Thoughts Archives - asthejoeflies

Jan 22 2018

Outlining my 2018 points biases, needs, and wants – a blog refocusing

One thing I always loved about the blog Milenomics was Sam’s deep thinking when it comes to matters of miles and points. Thanks to asthejoeflies (and everywhere else) contributor Robert Dwyer, Milenomics is back! I’ve been thinking all week about Sam’s article about his miles and points needs and wants.

He hits the nail on the head when he says “Learning a little about my needs and wants will help you to align with what I say or skip things that just don’t apply to you. I think it is important that writers are clear about their inherent bias, especially when time and money are involved.” If you don’t understand a bloggers inherent bias, how can you objectively analyze her or his advice?

Outlining my miles and points needs and wants so that you know what you're getting when you read the blog. Needs and wants determine how you should act! — Life comes at you fast.

So, as my life has changed quite a bit, I thought it important to take a look at my inherent biases, needs, and wants when it comes to travel. I think this might be something worthwhile to do every year, to see how things have changed. Hopefully this helps you decide whether reading my blog is useful or useless to you (or somewhere in between)!

Overall, if you read or skim this article, you’ll have a good idea of where I’m coming from when I’m posting in 2018. I’m sure some of you are in similar boats, so hopefully this helps.

Life changes

I started this blog a few months before the birth of our first child. Now our baby turns five soon and we tow around a two year old and a two month old. Thankfully, our biggest fears for #3 didn’t come to fruition, but we still have some medical appointments to work around.

In addition, traveling as a family of five presents its own logistical challenges that I haven’t quite worked out yet.

So I’m keeping my goals for the year simple. Two or three trips as a full family, and I’ll count a road trip if I have to. One or two trips with just myself and the older two kids (hopefully we do better than last time we did this), and maybe – MAYBE one of these trips will be international. I’ll get the baby a passport just in case (here’s my simple guide for that).

If we can swing it, I’d love to go on a trip with just my wife, but we’ll see. Three (plus a dog) is a large number to ask anyone to babysit.

My Needs vs. My Wants

Given my modest goals, I don’t need huge amounts of points necessarily but even in coach the costs add up. So to be quite honest, I am still in the process of reevaluating my miles and points needs and wants in light of what kind of point totals I’ll need. But here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Needs

Flexibility and the ability to change/cancel for minimum or no fees.
Flight times that work for the kids – no super early or super late flights
A minimum of one stop, or stopovers
Lodging with at least two beds and a crib

Wants

Business class on flights over five hours
Seats altogether
Seat for the baby
Lodging with two or more rooms

Business class used to be a “need” on international flight, but with the amounts of points it will take and more importantly the availability, I’m not going to pigeon-hole us by making that a “need”.

Everything else is pretty straightforward. At hotels/apartments having space to spread out can be the difference between vacation and insanity, though we can handle a single room for a short amount of time. My wife and I go back and forth whether all of us need to sit together as a family or split the team, but I think we lean towards all staying together. If flying domestically, we’ll grab a seat for the baby if the price is right. And I’m not going to take a 6:00 AM flight with my kids unless…well, I can’t think of a situation where I’d CHOOSE that.

My plan to address my travel needs.

Overall, my biggest “need” is flexibility. I have a lot of that due to Jetblue Mosaic status (from Jetblue card spend). I plan to keep that for the foreseeable future because I get flexibility (free changes/cancellations), can generally ensure the family sits together, and I can leverage the flexibility into flight times I want. An added bonus is the ability to buy up to Even More Space seats with points (generally <1000 pts each).

Here’s a good place to insert that I am Boston based, which is important! I loved what Sam said about travel hacking being local. Jetblue has such a large presence here it makes sense for me to invest a lot in the program, but that might not be the case for you. Find the solution that best addresses your local travel needs. I think it’s worth iterating, things touted as “amazing deals” on national blogs might not be amazing for your particular circumstance.

In terms of lodging, we are moving more towards renting apartments or getting double hotel rooms. Obviously the latter can be done with miles and points, the former will require more cashback earning.

I also need to think about how to deal with traveling with five hundred car seats…but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

How my miles and points wants and needs will influence the blog in 2018

I’ve spent the past few months thinking about what I want to write about here, and I think my 2018 is coming into focus. I’ve long said this blog is mostly a creative outlet, which still rings true, though I’m going to try to be a little more focused. So what kind of blog do I want this to be?

I definitely don’t plan to make asthejoeflies a “news” blog. There are plenty of sites out there that cover all the miles and points news as it breaks. I’ve never been good at that and I’m not about to start posting daily so that’s a nonstarter. If I post twice a week I consider that a good week already! (I’ve been writing this particular post for a week now…)

Let me crystallize my goal for the blog in a single sentence. My goal is to help readers fly their family further for less money and with less stress. What does that look like? I hope you can expect four main types of articles:

1. Practical tips for traveling with children

Since I’m still traveling with young kids, I’d like to help out other families who are looking to travel with young kids. Obviously, my tips are what work for my family, but my goal for posts like this would be to give you food for thought as you plan the logistics of traveling with kids. Example: my kids seem to hate the CARES harness (we returned it) but other parents swear by it, so YMMV.

Posts in this category would be similar to my musings about car seats, travel gear for your kids, or how to apply for an infant passport.

2. Touring tips for families at various destinations

I love writing trip reports so I can look back on my family’s travel, so I may continue to do those, but I generally find them very time intensive. What I think might be more useful to readers is to give some insight into places to go/things to do/stuff to eat in various locations, especially abroad. If I have time, maybe I’ll even go back and write about places I’ve visited in the past.

And of course, posts about Disney World, one of the biggest family destinations, will fall into this category. So expect some more tips about making those trips more magical. (Full disclosure I’ll be there next week so you may see more Disney posts in the short term).

Posts in this category would be similar to my post on free Chicago kids activities, my review of the Hello Kitty restaurant in Hong Kong, and Disney Fastpass+ Tips and Tricks.

3. Using miles and points to save money on family travel

Sad but true, but travel hacking posts aren’t my number one priority here anymore. (But I’d like to think I still make a small contribution to the travel hacking community at large through the podcast.) Like I said, it’s just too much for me to keep up with all the news, so I am planning to focus the majority of my travel hacking posts on how families can save money on travel using miles and points. Of course, what I write about would be applicable to larger groups of adults, too!

I plan to write a bit about how miles and points “needs” change (like what I referenced above). If I ever see lots of award space that works well for families, I hope to write about that too. And I may even write about how (gasp*) I think I could handle coach if it gets us to Europe.

The other side of the miles and points equation is miles and points earning, which I mostly try to do from home now. So expect some thoughts on that as well.

Posts in this category would be similar to planning to travel with five, cheapest lap infant award tickets, and expediting Jetblue Mosaic status earning.

4. Random musings on parenthood and family travel

My final type of post features some of my posts I’ve most enjoyed writing. Parenting creates a lot of feels, and sometimes I just need an outlet to write about them. Whether it’s how my wife keeps us from falling apart on the road, why I believe travel with young children is worth the headache (written for TDAD), or just thoughts on what it means to be a parent in general – every once in awhile I’ll just…write.

Final Thoughts

I guess in the end, this is a bit of a reset/refocus of the blog. And I think that’s a great thing because I still want to write. Hopefully you all keep sticking along for the ride and enjoy what you read.

My travel needs and wants will inform what I write, but I’d love to know what your travel “needs” and “wants” are too! What can you not live without when traveling? What do you consider a luxury? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

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Nov 13 2017

Theorycrafting miles and points travel with three kids

I have a colleague who cites travel as one of the reasons for not having a second child. I totally get it, the more kids you have, the more difficult travel becomes. So, truth be told, travel was one of the major considerations on my mind before we went for three. What will travel with three kids look like?

So, this post contains the travel complications I considered that a third child might create. I won’t say that these concerns would ever have prevented us from going for it, but I definitely paused to think. Ultimately, we decided that we’d having a third child was more important to us than keeping our travel lives at status quo – the last two weeks have only made me feel more confident about that!

After each complication, I’ve also theorycrafted a bit about how to deal with these complications. Obviously experience trumps theory, so if you travel with three kids (or more!) and want to share tips, I’m all ears in the comments. Thanks!

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A post shared by Joe Cheung (@asthejoeflies)

Concern 1: Cost of air travel with three kids

Cost of air travel (and travel in general) tops the list of most family’s concerns. And obviously we’re a travel hacking family that doesn’t really pay for flights with cash. I’ve learned I don’t even need to pay for Disney World with cash!). Still, since we eventually need to procure tickets for five people, even I’m beginning to worry about budget.

We happily have met our goal of taking 2-3 domestic vacations and one big international vacation ever year even since we had our first child. I basically earn enough points through credit card sign up bonuses and some light MS to cover the cost of all these flights.

However, our last trip to Hong Kong DID cost 420,000 miles – that was only three tickets in Cathay Pacific business class. That same trip, without devalutions (no guarantee), in two years will cost 700,000 miles!

Are you a large family preparing to travel with three kids? There's a lot to worry about, from cost to logics. Here are ideas to deal with the added stress! — I am seeing a lot more Jetblue in our futures

Theorycrafting solutions for cost of air travel

My goal remains unchanged – two or three domestic trips and one big international trip per year. Since I want the kids to get to Hong Kong or Taiwan (preferably both) every couple of years, here are my plans for how to make it happen.

1 – Hoard more: it’s going to be impossible to fly in business class if I don’t hoard more miles

2 – Fly one way in coach for European vacations if necessary: I really want that business class when we go to Asia and will save miles to Europe if need be. Those flights are pretty short, like flying to California, anyway.

3 – Take more road trips. This should save me some miles in the long run.

4 – MS a little more. Honestly, with 3 kids, I barely have the time, but if I need to, I can do this in a pinch to top off accounts.

5 – Lean on cash equivalents like US Bank Flexperks for domestic travel. This should save my transferable miles for the big redemptions!

Concern 2: Hotel room occupancy for travel with three kids

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I got slightly involved in the Deal Mommy and Pizza in Motion’s “spat” about hotel status. In their discussions they hit on one of my major travel concerns about a third child, hotel room occupancy. I used to maintain Hyatt Diamond (now Globalist status) for the confirmed suite upgrades.

I found, however, that both the Hyatt Regency Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong and the Hyatt Regency the Churchill base level suites have a room occupancy limit of 3. So I had to lie/talk my way into those suites when we were a family of four, I imagine things will just get worse now.

Theorycrafting solutions for hotel room occupancy

1 – Look to apartment rentals/AirBnB more. We already have moved in this direction since having a kitchen is indispensable for young kids, I expect us to move further in this direction

2 – Earn more cash back. (To pay for #1)

3 – Book adjoining rooms more often. This will especially work at low category hotels with cheap redemption costs

4 – Bring the grandparents and “assign” one of the kids to their room

5 – Contact hotels in advance to explain our situation and try to get a room that works for us (or leniency on occupancy). The worst they can say is no!

Concern 3: Uncontrollable chaos

“You get to play zone defense now.” I’m not sure how many times I’ve heard that since we started telling people we were expecting our third child. Even more people say it now post birth. Well, in my limited understanding of sports, zone defense usually means you just leave one person wide open.

Travel with kids can be chaotic, travel with three kids could very well be a nightmare. When they’re young, you’ve got conflicting nap times/schedules/interests. When they’re teenagers, you probably just have conflict!

Theorycrafting solutions for uncontrollable chaos

1 – Bring grandparents.

2 – Survive.

Honestly, I’m not sure what you can do about this. Chaos is chaos, and personally I don’t mind it. I know travel will be chaotic (it already is!), but despite the chaos we still find family travel incredibly rewarding. So I’m not gonna sweat this one TOO much.

Concern 4: Length of travel and locations for travel with three kids

One of the very few things I miss about not having children is the ability to get away for long, or even short, weekends. With miles and points plus the litany of fare sales, we used to be able to get away to Europe for a long weekend. Three kids and a dog has made that near impossible. And while it’s possible to take a child for a solo trip, we probably can’t take long weekend trips until the kids are older.

We also need to be picky about locations now. If we want to use miles and points to book hotels, Hyatt usually is easiest but they have the smallest footprint. Apartments often allow us to stay put in one place for one week, which helps with travel stress and also gives us the chance to really get to know a location.

Theorycrafting solutions for length of travel and locations

1 – Focus short weekend trips on domestic road trips or destinations less than three hours away, preferably avoiding time changes of greater than one hour.

2 – Even overseas, look for apartments where we can stay for a good amount of time

3 – To pay for 2, invest more in cash back

4 – When switching time zones for international travel, stay in that time zone as long as possible to make the most out of the up front jet lag pain

Concern 5: Health

One thing we thought of before going for our third and one thing we think about all the time is health on the road. Obviously, the fear of something medically happening on the road never deters us but with three kids the odds of a sick child increase exponentially.

Then, of course, after we conceived there was a point where I was worried we might not get to travel at all. Until she was born, I wasn’t 100% sure what needs CC might have and whether they might preclude us from almost all travel. Going into the third child, I definitely already accepted that our family travel would never be the same again. But with the health curveball, I spent a good couple weeks wrestling with the possibility that we might not have any family travel at all anymore.

During that time, I came to two conclusions, one sort of trivial, one kind of deep.

My trivial conclusion, I kid you not, was that no matter what we were dealing with, I knew we could still take the family to Disney World. I know that probably sounds crazy to people who could not care less about Disney, such as my wife. But Disney World remains one of my favorite places to visit, and I’ve seen first hand how well Disney deals with kids with special needs. Yes, Disney at the end of the day is a corporation, but the ground level cast members dealing with kids with special needs are simply spectacular. I found comfort in the fact that my family could still take that particular trip no matter what.

My deeper conclusion was more of a reminder. I love traveling and I love traveling with my family. The prospect of possibly losing that hurt. Of course, my family itself is more important than travel, but it took the possible loss to remind me how much I love travel itself. (For the record, it was a risk I was willing to take to have a third child).

Thankfully, everything worked out well enough that our travel shouldn’t be greatly affected (if at all). But I appreciate our chance to travel more than ever now.

Theorycrafting solutions for health issues while traveling

1 – Make sure we pack all necessary medications including children’s tylenol, benadryl, bandaids, etc.

2 – Have a general idea of where to go for medical help if necessary wherever we go

Final Thoughts

Sorry to get a bit deep at the end there, guess I’m still processing. Overall, I feel like we’ve mentally prepared as much as we can for travel with three kids. Now, it’s time to do it! Since we’ve mostly got all the medical stuff squared away, I’m looking forward to planning my trips as these miles and points burn a hole through my pocket.

Like I said up top, if you are a family of five or more, I’d love to hear your tips for traveling in a four person family tailored world. Miles and points tips, general travel tips, I’m all ears, hit me up in the comments!

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Oct 31 2017

On expectations, disappointment, hope, and parenting

Life sometimes throws you curveballs when you least expect it. This blog normally doesn’t address said curveballs unless they happen 30K feet in the air or in a different country. But when life threw us our curveball, it came in the form of polydactly for our third child. I scoured the internet looking for encouragement, similar experiences, and answers, but came up almost empty. So, if you’ll indulge me, I hope people who may need it find this post and find it encouraging. At the very least, hopefully any of you who are parents can relate to some of the stuff I share.

Now I don’t want to bury the lede, everything has for the most part worked itself out – I had played around with the idea of writing more “live” updates, but ultimately decided against it. So this post has been six months in the making and is a lot of rambling. Feel free to ignore.

Update Feb 2023: In case anyone happens upon this, it’s been almost five years since our daughter had minor surgery (general anesthesia) to remove her extra digits. She is healthy and well and we are so thankful – rereading this post five years later reminds me of all the anxiety and worry we had and how we take for granted the relatively easy times we have now. Parenting, amirite?

Expectations and surprises

I should start by saying, Jess and I feel lucky and blessed. There was a time when we weren’t sure whether we would have any children, and now we have three for the most part wonderful children. (Like all children, they can sometimes be turds.) Conceiving and the expectations around having a family are incredibly stressful in and of themselves, and while we’ve personally been there, that’s not what this post is about.

By the time we decided to go for a third child, we were already at peace with our family as is. In fact, I thought it pretty likely that we might not conceive, and I was okay with that. Of course, like I said, life throws curveballs and all of a sudden we were expecting way ahead of schedule. Everything was awesome.

Our baby passed some initial blood tests and so we cruised into our ultrasound on May 22. It’s tough to explain how awesome life was felt walking into the hospital at 9 AM that morning. My plan for the day was to see my baby, have a nice lunch with my wife, and then fly to Disney World for the Traveling Dad retreat and Pandora grand opening media event. #blessed, as they say.

The night before, I joked with Jess that as long as the baby had ten fingers and ten toes it’d be all good.

Woops.

I literally fell asleep for two minutes during the ultrasound. Seen one ultrasound, seen them all. (To be fair they measure the head size for a long time). But at some point I opened my eyes and blurted out, “That looks like a lot of toes!” The technician didn’t say anything but I started to have a sinking feeling in my stomach.

About twenty minutes later, the doctor came in and matter of factly said, “The technician said you noticed extra digits on the baby. I can confirm that she has four extra digits, one on each appendage, pinky side for all.”

The next hour or so was a blur. We went to speak to a genetic specialist who said that polydactyly, the medical term for extra digits, could be associated with a whole other host of genetic issues or defects. We answered the question “Is there any history of this in your family?” about ten times. (No, there isn’t.)

They asked us if we wanted to do further genetic testing on the baby, but when we found out that there was little chance we’d find out any actionable intel, we declined it.

I’m not sure how to describe how I felt that day. If you are a parent, you probably know the feeling. It felt as if I had been punched in the gut, and not in a “Mets lost the World Series” sort of way, but in a “Holy crap the rest of our lives might not be what we expected” sort of way.

That punch in the gut evolved into a litany of fears and questions. What if the baby has other issues? Will she have a difficult life? How will that affect our other children? And on and on and on…

Mourning our expectations

We cried a lot that first week. Babies are so innocent and vulnerable, it broke our hearts to think about any extra pain, suffering, or difficulty our child might have to endure. What happened over the next couple months, I now recognize as mourning our expectations.

When you conceive, you expect that you will have a perfectly healthy child who will be a blessing to your family. Sure, you may be afraid something might be wrong if you’re pessimistic like I am, but deep down you expect everything will be okay.

Well, when we found out everything was not okay, it sent me into a bit of a tailspin for awhile. I ended up going on the Pandora trip a day late, but the whole time I just couldn’t get over the fact that our daughter had tetra-polydactyly. I mean, there is so much to worry about.

Will people look at her weird?

Will I look at her weird?

What if she has those rare genetic diseases?

If she has surgery as a baby, what are the risks associated with that?

So yeah, I cried a lot. We cried together. We cried with friends and family.

Slowly, but surely, we mourned our original expectations for our child and gave them up to God. Slowly, but surely, we reminded ourselves that she was our daughter and we would love her no matter what. And slowly, but surely, we resolved that like for all of our children, we would do the very best we could for her as her parents, regardless of what might come. We prepared ourselves for the fact that our lives might be far different from what we may have envisioned, and that would be okay.

There were three major turning points that got me right, personally. The first was a Bible verse I heard not long after we found out: “People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart”. To be honest, when I heard it, I still wasn’t ready for that message – I can’t explain just how gutted I was about the whole situation at first.

Secondly, I found a Facebook group with parents of polydactyly. It was the first time I ever thought the existence of Facebook was a good thing. It really comforted me to hear the stories of other parents, even the tragic ones. As I shared these stories with Jess, it made us feel less alone. Although the group was only 250 people, we knew there were others who had gone before us. (A single extra digit happens about 1 in 10,000 babies, but tetrapolydactly, all four, is incredibly rare).

And the final turning point for me was a conversation I had with my daughter over the summer. We decided not to tell her beforehand, so she had no idea what was going on. But one day I was driving her home for school or going for a walk or something, and she said to me, unsolicited, “When the baby comes, she is going to be perfect. Just perfect.” From the mouths of babes.

A quick aside

A quick aside, because I don’t know where to put this, but even though I’m generally a sharer, I quickly stopped telling people about our situation. I just felt like I couldn’t handle people’s responses, even though they were all so sincere and kind.

“I’m sorry” just sort of rang hollow for me. I also felt bad putting people in the situation where they had to think of something to say, so I just avoided the situation altogether.

It also got super weird when people were like “Congratulations you’re having a baby that’s so exciting!” and part of me wanted to be like “Well, actually…there are some minor and potentially major issues so let’s just hold off on the excitement.” Anyway, the whole thing was just weird and difficult, so I just stopped sharing. If this hadn’t happened, I probably would have been talking about how excited I was over social media all summer. (And I was incredibly excited after I had finished processing the situation!)

Hope and parenting

While we mostly came to peace with everything before the baby was born, obviously our fears crept up from time to time. Waiting is so hard, especially if you don’t know exactly what’s on the other side.

But in the end, the whole polydactyly thing just reminded me that this is parenthood. You do the best for your kids with the things that you can control. You hope for the best for your kids when it comes to the things that you can’t. And if things don’t go according to plan for the things outside of your control, you loop back around and do the best that you can for your kids in those difficult situations.

Thankfully, when CC was born, she didn’t seem to have any issues outside of the extra digits. But even then, we had to decide how to handle them, should she keep them, should she have some removed in the nursery, should we schedule her for surgery as a baby? All tough, soul crushing decisions if I’m being honest.

And we made some decisions, and some things went wrong, and so we looped back and made some more decisions. We’ve been to the doctor more in the first week than we had been for our other kids, but that’s just the new normal. There are no do-overs in parenting, so we’re just doing the best we can and hoping for the best.

I expect plenty more heartbreak and stress as our kids grow older. I never understood until I was a parent just how much you get wrapped up into this thing that is your child. You want to protect them forever but ultimately they’re not yours to protect. And ultimately, it is a privilege and a blessing to be a parent, full stop.

So yeah, life is going to throw a ton of curveballs, and you probably won’t be ready, as a person or as a parent. You just gotta make up your mind, take your swing, and hope for the best. That’s what Jess and I aim to do from here on out.

Note: If you’re a new parent of a child with polydactyly or just want to reach out in general, please feel free to contact me any time via e-mail (asthejoeflies@gmail.com) or Twitter. We’re all in this together.

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Jun 20 2017

On blogger bias

Recently, Leslie from Trips with Tykes had a great post on truth in travel blogging. She pulled the curtain back from media trips a little bit. I’ve learned a bit about hosted trips myself over the past year and we had a fun discussion about how sponsored trips or posts affect how we write about things. I encourage you to give it a listen when you have a chance (embedded in Soundcloud below, or on the web here, or on iTunes at Saverocity Observation Deck). We also got some Disney nerd talk in about Pandora and the new Guardians of the Galaxy Mission Breakout ride in the second half, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Anyway, I had a few lingering thoughts on travel blogging, so I decided to…blog about them. Happy to hear everyone’s thoughts on the podcast or my thoughts in the comments!

Influencer is an apt term

Like we mentioned on the podcast, I only started personally hearing the term influencer in the last year or so, but it’s a great descriptor for what bloggers/vloggers/social media people do. A lot has been made of how social media can be a huge echo chamber in the past year, but I (foolishly) didn’t make the connection to influencers until the podcast.

A simple example is Jetsmarter. A lot of people in my social feeds have been flying private via Jetsmarter trials. Just seeing that all over my feed makes me feel FOMO and wish I had the time to join up myself.

Coincidentally, today Forbes released a list of top influencers. Some of those influencers have been paid quite a bit of money to help various companies market their products. So you have this weird space on the internet where we’re all influencing each other in our echo chambers but some people are getting paid to do it, so who’s opinion do we trust?

Objectivity is near impossible

I’m past the point in my life where I worry a ton about what others do; people are successful and I don’t need to get mad about it. So the discussion of travel blogging bias really has helped me to turn a mirror on myself.

One thing I didn’t get to adequately express on the podcast is my belief that full blown objectivity is impossible. We are all a product of complicated experiences which have led to more complicated belief systems and will always write with bias.

For example, I still don’t love cash back. While I’ve learned to appreciate its value more, I’m never going to write as excitedly about cash back as I might about a premium cabin redemption. Random tweets people write will be a product of their bias. So while I aim to be as objective as possible, I view pure objectivity as a golden standard that I will never reach, but will always strive for.

Concessions make objectivity even more difficult

Of course, when you throw affiliates, money, or “freebies” into the mix, objectivity becomes even more difficult. It’s human nature, it’s harder to be critical of someone you who has given you nice things. Even harder if you’re financially tied to that entity. This is pretty straightforward.

Drawing a line

So obviously, Disney has been very kind to me this year. I got the chance to attend the Social Media Moms Celebration (discounted off full ticket price) and the Pandora World of Avatar media preview (completely hosted). I thoroughly enjoyed both events, in part because Disney exerted absolutely no editorial control over how I covered them. (An exception was NDA stuff, like I saw the Pixar short Lou but wasn’t supposed to talk about it, but that’s “leak prevention” not editorial control in my mind).

But I know some affiliates or sponsors will dictate what you can or cannot write about in an editorial fashion. Disney could have easily said “don’t write or talk about how Flight of Passage can sometimes break down”, but they didn’t. (It can, btw. Monitoring early previews I had serious concerns it wouldn’t be able to handle the loads when Pandora opened, but it’s actually been running quite well, better than I expected for sure.)

I’ve never been in such a situation, but I remember Matt got put into that kind of situation a few years ago, and he told the affiliate to go pound sand. I’d like to believe I’d do the same in a similar situation.

Keeping myself honest

Let’s be real, nobody is pounding down my door when they see my Twitter following. But still, I want to keep myself honest, and that means not taking every free thing offered to me. I’ll be in Orlando for work next week and will likely visit Disney with my coworkers on my own dime.

I also think I need to keep myself honest because if I don’t I’ll be doing the tens of people I do influence a disservice. Which leads me to my final point.

Who’s opinion do you trust?

When it comes to the echo chambers, I’ve learned to be very selective about the people’s opinions I truly trust. And I’d like to be someone whose opinion is valued by others.

That means I owe it to myself and to readers to cut any B.S. and give my honest opinions. That means if something bad happens even if I’m #sponsored, I need to write about it. Otherwise, what good is my opinion?

So my goal is to be as honest and real about my travel, my family, and my life as possible. And hopefully that helps readers as they make decisions on where and how to travel. Like I said, it’s impossible to be completely objective, but I’m committed to doing the best I can. Hopefully that’s good enough!

Give the podcast a listen and let me know your thoughts in the comments. Apologies for the inside baseball, back to your regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

May 02 2017

Do we overrate travel credits on high annual fee credit cards?

I thought long and hard about getting the new US Bank Altitude Reserve card. The card definitely looks like a potential big winner. People (not me) who can maximize the 3X mobile payments bonus might really have something on their hands. Ultimately, I decided to pass on the card for now. One of the main reasons for this is my belief that I’ve begun to overrate credit cards travel credits. I’ll present my reasons why and I’m also curious to hear what others think in the comments below.

This post serves as a bit of a corollary to my post on all the credit card annual fees I theoretically need to pay. Readers, you’ll be happy to know I’ve canceled/downgraded 3 cards since then with 2 more planned for this month. 🙂

You still pay a huge annual fee

I’ve long believed that getting, for example, a $300 travel credit on the Chase Sapphire Reserve means I’m essentially paying a $150 annual fee. This kind of language often gets used when people try to sell you credit cards. As my thinking about the game evolves, I’m not sure I quite believe that anymore.

Bottom line, you still pay $450 a year. Yes, you potentially get $300 of that back, but you still need to drop the cash up front. But if your finances are tight, you still need to front a significant amount of money. While that may not be my particular circumstance, the high annual fee that I actually need to pay in cash flows into all the reasons I am starting to find travel credits overrated. For my particular circumstance, of course.

When you have multiple travel credits, they become harder to redeem

While we just took a big trip to Hong Kong, for one reason or another we plan to travel less than usual for the remainder of 2017. (Related: two 15 hour flights with two little kids). We booked our Hong Kong flights on points and stayed in a relative’s apartment. That means the only travel credits useful to us on this trip came from Chase Sapphire Reserve. Admittedly, we have two of these, so that’s $600 in reimbursements, but we didn’t use all that up for our taxis and trains. (Hmm, should have tried to buy my Hong Kong Disney tix to test…woops).

Meanwhile, my three $200 AMEX Platinum airline credits and one $250 Citi Prestige airline credit lay dormant and useless. Now, if you state that you have $1450 in travel credits, that sounds great! But in reality, especially for a family that is cutting back on travel for a bit, that’s not particularly useful.

But you can buy airline gift cards with your travel credit! (But then you need to keep track of them)

So admittedly, my $600 in AMEX airline credits actually are no longer available to me. That’s because like any good travel hacker I redeemed them for airline gift cards way back in January. Now, again, I used to use this to justify the annual fee – I’m only paying annual fee minus travel credits total!

Well, you only get value from the travel credits if you actually use them. And between canceled Jetblue flights, United compensation, Delta compensation, and AA and DL travel credits from AMEX, I’m sitting on like $800-$1000 of travel credits. Credits that I likely will only use on domestic flights, which I’m taking very few of this year.

So, suddenly I need to keep track of all these credits that will not be used for awhile. It’s easy to make a mistake and just lose that “money”, which actually was never really money to begin with. So one thing I’d recommend is for you to ask yourself whether travel credits fit in with your travel goals. If not, you might find yourself losing flexibility or buying flights just to buy them and less because they fit in with your goals.

Travel credits and points can become mutually exclusive

If you’re traveling 10+ times a year this probably won’t be an issue for you. But I keep running into this problem where I can either use travel credits to pay for travel or use points. So I naturally opt for using my travel credits first, but then why did I earn all these points?

Basically, this comes back down to “resources you aren’t using are wasted.” You can hoard travel credits just like you hoard points and there are only so many rainy days. So make sure travel credits aren’t getting in the way of redemptions that you want to make. Which brings me to my most important point.

When you use travel credits, you are paying cash for travel

I think Free-quent Flyer said this somewhere awhile back (Update: he did! Further proof I am just three years behind his curve), but it never clicked with me. Travel credits = paying cash for your travel. You paid cash for your annual fee, and some of that cash went to pay for your travel. If I use $200 in AA gift cards that I got from AMEX Platinum, I paid $200 for those flights!

But what’s even worse is this. When I said above that I need to decide between using travel credits or points, what I’m actually deciding between is using money I already spent or points. Which is why using the travel credits is a no brainer.

But if your whole goal is to save the amount of cash you pay on travel, travel credits run counter to that. They force you to pay cash for your travel! And remember, you can’t invest points in your kids’ college education or your retirement, only cash. So if you pay cash for your travel in the form of travel credits, that’s less money into those accounts. Makes me think.

Final Thoughts

So yes, in the end, I think travel credits are a bit overrated. (Update: Dustin agrees with me too.) Don’t get me wrong, they are great, but from this point forward I’m not going to let them be a selling point in getting a credit card. A credit card must bring good value to me regardless of the travel credit, because the travel credit forces me to pay cash for my travel. Obviously this year is a bit of extreme for our family due to lighter travel loads (I hope to ramp up again in 2018), but I think I’ve learned a valuable lesson from it.

What do you think, are travel credits overrated or an important part of deciding whether to get a card? Let me know!

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