Amex Starwood 30,000 offer is back, plus how to profit from Amex Sync deals

A COUPLE OF QUICKIES: 50% off a large pizza from Papa Johns with the online code 50THANKS, plus there’s a Groupon deal that will cut the cost of a Sam’s Club membership almost in half.

AMEX STARWOOD 30,000 OFFER IS BACK: Every August the past few years, Amex has rolled out a 30,000-point sign-up bonus (not an affiliate link, just promoting a good product) for its Starwood card, and this year is no exception. If you’re interested in this card–and this is one of the better ones out there–this is the time to get it. Hack My Trip has a very nice summary of why this card is so good. I like Starwood points myself–to a fault, as I tend to hoard them–because it’s not too hard to get two cents or more per value out of them.

WAY OFF THE BEATEN PATH: Kudos to Rapid Travel Chai! How many travel bloggers actually venture to places like North Korea?

GET MONEY AND POINTS WITH THE AMEX SYNC DEALS: I mentioned the Best Buy and Walmart Amex Sync deals last week, but Chasing The Points gets into a little more detail about how to profit from those deals as well as from the Barnes and Noble deal ($5 back on a $25 purchase), which had escaped my notice. In a nutshell:

Barnes and Noble you can sell the gift card for 79% of the value. With the American Express offer, you would receive 20% off if you buy just 1 $25 gift card. You would lose 1% for 25 points. In my case, it would be 1% for 25 SPG points.

Best Buy gift cards can be sold for 90% of the value, and buying $250 and receiving $25 back is 10% so this would be a wash. You would not make or lose money for a free 250 SPG points.

Walmart.com you can do what I did, buy a $200 Vanilla gift card. The fee is $6.88 and you get $15 back, depending on how you play with it, you could make money. For me, I only bought one card, so I will be receiving 207 SPG points and making $8.12 out of this offer.

Click here for the full report, and while you’re at it you might want to read why CTP is retiring from gift card churning. It’s because there’s a lot of fraud out there, and that’s the same reason why I never wanted to mess with gift card churning in the first place. Not to say you can’t profit by doing so, but that’s not a type of headache I want to deal with.