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Chase Ink: 60,000 point offer for this week only

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Ultimate Rewards points are pretty awesome, which makes the Chase Ink’s standard 50,000-point offer a really good deal. This week only, as part of a small business promotion, the bonus is 60,000. If ever you’re going to get this card, now is the time, as this is the highest bonus it’s had in a long time.

If you want to see an affiliate feeding frenzy, you can open the boardingarea.com coverage from Rapid Travel Chai, Frequent Miler, Mommy Points, One Mile At A Time, Marshall Jackson On Travel, View From The Wing, Point Me To The Plane, Delta Points, JAPT, and PMM in one browser simultaneously.

I am to small for Chase to bother with, so I have no affiliate links to share with you, dear readers. Personally, I really enjoy Frequent Miler and Rapid Travel Chai, so my wife and I plan on venturing over to their sites a little later today. Patronizing the advertising of your favorite bloggers is a nice gesture, and did I mention I have some nice ads right over there to the right of this article you’re reading right now? Not 60,000-point nice, mind you, but not bad either.

30,000 miles from Alaska Airlines: Much less exciting than the Chase Ink, but still worth a mention

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View From The Wing noted that there’s a 30,000-mile Alaska Airlines link. It’s not as good as the 40,000 it’s been in the past, but it’s better than the 25,000 standard offer that’s been out there for a while.

Why might you want this card? One Mile At A Time points out:

The card does come with an annual fee of $75 which isn’t waived for the first year, though you also get a $118 companion certificate, which is one of the most valuable out there. It’s eligible on all coach fares, is upgradable, and even the companion earns miles.

Also nice: there’s no minimum spend with this offer. Here’s a slightly older article from The Points Guy about how to use the Alaska Airlines program.

All in all, not as big of a deal as the Chase Ink deal, but still something to consider.

Chase Southwest 50,000 point offer is back, and so is the no-fee Chase Fairmont card!

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SOUTHWEST 50,000 POINTS: After being rolled out early this year and then yanked in April, the Chase Southwest 50,000-point offer is back! Thanks to Fatwallet for bringing this to my attention. There are actually four different offers (annual fees are not waived, alas):

What do you do with those points? They are pretty valuable if you just redeem on Southwests’s “Wanna Get Away” fares, making those 50,000 points worth around $800. You can also get the Southwest Companion pass if you get 110,000 points (easily done if you get both the personal and business versions, and don’t forget that you can transfer points in from Ultimate Rewards as well) and take along a friend for free on Southwest for a year.

You can also redeem for a variety of gift certificates–in fact, my wife and I just redeemed some Southwest points for Bed, Bath, and Beyond giftcards. Incidentally, for those of you with babies and small kids: did you know BBB giftcards and coupons can be used at BuyBuy Baby, and vice versa?

 BUT WAIT, THAT’S NOT ALL: Thanks to One Mile At A Time for pointing me to this Roms Deals post heralding the arrival of a Chase Fairmont credit card app with the $95 application fee waived for the first year. The bonus with this card: 2 free nights plus breakfast for two at any Fairmont hotel.

Fairmont is a high-end hotel chain, the kind I won’t be staying in for a while until my kids get a bit older. But this is one of their hotels I would love to stay at some day:

That’s not a castle, it’s the Le Chateau Frontenac, a Fairmont hotel overlooking Quebec City. If you and your spouse both get this card, that’s a four-day luxury trip for you two. Fairmont has hotels all over the world, so have a look at their site and see if anything interests you.

Chase United 50,000 mile business card offer? And how banks could make us more honest

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UNITED 50,000 BUSINESS CARD: Some helpful posters on this Flyertalk thread who have pointed out that it’s possible to get a 50,000 mile offer on the business version of the Chase United card. Go here, log in, and then click the “MileagePlus Explorer Business Card” link.

It appears that some people get the 50,000 offer and some people only get the 30,000 offer, though you may be able to fiddle with the page to prompt the better offer. Quoting from the first post in the thread,

I went to the united site, clicked link for united explorer business, got landing page for 30K offer, clicked tab for Mileageplus Club business card got offer for $0 first year, clicked tab back to explorer business and boom 50K offer W/2K spend in 3months + the 10K after 25K.”

Another poster wrote:

Seems like logging in activates the offer. Unlogged, I was shown the 30K one, but logged in, 50K appeared.
Better still – the Club Card went from $395 with $100 off, to no fee first year!!!

And another:

I have 3 similar MP accounts. They all received the 50K offer on the personal card in the past but only one receives the 50K on business now. And the only differences I notice right now are the activitiy dates and the number of miles. The one account that got the offer has plenty of miles with the lastest transaction date 06/03/2013 from UR transfer. The other two latest transactions are in May and from purchase point on personal card.

And another:

None of the 4 family accounts I manage had this. We all have pretty good balances, and a variety of times from our last mileage postings, but the common denominator is that NONE of us has earned a flight mile in years.

In other words, YMMV. Here’s a screenshot of the offer put up by one of the FT posters. For the record, I was not able to get the 50,000 offer, but hopefully some of you will have better luck.

TRUTH, LIES, AND BANKS: If you do apply for the United card, Point Me To The Plane has some interesting thoughts on truth-telling on your application from a reader named Brooke, who happens to be a divorce attorney:

I will not bore all of you non-legal travel lovers out there with all of the details, but what I will say is that during this process, I would often subpoena the person’s credit card applications to see what they alleged to have earned when applying for credit cards throughout the marriage.  More often than not, they inflated this number to gain approval for a card, and we (and the Courts) held them to this figure that they listed and signed off on during the application. This data supplied concrete evidence for the Court that the spouse earned more than they reported and assisted us in receiving higher settlements. This could be exploited by a greedy ex-spouse in an effort to prove to the Court that you are admitting to earning an amount that is actually higher than that you earn.  Believe me, an ex-spouse is nearly always claiming their spouse earns more than they do. Thus, the moral of the story is this: beware of what you put on those credit card applications, it can and will be held against you during legal proceedings!

I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that lying on a credit card application is also a federal felony, albeit one that is rarely, if ever, enforced. But then, a surprisingly large number of things are federal felonies. For example: sharing your HBO Go password can land you in a federal penitentiary.

Incidentally, this reminds me of a famous psychology experiment: researchers found that merely putting up a picture of a pair of human eyes caused people to behave more honestly. This is the actual document from the experiment, wherein people were asked to contribute to the coffee fund–on the honor system–according to how much coffee they drank. The mere presence of the eyes tripled the amount of money received:

♫ I always feel like somebody’s watching meeee…

….And that gives me an idea: what if credit card companies put a pair of eyes on credit card (or any other loan) applications? Would that reduce lying? This idea is certainly testable–you just randomize who gets what application and see if there’s a difference in reported income. What say you, Citibank? Chase? B of A? Anyone?

A MONOPOLY HACK: The mathematics are a little complicated, but long story short some very smart people have gone to the trouble of determining which Monopoly spaces are landed on most frequently. Which one are you most likely to land on? JAIL. But not the GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL space, thank goodness. Which property should you be angling to purchase or trade for? Illinois Avenue.

Have fun! And no stealing from the bank, please.

Just visiting…

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