channels a federal interest rate cap would operate through

If the federal government banned consumer interest rates above 15%, you’d see a few direct and indirect effects immediately:

• Interest rates would be capped at 15%. Economists and pundits are eager to rush to second- and third-order effects, but I prefer to linger on first-order effects: a law banning interest rates above 15% will eliminate interest rates above 15%. The law might be well-drafted to create sufficient enforcement and penalties, or it might be poorly-drafted and allow loopholes and exceptions, and of course it might be shredded entirely once our amateur judiciary gets done with it, but there’s no obvious reason to believe a law capping interest rates at 15% wouldn’t succeed in capping interest rates at 15%.

• Access to credit would be limited. It’s worth looking at this process in detail. The simplistic version would be that everyone who currently has an interest rate below 15% would be left alone, since the lender’s credit algorithm has determined that a sub-15% interest rate is appropriate for their risk profile, while everyone with an interest rate above 15% would be cut off completely. But this isn’t right: credit scores and credit profiles just aren’t accurate enough to make sure every single borrower has “exactly the right interest rate.” Instead, lenders know that some 14.5% borrowers are “really” 15.5% borrowers, and some 15.5% borrowers are “really” 14.5% borrowers. When you can’t overcharge good credit risks, but have to continue undercharging bad credit risks, your overall willingness to extend credit will fall. In some cases that will mean cutting borrowers off entirely, and in other cases simply reducing their credit lines to amounts the lender can live with under conditions of uncertainty.

• The rewards ecosystem would be completely changed. Today, high interest rates and easy access to credit (which go hand-in-hand) have created an enormous pool of profits that banks and loyalty programs fight over good-naturedly. Sometimes a bank will bail an airline out of bankruptcy by buying a billion miles up front, and sometimes an airline will twist a bank’s arm to squeeze out a slightly higher revenue-sharing rate, but at the end of the day, there’s plenty of profits to go around. A smaller (reduced access to credit), less profitable (lower interest rates) industry would by definition have less money to fight over. That would likely mean consolidated credit card portfolios (one or two Marriott Bonvoy cards instead of 9), reduced signup bonuses, closer scrutiny of manufactured spend, and of course lower referral and affiliate payouts.

A transformed credit card industry would definitely hurt Gary Leff. What about you?

A consumer lending industry that had been “right-sized” (no doubt through several years of painful adjustments) around a 15% interest rate cap would almost certainly make it hard for Gary to make as much money as he does today selling credit cards to gullible newbies, for the mechanical reason that he’s paid for credit card approvals. Even if affiliate payouts remained the same on a per-approval basis, a 25% drop in credit card approvals due to tougher underwriting would represent a 25% drop in revenue. If affiliate payouts also dropped due to the industry’s lower profitability, he’d be slammed twice, with lower approval rates and lower payouts per approval.

But how would a transformed credit card industry affect you? It’s a very different question. Personally, in the last 5 years I’ve migrated almost entirely into fixed-value currencies like US Bank Flexpoints and Chase Ultimate Rewards to book my flights because of the difficulty finding award space. High revenue passenger loads account for part of that problem, but I assume flooding the world with cheap miles accounts for part of it as well. A world with a permanently lower rate of miles being awarded each year seems naturally like a world with more award availability and less pressure on airlines to inflate away the value of their miles.

Won’t somebody think of the poor?

It’s naturally a tad revolting to respond to a libertarian maniac like Gary’s “concern for the poor” because it’s being made in such obviously bad faith, but I don’t want anyone to walk away from his post concluding there are “good arguments on both sides.”

The poor need money, not credit. High interest rates reduce the amount of money the poor have. Easy access to high-interest debt reduces the amount of money the poor have. Emergency medical bills reduce the amount of money the poor have. No-cause eviction reduces the amount of money the poor have. Universal health insurance, affordable housing, free public transit, paid family and medical leave, universal pre-kindergarten, tuition-free higher education, and generous universal public pensions are how you help the poor, if you’re so inclined (I am not aware of any evidence Gary is so inclined).

If you want to help the poor, you need to increase the amount of money they have, not the amount of debt they have.

But Gary Leff is obviously paid to see it otherwise.

Four possible deals spotted in the first three weeks of Daily Getaways

As predictably as the tides, summer approaches and the US Travel Association launches their “Daily Getaways” in an attempt to promote travel within the United States. And just like clockwork, the offers mostly generate a yawn from the travel hacking community. As usual, this year USTA is mostly just selling points and discounted theme park tickets. However, I did glance through the Las Vegas vacation packages and spotted a few offers that struck me as potentially good deals.

May 7: 4 nights at the Luxor for $500

The Luxor has a reputation as one of the more run-down properties on the Strip, and I’m sure that’s true, so ignore the value of the room itself: this package comes with a $400 food and beverage credit, and the credit can be used however you wish, while other Daily Getaway packages offer, for example, a $150 credit for a single meal. That reduces the chance of breakage (not using the full value of the credit) and overages (ordering a meal that exceeds the value of the credit), which means it should be worth very close to face value, assuming you value food at the Luxor at face value. Note that according to the terms and conditions the credit can’t be used at Diablo's Cantina or Public House, I assume because they’re owned by a third party, but can be used at Luxor’s TENDER Steakhouse, where entrees start at around $42, so a party of two should be able to get at least two or three meals from a $400 credit.

The Daily Getaway also includes two tickets to Blue Man Group. I know there are lots of options for discounted show tickets in Las Vegas, so it’s fair to value those tickets at perhaps $25 total.

If you get $400 in value from the dining credit, and $25 in value from the show tickets, you’ll be paying $75 total for four nights accommodation. That’s less than the resort fee you’ll pay at most Las Vegas hotels, even on a complimentary stay.

The other thing I liked about this offer is that it specifies the blackout dates in the terms and conditions, instead of simply saying “blackout dates apply” and leaving it up to the discretion of the hotel. The deal can be redeemed through January 31, 2020.

May 23: 4 nights at the Excalibur for $500

A similar deal to the Luxor, but with more restrictions: the $400 dining credit can only be used at the Camelot Steakhouse, which increases the chances of breakage and overages, but $25 per night is still lower than most Las Vegas resort fees, which means this has the opportunity to be a good deal — especially if you like steak!

May 14th: 2 nights at Harrah’s for $299

While not as good a deal as the Luxor or Excalibur, the Harrah’s offer again looks more competitive when you take the food benefit into account: it includes two “Buffet of Buffets” passes (as usual, upgrading to the Caesar’s Bachannal Buffet comes with an additional charge). If you want to try the Buffet of Buffets anyway (I did it once — it’s alright), then this deal will save you $120 plus tax, meaning you’ll pay $180 for two nights and roundtrip airport transportation.

I don’t like that the terms and conditions don’t mention the resort fee, which is $35 per night. Whenever a resort fee isn’t explicitly included, I assume it will be added, although it would be a pleasant surprise if not.

Like the Luxor deal, this offer explicitly names the blackout dates, “New Year’s weekend or Super Bowl weekend.” And finally, this deal has a much longer expiration date than some of the others, since you can book through July 1, 2020.

May 23: 3 nights at Circus Circus for $200

The Circus Circus offer is in some ways the most limited of the Daily Getaways, but also the one I’m most carefully considering buying for myself. It’s by far the cheapest, and explicitly includes the resort fee, so there’s no chance of surprise fees on checkout. The $75 Steak House credit is only good for a single visit, but is also low enough that there’s no chance of breakage. Likewise, it should be easy to get one breakfast buffet and one dinner buffet in over a 3-night stay.

The last time I stayed at Circus Circus they had a pitiful outdoor swimming pool, but it appears they’ve completely redesigned it. Since swimming is one of the funnest things you can do in Las Vegas, I’m considering this package if only to check out the reinvented waterpark.

Attractive duds

• May 7: 2 nights at New York New York for $549+. The resort fee is explicitly added to this deal, meaning the $475 price has to be adjusted upwards by $74, plus tax. December 28 expiration date and 3 long blackout periods mean there’s virtually no chance you’ll save money buying this deal, even taking the $400 dinner for two at Gallagher’s Steakhouse into account.

• May 14: 2 nights at Bally’s for $500. A $150 dining credit, airport transportation, and two show tickets still make this a $350 two-night stay. You can do better.

• May 14: 2 nights at Paris for $500. Ostensibly a better deal than Bally’s, but splitting up the $150 dining credit and $150 spa credit increases the chance of breakage and overages. $200 for two nights at Paris just doesn’t add up.

Conclusion: at peak periods, these are all good deals

The fundamental problem with trying to save money in Las Vegas is that 300 or so days a year, Vegas just isn’t that expensive. Between status matches, chain hotel partnerships, and other promos and gimmicks, my airline ticket is usually my biggest travel cost when visiting.

On the other hand, during peak periods, when the biggest national conferences and events come to Vegas, the deals dry up and the hotels and resorts actually try to make a profit from room rates instead of just relying on the slot machines. If you know you’ll visit Vegas during one of those peak periods, and are confident you’re not going to be locked out by limited availability and blackout dates, then jumping on a room rate of $25 or even $100 per night may end up saving you a lot of money.

The Hilton Honors Ascend American Express Priority Pass Membership "Year"

Unlimited access to the Priority Pass network of airport lounges, which was long an afterthought compared to airline lounges and, more recently, the superb American Express Centurion lounges, has quietly become an impressive benefit of many super-premium credit cards, like American Express Platinum cards, the Chase Sapphire Reserve, and the Citi Prestige. In part that’s because Priority Pass has aggressively added airport restaurant locations where you can typically receive about $28 towards your food and drink bill (excluding gratuities). When I first started tracking that option, I recorded just 23 participating restaurants. The number is now up to 49!

Credit cards issued in the United States have typically offered either unlimited Priority Pass memberships or, like the Chase Ink Plus, “memberships” in name only where “members” pay $32 or so for lounge access. Obviously those memberships don’t offer any value at all at non-lounge locations, since the benefit is usually capped at $28-$30, although they might theoretically still be useful on long international layovers.

The Hilton Honors Ascend American Express struck an interesting compromise, offering a Priority Pass membership that includes 10 free visits per year, a benefit I enjoyed last year (although my partner’s new Hilton Honors Aspire card will give us both unlimited free visits while traveling together).

If you have an Ascend card and don’t otherwise have unlimited Priority Pass access, you should already be asking an important question: what’s a “year?”

Three ways a year could be defined

The two most common ways credit card benefits are restricted are by cardmember year and by calendar year. For example, American Express airline fee reimbursements are offered on a calendar year basis, while American Express Delta companion tickets are offered on a cardmember year basis, with the companion ticket appearing in your SkyMiles account shortly after your annual fee is charged each cardmember year.

There’s a third option, however, when benefits are provided by a third party: third-party program year benefits. For example, American Express Platinum cards offer Hilton Honors Gold status as an incidental benefit, but your Hilton Honors Gold status doesn’t depend on either the calendar year or your cardmember anniversary. Instead, it depends on the Hilton Honors program year, and your Gold status will continue for a year or longer even if you don’t renew your Platinum card.

American Express claims Priority Pass membership is based on a third-party program year

You can find American Express’s description of the Ascend Priority Pass benefit on the online application or by logging into your account. It’s more or less identical in both cases, and crystal clear (this text comes from the description in my online account, emphasis mine throughout):

“Your Priority Pass Membership year begins on the date you enroll. Once enrolled, you will receive your Priority Pass Select card directly from Priority Pass within 10-14 business days. There is no membership fee with your Hilton Honors American Express Ascend Card. With your Hilton Honors American Express Ascend Card you will receive 10 complimentary lounge visits each Priority Pass Membership year. Once your 10 complimentary lounge visits are used, all subsequent lounge visits during the remainder of the Priority Pass Membership year are subject to a fee equal to the amount of the guest visit fee of the Priority Pass Standard program per person per visit, which will be automatically charged to your Card. To check on your remaining complimentary visit balance, please contact Priority Pass directly. Any unused complimentary lounge visits will be forfeited at the end of each Priority Pass Membership year.”

In other words, whenever you get around to enrolling in Priority Pass, the clock starts on your Priority Pass membership year, during which you can make 10 total visits, including guests. This would theoretically be gameable, for example by waiting until a few weeks before the first trip you expect to use Priority Pass on, thereby delaying the start of your Priority Pass membership year.

But it’s not true.

The Hilton Honors Ascend Priority Pass membership is a calendar year benefit

I know travel hackers all fancy themselves jailhouse lawyers, so before anyone starts commenting about how crystal clear the terms and conditions are, let me say: I know how crystal clear the terms and conditions are. But if you rely on the terms and conditions, you’re going to end up with a bunch of $32 credit card charges before you know it.

Fortunately, I only ended up with one, but it illustrates the issue perfectly:

• My Hilton Honors Ascend annual fee was charged on January 19, 2018;

• I registered for Priority Pass on February 7, 2018;

• I made 11 visits between August 20, 2018, and December 26, 2018, and was charged $32 for the 11th visit;

• I made another visit on January 2, 2019, and was not charged.

There’s simply no other way to explain this set of facts than the benefit being based on the calendar year, contrary to the explicit terms and conditions of the benefit.

My secondary piece of evidence is that I called Priority Pass today to ask how the benefit works, and spoke to a lovely woman with a perfect British accent who nevertheless understood no English. After both of us shouted at each other in perfect English long enough, she finally understood my question and told me I get 10 free visits per calendar year, I’ve used 1, and I have 9 remaining. At that point I politely thanked her and she politely hung up on me, to both of our relief.

Conclusion

For me, travel hacking is about staying focused on a simple question: how does it really work? The systems we take advantage of lie on the intersection of marketing, engineering, and law. Sometimes the marketers talk to the engineers, sometimes the engineers talk to the lawyers, and sometimes nobody talks to anybody at all. It isn’t enough to ask what the marketers intended, or what the lawyers wrote, if you don’t pay attention to what the engineers actually programmed.