The Stanley Cup Finals are done as are the NBA Finals. TPOL predicted another championship incorrectly for the record.
Now that there’s nothing left to watch on television, TPOL will be spending the next few days with nothing to do. This extra time is an incentive to plan a few last-minute getaways for the summer and for the fall. I doubt it will be exciting as last summer where I went to Shanghai, Bali, Helsinki, Stockholm, Riga, and finally my new/temporary home of Ulaanbaatar.
What’s on the agenda this summer? Only time will tell. One thing is for sure Iguodala is not the MVP.
Whether you’re going to Ibiza this summer or just driving a taxi around in the dead heat of Arizona, you can’t miss the sound of summer in the form of that unmistakable hit. The tune may be annoying initially but over time it will come to define the good times of summer.
Here is a quick rundown of the songs from the last few summers and the international Trip Report where it was overplayed.
TPOL called it. SPG’s no foreign transaction fees on the Amex card was good news, sort of. Today Amex announced that the card’s annual fee of $65, a very reasonable fee, is going up to $95, the standard for all cards. Unless I spend cold, hard currency overseas on SPG hotels in excess of $30 of what would’ve been a 3% charge, I see no overall gain in this added ‘feature’.
The two other benefits, complimentary, Unlimited Boingo Wi-Fi and Sheraton Club Access aren’t a big deal to me because 1)I’m an SPG platinum member and will get Club Access for free 2)I have a Platinum Amex so Boingo and GoGo are an included perk for that $450 annual fee.
What do I get for $95? Nothing but another fee that I have to pay.
Trust in TPOL, he calls it all before it happens without any inside source besides common sense. Next up AA devaluation.
Here’s what I learned this week from having nothing to do but read travel blogs.
1. List of Taxes from Major Cities in Europe: Mile Value: I don’t care how nice British Airways is, I’m not paying fuel surcharges. That’s like tipping in Asian countries.
I consider myself a wine enthusiast. It’s a moniker that used to be reserved for the elite but TPOL has broken through this glass ceiling by traveling far and wide in search of the best vino.
My wine tour includes:
Stellenbosch, South Africa
Yarra Valley, Australia
Wellington, New Zealand
Napa Valley, California
Mendoza, Argentina
France, Italy, and Chile are notably absent but not for long. The tours help wine novices appreciate the process of how wine is made, stored, and distributed. At the same time, it makes purchasing wine once you arrive home less intimidating. This new-found knowledge is useful when ordering a bottle at an expensive restaurant or picking up a bottle at your local grocer.
The problem whether it be in a restaurant or at the store is determining if the mark up on that bottle is appropriate or obscene. Do the words ‘reserve’ automatically mean the $20 MSRP is warranted? Is the waiter trying to upsell a bottle because he spots your vulnerability?
I recommend Wine-Searcher which tells you the rating and average cost for the bottle. If you like the bottle, you can add it to your favorites list since it is next to impossible to remember the name, label, year of the innumerable vineyards. I shamelessly look forward to trying it at an upscale restaurant because the app also has a ‘read wine list’ feature.
For tonight, I’m satisfied that this 2010 Carmenere Reserva which I purchased for $12.69 was only $.20 higher than the average but let’s see how it tastes.
If you’re in the points game then you better have AwardWallet which keeps track of all your miles, hotels, rewards, and organ donors.
Today I went through my account admiring the stockpile I have amassed, a clear violation of the Shut Up & Book ideology. While doing so I took note of a few accounts that are not supported by AwardWallet including the following:
Delta
United
Copa
Southwest
It is annoying that these programs do not participate because the expiration date of the miles is not updated. Delta miles are useless so the fact that they don’t expire isn’t a game changer. The others like Southwest and United do expire so it’s important to manually update the dates as a reminder. The same should be done for SQ KrisFlyer which is supported by AwardWallet but doesn’t confirm the expiration.
Finally, if you are going to have a 70 character password for any of your accounts that you protect with your life, it should be your AwardWallet account. Most of us probably have more points than dollars and someone accessing your AwardWallet could cause quite the mess. More disturbing is that AwardWallet allows you to reveal the password for each account. If you keep your Amex, Barclays, and Chase accounts in AwardWallet without a hyper secure password (which doesn’t exist) then they are vulnerable.
Obviously, there is no fool-proof solution to hackers but there is a need for common sense and reasonable precaution.
The duck is dead. According to Miles to Memories, GiftCard Mall is no longer a viable source for MS. They’ve cut the $500 gift card down to $250 making it both inconvenient and more expensive to hit those pesky minimum spends. The good days of the rubber duck when I received cash back, loaded them onto my Bluebird at Walmart are no more.
Now we are at the mercy of drug stores, grocery stores, and whoever allows us to use our credit card to purchase $500 cards for a fee of $6.95. The fees suck but imagine the alternative, actually spending money.
UPDATE: Rubber Duck may be on life support. The $500 cards are back but for me I think he’s a goner because all my orders have been cancelled. The last one was escalated to management and they never got back to me about it.
Well that was much ado about nothing. Amex approved my Delta Platinum card netting me 60k useless Delta Skypesos. It always feels great to get accepted but I will have to be creative if I want to burn these points in style. Most likely I’ll apply for the business Delta next. Perhaps I will wait a year and get the gold too and then try to find availability from FNT to DTW in first class.
Spoiled churner comments notwithstanding, I think I learned something today or maybe I am more confused. At the time of my application I had the following credit cards (not charge cards):
Hilton Surpass
Hilton
Amex Blue
SPG Personal
SPG Business
The rule I thought I broke when I initially applied was that card members were capped at 4 credit cards. Recognizing this, I cancelled the Surpass which had an annual fee to bring me into compliance. But today when I called the agent said that my SPG business counted as a credit card towards the tally forcing me to knock off the Hilton in order to get approval.
So either the agent was mistaken or that is the new rule. Either way I’d like to welcome the Delta Platinum Amex back to my house. I haven’t seen it since my beloved NWA card left US Bank.
Remember that kid in law school who never created his own outlines, was always lurking around for handouts come finals time, and basically annoyed everyone? To some degree I am describing myself but only to a limited extent. In law school I found it more efficient to share my work product with others by becoming a broker of information. I specialized in the area I was interested, others specialized in theirs, and the dissemination of information flowed freely. “I’ll trade you Descendant’s Estates killer outline created by X for my Prisoner’s Rights outline.” Then I’ll trade that for T’s Evidence outline. And on and on it went.
The unspoken rule was that the mooch of information would be frozen out of the mix leaving the bottom feeder to fend for himself. After all, grades were based on a bell curve and giving away all the shortcuts would put those who actively participated in the swap at an unneeded disadvantage. Those that were in the inner circle understood that having an inclusive outline did not mean they would automatically score the highest. They would have to compete with their peers and ultimately the best would score well by effectively parlaying their own skills with the shared information.
The metaphor pairs perfectly in the points game. A certain billionaire who can’t keep a secret loves to disseminate any and all information crassly and carelessly with no regard for those who do the research by finding ‘sweet spots’, ‘two browser tricks’, and travel hacks. Good bloggers pay their dues to the system by making their own mistakes and then share their results with fellow bloggers and avid readers. Opportunistic bloggers troll websites for content then post arbitrage opportunities in big bold letters openly mocking the banks, airlines, pharmacies, bird zoos, and anyone else who is offering something for nothing. The inevitable result is that transactions that used to go through are now hard-coded in registers as impermissible. Churning opportunities for the 49th state that were readily available quickly dry up. And everyone is worse off as a result. Everyone except for the billionaire who makes a killing on affiliate links and is oblivious to the tacit rules of collusion that we all followed in law school.
There is no solution to stop this from occurring apart from speaking in code in deep, dark forums. This would make everyone worse off as collaboration would cease to exist leaving readers who don’t have the time to peruse every thread at a decided disadvantage. At the same time, wouldn’t it be nice to eliminate the free riders? Wouldn’t it be nice to stop seeing pictures of a spouse covered with BlueBird Vanilla droppings? Make no mistake all parties that participate in the points game are aware of each other. Chase knows that you switched your Sapphire from Visa to MC just to get the sign up bonus. Target knows about your macaw parrot. And GiftCardMall knows you aren’t that nice to be spending 15k a month shelling out gift cards.
They let these activities transpire because these institutions have a ledger that dictates when an offering goes from profitable to unprofitable. Seemingly this coincides when someone decides to flaunt his success stories via blog post after blog post.
Do you have night sweats from pending credit card apps?
Do you find yourself muttering incoherent explanations as to why you’re opening X card with Y Bank?
If so then you understand the superfluous, exaggerated anxiety of latest application with Amex for a Delta Card that I don’t even want. Today came and went and the promised call from Amex did not occur.
Applying for a card with the worst awards program next to Spirit is as pointless as this post but for some reason I decided to do it.
Now I sit and wait for my fate. I promise that my next churn much like my next post won’t be so worthless.
