Why do card counters sleep in their cars?

For the last few months I’ve been casually following up on my long-time interest in learning to play blackjack. I’ve now sunk about 100 hours into learning more about blackjack and casino “advantage play” in general, including listening to podcasts, reading forums, and yes, playing for real money in one of our local casinos. While it’s safe to say the casino still has a healthy advantage over me, what has struck me the most dipping my toes into the advantage play community is just how much it resembles the one I’ve been immersed in for well over a decade now: travel hacking.

Introduction to card counting

For those unfamiliar with blackjack advantage play, it consists of three largely unrelated components:

1. The ability to master “basic strategy.” For every set of blackjack rules, each hand of blackjack has a corresponding ideal move that offer the highest expected value to the player. This move does not always increase your chances of winning the hand; sometimes the move with the highest expected value is to surrender your hand and half your bet, guaranteeing your defeat! Playing perfect basic strategy reduces the house edge in most blackjack rulesets to 1% or less.

2. The ability to accurately count cards. There are a number of different card counting techniques with various advantages and disadvantages, but they all share the requirement that you update a running count as the dealer reveals each card. The ability to count cards has no effect on your odds of winning any given hand.

3. The ability to make the necessary moves to take advantage of perfect card counting. The most important of these is changing the size and number of your bets depending on your running count.

Note that these three skills are essentially unrelated. Learning basic strategy is a form of pattern recognition. While there are technically 310 different combinations of dealer and player hands that must be memorized to play perfect basic strategy, these fall into just 6-12 “patterns” (depending on how you find it easiest to memorize them). It probably took me 10-15 hours practicing with the “Blackjack101” iPhone app to be able to consistently play perfect basic strategy. If you practice using an app, note that you should find out the most common ruleset at your local casinos in order to make sure you’re getting the most practice on the ruleset you use the most. Different tables at the same casino can also have different rulesets.

Counting cards is a completely different skill, since there are no patterns in the order of cards dealt from a well-shuffled deck. The only way to learn to count cards is through hundreds or thousands of hours of practice. Depending on how you’re wired, you may find it easy or hard, relaxing or irritating, but if you cannot count cards perfectly every time then you cannot play blackjack with an advantage.

Finally, you must be able to adhere to a system of play that maximizes the amount of money at stake when the deck is rich with cards that benefit the player and minimizes the player’s losses when the odds are in the casino’s favor. This is not a matter of math or intellect at all: the knowledge of the correct bet flows mechanically from the method of card counting employed. But the ability to act on that knowledge is a matter of character and circumstance.

Advantage play and travel hacking

Using this framework, the parallels to travel hacking are obvious.

1. Travel hacking requires you to learn and access with relative ease the details of, if not the entire loyalty universe, then at least the programs that are or might be relevant to you. For a casual US travel hacker, that means at least 4 or 5 airline loyalty programs, one or two hotel programs, and a bank rewards program. Serious travel hackers learn much more, including about obscure and foreign loyalty programs.

2. A completely unrelated skill is learning and monitoring the current state of travel hacking techniques. Here, just as in card counting, accuracy is absolutely essential, since older techniques are constantly dying while new ones emerge. There’s no point applying for a signup bonus that expired last week, or expecting bonus grocery store rewards for a promotion that starts next Friday. Just as the skill of card counting atrophies without constant practice, returning to travel hacking after a long break requires refamiliarizing yourself with the current state of play.

3. Finally, perfect knowledge of loyalty programs and travel hacking techniques is useless without the ability to make the moves necessary to take advantage of them.

Most people cannot play blackjack with an advantage or succeed at travel hacking

A common lie, the motives behind which I’ll return to shortly, is that “anyone can win at blackjack” or that “anyone can be a travel hacker” (the latter claim normally safely couched by affiliate bloggers as “anyone can save money on travel” or something equally mealy-mouthed).

This is, of course, false.

Most people can’t play perfect basic strategy or memorize a dozen airline sweet spots because it is boring and has no meaningful connection to their everyday life.

Most people can’t count cards or decide whether a potential manufactured spend technique is worthwhile because it requires tedious and unfamiliar calculations.

Most people can’t make large bets when the deck is stacked in their favor or go big when a one-of-a-kind travel hacking opportunity presents itself because they are loss-averse, bet too low and forego lucrative plays, locking in their losses while passing up the chance to win correspondingly big.

Successful card counters and travel hackers don’t last long

What struck me most while learning about the card counting community and the available resources is that the biggest voices for card counting don’t seem to actually do it very much.

The typical progression is that someone discovers card counting, has a rough introductory period full of endearing anecdotes, then goes on a winning streak of 6-48 months (the length is immaterial). After that, they start Youtube channels, record podcasts, write books, and launch websites to sell card counting content and merchandise.

This is the same progression we see in travel hacking. Someone discovers travel hacking, has a few big scores, gets involved in the community, then they launch a blog, a podcast, a Youtube channel, and an affiliate relationship with the credit card companies.

There are two major reasons for this. First, the money is better, certainly on an hourly basis. Most travel hacking techniques require at least some time and attention to implement on an ongoing basis. Even simple online techniques require you to sit down at your computer and actually click the necessary buttons to trigger your payout each time. Writing a blog post full of credit card affiliate links, on the other hand, creates a kind of passive, semi-permanent money-generating asset as new readers discover the post and click through to your payday.

The second reason is that most people, even skilled, experienced people, don’t seem to enjoy it very much. For a lot of card counters and travel hackers, actually putting their knowledge to work seems like an unfortunate chore at worst or a dead-end job at best. “Running a business” packaging bite-sized tips on Tik Tok while burnishing your reputation as a Respected Elder must seem like bliss by comparison.

Why do card counters sleep in their cars?

One of the questions posed in the original “Freakonomics” book was “Why do drug dealers still live with their mothers?” The answer they arrive at is that despite handling enormous amounts of money, most individual drug dealers make poverty wages, so they live with their mothers, like many people who don’t make any money and are on speaking terms with their parents do.

What you realize listening to professional card counters is that they live in a kind of self-inflicted misery, driven in large part by the fear of “giving away their edge.” This often takes the ironic form of ascetisism. A common boast is that during a gambling trip a player will play for 20 hours straight every day. When they travel in teams, advantage players will bunk up in a single hotel room like a high school marching band to save on rooms. One player described sleeping in his (heated and air -conditioned) Tesla over the summer as he drove from casino to casino counting cards.

Importantly, this behavior is not driven by anything inherent to the principles of blackjack advantage play. In blackjack (if the dealer is using a “shoe,” or box of cards that are shuffled only once and then dealt out in order), each shoe is a new randomly ordered sample of cards, so the player’s result from the current shoe cannot have any effect on the probability of winning the next one. That means the player’s advantage, if any, is the same regardless of the number of shoes played. In other words, the player can stop at any time without affecting in any way the expected value of the hours they do play.

And yet, people who claim they have an expected advantage over the house of $100 per hour are willing to work for 20 hours in a row before falling asleep in their cars, all in order to save a few hundred dollars on a hotel room.

Conclusion

Lest anyone suggest I’m being snobby when suggesting most people can neither play blackjack with an advantage nor travel hack successfully, nothing could be further from the truth. Neither requires any special aptitude or gift.

Most people cannot do it because most people do not want to do it. If you try to talk to them about it, they may pay attention for a longer or shorter period of time out of politeness, and then they will lose interest and seek to change the subject to something that interests them instead of something they find tedious.

This is good and proper, not because it “preserves the opportunities for longer” or any hogwash like that, but because people should go through their lives seeking out things they find interesting and rewarding, not be lectured to by pedants about how they’re leaving money on the table by not doing whatever that particular pedant happens to believe is best for them.

The flip side is that when a nice online personality tells you something is easy, fun, and profitable, there’s a good chance that it is: for the person trying to get you to participate, against your better judgment.

Hilton gift cards trigger American Express Surpass statement credits

In October, 2023, American Expressed announced changes to the Hilton Aspire and Surpass co-branded credit cards. American Express has acquired a well-deserved reputation as a “coupon book,” and these changes were no exception. Alongside an increase in the annual fee from $95 to $150, American Express added “up to $50 in statement credits each quarter for purchases made directly with a property in the Hilton portfolio.” The only question was, how easy would it be to trigger those statement credits?

Hilton gift cards trigger Surpass statement credits

Back in December I tweeted that I’d received the $50 statement credit for the fourth quarter for purchasing a $50 Hilton gift card. Since the first quarter of 2024 was just around the corner, I decided to wait to write a blog post until I’d replicated that experience. This is that blog post.

Interestingly, the gift card purchase also triggered the Surpass’s 12 points per dollar spent on “eligible purchases made directly with hotels and resorts within the Hilton portfolio.”

Timing

I purchased my first $50 gift card on November 23, 2023, and my first statement credit posted on December 2, 9 days later. I purchased my second $50 gift card on January 1, 2024, and the second statement credit posted January 10, again 9 days later.

Having established that pattern, do not worry if your statement credit still has not posted 8 or fewer days after making your gift card purchase!

Why does it work?

All I can do here is speculate, but there are two obvious explanations.

First, it’s possible that when Hilton set up their gift card provider, they explicitly coded it as a Hilton property. If gift cards were coded as regular spend, earning just 3 Honors points per dollar, there would be a real tradeoff between putting your hotel spend directly on your card versus paying with a gift card. Coding gift cards as Hilton purchases eliminates that tradeoff.

The second possibility is that when American Express coded the $50 statement credit, they used a simple filter for the word “HILTON” in transaction descriptions. Since gift card purchases post as “HILTON GC [STRING OF NUMBERS]” they trigger the credit. This raises the interesting possibility that, for example, purchases made in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, would trigger the credit if the merchant included the town name in their credit card description!

The cards themselves

Perhaps fittingly given the relationship between American Express and Hilton, the gift cards take the form of American Express cards, in the sense that they have 15-digit card numbers starting with 3, and can be used at any Hilton property that accepts American Express.

Whether the cards can be used at non-Hilton merchants that accept American Express is an exercise left to the reader.

Conclusion

Each $50 Hilton gift card has a $1.95 shipping and handling fee, so purchasing $200 in gift cards per year raises the total annual cost of the card (including the annual fee) to $157.80. In order to break even, you therefore need to value Hilton gift cards at about 79 cents on the dollar. Whether that’s a high value or a low value depends on how you plan on using the cards.

From my perspective, 79 cents is “a bit high” for spending the cards on food and drink at Hilton properties, since hotel prices are typically marked up by more than 25% off street prices, so I rarely spend money at hotel restaurants.

On the other hand, 79 cents is quite low if you plan on using the gift cards to “pay down” your hotel room charges, whether for your room rate on paid stays or, for example, for resort or other ancillary fees that you’d otherwise have to pay with cash. While resort fees should be waived on award stays, some resorts (like the Maldives resorts that have launched a thousand blog posts) charge hundreds of dollars in transfer fees that should be eligible for payment with Hilton gift cards. A 21% discount on those fees is likely better than anything your credit card offers, unless you’re spending towards a particularly lucrative signup bonus and have limited manufactured spend opportunities at home.

My successful experience replacing an Incomm Visa prepaid card

There is, by all accounts, an epidemic of fraud striking prepaid debit card retailers across the Western United States. I’ve had the remarkable good fortune of never encountering a tampered prepaid debit card in the wild. So when I needed an Incomm prepaid debit card replaced this month, I jumped at the opportunity to find out how the process works in practice.

Fraud has become a huge problem, but not my problem

If you visit manufactured spend forums you quickly find an ocean of complaints about gift card fraud. Not the “elder abuse” fraud that newspapers love to write about, but genuine larceny: card packaging is opened, the details of the card are swiped, then the card is repackaged so that when an unsuspecting customer activates the card, the balance is quickly drained by the fraudsters. I don’t have a representative sample but it sounds like there are at least some stores on the West Coast where almost every card seems to have been tampered with.

This was not my problem. My problem was that I messed up the magnetic stripe on a card. In other words, user error. Since the balance was still there and I had the card details, I could have liquidated the card online for a tax payment, or to reload my Amazon balance, but instead I called up Incomm to see what the process was to replace the card.

Incomm prepaid card Replacement process

When I realized my error, I first called the number on the back of my Visa prepaid card (833-322-6760). During that call, which according to my phone lasted 17 minutes, I provided the usual card information, as well as the prepaid card’s “serial number,” which is located on the bottom right quadrant of the back of the card, as well as on the card packaging. The phone representative also asked for my name and address. Finally, he asked me to send “copies” of the receipt, the front and back of the prepaid card, as well as my government ID, to “consumed@incomm.com”. I took photos of the documents using my phone on my dining room table.

I first sent the documents on Friday, December 1, 2023, and on Monday, December 4, I received an e-mail from the same address asking for copies of the front of the card and the receipt again. I immediately submitted new pictures.

On Monday, December 11, I received a new card via USPS first class mail. That card had to be activated over the phone, which according to my phone records took 1 minute. I had the option to set a PIN over the phone or use any 4 digits on the new card’s first use, like a normal Incomm prepaid debit card. The card could be and was immediately liquidated through one of my usual in-person channels.

Conclusion

Obviously I wasn’t going to freak out over holding a card for 10 days instead of my usual 90 minutes, but despite my story being anti-climactic there are some obvious lessons you may need a refresher on if you’ve gotten lazy in your manufactured spend routine:

1. Keep your cards, receipts and packaging together. You can use filing cabinets, ziplock bags (guilty) or anything else you like, but if you get a fradulent or defective card you will want to be able to pull everything out at once without having to triple check card numbers and your purchase dates and times. Any unforced errors you make are going to slow down the replacement process.

2. Act quickly. In the case of tampered cards this is more important, but even if you mess up your own card, Incomm isn’t going to replace it until you contact them. Set aside 20 minutes and pick up the phone.

3. Don’t float more than you can afford to. I got stuck with $500 in the ether for 10 days, which didn’t bother me because it was a short period and a reasonable amount. If I’d just bought $10,000 worth of cards and needed them all replaced before my next credit card bill was due, I’d have been sweating a lot harder!

Gift of Choice, the new (to me) restricted gift card product

Last week I had the opportunity to try a brand of “merchant-restricted” gift cards I hadn’t used before: the “Gift of Choice” cards sold by Safeway and “powered” by The Gift Card Shop. This gimmick, the merchant-restricted gift card, is has come around repeatedly over the years.

Five Back Visa gift cards are a way to earn a 5% rebate at certain merchants, including at Bed Bath & Beyond, a formerly-ubiquitous shopping mall staple that used to sell a variety of home goods, but also PIN-enabled Visa prepaid debit cards, leading to a negative-cost manufactured spend technique.

Happy Cards used to be physical gift cards that were (supposedly) limited to use at the merchants specified on the card. Judging by the website they seem to have mostly abandoned that model and now sell codes you exchange online for merchant gift cards.

That’s precisely the model used by Gift of Choice: you buy some flimsy cardboard packaging, scratch off some codes on the back, and redeem them for the digital gift card of your choice.

The Deal: 10 Just4U points per dollar

During the promotion last week, you would earn 10 Safeway Just4U points per dollar spent on Gift of Choice gift card codes, obviously in addition to any rewards you normally earn on grocery store purchases.

I normally value Just4U Rewards (100 points) at “about” $2.78 each (my valuation has increased since I wrote this post for a variety of reasons), so on a $500 Gift of Choice purchase (50 Rewards) I earn a rebate of about $139. I also save the $5.95 I’d pay to activate a $500 Visa prepaid debit card, while earning the same credit card rewards (minus the rewards on the $5.95 activation fee, natch).

Gift of Choice sells their redemption codes with a variety of merchants listed on the front, although I believe you can redeem the cards for any of their supported merchants regardless of the specific version you buy (I can’t check anymore because I’ve already fully redeemed all the cards I purchased, which deactivates their numbers). You can also split the value of the Gift of Choice code into multiple different merchant gift cards, and you don’t need to redeem the full value all at once, so you can spend it down over time.

The gift cards you receive after redeeming Gift of Choice codes are “real” electronic gift cards: you can check their balance online and spend the cards directly at the merchant, and gift card resellers shouldn’t have a problem with them, as long as they accept electronic gift cards.

I bought a Gift of Choice version listing Lowe’s as a redemption option, and redeemed my $500 codes for $500 Lowe’s gift cards. CardCash offers $412.50 in cash for $500 Lowe’s gift cards, or $457.88 in Hotels.com gift cards. Since I book most of my non-points stays through Hotels.com, those gift cards are worth almost the same as cash to me, and that’s how I liquidated the cards, paying $42.12 for at least 9,100 Alaska Airlines miles, or a maximum of 0.46 cents per mile.

Obviously, if you can actually use a gift card at a participating merchant, then your value proposition will look even better, and there are some moderately useful merchants in the system. If you grab fast food regularly, you can stock up on Taco Bell, Domino’s, and Subway gift cards. If you are in the market for athletic wear, Columbia, Under Armor, and Athleta are options; they sell some expensive stuff, and a 28% discount is nothing to sneeze at.

An intriguing possibility is to redeem your Gift of Choice codes for Xbox gift cards. My understanding is that these cards, in addition to games and loot crates and whatnot, can also be spent on Microsoft devices. I have no idea what the current state of the market is, but when consoles were in short supply ambitious resellers spent a lot of time buying and selling them, which may be a way to liquidate Gift of Choice cards at face value or for a profit.

The curious case of the code format

If and when this deal returns and you decide to pursue it, you’ll notice something right away I may as well mention now. I’ve been referring to Gift of Choice redemption “codes” throughout this post, because that’s how the system is supposed to work: you scratch off a little aluminum panel to reveal a series of numbers you redeem online.

But those numbers are actually formatted as a 16-digit “card number” starting with 4, a 3-digit CVV code, and a 4-digit expiration date. In other words, they’re formatted as a Visa card, and the card number satisfies the Luhn algorithm. The specific 6-digit BIN identifier (465568), according to numerous free and disreputable online services, is registered to a Swiss private bank, for whatever that’s worth.

What does this mean? I have no idea — I already explained how I liquidated my cards. But if someone is out there liquidating Gift of Choice cards online at face value as Visa cards, they’re not shouting it from the rooftops. The funniest possible case would be if they can be used as Visa cards, but only within Switzerland. Still, I have no reason to believe they can be used as Visa cards at all.

Successfully liquidating 3rd-party gift cards with CardCash

Gift card reselling is a manufactured spend technique that sees periodic surges in interest. At its base, it’s is as simple as any technique: buy gift cards at a big enough discount, or with enough of an earning bonus, and sell them at a small enough discount to make the points you walk away with worth the difference.

Players cycle in and out of this space with some regularity, and then are inevitably washed out by the inherent precarity of this line of business: a single batch of compromised gift cards can wipe out the usually-slim margins and cause an entire enterprise to tip into insolvency.

Revisiting CardCash

Checking back through my e-mail, it looks like I first used CardCash to liquidate Hewlett Packard gift cards back in 2016 when it was possible to generate unlimited points and cash by recycling them. I hadn’t used CardCash since, and while I didn’t remember having any problems with them back then, I didn’t even know if the site was still around.

Fortunately, it still is, and I was able to successfully use them to liquidate some Adidas gift cards I purchased during a recent promotion.

Bonus Safeway 4 U points on Adidas gift cards

Most weeks, the grocery stores around me run promotions for discounts or bonus points on gift card purchases. The promotions are usually for third-party gift cards, although last week Giant ran a formerly-common, now-rare promotion for bonus points on Visa prepaid debit cards.

Last week, Safeway ran a global promotion for 10 bonus Safeway for U points per dollar spent on Adidas gift cards. Since third-party gift cards usually earn one Safeway for U point per dollar, this meant you could earn 5500 points (55 Rewards) for each $500 Adidas gift card you purchased, plus any credit card rewards you earned on the purchase.

This was a nice combination of a big mainstream retailer (rather than a niche merchant like Top Golf) and a substantial bonus, so I decided to pencil out whether it made sense as a gift card reselling play.

Putting CardCash through its paces

Since it had been so long since I used CardCash, and the promotion lasted all week, I decided to run a few experiments before going all in. Fortunately, CardCash offers the same payout rate on all card denominations, so I first bought two $75 Adidas gift cards (the minimum to trigger the Safeway promotion), and submitted one to CardCash on Wednesday requesting a PayPal payout, and one on Thursday requesting an ACH payout. Both orders were immediately “confirmed” by e-mail, and both were “accepted” on Friday. I received the PayPal payment Friday afternoon and the ACH payment on Monday. The cash payout rate was identical at 80.5%, or $60.38.

With those experiments successfully completed, I was then confident enough to buy three more Adidas gift cards for $500 each.

Alternative redemption options

While CardCash will pay out cash, they also allow you to exchange third-party gift cards for other cards at a higher value. The highest redemption rate available was (and still is as of this writing) Hotels.com gift cards at $446.78, or 89.36% of face value.

I don’t have any special love for Hotels.com, but I do use them periodically when they have competitive rates or cancellation conditions for stays I don’t want to use points on. In fact, I have already booked two upcoming trips that added up to almost exactly the $1340.34 I’d get from swapping out Adidas gift cards. In my case, the Hotels.com gift cards were literally as good as cash to me.

Request for Proof of Purchase/Origin

I submitted my first two $500 cards on Friday and Sunday, and on Monday received an e-mail with the subject line “Request for Proof of Purchase/Origin” and the order number for my Friday order. The e-mail read:

“Thank you for choosing CardCash to sell your gift cards.

“To ensure secure transactions, please reply to this email with proof of purchase/origin for the gift cards you intend to sell. Please choose from the suggested examples or attach any other applicable documentation when replying to this email:

1. “Purchase receipts or invoices with transaction details.

2. “Documentation supporting their legitimacy, such as proof of employee incentives, loyalty rewards, or other valid sources.

3. “Additional details or explanations that provide clarity on how the gift cards were obtained.

“Upon receiving the requested information, our team will review it promptly.

“Providing this information is crucial in maintaining our commitment to a safe and trustworthy platform.”

I e-mail a photo of the card packaging, the back of the gift card, and the Safeway receipt showing the purchase details a little before noon and a little before 1 pm I received both a polite e-mail back and two e-mails with links to my newly-minted Hotels.com gift cards.

My third order was accepted without any additional verification.

Doing the math

I value Safeway Rewards in volume at about $2.39 each. They are only worth this much in volume, because more expensive awards also give better value. A single Reward is worth at most a dollar or two, while 7 Rewards are worth around $19.50. The 55 Rewards earned on a $500 Adidas gift card were therefore worth about $131.45 to me.

Selling Adidas gift cards for 80.5% of face value ($402.50) would still be slightly profitable, especially if you have a particularly high-value redemption in mind. But if you value Hotels.com gift cards the same as cash, as I did, then the value proposition becomes much more attractive, as I paid just $53.22 for what I conservatively value at $131.45 in Alaska Airlines miles.

Don't sleep on the Better Balance Rewards forced product change spending bonus

One of the interesting things about Bank of America credit cards, historically, has been that they were pretty indifferent to how many of the same credit card you carried. Bank of America’s credit card portfolio isn’t terribly impressive, but they had two gems where this indifference really shone: the Alaska Airlines suite of personal and business credit cards, with their generous annual companion tickets, and the Better Balance Rewards card, which offered $30 in cash per quarter, per card, as long as you simply paid off your card’s balance each month.

Knowing Bank of America’s willingness to let you carry multiple copies of the same card, many people used the Better Balance Rewards card as a target when requesting a product change from a card they’d already met the signup bonus on and didn’t have any more need for. $30 per quarter may not sound like much, but once you had a system set up to charge and pay off the card, it was also free money, which folks in our hobby are typically fairly interested in.

Back around May, 2023, those cards were forcibly product-changed into Unlimited Cash Rewards cards, which can be as good a way as any of earning 2.625% cash back on all purchases if you have Platinum Honors status with Bank of America. Of course, there’s no reason to have more than one 2.625% cash back card, so it wasn’t unreasonable to bemoan the loss of your cache of Better Balance Rewards cards which provided a steady flow of quarterly income.

Sidelined in that conversation was the fact that alongside the loss of passive income, the new Unlimited Cash Rewards cards came with a bonus of $200 when you spend $1,000 on the card by September 30, 2023. Since there’s no reason to put actual spend on more than one of these cards, I suddenly worried that folks who had more than one Better Balance Rewards card may have forgotten about the little glossy sheet that came in their new card’s envelope describing the free money they were entitled to.

So, since September is not all that far away, be sure to score the $200 product change bonus before you cancel your new Unlimited Cash Rewards cards or change them to a more valuable product.

"Transfer" timeline for Just 4 U Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan redemptions

Last month I wrote about the option of redeeming Albertsons (and their subsidiaries) Just 4 U rewards for Alaska Airline Mileage Plan miles. The option of redeeming, for example, 7 Just 4 U rewards for 1,300 Mileage Plan miles instead of a $10 grocery reward is the functional equivalent of buying Mileage Plan miles for 0.77 cents each.

If you can generate (or have stockpiled; more on that below) more Just 4 U points than you can use for actual groceries, that's a perfectly sensible redemption, especially if you’re saving up miles for a premium award on one of Alaska’s partners.

My April Alaska Airlines redemptions posted in one batch on May 1

What I could not answer in that earlier post is how long it takes miles to appear in your Mileage Plan account after you’ve ordered a redemption. That’s because one or both of the programs backdates your miles to the date of the Just 4 U redemption, not the date they become available for Alaska Airlines awards.

In April I could see that I had placed an order for 100 Mileage Plan miles on January 27, and I could see 100 Mileage Plan miles dated January 27, but I could not see when the miles actually became available.

[Note: I say I could see the order “in April” because Just 4 U only shows your order history for 90 days, so when I wrote that post on April 6 I could still see my January 27 order, but I cannot see it in my Just 4 U order history any more.]

That being the case, over the course of April I made four additional Just 4 U redemptions, on the 6th, 14th, 19th, and 29th, and made it a point to check my Mileage Plan account every morning to see if anything had posted. That way, while I might not catch the exact moment the miles became available, I would know within a pretty narrow window.

That’s how I found out that all four of my Just 4 U redemptions (three for 100 miles and one for 250 miles) all posted on May 1, 2023.

Obviously one datapoint is neither dispositive nor permanent. For all I know they post miles every 45 days and May 1 just happened to be 45 days after the last batch posted in March. But that seems less likely than all of each month’s mile redemptions posting sometime on or around the first day of the following month.

There’s no point redeeming aggressively but there’s no point waiting

Batched posting like this means, on the one hand, you don’t need to immediately redeem each reward as you earn it (as a reminder, you earn one reward for every 100 points you earn in the Just 4 U program, and larger redemptions give better value) since if you get your redemption in by (near) the end of the month you’ll receive the miles on the same day as you would have, had you redeemed earlier in the month.

On the other hand, each Just 4 U account’s redemption inventory resets every week so if you are earning more rewards than you know what to do with, you don’t want to miss a redemption opportunity by sitting on your hands either.

About that stockpiling strategy

Normally, “rump” Just 4 U points expire at the end of the month they’re earned and rewards expire at the end of the month after they’re earned. Back when it was trivial to amass unlimited Just 4 U points alongside credit card rewards a number of people pointed out that these rewards could be extended indefinitely by signing up for a paid FreshPass subscription. I’m sure there are plenty of people still eating for free on the rewards they earned back then!

This naturally raises the question: if another opportunity for unlimited Just 4 U points comes along, should you pay for a FreshPass subscription in order to redeem 22 rewards per week for Alaska Airlines miles? How many subscriptions? One for every member of your family? One for your dog?

This is not, fortunately, a question I can answer for you because it goes to the heart of how you choose to play the game. I chose not to get a FreshPass subscription and stockpile rewards back then simply because that’s who I am: after I’d filled up my fridge, and my freezer, and my cupboards, and my linen closet, and my local free pantry, I just stopped. Paying $99 per year to buy groceries I didn’t want or need for the rest of my life or until the program was devalued simply didn’t have any appeal for me. I wrote it up for my Subscribers-Only Newsletter and moved on.

On the other hand, I know lots of people who stockpile every currency under the sun on the off chance they find an opportunity to score the perfect luxury redemption. The thrill of finding first class award availability or consecutive exotic award nights with one currency is simply more exciting than seeing the value of another hoard whittled away by devaluations, mergers, or bankruptcies is discouraging.

And if you’re one of those people, then why not add Just 4 U into the mix? Of course, I don’t need to tell you that: you probably already have!

Just 4 U Alaska Airlines redemptions work, for what it's worth

A few months back a number of bloggers reported that Just 4 U rewards (the rewards program of Albertsons grocery stores and its countless sub-brands) could be redeemed for Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan miles.

How it works

The basic mechanism is simple. When a Just 4 U account has a store in Alaska designated as your “preferred store,” then you’ll see the following redemption options:

• 1 Reward: 100 Mileage Plan miles.

• 2 Rewards: 250 miles.

• 3 Rewards: 400 miles.

• 4 Rewards: 600 miles.

• 5 Rewards: 850 miles.

• 7 Rewards: 1300 miles.

Thus, you can redeem a total of up to 22 Rewards per week per Just 4 U account for a total of up to 3,500 Mileage Plan miles.

As a reminder, you earn 1 Reward each time you earn 100 Just 4 U points. Just 4 U points expire at the end of each month, but Rewards expire at the end of the month after they’re earned. Paid FreshPass membership keeps your Rewards from expiring indefinitely.

Mileage Plan Miles Versus Grocery Rewards

If you have access to unlimited Just 4 U points, then the “grocery rewards” double dip is the most valuable option because it allows you to stack multiple grocery rewards redemptions on a single purchase, even to the point of generating a negative balance (although since this will invariably raise suspicion, I recommend spending the negative balance instead, for example by buying a prepaid debit card).

That technique lets you redeem 44 Rewards for $64 off your bill when you buy $20 in groceries (leaving you with $44 to spend on dairy, alcohol, gift cards, or anything else that isn’t usually eligible for Rewards).

Note that the grocery rewards option is only more valuable because of the double dip. If you could not double dip grocery rewards, then redeeming 7 Rewards for 1,300 Mileage Plan miles instead of a $10 grocery reward looks a lot more attractive. Lots of people would be willing to buy Mileage Plan miles for 0.77 cents each, at least at the margin.

What this means is that while double dipping grocery rewards may be the best combination of Just 4 U redemptions, single dipping Mileage Plan redemptions at the 7-Reward level is a solid alternative after you’ve redeemed those and have Rewards left over each week. And this is, in fact, more common than you might think.

Leftover Just 4 U Rewards

Take, for example, last week’s offer for 10 Just 4 U points per dollar spent on Google Play cards. Since you can buy cards up to $500 in value, the maximum earning per card is 5,000 Just 4 U points, or 50 Rewards. After redeeming 44 Rewards through the grocery rewards double dip, you’re left with 6 Rewards. By earning a single additional Reward (or using a leftover Reward from a previous week), you can also redeem for the highest-value Mileage Plan reward the same week, before repeating the process the next week.

I don’t engage in much gift card reselling anymore, but when very high earning rates are offered on high-value cards (or even cards you plan to use yourself), you may be able to break even or turn a profit on Just 4 U rewards in addition to the credit card rewards you earn on the original purchase.

Comparing IHG's 4th-night-free with Marriott and Hilton's 5th-night-free

I was reading Danny the Deal Guru’s write-up of the latest Chase IHG Rewards signup offers and something jumped out at me: the 4th-night-free benefit offered to cardholders, including those who hold the no-annual-fee IHG Rewards Traveler card. To be clear, this isn’t a new benefit, it’s just one I haven’t had a chance to think about in depth.

Generally speaking, I don’t rate IHG or their rewards program very highly, because while they have an enormous global footprint, they’re rarely competitive compared with the main hotel programs I rely on, Hilton and Hyatt. For example, I regularly visit Portland, OR, which on a sample search turned up two downtown Hyatt properties priced at 12,000 World of Hyatt points, a Hilton priced at 37,000 Hilton Honors points, a Marriott priced at 30,000 Bonvoy points, and a Kimpton priced at 25,000 IHG Rewards Club points (plus a nightly “amenity fee”). For a one-night stay, it would be ridiculous to choose the IHG property unless you’d built up a large orphaned balance through various shenanigans.

Since my framework is manufactured spend, not signup bonuses, it’s easy to make a direct comparison between the options:

• 12,000 World of Hyatt points transferred from Chase Ultimate Rewards is worth $120 in cash.

• 37,000 Hilton Honors points earned at 6 points per dollar with the American Express Surpass co-branded card is between $123 (if the same $6,200 in spend had been put on a 2% cashback card) and $185 if the points were purchased for 0.5 cents each, an offer which is regularly available, including now through March 7, 2023.

• 30,000 Marriott Bonvoy points are worth between $240 (if you bought the points during one of their periodic promotions) and $300 (if you transferred the points from Chase Ultimate Rewards.

• 25,000 IHG Rewards points are worth between $150 and $175 if you buy them using the “points and cash” trick (purchasing points while making an award reservation, then cancelling the reservation and having the points refunded to your account).

This makes comparing the four sample reservation options, and indeed comparing all reservation options at the four chains, easy, if on average:

• World of Hyatt points cost 1 cent each;

• Hilton Honors points cost 0.42 cents each;

• Marriott Bonvoy points cost 0.9 cents each;

• and IHG Rewards points cost 0.65 cents each;

then on a one-night stay you can convert the points cost of any property into the cash cost of manufacturing, transferring, or purchasing the required points. In the concrete example above, we saw that Hyatt and Hilton were quite competitive, while Marriott and IHG Rewards were significantly more expensive options.

On four-night stays, the equation changes, but only for IHG Rewards points. On four-night stays at the other three chains, the cost per point remains the same, while the 4th-night-free benefit offered by the IHG Rewards credit cards increases their value by 33% or decreases their cost by 25% to 0.49 cents each — same difference. The four-night IHG Rewards stay now costs just $122 per night, putting it squarely in the middle of the “competitive” pack of Hyatt and Hilton, or even on the cheaper end (ignoring that pesky Kimpton amenity fee, which you obviously shouldn’t in practice).

Moving to a five-night stay, the equation shifts again, but this time against IHG Rewards, since Hilton and Marriott both offer the fifth night free on award stays. The cost per night on the sample five-night stays with Hilton is $123 per night, with Marriott is $216, and with IHG $130. Hyatt doesn’t offer free nights on longer stays so their cost per night remains flat at $120.

Reference Card

I wanted to use a specific example to explain why I personally don’t care for IHG Rewards, but in case you want to bookmark this post or paste the values into your notes app, here are the shortcuts when calculating the cost of stays of various lengths.

Stays of 1-3 nights:

• World of Hyatt: 1 cent per point

• Hilton Honors: 0.42 cents per point

• Marriott Bonvoy: 0.9 cents per point

• IHG Rewards: 0.65 cents per point

Stays of exactly 4 nights:

• IHG Rewards: 0.49 cents per point

Stays of exactly 5 nights:

• World of Haytt: 1 cent per point

• IHG Rewards: 0.52 cents per point

• Hilton Honors: 0.34 cents per point

• Marriott Rewards: 0.72 cents per point

Now you can easily calculate the cost of reward stays of up to 5 nights in length in every city in the world — not just in Portland, Oregon!

Seven of my favorite travel hacks for people of all skill levels

I was impressed by Greg’s post at The Frequent Miler yesterday, although I was a bit worried since I’d been planning my own post about my favorite still-working travel hacking tips. Fortunately, his list didn’t end up overlapping with mine much at all. Still I thought I should get this post up before anybody else had the same idea.

The list below runs the gamut from “using the program as intended” to “highly illegal” so as always apply your own judgment and discretion when deciding which of these are right for you.

Nesting Alaska Airlines companion tickets

One of the posts I’m most often asked about gives some examples of the zany routes you can book with the companion tickets you get when signing up for Bank of America Alaska Airlines co-branded credit cards and on your account anniversary. It’s such a good deal (a $95 annual fee and a $99 fare (plus taxes!) for any Alaska-operated flight in any economy fare bucket) that almost anyone who lives in or near a city served by Alaska and flies with a companion once a year is virtually certain to come out ahead.

The example I gave in that post is booking a flight from Washington National Airport to Los Angeles, then a roundtrip between LAX and Maui, then a flight back from LAX to DCA. Since you can spend an unlimited amount of time in both Los Angeles and Maui, that’s functionally two itineraries: one between DCA and LAX, and one between LAX and OGG — and the second passenger gets to take both while paying for a single companion ticket (a little over $170 in that example).

If you’re able to “nest” companion tickets on routes you fly regularly you can get even more value from multiple companion tickets. To continue the example above, say you want to return home to DC from LA before your trip to Hawaii. You could of course find that another airline has better timing or prices, but if Alaska is the best carrier for you, you can also book a second companion ticket partially “nested” inside the first one by booking a flight from DCA to LAX that meets up with your existing LAX-OGG itinerary. That gets you to LAX, but remember you already have your return flight from LAX to DCA from the first companion ticket. That means you can use the “return” portion of your second companion ticket to book any “reasonable” routing (see the original post for additional details on routing rules). For example, it’s perfectly legal to use a companion ticket to fly from DCA to LAX, then from Portland, OR to Missoula, MT, then from MSO to DCA.

Thus from two companion tickets we’ve built 3.5 round trips: DCA-LAX, LAX-OGG, PDX-MSO, and then a one-way ticket PDX-DCA.

Using closed or drained debit cards to pay for in-flight food and drinks

This trick has been around since the invention of the inflight credit card reader, but still works almost everywhere. For whatever reason (presumably so the flight attendants don’t screw around on Twitter while they’re working) the handheld readers flight attendants use to charge for in-flight food and drinks aren’t connected to the internet, or at least aren’t connected to a payment server. They apparently dump all the card data when they land, or at the end of the day. That means in flight, you can order whatever you like for free, as long as you have a card that will decline the charge once you land.

Obviously this doesn’t work on cash-only carriers (mostly regional flights these days), and some international carriers verify card data in real time as well. This also does not work for in-flight internet charges in my experience.

Earning free night certificates at hotels you stay at

A lot of people are paid to inflate the value of the free night certificates that come with many credit cards. I’m not, so I take a much more skeptical approach to them. One heuristic I like to use is: “would I use this certificate to extend a stay I’m willing to pay for?” For example, I used a Hilton free night certificate for a sixth night at the Grand Wailea resort in Hawaii, after paying for 5 nights with points (and getting the fifth night free).

On the other hand, in most cities I visit, Marriott properties are either non-existent or not competitive on price with Hilton or Hyatt, so I would never use a free night certificate if it meant locking in a higher daily rate on the remaining paid nights.

Of course, for road warriors who pay for their own expenses, having a trove of free night certificates in case of bad weather or other travel emergencies can save a ton of money on last-minute expenses. I think that’s perfectly reasonable — but it’s also not very many people.

Using Fluz as intended

I wrote about my first experiments using Fluz as intended back in 2021, and while I wouldn’t say I use it often, it’s become a resource I check at least a few times a week. Most travel hackers use Fluz to manufacture spend, but they do also sell gift cards to a range of merchants with automatic cash back (redeemable for cash once you hit a pesky one-time $26 payment threshold).

The basic premise of Fluz is that you can buy exact-denomination gift cards to a surprising range of merchants. Presumably Fluz buys this credit in bulk, then splits the discount with its customers. The value-add of Fluz is that it passes along not just the merchant category but the actual merchant for every card I’ve ordered. For my sins I occasionally order Domino’s pizza from around the corner, and I often have Chase offers on my credit cards for some percentage rebate on Domino’s orders. Since Fluz passes through the merchant to Chase, I can stack my 10% rebate through Chase with my 4% rebate through Fluz (after clicking through shopping portals and applying coupons).

Obviously, this isn’t a great idea at merchants you rarely shop at or are trying for the first time, since if you’re disappointed your payment will be refunded to a gift card you’ll never use. But for picking up a pizza or a burger, or at a store you shop at regularly, it’s a no-brainer.

Registering for hotel promotions

While this may sound like table stakes, I doubt there’s a person in the game who hasn’t gotten home from a trip before realizing that they could have earned a few thousand or more points on their hotel stays if they’d registered for an ongoing promotion in advance. It’s a bad feeling, so avoid it whenever you can!

I try to keep my Hotel Promotions page up-to-date with all currently ongoing and announced promotions, but I’m not always on the ball, so if the chain you’re staying with doesn’t have a promotion listed there, it’s a good idea to search Frequent Miler or go to the hotel promo page at Loyalty Lobby. Note that Loyalty Lobby publishes every promotion, even targeted and regional ones, for every chain so their site is incredibly cluttered, albeit comprehensive.

Using Hotels.com at non-chain hotels (or chains you don’t value)

For the most part, you’re better off booking chain hotels directly if you value the chain’s rewards currency or elite status benefits, since you won’t earn points and may not get elite benefits if you book through a third party like Hotels.com (or Priceline, Expedia, etc).

On the other hand, if you don’t value a chain’s loyalty program, or for stays at non-chain hotels, you can use Hotels.com to “lump” those stays together into Hotels.com’s rewards program. Plus you don’t need their co-branded credit card to participate, although it may help.

Hotels.com also appears in most shopping portals and in Fluz, so you can save money on hotel stays 3 times: clicking through a shopping portal, selecting your stay details, then going to Fluz and buying an exact-denomination gift card for the total amount. Credit cards periodically offer rebates on gift card purchases as well (American Express, Citi).

Knowing the difference between calendar year and cardmember year benefits

This one’s essential to maximizing the value of your credit card benefits, and if you’re paying an annual fee for a credit card, losing out on a benefit you’ve paid for is the worst case scenario. Take the Chase World of Hyatt credit card for instance: it offers a Category 1-4 free night award on every cardmember anniversary, and a second free night award when you spend $15,000 in a calendar year. That means you can get 3 free night awards during your first cardmember year, depending on your anniversary date. If you get the card in July, then you have until December 31 to spend $15,000 on the card to earn the first award, and until June 30 to spend another $15,000 to earn the second, before you even have to decide whether to renew the card for a second year (personally I value the free award nights so highly I plan to keep the card forever, but that may change down the road if my taste in travel evolves).

Other examples of calendar year benefits include most Global Entry and Precheck reimbursements, most airline fee reimbursements, and bonuses for hitting high annual spend thresholds.

Conclusion

My posts normally focus on one topic at a time so it was fun exercise to take a 30,000-foot view of the techniques I actually use to save money on my travel. I manufacture spend to earn the points and miles I need to pay for the outstanding cost of my travel, which makes it even more important to make those outstanding costs as low as possible by double and triple dipping my credit card rewards, portal cashback, and any other discounts I’m able to scrape together, since it means I don’t have to work as hard manufacturing spend!