We bring you the new IHG Rewards card, Hilton Honors changes, the sad cult of Rajneesh, the crypto blood bath and lots more for you, freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
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This is going to be a quick post as I am traveling with my girls through Florida…
Looks like the best hotel rewards credit card is no more, RIP IHG Rewards Visa at just $49 annual fee allowing you to stay for free $49 at an awesome Intercontinental property. We now have an 80,000 point IHG Rewards Visa with an $89 annual fee. This is a good post about it: The New Chase IHG Card Offer — How Does It Compare to the Old One, and Should You Apply?
The revenue based movement tsunami shows no signs of stopping anytime soon, regardless of what bloggers invested in the present scheme keep screaming about. British Airways Avios is next.
I am not sure what the fuss is all about with bloggers screaming about Hilton devaluing again. What the hell did you expect when they pulled a Delta like move to do away with the award charts huh? Come on! Spare me all your Titan cries of injustice while you push their Hilton credit cards non stop…Ok, here is the latest on the Hilton devaluations. And here we have a nice research job on the Hilton Honors Award Category Changes April 2017 – March 2018 + New Properties.
Delta has a weird promo awarding double points for transactions with partners you did not use at all in 2017. Long list of partners not qualifying. Took a few seconds to register just in case one of these oddball transactions happen. I miss the old Northwest Airlines Worldperks promos, those were the days!
Good luck to her! The adventurer trekking from Mongolia to London by camel.
I had no idea about the island of Santa Cruz del Islote two hours off the coast of Colombia. It is four times as dense as Manhattan, wow!
Are you following this? THIS is what we must worry about, not some crappy wall fence or Stormy or the royal baby name or whatever! Six days after a ransomware cyberattack, Atlanta officials are filling out forms by hand. I blame the North Koreans!
Looking for your tax refund from the IRS? You can find out when you will get it HERE.
One of my favorite phrases is “There are no gurus”. In this article, “There is no Next Warren Buffett” we see some of the gurus who were going to be the next Warren…only to crash and burn spectacularly!
I enjoy learning things I did not know. Like this one: The Cult Of Rajneesh And The Largest Act Of Bioterrorism In U.S. History. I had never heard of this!
Stunning pictures here: Hawaii Lava Photography by Michael Shainblum.
Crypto blood bath baby!
In this hobby, when you go hard, you may lose some dinero, like $5,000!
As of now, I have no credit card links. And I have not heard from the link provider. Update: I finally heard late on Thursday. The soul searching will continue this weekend and I must finally make some hard decisions. If only Ingy was around to help me out 🙂
If you think we travel bloggers get special treatment while we travel you are mistaken. I was turned down for late checkout in two out of my three hotel stays in this trip. Which I find shocking! And I only got one upgrade to a suite, sad! The other two had awful views. Especially the one which was touted by the check in desk rep as “inter coastal view” lol. And I had no idea a full size car will get me a Hyundai Accent. I was 5 minutes late to return it to a city location and was charged for another half day. I think I must be a bad travel blogger to have so many things go wrong…Maybe I will blog about my trip some more later on.
I finally did one of those bucket list items on my list, the drive to Key West, Florida.
And I leave you with this…
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Opinions expressed here are author’s alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.
The Carlin bit is great! Thanks.
Thank you for blogging. I am sorry you don’t have your CC links right now, hope it changes. FL is lovely, I am on the west coast of it with my family this week. I hope you are enjoying your time with your daughter.
Sorry for not dropping by more frequently, I still think you provide great content aggregation with wonderful commentary.
Cheers,
PedroNY
Carlin was a master.
Why didn’t you tell the rental place that you are a pal of “The World Expert on Points and Miles” and he makes frequent contributions to your travel articles, which are distributed worldwide.
I just finished the Rajneeshie documentary on Netflix it was fascinating. I don’t know if its worth the 7 or so hours invested but worked great to pass the time at the gym during cardio.
I wonder what hotel employee created the “inner coastal view” phrase, the tweet sure looked like a “city view” and a dumpy one at that.
Check out the YouTube of George Carlin discussing airline procedures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IC_It9DwDA
Thanks for taking the time to comment you guys.
I need to catch up with everything after my trip.
We had three AA flights and they were all pretty great I thought. On time departures, early arrivals, pleasant FAs. I think Dougie is doing a decent job.
The Thrifty car rental rep was nice and did not hurt us too much for being a day late after I was five minutes late in returning the car and the city location closed ( I thought it was closing at 8 pm instead of 6 pm!). Rookie mistakes.
Some weird interactions with an MMS intern on Twitter last night.
The dilemma I am facing is gut wrenching. I had no idea what I was doing was wrong but it appears I may have finally pissed off some higher powers.
I have a lot of material in the queue.
I thought Michael H.’s post was great. And the comments that accompanied it as well.
It is pretty obvious that my blog has not made a single dent in fighting the Titans…in stopping/shaming them to stop their way of blogging (to maximize conversions). Lets not kid ourselves. The lists will stay and be updated. But I need to keep reducing time spent in producing TBB because it is a HELL OF A LOT. And when I compare it with $ ($1.44 this week woohoo!) is, lets face it, sad! I am afraid Trump may attack me and call me out for losing lol. If only Ingy had not abandoned me I may feel differently.
The Rocco’s tacos in Ft. Lauderdale has amazing tacos #wow.
I am done with the Sheraton Beach Resort in Ft. Lauderdale. Not even one hour late checkout….and when you hurry up to go check out at 11 am you over hear neighbor telling housekeeping staff they have a late checkout at 12.30 pm. So much for the “big group” coming in to take the whole South Tower. And the nerve to pull the “inner coastal view” for one of the shittiest views ever was a bit much to stomach. But the Sheraton Key West place is great.
I gotta hit the gym today to repent.
Who is this Bond007 guy? Hope he contributes more in the comments!
Happy Easter to all! I will have a Best of Web post on Sunday! Maybe Saturday with some blog updates if I get to it #notlikely
In small defense of the desk rep at the hotel… I grew up in South Florida and for whatever reason we pronounce “Intracoastal Waterway” like “Innercoastal”. I’m surprised you got an audible “T” sound to be honest.
I think your Ink card you applied for here (I think it was you) may have been the last card ever applied with my links.
Thanks a lot.
Happy Easter
#developing
Well I hope it was me. I definitely used your link the day before you posted they were shutdown. However, I hope I’m not the last one. I’ll be disappointed if I am. Especially since Mrs. Castle is about to roll down to 3/24.
Business Insider was deleted out of my Feedly list! Big step. Too much marketing crap! It will go a long way to keep this TBB thingie viable—–>congruent with goal to try to make minimum wage PER hour 🙂
That was TBBTheDude lol
I wonder what Delta is cooking after throwing a bone (less award miles to Asia).
#BeVeryAfraid #ItIsComing #ItWillShockYou
Recommendations for the Florida Keys? I will be heading out that way soon. How do cabanas work and do they even exist if you don’t have a beachfront hotel? Or is everyone out with giant umbrellas?
Oh, and don’t worry about the titans. They will fall eventually because slowly but surely, the game is becoming less lucrative. I have to imagine their conversions are declining. If Walmart and a couple of other places ban gift cards to halt MS, then quite a few people will fall to the wayside. As it gets harder to play, the barrier to entry will be that much greater.
You can make very serious amounts of money without credit card links. The problem is that most US bloggers are too blinded by those with card links to see it. Over in the old world we have generally figured it out.
I have a nice job you know. TBBing is not my job. I actually get to do two things that are not jobs but only one provides food on the table for my family…and it is NOT this one lol.
There may be serious amount of money but this little outlet of mine revolving my diminishing returns hobby would NOT be doing what is doing if that was the main goal. If someone wants to buy my business outright (NOT the blog of course) and then, maybe, I could have the time to make it more commercially friendly. This is YOUR job Rob and you are doing it well after working your tail off. I always said, there is nothing passive about passive income!
I had a dream I can become a Titan by having crazy organic traffic and, more importantly, groupies. Well, those dreams were brought down to earth pretty quickly after I learned a few more things about the online business world. And that’s fine.
Bottom line is if I did not have the credit card money to make up more than 95% of the income in this blog…this blog would have died a long time ago! What comes in still would not pay what a good client will pay me in the first year alone. And I am okay with that. Yes, I am a moron if you look at it in pure dollars.
There may be an opening to get them back. I will wait to hear from them again. I like one guy there who has been around and is very reasonable. Maybe he can make it happen in a way that I can live with. But probably not…which it will be a relief for me as I can then unload what has been building inside of me. I have an article ready for that Journal on the very topic of travel rewards credit cards and the inherent huge conflicts of interest that are built in and the complete lack of transparency and, please sit down, the need to bring in a fiduciary focus in this corner of the online world. It can sure use it and it is actually a perfect time with all the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica privacy shenanigans going on lately. So stay tuned everyone!
Just when I was ready to go all positive even before the compliance violations notice. I guess timing was never my forte as I have been always a buy and hold kind of guy 🙂
@Josh: No recommendations for the Keys. It is a long drive and we got stuck behind a big accident on the way down. Got in late and checked out at noon the next day. Other than the keys and the bridges (which are very cool, especially the Seven Mile bridge) there is not much to see really. This is Trump country all the way. OMG, I did not know KMart was booming (bathroom stop). The fish at the restaurant by the pier in Key West “Shelled Fish” or something Fish is fine. The Asian eatery is not that good, too darn salty. It was too windy to swim. Sheraton Suites Key West is great, nice upgrade. But lots of kids around, beware. Pier nice walk but Key West is just not that attractive as the town goes. This is boating territory and lots of fishing too. FWIW. We drove, we saw, we left.
My comment was in reply to Josh by the way!
Ooops…Still my comment was educational to some 🙂