Additional Thoughts On TravelCon With Scott And Grant’s Presentation

Scott Mackenzie

Scott opened his presentation with what loyalty program should you bank your airline miles. His answer? It depends. Those two words have probably been the most used words and sentence combination I have heard during my MBA program. There have been numerous example situations where we’re given a bunch of statements with missing information and we’re asked, did this company make the right choice in manufacturing the widgets with Chasing The Points?

That being said, the next time you manufacture spend for travel, make sure you do your homework of your destination. You need to know what type of points and miles are good to bring you to complete your trip. I’ve seen a lot of people in all of the forums asking how to get to a certain location and have miles that make traveling a little more difficult than having say American Airlines for OneWorld coverage.

The first rule to manufactured spending is to have a goal in mind, be it travel or cash. My goal? It’s to manufacture as many cheap and easy points, preferably Chase Ultimate Rewards points. I do not have any immediate travel needs to use it and do not mind banking them. So if you ever ask me what type of mile or point you should manufacture, I will tell you “it depends” and you’ll need to be prepared to tell me what your needs are.

Grant Thomas

Grant covered credit card retentions, and you can view and listen to it here. I’ve only had 1 successful retention offer, and it was from Chase for my Ink Bold. I liked his technique with Citi, 1 phone call to speak with a representative and you could see all of the offers available to you. One of things Grant mentioned during the presentation that I thought was pretty funny are the “trigger happy” phone agents. So if you decide to threaten to cancel your card and actually don’t plan to, make sure you don’t bait the agent. I have the grandfathered Citi Forward 5x card and I would never lead the call to threaten to close that card. There could be a huge “oops” and I’d lose a 5x card that’s no longer available. Instead, I suggest leading with a lessor card. For me, I would lead the call with my Dividend card.

My Thoughts

I think that wraps it up for my additional thoughts to TravelCon. It would not be in anyone’s best interests for me to write about BMG’s presentation. Not to leave out Jamison, Hao from Hotel Tonight, or Travel Summary, but their presentations were great because I learned a few things. I am not sure how I could add any value to adding my thoughts. Why? It’s in the travel arena and that is where I am the weakest and I want to avoid giving poor advice.