When booking our spontaneous (for us) trip to London, I needed to top up our Delta SkyMiles balances to have enough miles in our accounts for the tickets. One of the reasons I earn flexible miles is the ability to transfer them where and when I need them. Since American Express is the only one of the three main flexible currencies that partners with Delta, I went to the Membership Rewards website to transfer 30,000 points from Sharon’s AMEX account to Delta. Continue reading “Watch Out For This Fee If You Transfer AMEX Membership Rewards To A U.S. Airline”
Tag: Transferrable points
I Fell For The Barclays Survey Email About Their Arrival+ Card
If there’s a bank that’s giving Citi a run for its money about not knowing where they want to take their credit card business, it’s Barclays. While they have co-brand credit cards with many airlines, including American, JetBlue, Hawaiian and Frontier, their proprietary card line has been inconsistent. It was just in June 2018 when they launched the Arrival Premier with points that could be transferred to airlines. However the lack of partners that customers in the U.S. were familiar with and a confusing transfer ratio system caused the card to be closed to new applicants in October, just three months after its launch.
The Barclays Arrival+ (plus) card has been around since 2014 and has gone through several refreshes. New applications were closed for a while in 2018 when the Arrival Premier was launched but applications were opened up again, with a 70,000 point sign up bonus, when the Premier fizzled out.
So what were we to think when Barclays, again, closed new applications for the Arrival+ in June of 2019?
Continue reading “I Fell For The Barclays Survey Email About Their Arrival+ Card”
This New Way To Search For Awards Found Me A Ticket For 8,000 Miles
A fact you learn when you get started with miles and points is that the earning part is relatively easy. You don’t have to learn a lot to get going and jumpstart those balances. This can cause problems down the line if you get too enthusiastic so here’s a list I made of what you should do if you’re rather new to the game.
Redeeming your miles and points for rewards can be a bit more difficult. For starters, there’s the availability problem. Unless you’re in a fixed value program like Southwest or JetBlue, not all flights have award tickets available.
Even if you find an available flight, if you have transferrable points there are numerous programs you have access to, and each of them might charge a different amount of miles and fees for the same award ticket.
If you can keep track of every award in every program, good for you. I know I can’t. But that’s not as much of a problem as it used to be…
Continue reading “This New Way To Search For Awards Found Me A Ticket For 8,000 Miles”
Stupidest Way To Damage Hotel, How Far Can You Go On 40K?, Most Terrifying Theme Park Attraction Ever + More!
Happy Sunday to all of our travel friends, both near and far! Here are some articles we’ve read from other bloggers (and other sources) that we think you may like, as well, so we’re passing them along.
How To Combine Points From Two Banks To Book An Award
Since we started writing Your Mileage May Vary, several of our friends have started collecting points and miles. I feel a level of satisfaction when they’re able to go on that first award trip, partially because of our help. Just like any mentor, occasionally we’ll get a question about a topic where we don’t know the answer. While I could just say that I really don’t know about that, I like to use these situations to learn about things I hadn’t focused on before. Such was a question about how to combine points from two different bank programs.
While the answer may seem obvious if you’ve been collecting points and miles for a while, for someone just starting out this can be very confusing.
Continue reading “How To Combine Points From Two Banks To Book An Award”
