Discover cashback runs only on Apple iphone iOS9

There is a datapoint for the Discover cashback deal which has got some people pretty excited in the credit card community and blogosphere. Basically, you get 10% cashback. 

Yesterday, I tried this on various versions of iOS 8 and then downloaded and installed iOS 9 and it works only on iOS 9. Apple or Discover do not support it though the error message says the bank does not support this card currently for iOS 8.

Say whatever you want about Apple, they make things very user friendly. The credit card reader was spot on. Pretty accurate reading and easy to use interface to add the card. 

There is some small difference though - in iOS8, the Apple Pay app is inside another app and you can also access it from Settings directly. In iOS 9, this is replaced by Wallet. Which is am more intuitive name for this. As Wallet has cards storage and pass ( concert tickets or boarding passes etc) and it is a neat tool. One should give it to Apple for designing things in a way that does not make it hard to find. It just flows. While Android is there too, Samsung especially is nice with all this but there are other devices which are really not upto the game which blemishes the whole platform.

Finally, kudos to the Discover marketing team if they could pull this off. I mean, these are the days of cut  throat competition in the credit card sector and I have seen lots of folks cutting down their credit cards or just opting for a plain vanilla one from a neighborhood big bank. In a way it simplifies things a lot and one has to give credit to the marketing teams here who come up with programs such as these where it is not about big sign up bonuses but rather you are incentivized to forget about other cards for an entire quarter!

As I covered in the earlier post, this deal is good but has a huge spending. If you have some big spending coming around the corner and the retailers where you shop use Apple Pay ( just ask them directly thats the best way as different swiping machines have different logos and support different protocols) then this is a nifty deal for sure.

Ting Referrals

Ting is a pay as you go data and voice plan that is pretty popular these days with millenials and getting traction amongst masses. It is just ala carta menu instead of the buffet that the big carriers serve. It is a neat service, neat website and the cost seems less for folks who rely on wifi for most part but want the odd directions when then venture out. If you consistently go overage - which is industry term to denote that you go over 1 GB, then you are better off using a fixed plan such as AT&T which gives 2GB for $25 and there are myraid number of MVNOs - another industry term for secondary data providers .. which means these are private operators who offer the plans which run on the Sprint or AT&T or Verizon networks. Boost Mobile or Cricket or Metro PCS give $30 plan. There are a bunch more for $20 or so. These are better than the bigger ones such as T-Mobile.

My referral if you choose to use is https://zfhaib4h08c.ting.com/

This will give us both $25 each and now for a limited period of time, till September end, you can get a ting sim card for $5 with free shipping. The phone selections that they have is not half bad either!

September app run and discover deal

For September, after a long time, I apped a bunch of cards from Discover It miles, club carlson, best western inn,  citi cards, fairmont, choice cards from Barclays. It was fun seeing the instant approval page after a long time. The focus, as you could tell was on the hotel cards since I have got a good arsenal of airline points at the moment. The hotel cards however are a different game and often time they would give you free nights but when you go for redeeming it is hard to get those. One exception though is Marriott from Chase and they have very good deals often. The other cards such as SPG or Hyatt etc are also good. And it is not as bad as rental loyalty programs but not exactly as good as some of the airline programs out there. So it is pretty broad out there when it comes to miles programs. But not bad if you load up on both hotel and airline cards at the moment as they are having some good bonus rounds from the bank sites directly.

First up, Discover. Many blogs covered it and I think it is a good deal but not worth the hype or a dedicated post. Turns out from tomorrow, i.e. September 16, if you link a Discover card with Apple Pay app which comes with iphone 6 and above versions and use it to pay at stores where they accept Apple Pay, then Discover will give cash back upto 10% of 10,000 which is 1000. If this card is new, then you get $2000. I already had Discover It card. So I tried to app for Discover It miles card as both these cards are different and got approved for the second one. You can have both cards simulataneously. Generally the Discover IT card is good as there is rotating 5% categories. But IT miles card is not that bad and their redemptions options are good and not to mention, the points accumulate faster too. So the plan is to load up these two cards in Apple Pay tomorrow and get on the next spend of $10,000 on this. Which is what my sore point about this "deal of the year". Even if one is talking about finding some stores and getting Vanilla gift cards, $10,000 is huge. You are getting 1000 or 2000 vs a typical offer like this which nets you about 100k points. Make no mistake, this deal is nice but is also a huge spending requirement. So unless you have some expenses coming up say a deck or HVAC or something on the heavier side, there is little day to day use of this one. I would not use this towards gc of airlines or hotels. Or prepay any utilities for that matter. Which all leaves to only one or two options such as buying some other gift cards or just doing the usual spending cliche thing that is out there. So tread with care on this one. People - especially bloggers have a vested interest in pushing products. But this blog aint no shrill for no one. And even if we in future get some ad partners, we wont sell something for the sake of selling. So read up the discover deal and more importantly check out your stores whether they accept apple pay before you venture into this deal.

The other cards such as Choice and Fairmont etc are good hotel cards deals. And many of them are coming with no annual fee at the current time. I have already written about the Best Western Inn Mastercard. For residents of US, this is a new opportunity since this card was available for only canada. But now they have started issuing it in US. I would urge to fully take advantage of this card and go for the premium card and get the free nights. 

The citi cards are good deals - specifically the ATT card where you have to sign up for the ATT data plan for three months minimum and you can get an iPhone 6 or Samsung 6 for free for upto $650. This is a good deal and no one knows how long it will last but I have verified that it works. If you get iphone 6 then you can use it in discover deal such as above.  Once done, you can always buy something from the local best buy for much less. iPhones fall down on values pretty quickly. I got it for $700 from ATT store unlocked and now if I were to sell back I would be getting 50% off .. which is just $350. Then again you can turn to craigslist but the current going rate of $550 is still less in open markets such as eBay, Amazon, craigs among others.

Chase is back with its Southwest 50k promotions. It is a pretty  common promotion for this time of the year. I would not hold back on having this card for the long haul as it gives you annual points on lesser annual fees. Bank of America is intensely promoting their cards in the wake of intensified competition from the likes of Citi and Chase. So that is pretty much it for now. As we enter mid September, this is a good time to load up on Amex cards for the upcoming Small business Saturday. But other than that, it is advisable to stay clear in October for new cards since November end and December is  the time when the marketing team will go in overdrive to meet yearly targets of customer acquisitions.

Rental cars loyalty programs - are they worth it?

As you accumulate the airlines miles and hotel cards points for your next travel, the only other component of travel that is left is car rentals. You will dine in based on your credit cards again! Of course, dont be so cheap to go for free food even then! And your other needs are taken care off by your well earned money. I have been researching a lot on the car rentals these days. 

There are some good sites such as carrentals.com or rentalcars.com and so many other permutations and combinations to get on top of search engine SEO ratings that you would be confused by so many aggregators and actual car rental sites that are out there. Sometimes, man amazes me by making these things so so complicated that a simple act of reserving one basic car outside an airport or a city has turned into a mapping appliction + algorithm + revenues and so many things that the poor you and me will end up paying high rentals. 

To blurt it out, I think car loyalty programs are a waste of time.

They just offer menial things such as avoid lines ( big deal!), some percentages off ( likely 10 or 20 % off which you can as well get by searching for some codes online) and many rudimentary things like upgrading cars from economy to SUV or something like that. Really speaking, there are lots of analogues of Southwest out there in car rental space. It is one of the cheapest business out there to bootstrap. US alone has some 600 million cars on the road. Tons of cars by the year, massive rolling in inventories means there are so many mid year cars in the road that you can share these inventories and front end a rental car business. This business is just about grabbing customer eye balls and reserve them. The big players are Avis/Budget and Hertz, Nationals, Enterprise and so on. Depending on markets there are thrify, alamo, fox, dollar and so many myraid amount of car rental stores out there. A new kid in the block, usave, is also making huge waves in metro areas in the east coast. All in all, these discount players have already positioned their cars in rentals at about 50% less than premium players such as Avis or Hertz. If you search casually in major airports, Avis and Hertz might dole out a car of $60 while the same ones or economy ones are given by Dollar or Thrifty for about $30. They margin is tight. These can be easily outsourced to various card programs such as AAdvantage which is another big player and also the american airlines mileage program or Ultimate rewards from Chase or Amex Membership programs. They make the money in the addons such as insurance and selling you upgrades such as bigger cars, GAS fillups, toll programs and so on. There is really no discount in that space. Be smart and book the cars using a Citi Prestige card or Amex card and save on such insurance programs. 

So that leaves only the starting price. Most car companies will be glad to give you running offers such as 10% discount and what not. They may give you free weekends if you rent for the whole week etc. Given the ultra competitive market, this commodity is easy to break and it is not really worth the time to sign up for their rewards program. It is not like you are going to get free add ons or free rentals. Gas is anyway your cost and if you are just trying to score a free rental, most likely you are going to pay for it in other way. From National to Hertz, they have one free rent available for rent after 7 to 15 days. If you are business consultant who often rents the cars for long time, it makes sense to sign up and at times get some free days. But I think in the grand scheme of things, waiting for this code to arrive and then booking for a free car for a day etc. is not worth the pain. I mean, if you are going somewhere you look at the big picture and the big expenses such as airlines and hotels. The rentals and incidentals could be just another 100 bucks. Would you wait and argue with a travel desk clerk who is going to most likely sigh at you since you got a free reward and then go for a free day ( which is more often than norm to be used by so and so date ) , use this certificate online and then still be liable for gas and insurance which will simply take it closer to the price that you would have paid had you not been enrolled in first place. In all I think despite free rentals that you may score thru corporate programs and travel, you are looking at only 20-40% cost reduction. And in say about 10 trips, you might come ahead by about $250 at maximum. For all these pains, you are just tacking on additional processes - something this blog aspires to keep so low and down that you are not doing any additional work. 

Bottomline, in its current form, rental cars are where hotel programs were 10 years ago. Hotel programs and airlines programs were forced to change in the last 10 years to be more meaningful. They did away with old bad programs and expiring points and survived the recession. Airlines were the first to realize this given the rampant bankruptcy in that industry. Soon to follow the suit, albeit reluctantly and sloddily is the hotel industry. Rental cars might not even follow suit given the cheap booting required for such businesses. They are better off and you as a customer are better off if some one just gives you a lower practical rate. Imagine if hotels were to just price rooms with basic amenities at 50 bucks a night, would anyone really care much about points? Yeah, if it is just out there in the table but not worth it otherwise. Rentals and parkings fall in that category. No point in it as of 2015.

Hotel cards - Best Western MasterCard with free sign up points!!!

Long time no posts here! :D

Mainly because we have stayed true to our ideals of not posting garbage and wasting your time. There is really nothing exciting happening here - whether you are a freebie or veteran or just casual user of credit cards and using them wisely for some good travel. The usual cards that are listed in the good credit cards section above still stay valid. But finally, I found something that was exciting and not being covered in other blogs. 

The Best Western Inn credit card.

The best western inn is a canada based inn. Similar to holiday inn or hampton inn, it is distributed pretty well geographically and can be also found in places such as Hawaii or Grand Canyon or New York area among others. So what is the big news out here? Welll till May of this year, there was no Best Western credit card to speak off for US residents. Canadian residents had some Mastercard which was giving some rewards points. The points credit and redemption with Best Western is pretty aggressive to say the least. They market their offers and rooms pretty well. If you stay there, you will get automatically enrolled and you might get multiple loyalty cards till you sign up in their website. The credits are quickly stacked similar to Marriott and in any many ways their redemption is opposite to that of Hilton HHonors which have greatly devalued their programs in recent times.

The hotels and rooms in Best Western Family themselves are pretty decent. In many places such as New York or California or Western US or in the rugged middle, you are there to witness and view things and not necessarily to enjoy the hospitality. You may want a room to essentially sleep for 8 hours and get fresh in another hour. So this 9 hour is essentially what you need a room for. For such cases, I think Best western inns are good. They are safe, secure, neatly staffed, good rooms, free breakfast and internet, not much hassles and bells and whistles. Their checkin / checkout is pretty quick and smooth. And their hotel family is vast - like any of the major chains. For more information, you can directly visit their site: https://www.bestwestern.com/rewards/

The one drawback holding me back to endorse this chain was lack of credit card. I had stayed in this hotel chain multiple times and had overall good experience. The credit card missing was a sore point. However, I checked recently and they have tied up with First Bank to offer a great credit card.

Direct link to the credit card is here: https://www.firstbankcard.com/bestwestern/landingpage/rewards/index.html

As mentioned earlier and through out this site and blog posts, we are not affilated with them or any other credit card issuer or bank per se. We do not get paid a dime for the above referrals and we are solely ad supported. However, if you do use the above links, maybe the stature of this website will grow and we can put in more useful info if such info arises.

Back to this card, it is a neat and nifty card - reminding of how Amex was once upon a  time and how Chase gives some good card offers. It is not some random paid card which gives you some free nights on days which you dont want and no free nights are available for the nights you want. It is way better than US Bank/Club Carlson family in terms of redemption offers, the credit card sign up bonus and the offers that they have put on. The cards are neatly classified into secured, personal, premier and business. On the free version, you get a 20,000 sign up points - enough for the best western inn in waikiki beach in Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii. Then there is $59 annual fee for the premium card which gives you 70,000 points and more than makes up for the annual fee. I would strongly recommend this version of the card. Then there is the secured card and the business card with 20,000 points. 

The premium card has its annual fee waived for its first year. From second year, you pay the $59 fee. The bonus points are creatively given in stages rather than just sign up bonus or spending x amount of money. For the premium card, it is 

25,000 bonus points after you spend $2,500 in first 3 billing cycles²+25,000 bonus points after you spend total of $5,000 in the first 6 billing cycles²+20,000 bonus points when you spend at least $10,000 during each 12 billing cycle period.²

It is a nice mastercard to have in your wallet. The points add up quite quickly as do the rewards and the positively oriented redemption options. The spend of $10,000 does sound daunting but you are gaining quite a bit of points in return. 

For similar cards in this space having such creatively staged rewards, Chase BA or American Express cards, the spending of such money does net you points in the region of about 50,000 to 100, 000. I would certainly rate Best Western points on the same scale as say SPG points, given the redemption rates in the big hotels of Hawaii or CA or NY region is pretty similar. The east coast and west coast spread of these hotel family brands are quite common and so is the availability and the point scale and category in terms of geographical locations near major parks and cities and beaches. 

Going into the hotel cards space a bit, this is a very offey space. Not quite exciting as Airlines cards space. If you are a newbie, certainly accumulate airlines miles and then go for the Hotels space. 

In the hotels credit cards, the big ones are Hyatt, SPG - both of them are pretty good hotels and nice points etc. Best Western Inn/ IHG family brands such as Holiday inn etc./ Hilton family such as Double tree, Hampton Inn etc. - they are all good. Better off applying this cards in anticipation of your travel. I wish they start a Airbnb card with safer guesthouses and something that is very rudimentary. As outlined in the start of the post, most people just need those 8 or 9 hours to replinish their energy levels, recharge themselves and move on. There is really no point in having anything other than basic hotel accomodations. Like other industries, hotels and likely they call themselves, hospitality services, have come to rely more upon customer services since real estate, room saturation etc have all played. Add to that, the younger millenials are gravitating towards Airbnb, couchsurfing and something similar where they share space with one another in exchange for rented services or shared services and you have a very tight industry with already tight margins who have to manage their costs in an ultra competitive market. 

For a traveller, I would suggest pool in points from all major hotel brands, that would give you the flexiblity to choose and go ahead swiftly with what is available and focus more on the fun part - planning on the actual travel and executing it! The major hotel brands that offer credit cards are SPG, Hyatt, Best Western, IHG, Hilton, Club Carlson, Wyndham.. and of course there is the whole bunch of inns and chains and the simplest way is to search them in online maps, go their site, check out and apply for credit cards. Likely you might come ahead by 70 or 80 bucks. In the case of biggies such as SPG you might well come in ahead by about 400 to 500 bucks based on the cities.