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Get the Amex Blue for Business card right now! I don’t have an affiliate link for you, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find the current bonus offer, given that half the ads in my Facebook feed are for this card. What’s that? It’s Christmas Eve and you’re observing the birth of your Lord with your family and you don’t have time to think about credit cards? Pish posh! You’re either in this game or you aren’t, so get busy applyin’ or get busy dyin’.

It’s not exactly a secret that there’s an amazing offer on this card, although the temperature of the blogosphere is decidedly tepid for some reason. To recap, here’s what you get:

• No annual fee
• 10,000 points after your first purchase (!)
• 10x points on restaurants for the first 6 months, up to 20,000 points
• 2x points on all spending for the first year (!!!!!)
• 30% annual bonus on all base points earned on the card

Holy shit, right? Can you imagine how The Points Guy would react if Chase offered a card with this earning structure? As it was, the Blapphire Reblerve pretty much broke the internet when it was announced, and it’s nowhere near as good of an earner as this card. Then, Amex debuted the “Enhanced” Business Platinum card to much fanfare, even though most of the benefits don’t apply to most people. To wit: you get a 50% bonus on purchases over $5,000 and a 100,000-point bonus after spending $15,000 in the first 3 months – great if you actually own a going concern that can spend that much, but not as relevant to the hobby businesses that a lot of us use to justify opening business cards in the first place. Maybe those those two introductions, as well as the 80k offer on Chase’s new business card, sucked up all the available oxygen and there wasn’t enough left to wax orgasmic about how great the Blue for Business card is. Still, I can’t get over the fact that there’s a credit card out there that earns 2.3 points on all spending for a year and people aren’t falling all over themselves to get it.

Now, there are a couple caveats here that I should point out, lest I be accused of being an unapologetic Amex fanboy:

• This is a business card, so you do need a business to open one. That said, Amex does almost no verification at all, so as long as you’ve sold a couple things on eBay in the past year, you’re probably good.
• The points that the card earns are not “full” membership rewards points, in that you can’t transfer them to partners unless you have a card that does earn transferrable points (in which case the points all pool into one account). If you’re super averse to paying fees to Amex, though, you can always open an Everyday card, which earns full membership rewards points and has no annual fee.
• The 10x on dining isn’t as great as it sounds, since spending there trades off with spending on a card that would earn up to 5x anyway. It works out to a 10-15K bonus on dining spend over six months, which is good but not amazing.
• You can’t stack the bonuses – so when you earn double points on all spending, that doesn’t mean you earn 20x on dining, and when you earn a 30% bonus, you don’t get 30% of 10x. Instead, you earn base points that post the month after each statement closes, as well as bonus points that post with each transaction, creating a steady trickle of membership rewards points. Here’s what my account activity looks like:

(As you can see, I’m earning my “extra” points right away, and then I’ll get the 1 point-per-dollar base earn rate every month when the statement closes. The 30% bonus will be on those base points (I’m assuming), so by the end of the year I’ll earn net 2.3x on all spending and net 10.3x on dining.)

I don’t know what the point of writing this post is – I’m assuming the five or six people who read this blog regularly are already familiar with this card and have incorporated it into their portfolio already. I suppose I’m more interested in the way the excitement dynamic operates such that what I consider to be the most lucrative earning offer I’ve seen since I got into this game gets such comparatively little ink spilled about it. Either that or I’m blatantly trying to get Amex to give me an affiliate link, since it’s fucking Christmas Eve for fuck’s sake and I’m posting on my blog about their credit cards. Happy Holidays!

This is a follow-up to my post yesterday about business class availability on Swiss around the dates I’ll be traveling next spring. After thinking on it some more, I realized that after a long week working at a trade show, it was*really* going to suck waking up at 5AM to catch a flight from Zurich to Copenhagen followed by a 3 1/2 hour layover. Also, there’s the novelty aspect to consider: I really liked SAS business class, but I do this so infrequently that I should take the opportunity to try different products when I can. While my cocoon in 9H on SAS would have been a great way to get from Europe to San Francisco, that connection was really eating at me now that Swiss popped up with some availability on a direct flight.

Here’s what I did. Feel free to weigh in to let me know what I did right or wrong, or how you would have handled this change. First, I checked the seat map on Expertflyer and found four throne seats still available. Most of them are blocked, I assume for Swiss elites, so my options were limited to the back part of the business class cabin. (From one review, I read that those seats in the back of biz aren’t great, since they’re close to the bassinet rows in the economy cabin. Hopefully it’s not too much of an issue.) After verifying throne availability, I was ready to make the change, but I was really worried that whatever rep I spoke to on the phone wouldn’t be able to put me in one of the seats I wanted. Plus, I did NOT want to call Aeroplan’s contact center to change my flight. The reps are nice, but god dammit if it doesn’t take an hour to get through to someone.

So, with all that in mind, I transferred 55,000 Amex points to my Aeroplan account and booked the ticket on Swiss before canceling the original SAS booking. I figured that if I called in and couldn’t get the seat I wanted, I could keep both open and decide my fate at a later date. It also meant that no matter what, I would have 55,000 less Amex points and a stash of 55,000 Aeroplan miles. That’s not a huge problem for me, though, since I use Aeroplan a lot, so I’m quite sure those points won’t languish for very long. I called Swiss and got a rep on the first ring, and he happily confirmed my second choice seat (the first choice – 7A – is blocked for people traveling with infants). After that, I canceled my original SAS booking with a couple clicks. Also, as a bonus, I found out that the new Aeroplan fees don’t apply to tickets booked before December 6th, so it was only 90 CAD to cancel – whereas it would have been 150 if I wanted to cancel the new booking I just made.

Whew! So there you have it – a very boring, windbaggy walk through my decision process in crafting an itinerary that’s still 6 months away. Still, though – Swiss! I’m pretty excited – the throne seats on the 777 look awesome, and I’m excited to get to the airport early and hang out on the terrace in the business class lounge.

I don’t know, I think I might have enough for an uber ride to the Whole Foods that’s a block away from my office. I might be cutting it close, so I may take uber-pool instead.

Like many of you, I was really excited about the shop small promotion, thinking I’d rack up tons of extra points. Now that it has been live for a month, I decided to check back and see how I’m doing. The results are underwhelming, to say the least: 384 measly points so far. I haven’t been going out of my way to check if places are on Amex’s list of approved small businesses, but I guess it’s more limiting than I thought.

I can’t fault Amex, though – I’ve earned so many points with them in the last two years, I’m just grateful not to be blacklisted (I don’t manufacture spend or anything, this is just from signing up for new cards). Just today I earned 5000 points + 2500 Delta miles for adding an authorized user to two of my accounts. And I’m already licking my chops about the Blue for Business limited time bonus of 2x points on all spending for a year. But just concerning shop small, the promotion really is “small” indeed.

Is anyone out there killing it with this promo? If the tattoo shop where Justine just got an upper arm sleeve qualified, I’d be doing a lot better…

Travel priority one right now is going back to the Faroe Islands. I’ve been to some amazing places, but I’ve never in my life felt the same mixture of serenity and boundless excitement that I felt there. Justine feels the same way, so we’re planning our next trip. As established in the “About Me” section that I’m sure you’ve read by now, I can’t exactly pick up and travel for a week or two at a time whenever I want, but there are general windows in which I can travel, and September of 2017 is one of them. (I know I plan insanely far in advance, but it’s kind of the only way I can take trips like that at all.)

So, September of 2017 – what does availability look like? The problem with the Faroes is that there is only one routing that can get me there with one stop: SFO-CPH-FAE. And only one alliance-partnered airline operates that route: SAS. (Norwegian operates OAK-CPH, but they’re not part of an alliance, so I can’t book them with points.) A new development is that SAS is now serving CPH-FAE (not just codesharing with Atlantic). This is pretty big news for me, since SAS’s codeshare with Atlantic didn’t translate into Aeroplan and United recognizing FAE as a Star Alliance destination, so it was necessary to purchase CPH-FAE separately on my last trip. Now that SAS operates the flight with their own planes, United and Aeroplan both show SFO-FAE as a legitimate routing for the normal USA-Europe price.

Problem is, SAS’s availability isn’t great. It’s not Air New Zealand-level bad, as evidenced by the fact that I’m flying CPH-SFO this June when I come back from my trade show in Europe. But especially on that route, it can be tough to find space. Not to be deterred, I dug and dug to find acceptable routings and pitched the following to Justine last night, both of which were vetoed. I’m curious if you would have done any of these, or if I’m crazy for even considering them! I think they sounded pretty good, but I don’t want to use all the points required if my travel companion is going to be miserable with all the connections.

Outbound option 1:
OAK-SLC-AMS-CPH-FAE
(Buy OAK-SLC for ~$100, SLC-AMS in KLM 787-9 business for 70k Delta miles, AMS-CPH-FAE on SAS for $150)

Outbound option 2:
SFO-ORD-CPH-FAE
(This is all one award routing – amazingly – although the SFO-ORD and CPH-FAE legs are in economy)

Return option 1:
FAE-CPH-AMS-LAX-SFO
(Basically the reverse of the first outbound option, with LAX instead of SLC)

Return option 2:
FAE-KEF-SEA-SFO
(Buy FAE-KEF for ~$100, KEF-SEA in Icelandic business for 50k Alaska miles +$100, SEA-SFO as part of the same award but in economy)

What do you think? If you had the miles and the inclination to go to the Faroe Islands, would you settle for any of these, or would you keep digging? And have I missed any obvious options here?

Since my wife is from New Zealand, I pay particular attention to points/miles trends there, especially considering that the flight from SFO in economy on Air New Zealand totally sucks. Once the safety video is over, the fun stops as you contemplate 12 hours in a 17″ wide seat on a flight that’s almost always completely full. A couple other things about Air New Zealand that make me hate them: they NEVER release business class award space, and until very recently, the had a monopoly on nonstop routes to NZ, so no one could do anything about it.

Lucky us, then, when United and American both started offering nonstop flights there, finally providing some downward price pressure on Air NZ, leading to some awesome fare sales earlier this year. Some business class availability on United started to trickle out as well, although you had to book really far in advance to get it. Still, a promising sign.

Anyway, Justine has a trip home in a couple weeks, and I originally booked her a round trip in economy (half through United and the other half through Aeroplan) – not a great use of points, but we didn’t have $1000 laying around when she planned the trip, so we used the rest of my United miles and some Amex points. This was back in April, shortly after the route was announced, and all the flights were scheduled on a 787-8. However, I checked recently and noticed that United has subbed a 777-200 on that route for the indefinite future, which had me wondering… what about Global First? If they originally announced the flights on 787s, then the flight was on sale for a long time without any first class seats being offered. I figured there was a chance those GF seats would become distressed inventory, and I set an ExpertFlyer alert for both her outbound and return legs.

Today, I got a notification that there were available Global First on her return leg, so I scrambled to change the flight. Because that leg was originally booked through Aeroplan, I didn’t want to just upgrade the ticket, since Aeroplan charges 110,000 miles vs only 80,000 on United. Instead, I canceled the ticket for ~$135 (luckily this happened before they raise their fees). Turns out: you CAN cancel an Aeroplan ticket inside 22 days, even though the website says you can’t. Just ask the rep to move your ticket to a date more than 22 days away, and then have them cancel that ticket. You have to pay the fee twice, but it’s still less than a single change/cancellation on United or Delta (though again, that’s unfortunately changing soon). I then transferred most of my Sapphire Reserve bonus to United and booked the first class award from there.

After the dust settled, I looked on ExpertFlyer some more, and gadzooks there is some insane availability right now, as long as you can swallow the $75 close-in booking fee. (And, of course, assuming you plan to be in New Zealand in the near future.) Thing is, I don’t know how long this has been going on, or whether it will continue. Looking out into the future yields no hits, so it seems like this really is a last-minute dump of inventory that went unsold. I’ll keep checking back to see if they keep putting new seats up, or if it’s only a one-time bonanza. Anyway, here’s a sample of what I saw when I looked for FIVE first class saver seats:

My screen shot got cut off, but basically – I searched 11/12/16 +/- 3 days and saw at least one seat available every day, and up to 5 seats available most days. That’s nuts! Anyway, if you can book travel on short notice and have a good way to get out to New Zealand, this could present a nice opportunity for you to get back home.

Let me know in the comments if you end up taking advantage of this – I’m curious if it’s useful. When I found that Hyatt thing, I figured no one would care, and it blew up big time, so I can’t really tell in advance.