A few months ago I wrote about booking all of the hotels for a week-long trip to London, Venice and Rome through the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal. It’s powered by Expedia, don’t you know, and it’s been interesting to take stock of how selection and prices have trended since Chase transitioned to Expedia for its […]
milenomics
Learn, Use, Repeat. A detailed trip into the world of Points, Miles, and Travel. How to earn more Miles and how to use those miles more effectively
Unlocking Award Availability with Bank Point Transfers to International Frequent Flyer Programs
Most people realize that you can use US frequent flyer miles (United, American, Delta) for award travel on Star Alliance, OneWorld, and SkyTeam partners. The hard part about this is finding partner award availability. Today, I’d like to talk about transferring bank points to international frequent flyer programs. Many international airlines release award space far […]
Booking Hotel Timeshares with Bank Points
We’re headed out to California for vacation this week, splitting time between our beloved Four Seasons Residence Club Aviara and Disney’s Grand Californian. Here at Milenomics we like to talk about “techniques we use over and over again”. Because the Net Present Value of a deal is higher when it can be repeated thus generating […]
This Week in Bank Points: Amtrak First Class Upgrade Coupons
I recently wrote about transferring bank points to Amtrak for 1.5 cents per point+ of value. See: Redeem Bank Points For Amtrak [Up To 1.64 Cents Per Point] In that post I mentioned the option of buying Amtrak upgrade coupons. I went through the process recently, upgrading Acela Business Class to First Class. In short: It […]
Dog Catches Car: The AA Etihad Apartment Trick Worked But I Let It Go
I was saying a couple of weeks ago how I did some research on booking Etihad Apartments with AA miles and found that I was unable to do so. See: What I Learned: Booking An Award For Travel On Etihad But after some more exploring, along with guidance from experts, I found that I was able […]
Bank Points Just Got a Little Harder to Redeem
Connexions Loyalty is a company that banks partner with to operate travel rewards redemptions. Programs like Chase Ultimate Rewards, Citi ThankYou Points, and City National Bank Rewards rely on them for some portion of their bookings. In August of 2018 Chase announced they’d be switching to Expedia for their online booking portal. Bank point enthusiasts […]
This Week in Bank Points: Booking El Al Business Class Flights
I recently spent some time learning about El Al’s award scheme while helping a family member book roundtrip flights in Business Class. I thought I’d summarize my findings here in case you find yourself interested in visiting Israel and booking El Al Business Class with points. Want: Boston to Tel Aviv round-trip in Business Class […]
Redeem Bank Points for Amtrak [Up to 1.64 Cents Per Point]
I was poking around reddit the other day and came across this post about transferring Membership Rewards to Amtrak Guest Rewards through a two-step process to achieve ~1.5 cents per point (cpp) of uplift. I thought this was an interesting tip, for those who want to travel on Amtrak, because no bank point programs (that I’m […]
This Week in Bank Points: Hotels in London, Venice and Rome
With flights secured to Italy in April, I set out to find some family friendly hotels in Europe bookable with points. Our inbound flight lands in London, and we’re flying out of Rome so I had some flexibility with the itinerary between those two endpoints. I talked it over with the family (our boys will […]
This Week in Bank Points: Amex Insider Fares, Disneyland, and Four Seasons
I wrote last week how co-mingling and redeeming bank points is the next step after being an Optimizing Transactor. It became clear to me how non-trivial a step this is while performing an annual review of family member’s credit card portfolios. It takes a lot of effort and organization to even be an Optimizing Transactor. […]