The Weekly News Roundup is a collection of headlines from around the internet that caught the attention of the Tagging Miles team. Content on these blogs do not necessarily reflect the positions of Tagging Miles, and should not be considered endorsements. Have a great story we should read? Contact us now and let us know!
Travel
- The Flight Deal celebrated 4 years at the beginning of the month. I would go so far as to say that I don’t know a single person who hasn’t benefited greatly from the awesome Flight Deal team. Here’s to another four (or more) great years!
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In case UberBLACK isn’t good enough for you, one day only, in Hong Kong, you could get your very own UberCHOPPER (or Choppah as the Governator says it). Because, why not? It’ll only cost a mere HKD 1,800 ($232 US).
- From JetCD on Conde Naste Traveler, a Safari like you’ve never heard of.
Miles, Points, and Credit Cards
- Gary Leff comments on Jeff Smisek’s recent comments about how United is a business. Its pretty surprising to me that Jeff believes this, given the fact that during the merger, he was more focused on the paint business (painting planes was his priority, or so the intro video implied). Having seen him at the Aviation 2015 conference I’m not really sure why he’s still at the helm, except, as Gary says – even a poorly run airline will make money with low fuel prices and constrained capacity.
- Milecards does a spot check on summer 2016 business awards to Europe, it’s not dire, but it’s not great.
- Orens Money Saver highlights the value of the Fidelity American Express. We don’t have links here at TaggingMiles, but if we did, this is one we’d be pushing. No annual fee, 2% cashback on every single purchase, and it automatically goes into a fidelity retirement account. Fair, it doesn’t pay for your travel, but, you have to take a longer view on some things.
- The Pernicious effects of Credit Card Affiliate Marketing. Let that sink in for a moment. Nick who writes Personal Finance Digest — PF Digest for short, wrote a brief but pretty enlightening post about the impacts of affiliate marketing. It’s worth a read, but I won’t go much further, I’ll leave that to TravelBloggerBuzz since he did a better job than I could.
- FrequentMiler shares how to increase credit card spend from your couch.
- Pizza in Motion highlights that you can get 500 bonus points by booking your Hyatt stays via the mobile app… Its not as good as the 1,000 points last year, but, take what you can get, right?
- From Kenny, Award Booking Fish Tales. There’s a lot of wisdom here, well worth a read or two.
- Shawn reports on his wife’s Citi Retention Offer. I don’t send Secure Messages all that often, but reading this, I’m thinking I should be doing so much more frequently.
- Doctor of Credit writes about how many bank accounts you can safely open within a year for bank bonuses.
- Matt’s got a great post on 0% balance transfers, and some different scenarios where it makes sense, doesn’t make sense, and could become pretty dire. I’ve written about the Chase Slate in the past, and used it to pay down some long term debt, but, it’s not for everyone.
- Dans Deals has a great post on some really negative changes United is doing to their website. All the reasons that we like United’s award search functionality seem to be going away. Less transparency. It’s bad, take a read and see how you can help try to cajole United to keeping functionality.
- It’s back to school season! and the shopping portals know it! Shawn has a great roundup of the various promotions out there. You can certainly stack some of these with quarterly bonuses… of course there is the opportunity cost, e.g. United vs. DiscoverIT (with Double Cash Back in a year for example).
- How do you value your points? I posed this question earlier this week — I thought it’d have been controversial, but apparently not.
Reselling
- Vinh of Miles per Day has a great post about fighting the temptation of procrastination and starting something new. For him its house flipping, but for others it may very well be reselling. Definitely worth a read.
- Chasing the Points has a new view on life (aka miles, points, reselling) after #ResellingDO. Me too, although I’m still sorting things out, which is why I’ve been kind’ve quiet.
#Avgeek
- An oldie but a goodie, Airliner repossessions. They happen, here are some fun stories about past ones.
- Emirates says goodbye to its last Boeing 777-200… Sadder yet, it’s going to the desert, aka the graveyard… I would’ve thought other airlines could find use for a plane that’s still pretty popular, but really, the efficiency increases of newer planes probably make it much harder to find a home for older planes.
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US Airways former CEO Ed Colodny will be flying on the last US Airways flight. It’s cool that he’ll be flying it, but, really the last of the US Airways flight numbers will probably ease the confusion (and discrepancy in fares, but that could go either way)
Trevor – think you skipped the Plastiq link in the body.
Ah – See it now; miles from your couch! Disregard.
In hindsight I should’ve more clearly stated it.