A couple of credit card offers are supposed to expire today.
Starwood Preferred Guest Personal and Business Cards
Just in case you were unconscious over the past month and this is somehow the only webpage you can view, you should know that today is the last day to get approved for Starwood Preferred Guest personal or business cards and get the 30,000 point bonus after spending $5000 on the card within 6 months. Tomorrow it will be back to 25,000 points, where it will likely stay until next summer. You can give someone else 5,000 points by using their referral link – check your favorite forum’s referral or conga theads, or you could use my referral which is under the ‘Credit Card Links’ tab. Besides Starwood hotels, Starwood points have a lot of potential good uses including transferring to nearly every airline program not named United or Southwest at 20,000 Starwood points to 25,000 airline miles. Unfortunately those transfers take several days to several weeks, so you pretty much have to transfer speculatively. Note that the terms and conditions say you must be approved by today, so if you apply and aren’t instantly approved call in right away at 877-399-3083 to have your application processed.
Lufthansa Premier Miles & More® World MasterCard®
Another offer scheduled to end today is the Lufthansa card offered by Barclays. This one will probably be back before too long. I think there is one especially sweet spot for families on Lufthansa’s award chart: flights on United Airlines from anywhere in the lower 48 states to Alaska for 12,000 miles one-way rather than 17,500 United miles.
If you’re traveling from the Pacific Northwest to Alaska you would likely be better off using AA miles or BA Avios on Alaska Airlines, but Alaska seems to not open many saver award level seats on their flights from the Midwest and Southeast to Seattle. As always, it’s worth doing some award searches to see what is likely to be the best program for your own needs. Just be sure to sign out of your United account to check for seats available with Lufthansa miles to make sure you’re not looking at XN class space. Then even if you do need XN space for a seat or two, you could book the available one-way seats with Lufthansa miles at 12,000 miles per person and the remainder with United miles at 17,500.
It’s a small niche, but if you are looking at a family trip to Alaska in summer 2015 this card might make sense. I have an affiliate link which pays me a commission under the ‘Credit Card Links’ tab, or the public offer for it from the Lufthansa site is here. The $79 annual fee is not waived and the signup bonus is 20,000 miles at the first purchase and an additional 30,000 miles after spending $5000 within 3 months. Barclays can be difficult to get approvals from if you have a lot of recent applications, like I posted about yesterday. Barclays reconsideration phone number is 866-408-4064.
Disclosure: This post is pretty boring. Please don’t waste money on credit card interest.
-Kenny
The end came and we survived! I got my husband in on the SPG Amex before all was said and done. I currently have the card, and my annual fee is coming due in August. So, we can cancel my card to avoid the fee, get one more year of benefits from the card as a family, plus get one more sign up bonus. Works for me. But, of course, I did my own analysis of whether the card made sense for us and didn’t blindly follow the blogger hype. I don’t think the SPG Amex is something we are going to hold long-term based on our spend and travel patterns, but at least this delays the ultimate decision for us.
And I think one partner getting a card and the other partner getting the same card the next year (after cancelling the first) is a great strategy for married couples. This is best when you have no immediate joint need for the particular miles/points offered. It extends your time to take advantage of other benefits.
I feel fine 🙂 I agree, we also try to trade off cards unless there is a specific need for the points.