Club Carlson Mega Points Promotion

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Hat tip to Mommy Points and her reader who passed along the news that at a few Club Carlson properties, you can earn 10,000 bonus Gold Points per night when you make a reservation using the promo code "MEGAPT." Here's the list of participating properties:

  • Radisson Martinique on Broadway
  • Radisson JFK Airport
  • Radisson Resort Orlando – Celebration
  • Radisson Hotel Orlando – Lake Buena Vista
  • Radisson Hotel Orlando – UCF Area
  • Radisson Hotel Fisherman’s Wharf

Of course, I'm planning a trip to New York in March, and currently have 2 nights booked at the Radisson Martinique for a total of 50,000 Gold Points, but don't have my third night booked yet. This promotion has put me in a tough position. The way I see it, I have three options:

  • Option 1: keep the 2 award nights, pay $228.42 after taxes for a "AAA Hot Deal" 20% off rate;
  • Option 2: keep the 2 award nights, pay $307.59 after taxes for the "Mega Points Promotion" rate;
  • Option 3: rebook all 3 nights, pay $1037.51 after taxes for the "Mega Points Promotion rate.

Deciding between Options 1 and 2 depends on my valuation of Club Carlson Gold Points. Are 10,000 Gold Points worth $79.17? Maybe, sometimes. But it takes more than "sometimes" to get me to spend $79 out of pocket (although I'll naturally redeem Barclaycard Arrival miles against the transaction later).

One of these options is not like the others though: why would I pay $1038 when I could pay $228 instead? Because of the other current Club Carlson promotion, which gives 38,000 Gold Points after 3 paid nights between January 6 and April 13, 2014.

By triggering that second promotion, I'd end up paying $810 for ~144,850 Gold Points (30,000 "Mega Points," 38,000 "Stay 3 Nights," and the 50,000 Gold Points I'm currently paying for the 2 nights, plus 30 Gold Points per dollar on my $895 room rate as a Gold elite), or 0.56 cents each. There's no denying that's a good rate to buy Gold Points at in bulk. It's almost enough for 6 free nights at a Category 6 property, as long as the nights are booked in blocks of 2, so conservatively $1,200 in value.

So, am I gonna do it? Of course not. The least valuable point is the one you don't spend, and I have 50,000 Gold Points burning a hole in my account. They're not going to get any more valuable by sitting on them.

My fellow travel hackers, we are the redemption we've been waiting for.

Check back tomorrow for my take on the Club Carlson "devaluation" (hint: I love it!).

Revise and extend: uses for Evolve Money

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Last Friday I was wrapping up the week and shot off a quip:

"Evolve Money is live with prepaid phone refills, but you're probably better off using a card that bonuses cell phone or telecom service."

This felt true to me at the time. After all, the US Bank Flexperks Travel Rewards card (the Olympics bonus is back!) earns double Flexpoints on cell phone services (but not cable or internet), worth up to 4% cash back in paid airfare redemptions, and the Chase Ink cards give 5 Ultimate Rewards points per dollar spent on all telecom expenses.

Those are good deals, but I was wrong to suggest that they're self-evidently better than the discount you'd realize by paying for your phone, internet, and television service using Visa or MasterCard gift cards through Evolve. Specifically, the Ink deal at Staples seems straightforwardly more lucrative than paying for your telecom service directly — especially if you're paying a service that charges sales tax depending on your credit card's billing address (like AT&T's GoPhone, my own cell phone service) but doesn't when paying from an external account like Evolve.

Anyway, I didn't want my somewhat ignorant quip to stay out there as my official opinion. Do the math for yourself, make good decisions, and save yourself some money!

Reminder: rewards aren't earned on statement credits and fees

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Over the course of about 24 hours I ran into several variations of this situation, and it took me about 25 minutes of staring at my credit card statements to figure out what was going on. In case any of my gentle readers run into a similar situation, I thought I'd share my experience.

Statement credits are treated as discounts, not payments

This is a situation you're bound to run into if you take advantage of Amex Sync deals or Visa Savings Edge. When your statement closes, you won't receive points for the part of your purchase rebated by the two programs.

So if you paid exactly $50 in flowers from 1-800-FLOWERS for Valentine's day and received a $15 Amex Sync rebate (and a 5% Amex OPEN rebate), you'll only earn miles and points on $35 (or $33.25).

Of course that's not true of portal earnings, which your credit card company doesn't see, so you'll receive portal earnings on the entire purchase as reported by the online merchant (who may exclude taxes, shipping, or gift cards, but frequently don't).

Credit card fees aren't treated as purchases

A kind of inverse problem arose when my Chase Sapphire Preferred annual fee hit this month. Since I pay off all my credit cards each month, my statement balance should always equal my purchases during the statement cycle, and I should earn exactly that number of Ultimate Rewards points (plus bonused earnings, which are listed separately).

But this month my numbers were off! Since I'm constantly running experiments with my rewards credit cards, my first thought was that I hadn't earned points for one or more of those small experimental transactions. It wasn't until I realized that I had earned exactly 95 fewer points than I expected that I realized the problem: my $95 annual fee was included in my statement balance, but wasn't treated as a purchase (which, of course, it wasn't).

Conclusion

All this is spelled out in your credit card's terms and conditions, so don't think they're trying to pull a fast one on you. However, it can be confusing the first time you notice it happen. Hopefully after reading this post you'll be both forewarned and forearmed.

Is it time to reconsider Hilton HHonors?

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[update 2/18/14: I updated the charts below to show the effect of the depreciating 5th night free for stays of 6 – 10 nights in length.]

I applied for the no-annual-fee American Express Hilton HHonors card in January of last year, in order to take advantage of its then-lucrative 6 HHonors points per dollar spent at drug stores. Of course that was rapidly followed by both the 2013 Hilton devaluation and an end to bonus points at drug stores in May, 2013.

Since my experiment buying PayPal My Cash cards for bonus points at 7-11 ended in failure, I shelved my HHonors card except for periodically taking advantage of promotions like Small Business Saturday and Amex Sync offers.

Now that I have another local gas station willing to play nice, I need to decide whether it's worth getting the card back out and potentially even upgrading to a Surpass card that would earn 6, instead of 5, HHonors points per dollar there.

Back in December I tried out a new approach to valuing manufactured spend, by calculating the value you would need to get from a night's stay to make it worth manufacturing spend on a chain's co-branded credit card, rather than a 2.22% cash back Barclaycard Arrival. The advantage of this approach is that it gives you a straightforward calculus (do I value this hotel night at more or less than the break-even point?), without needing to take into account the actual cost of an identical, paid hotel stay.

Here's that same analysis applied to the American Express Hilton HHonors Surpass card, assuming that your spend is manufactured exclusively at merchants that give 6 HHonors points per dollar.

Note two things about these charts: first, I've assumed that you'll be redeeming your HHonors points during the "high" period at Category 4 – 10 properties. If you redeem at the lower end of the award bands, the points required and consequent required value per night will be lower. Second, I haven't taken into account the additional HHonors points you would earn on paid stays. That's a real shortcoming, but I can't think of an elegant way to capture it. You should feel free to adjust these rates based on your HHonors earning rate on paid stays.

Finally, remember that you receive HHonors Diamond elite status in any calendar year you spend $40,000 or more on the Surpass card, and you keep that status through the following membership year (i.e. in March 2 years in the future).

Here's are the points and bonused spend required for 1 and 5 night stays at each category of Hilton property:

And here's the value you'd need to get per night in order to justify manufacturing spend on the American Express Hilton HHonors Surpass card:

So is it worth manufacturing spend on the Surpass card? The sweet spot here appears to be category 5-6 properties, where you can get a night for less than $200, including tax, and possibly category 7 properties on stays which are multiples of exactly 5 nights.

Of course if you're intent on visiting a resort property like the Conrad Maldives Rangali Island, where your only options are to pay a cash rate or redeem points, you'll save easily $1,000 per night on a 5 night stay by redeeming manufactured HHonors points instead.

APR and APY are irrelevant concepts in the world of manufactured spend

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When lawmakers decide to crack down on payday lenders, they invariably cite the extortionate annual percentage rate, or APR, charged by those lenders. Wikipedia helpfully provides this example:

"For a $15 charge on a $100 14-day payday loan, the annual percentage rate is 391.34%."

You won't find a bigger defender of consumer rights and economic justice than your humble blogger, but I have to confess that I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with the concept of APR and APY (annual percentage yield) as applied to my own lifestyle.

The important thing to understand is that APR and APY aren't laws of nature: they're accounting identities that are based on the idea of compound interest: if the fees you pay, or interest you earn, is added to your original balance on a daily or monthly basis, then you'll end up paying (or earning) more over the course of a year than you will if you simply multiplied your first month's balance by 12 times the monthly interest rate paid (or earned).

How, then, to account for manufactured spend? Am I earning interest when I take out a "loan" for $1007.90, with a "rebate" of $20.16, then use the proceeds to pay off my loan during its 20-50 day grace period? If so, what's the relevant time period to extrapolate over the 12 month period required for APY calculations?

The Barclaycard Arrival World MasterCard allows immediate redemptions of earned miles, meaning the total turnaround time between earning and redemption might be as little as 3-4 days; using APY calculations I'd end up with something like 202%.

What I'm trying to say is that while this sounds like an epistemological question, it's actually the opposite: it's the question of how to account for certainty.

That's why I'm increasingly inclined to think about manufactured spend not as an investment, with concomitant risk and return, but as a job. It has a more or less guaranteed return depending on the time and skill you devote to it.

You should think about APR when deciding on a mortgage lender, and APY when deciding on a retirement fund, but when thinking about manufactured spend the much more important concepts are revenue and cost.

Personally, my rule of thumb for the bulk of my manufactured spend is that every individual transaction has to be worth it. Of course I run a lot of experiments for the sake of my readers —I redeemed 8,000 Ultimate Rewards points for a roundtrip to Philadelphia on Saturday, and I don't expect to turn on a profit on those points! But if I pay $17.68 for $44.76 in travel redemptions with a Barclaycard Arrival card, I'll call that a $27.08 profit without losing too much sleep over what time period it should be calculated over: a 60% discount on my paid travel is good enough for me, without claiming to have beaten the market with my brilliant "investments."

The sun also sets on US Bank Visa Buxx

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When I started this blog, the Wells Fargo Prepaid Card still allowed users to load up to $2,500 onto the card for a flat fee of $5. The card still exists, but as of May 1, 2013, has only been loadable using Wells Fargo-issued credit and debit cards, which I believe don't earn rewards on load transactions.

Meanwhile, the Nationwide and US Bank Visa Buxx cards have kept plugging along, allowing $1,000 and $2,000 in loads monthly using any Visa or MasterCard credit or debit card (although Citi-issued credit cards are notoriously at risk of cash advance fees).

Today I saw the news that US Bank is no longer allowing new online applications for their Visa Buxx card. I'm still able to log into my existing account, and haven't seen any indication that they'll be canceling existing card accounts, although at this point I'd say it's a near certainty that they'll be restricting loads to US Bank-issued credit and debit cards sometime in the next 12 months (check back February, 2015!).

I hope that all my readers have already signed up for a least one card account, so they won't be immediately affected by this change. And as always, remember the first two laws of travel hacking:

  1. Every deal dies eventually;
  2. There will always be more deals.

JH Preferred cash advances: your miles may vary

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One last post for tonight, after my epic (and successful!) quest to Philadelphia today.

I reported back on January 31 that the JH Preferred card had some limitations that some of my more enthusiastic blogger brethren had overlooked in their original reports. Namely, unlike their "direct" competitor, the HR Block Emerald card, JH Preferred doesn't allow ACH pulls from the account, which makes it simultaneously less convenient and more expensive.

After patiently loading my JH Preferred card up with $5,000 in Vanilla Reload Network reload cards, I ran into yet another limitation: my usually-completely-reliable local Bank of America branch was unable to process a cash advance for $4,995 (why $4,995? There's a $5 cash advance fee, and I don't have any interest in trying to rip $5 off from Bancorp).

I'm not willing to rule out user error on the part of the teller, but I do want to share my experience so my readers aren't unduly surprised if they're not able to liquidate their JH Preferred cards in one go. It may still be worth trying, if you have a bank branch willing to help, since there are a few reports of successful $5,000 cash advances in the relevant Flyertalk thread.

I was ultimately able to liquidate my $5,000 JH Preferred balance by making 3 Walmart PIN-based debit transactions, so don't despair if your cash advance attempts end up not being successful.

How much would it cost to live in a hotel?

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[Editor's note: as a reminder, I'll be blogging and tweeting all day today since I'm taking a 5 hour train to Philadelphia, then another train back tonight. Thank God for whiskey.]

I read a lot of "aspirational" travel blogs, but I personally take only a few aspirational trips per year. Last year over the summer I flew to Prague on Delta's new lie-flat BusinessElite product for 100,000 Skymiles (now 125,000 Skymiles), and of course over Christmas I flew on a paid Alaska Airlines first class ticket in order to secure one last year of Platinum Medallion status before I status match to Alaska's Mileage Plan.

For me, travel hacking is about saving money on flights I would take anyway, and making money by taking trips I wouldn't be able to otherwise afford.

That's why I've been following with interest Lucky's musings on hotel living. Lucky's an aspirational kind of guy, so he's talking about bouncing around the world's most beautiful locals being waited on hand and foot.

But he got me thinking: how much would it cost to live in a hotel year-round?

Club Carlson to the Rescue

Fortunately, this is wildly easy to calculate thanks to my lovingly-crafted point density charts. The obvious candidate for a hotel chain is Club Carlson, where Category 1 hotels cost just 9,000 Gold Points per night. Using a Club Carlson Premier Rewards Visa or Club Carlson Business Rewards Visa, you'll need to spend $1,800 to earn enough points for a night at a Category 1 property.

Of course, as a cardholder, you receive the last night free on all award stays of 2 or more nights, good for up to 100 free nights annually. That means you'll need to spend $1,800 on the card for every 2 nights you plan to stay — assuming you're able to book stays of exactly 2 nights.

In order to do so, you'll need a partner who also carries a Club Carlson Premier or Business Rewards Visa. You'll book alternating blocks of 2 nights each, paying a total of 135,000 Gold Points per 30 days.

That means between you and your partner you'll need to manufacture $27,000 in spend on the Club Carlson credit card each month. [Yes, there's an annual renewal bonus of 40,000 Gold Points, which takes care of 8 nights for each person, or about half a month between the two.]

Getting to $27,000

This is an almost laughably easy amount of spend to manufacture between 2 people. Here's how I'd do it, in ascending order of cost and using strictly "within the lines" techniques:

  • Amazon Payments, $1,000: one partner to the second partner; free.
  • TD Go, $6,000: $3,000 per person; load cost $6; liquidation cost $4.20; total cost $10.20.
  • Nationwide Visa Buxx, $2,000: $1,000 per person; load cost $8; liquidation cost $1.40; total cost $9.40.
  • US Bank Visa Buxx, $2,000: one partner as parent, one as teen; load cost $10; liquidation cost $1.40; total cost $11.40.
  • Bluebird, $10,000: 2 Bluebirds; load cost $79; free liquidation; total cost $79.
  • PayPal, $6,000: 2 personal accounts with linked PayPal Personal Debit Cards; load cost $47.40; liquidation cost $4.20; total cost $51.60.
  • Club Carlson Premier Rewards annual fees: $150 ($12.50 per month).

30 days in a Category 1 Club Carlson property, with accomplice: $174.10.

But Which Hotel?

Interesting exercise? Sure. But we still have to figure out which Category 1 Club Carlson property to move into!

Fortunately Club Carlson makes it easy to find properties by Category. Here's the list of all the Category 1 properties in the world we have to consider.

Home or Abroad?

The first question you should ask is whether you want to manufacture this spend on an ongoing basis, or stockpile 1.62 million Gold Points before you move in. On the one hand, the former gives you more flexibility if Club Carlson undergoes the long-awaited devaluation of their award chart. On the other hand, it requires you to pick a property that's convenient to your manufactured spend techniques, which rules out any overseas properties.

Since Gold Points reservations are easily cancelable, you don't actually have to decide this in advance, since you can move out after literally any 2-night reservation. A lot cheaper than breaking a lease, in my experience!

Stateside Options

I looked into all 10 US Category 1 properties [editor's note: it's a long train ride], and here's what I found:

  • Country Inn & Suites By Carlson, Saraland, AL: CVS, Walmart
  • Park Inn Fresno, Fresno, CA: CVS, Walmart
  • Country Inn & Suites By Carlson, Jacksonville, FL: CVS, Walmart
  • Country Inn & Suites By Carlson, LaGrange, GA: CVS, Walmart
  • Country Inn & Suites By Carlson, Norcross, GA: CVS, Walmart
  • Country Inn & Suites Greenfield, Greenfield, IN: CVS, Walmart
  • Radisson Hotel Indianapolis Airport, Indianapolis, IN: CVS, Walmart
  • Country Inn & Suites By Carlson Tulsa Central, Tulsa, OK: CVS, Walmart
  • Country Inn & Suites By Carlson, Cookeville, TN: CVS, Walmart
  • Park Inn By Radisson Dallas Love Field, Dallas, TX: CVS, Walmart

So based on my research, I'd say these are all outstanding options, if you want a taste of Southern living (or airport-adjacent living).

Options Abroad

As they say, read the whole thing, but a few properties jumped out at me from the list of Category 1 properties.

5 Eastern European capitals:

  • Park Inn Sofia (Bulgaria)
  • Park Inn Central Tallinn (Estonia)
  • Park Inn Budapest (Hungary)
  • Radisson Blu Beke Hotel, Budapest (Hungary)
  • Park Inn by Radisson Vilnius North (Lithuania)
  • Park Inn Danube, Bratislava (Slovakia)

One beachfront-ish property:

  • Radisson Hotel Hacienda (Cancun, Mexico)

And one place in Costa Rica. Island living!

  • Country Inn & Suites By Carlson, San Jose (Ciudad Cariari, Costa Rica)

Now you know everything I know. See you in Cancun?