We do a play by play how one of the easiest ways to earn miles/points in our hobby died…Why oh why another one dies?
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Amazon Payments, in case you were living in a cave, was a super easy way to send $1,000 to others. If you had a spouse you could easily double that. I have been doing this in a 4 way with another couple for a very long time. There were other “ways” to make even more points by being creative in the number of Amazon Payment accounts….not going there as I think this is wrong and against my ethics threshold. I was perfectly fine charging $2k on our mileage-earning credit cards every month, receiving $2k and then withdrawing to our bank accounts. Hey, I was helping my buddy Bezos to get this payment system off the ground. Perhaps the ipay and iphone 6 announcement finally killed this as I think they imply in this release. Frankly, it made absolutely not much sense subsidizing our miles/points earning and I am shocked this deal lasted as long as it did. Or maybe some sharp Amazon staffer caught the traffic coming from yet another blog writeup. This one came from the biggest miles blog, The Points Guy, recently. All I am saying is writing about these things create traffic for bloggers’ sites and credit card conversions and, undoubtedly, contributes to the killing of these deals. Yeah…and on it goes….and on and on…
What I will miss the most is the peace of mind I had when I bought many gift cards at a time that I could not unload fast enough…I was always comforted with the thought “Hey, no need to panic, Amazon Payments is always there to help get rid of them”. Sigh…
As a self appointed industry blog reviewer and observer I would like to give you a play by play…just for the hell of it:
I first saw the awful news at Dan’s Deals with Amazon Payments As We Know It Will End On 10/13/14
Short and to the point. Devastating. I felt like I lost an old friend. I immediately reached for a bottle of wine to comfort me. Will life be the same after October 13? Why don’t these big banks and companies leave us alone to earn the miles/points we work so hard to earn so we can travel for free huh? Life can be so unfair sometimes…
As I tweeted about it… BANG, we are talking seconds later….I see the blog post by View from the Wing titled “The End of Amazon Payments: No More Sending Other People Money Effective October 13″. Unbelievable speed, is this guy ever in, you know, a meeting? He links to the DD post in the end.
By this time I got to the gym and while working on my physique on a new machine I exercised my thumb on my huge Samsung Note 3 phone (iphone 6 Plus? Pffft) and it was on! The same Amazon Payments news was then blogged at (in order of appearance in my Feedly) the following blogs so you can get a sense who has fast fingers:
Reward Boss
Points Centric
Points & Pixie Dust
PointChaser
Points With a Crew
Million Mile Secrets – MMS says he wrote about this 3 years ago and the “angries” were upset he shared the secret with his readers. Well bow tie dude, 3 years ago your site was a fly in an elephant’s ass. Your co-resident in the TBB Blogs to Barf wrote about it a few weeks ago and BANG, it is killed. Coincidence? Who knows? Hey looking at your site with all the credit cards on top, left, right and bottom is similar to Frugal Travel Guy‘s site. Did you write this or did you delegate it to a staff ghostwriter? Drew, don’t do it again man!
The Points Traveler
Deals We Like
Free Travel Guys
Hack My Trip
Frequent Miler
The Lazy Traveler’s Handbook
One Mile at a Time – No surprise it links to View from the Wing
Mileage Update
The Miles Professor
The Points Guy – Shocking development it only took less than two days to post about this change!
Running With Miles
Noob Traveler
Giddy for Points
Well Traveled Mile
Doctor of Credit
the #hustle blog
I may update this with all the new blog posts that will appear on Thursday. You can rest assured one of the last ones to tell us all about it may be…The Points Guy as all the Directors there are busy doing…have no idea what! Update: They must be reading TBB so they finally wrote about it!
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Bye, bye, 1st American pie…
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry…
Your comments always bring a smile in my face, well done! You deserve to be First! Perseverance wins!!
And good old boys (and gals) were drinking whiskey and wine….
2nd to none
No doubt, no doubt. Welcome to the highly esteemed circle of medal winners!
Well my comment also pertains to Amazon Payments. In terms of ease and lifetime, it is(was) a ‘2nd to none’ MS scheme 🙂
Oh ok, sorry…I thought you were playing along. Yeah we will greatly miss Amazon Payments. Hard to believe it lasted 4 years!
I can’t wait to see how the credit card pimps are going to sell their credit cards without AP.
Amex has one bonus per lifetime, Chase is shutting people down left and right and is brutal during reconsideration. How are the lemmings going to find a way to MS 5k in 3 months now? Hopefully the more ridiculous the credit card pushing posts are, the more people are going to be put off by them.
They still have the bird that is blue in color. They will continue to beat it till it dies.
I certainly expect more ridiculous pumping to occur going forward.
Many MS opportunities have gone away this year including TD buxx, AP, VR, evolve etc. We’ve reached a critical mass. What’s next?? BB/ISIS?
Yeah, it certainly appears so. And it is sad to watch.
AP was my primary source for meeting minimum spending. I’m not a big MSer so I hate to see this go away. Especially since I just finished a churn and have some spends to meet. However, and don’t get me wrong for what I’m about to say, but…..
Shit has gotten way out of hand the last couple of years. Some great bloggers have sold their souls, miles have been so easy to get we’ve seen massive devaluations so companies can balance the liability on their books, and award availability is tightening up. I almost welcome things getting harder. There are too many hogs at the trough.
I hear you and I feel your pain!
Your 2nd paragraph is certainly in the running for MVP Comment Gem, WOW! You nailed it Sir!
You can make up for the loss of points earned from AP by opening just one credit card. Click here! On a lighter note, if anyone needs a good laugh right now check out Pfd’s new guest writer.
Thanks MilesMatch, I appreciate the plug.
I wonder if the loss of AP will have any effect on this niche? It’s the easiest, most noob-friendly way to meet minimum spends.
MilesMath, not MilesMatch.
If you are going to plug a cc at least make it funny. And this is why PFD is on the world famous TBB “Blogs I Like” list 😉
The funny thing is, I didn’t even set out to plug the card, I just wanted to do a really over-the-top parody of a hard sell. But then I realized it would be even funnier if I actually had affiliate links. And much to my surprise and delight, I’ve actually had a few clicks on the affiliate links. If I actually get a conversion from this I’m going to drink a bottle or two of wine and buy a bunch of stuff with George’s Amazon link.
You da man!
I loved todays post. George, i wonder how could you still manage to write a great short synopsis of the news with so much of sarcastic humour (even under the influence of drinks), without going overboard, in just 3-4 hours of the news breaking out? You have some great comprehension and writing skills man. You should may be writing for some big newspapers?
Thanks. We like compliments, it is human nature 🙂
Them big newspapers do not want to leave me alone to focus on this baby and make a killing with the Amazon link lol.
This stinks…but…AP was written up by most bloggers over the years at one time or another, and not just those in the miles/points space. I’ve seen the scheme mentioned on big personal finance, wedding, and parent blogs, although the goal may be different (“liquidate all your Visa gift cards from your wedding”, “get more (non-travel) rewards”, etc.). So I don’t think it is necessarily the fault of TPG or MMS, they may have just been the most recent to re-publish in the miles/points area. Like you say, it was surprising how long it lasted, given the wide number of people who knew about it. RIP…I wonder how many people are now going to establish ALR accounts for the 1.75% intro fee, LOL. Perhaps this was Amazon’s goal?
Yeah, I certainly agree, I just like to piss off the commercial blogs 🙂
We don’t know what’s in Bezos’s mind. Certainly sounds plausible. I still don’t get all the hoopla about ALR. We are talking 1.75% so if you use the Arrival card you make .25% or .45%. And then you may run into them tax related recordkeeping crap…Explain THAT to the IRS!
1.75% to get 2% is definitely not all that great. But 1.75% to spend $5,000 and pick up a 50,000 sign up bonus, that is still a great game in town. Also, ALR up to two weeks ago would be best leverage with Amex Gift Cards cashback portal, that may still come back, in that case you get to do it for free. So a few more steps, but keeps you costs close to 0%.
It’s sad, very sad, it was such a great thing to have around, it lasted for almost 4 years! Even US Mint didn’t last for 4 years. 🙂 Amex Travelers Checks did, but that was way more under radar, not as many blogs exploiting it.
Cheers,
PedroNY
4 years…is like an eternity…or a generation. Good point on the ALR. Due to close dealings with the IRS I would like not to give them an extra reason to bother me 🙂
Never actually used AP. I’ll go turn in my hobbyist badge now.
George, I think your bigger concern is your huge stack of miles and points, which lose real value every day.
Yeah…I am a sucker…trying to keep up this blog while having no time to burn the stash that, for unknown reasons, it keeps to be going up. Another 72k up today (from my own UA Mileage Explorer card)…
One thing i can never digest is reading so many people who seem to have resigned to the fact that they wonder or are happy it lasted so long. I am not blaming anyone making that statement as i can perfectly understand where they are coming from considering that most of MS opportunities dont last long but then they they are missing something. Remember it could have lasted longer had the discussions been restricted only to forums and had bloggers shut their mouth and back and not write anything about deals which are best left to forums. Bloggers have better things to write like coming up with intelligent tricks and tips on travel rather than bluntly stealing ideas from what has been discussed in detail in FT and other forums. Heck – let them even stick to pimping CCs (that will ensure there is more work for people like George 😉 )but let them not write stories with pictures about any of the deals. Let them all start their own Private forums/newletters if they are so fond of letting out deals to their dearest and nearest readers. Only that will ensure that deals last longer.
These bloggers don’t give a *^%#$ about deals lasting longer. All they care about is credit card conversions…so the more eyeballs they attract to their website and the more they pump….the higher the conversion rate. This is what it’s all about. The rest is all…marketing 🙂
Bezos and his gang are the smartest business people on earth. If you guys really think that their decision has come because some of their IT people have finally “seen the light”, mind you, due to some bloggers spelling it out–I really don’t know what to tell you.You seriously do not see a correlation between the birth of ALR and the demise of AP? OK, so MMS was small by the time, but DansDeals wasn’t. His AP post was one of the first. It was in September 2010.
You’re telling me, Amazon has let it ride for 4 years because they didn’t know? I can’t help shaking my head!
I could go on a limb and propose the theory that the AP demise has been brought up not by the bloggers, but the extreme greed of some of our heavy hitters–read about a guy with 12 accounts on Flyertalk, TWELVE: Jesus Flocking Christ! I could, but I won’t. Amazon people have been trying for years to bring their P2P system to the masses, and it hasn’t worked. So they put it under the knife, changed their business model, and introduced ALR. I would not be surprised if their calculations had taken us, MS-ers into account. Far off? Only because most people have no idea how sneaky Amazon can be. I publish on Kindle, so I do know.
I will sooner believe that Chase doesn’t know, or City doesn’t know, or AMEX doesn’t know (although I don’t believe that either), but I will never believe that Amazon didn’t know what was going on from the day one. OK, maybe, day two, but that’s it.
Yeah, you are probably right. The point is the bigger the blog that publishes detailed instructions on how to do it, like TPG, certainly does NOT help. Is it the cause? No…but, you know, it’s like that thousands paper cuts or however it goes.
I am interested to hear your take on TBEX.
Lucky’s latest post may have set a record: 36 affiliate links, all under the guise of answering a reader question. The best part? The Google-search-grabbing headline: “Collecting Miles As A Beginner”. I think even my eyes started bleeding (maybe he’ll recommend a credit card for that too?)
I have it marked to look at. I was definitely going to comment on it just by looking at the headline 😉
Plink just died today as well. I was wondering why my last two transactions never posted and they were out of stock of every GC. So long churning at my favorite flower shop…
I bailed out on Plink long time ago…Hope many were not hurt by losing their unredeemed points. The business model was never executed well over there…It happens.