Let’s go on a wild ride through Western Australia and Nepal, learn more about Serve, check out the Brando luxury hotel and some awesome world maps, learn about some investing wisdom and my scientific results from pimping my Uber link.
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Very slow day at the blogs as many bloggers are at the Freddie Awards and Frequent Flyer University (FTU) events.
What I find so fun about this hobby is that it ALWAYS changes! Deals come and go. Mistake fares come and go (fast!). Devaluations keep coming (ok, that is not much fun at all!). And this Manufactured Spend thingie has exploded in the past few years to make earning so much more plentiful than earlier years (unfortunately, this has led to the steep devaluations undoubtedly!). Anyways, where am I going with this?
Well, as laid out in the last Buzz post, the Amex Serve product is now reloadable at Walmart as first reported by Travel With Grant (who is now enjoying the fame and pretty soon he will be traveling with his own groupies!). Why is this a big deal? Frequent Miler lays it all out. Will I be swapping my Bluebird with Serve? Not yet. I have read several horror stories of this “transfer” (you can NOT have Serve AND Bluebird, you must choose one!). Or Amex will do us all a favor and merge the two products for crying out loud and make our lives simpler! Or they simply shut this down when the hordes of MS hobbyists start long lines making Wal Mart cashiers a little busier than usual. Dang it, I wish I can switch by just pressing the Easy Button!
Finally, my kind of hotel is about to open! The Brando in French Polynesia. I will get here with my personal jet and my entourage. It’s nice to dream and have goals I guess lol. I do have a memory from my trip to Tahiti many years ago. Driving around the island we found this chicken BBQ equipped car at the side of the road. We bought one of the tastiest chickens we ever had (it was imported from New Zealand actually!) and we then walked to the beach behind the car and had an awesome picnic. Watermelon too! It was one of the best travel memories, we still talk about it. “Poulet, poulet”. Mmmm. One of these days I will digitize these pictures; they were taken with Kodak film, yes Kodak!
Base Jump from Burj Khalifa. Absolutely crazy. I have a feeling Red Bull will never sponsor me for jumping from my porch next to my Weber grill in my back yard. Speaking of grilling, I can’t wait to fire up the baby again!
Yomadic goes back home to Australia and heads over to the land of Mad Max madness in Western Australia hanging around with some unpredictable macho characters. Guns, BBQ and Beer!
36 Maps that will make you see the world in completely new ways by Matador Network. Wow, some of these really make you think. Definitely worth a click. You can click on the map to enlarge it. Heck, it would not appear in TBB if it was not worthy of a click you know. We take credibility very seriously around here 🙂
12 Reasons Nepal Should Go On Your Vacation Bucket List by Bored Daddy
I finally canceled my Amex Platinum card. RIP.
A short introduction to Investing (in 400 words) by Above the Market. Really, really good stuff.
I apologize for pimping my Uber link in the past few days, I was conducting an experiment. Thank you to the one person who signed up for it! It is becoming obvious to make money in this space you must target clueless newbies (my readers tend to be too smart who probably have their own Uber accounts or too smart to overpay and use much cheaper options instead!) and clobber them non stop with such links ’till the cows come home. Do you notice a similarity of such approach with the top miles/points blogs who kept their Amex links? Food for thought. Clearly my approach resembles this lol
or simply this approach 🙂
Check out my updated blog lists: Blogs I Love, Blogs I Like, Blogs I Ignore
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George
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first!
Second – but posting from AA 180 up in the air!
3rd – getting better!!
Credit Card Salesman, Gary Leff from VFTW gives us a lesson on how to write with FAKE HUMILITY in his article…”Your Advice Please on Taking a Comp.”……. I call BS on this>>>>>>>>>>says he wants to do things the way we do instead of special treatment (unless he is getting his picture taken with celebrities at special invite parties). Gary if you want to get HH gold status like we do you will have to change your HH address on file to one in Australia.
Most of us know about the Australia thing because of Gary.
I see Gary Leff is giving away some AA goodies-were there any stopovers handed out?
nice.
I wish I had those groupies 😛
Will I see some of you at FTU? P.S. I’ll probably be the youngest person there
Nope, I am at Roger Ebert’s film festival this weekend, which is much better therapy than FTU:)
dumb article by gary. he “debates” the almost worthless hilton status? what about years of pimping for at least hundreds of thousands of dollars? he’s so annoying lately. wtf was with him posting the costco trick being for no reason the other day?
Dumb or not, have to disagree on the “worthlessness” of Hilton Gold. It’s the best mid-tier status all round. Well, Fairmont comes close, but try staying there for free beyond the 2 nights bonus.
Surprised that people are still so laser focused on serve/bluebird. I thought after CVS was shut down other methods would start getting a bit more coverage, but nope!
Are you Ryan Seacrest in disguise?
Not sure if compliment or insult.
I had to Google map Quairading but it turns out it’s around 160 km north of the Dryandra Woodland where I was birding in Feb. I’ll take birds over guns any day!
Is there any way to use Google (or any other tool) to count the number of appearances of a phrase on a website in a given period of time? I’m wondering if it’s possible to quantify the level of discussion of the Amex Platinum pre- and post-Amex affiliate withdrawal.
Just wait until the summer 30K SPG Amex offer comes around this year
Remember the hysteria last year? And the year before that? Over a 5K increased offer
I suspect we won’t get any 15 part series this year on SPG points, which are essentially just copy/pasting information from SPG’s website
I know milevalue is on your ignore list, but check out his post on the It card. Haven’t seen link pimping on a single product in a single post that bad in a while.
Overall the blogs have been terrible lately. VFW is going downhill very fast. Not sure why.
OMAT is starting his moronic “living in the hotels” thing, I guess he ran out of the 1st class
flights, so now he’s gonna review the hotels, god save us…
But MMS is beating them all. His Etihad series is just plain wrong. You don’t need to subscribe
to Etihad Guest program to be able to check the available award space, all you need to know
is one link: http://www.etihadguest.com/en/spend-miles/reward-flights/
Four part series with wrong information (including using a paid tool!) instead of ONE SIMPLE LINK.
His destinations and what qualifies for one award vs. two is all messed up too.
Sharing his MS “secrets” lately has been all wrong too… And his thing about British Travel Together
was very long, just missing one important bit of info – ZERO availability for two F/J award tickets anywhere from the US. I guess nobody would use avios for economy, right?
Pushing credit card links is one thing, but giving so much bad info is just bad…
Milevalue is dying, feel bad for him because getting a real job might be a cruel awakening…
But he is such a douchebag he deserves it.
Suddenly nobody has anything to write about? I need to know how amazing Amex cards are.
Thanks god I can still read about the Frontier card!
Does anyone know if the coupon connection will be back? Ever?
“ZERO availability for two F/J award tickets anywhere from the US.”
Try Philadelphia, Atlanta and DC occasionally, and plenty to/from New York. It’s the Midwest and West Coast that are hard. Don’t ignore Canada.
Thanks. Yeah, for me if I go for a high fee British ticket, I’d want to fly direct from LAX.
I got my British card with the 100K bonus and pushing $30K is not big if I need to do $20K
for my bonus, but I checked over last few weeks and hasn’t seen anything for the entire year!
Can I do LAX-JFK on the first class new AA A321t connecting to first class JFK-LHR using
the Travel Together cert? I guess not possible neither as there is never 2 seats available
for that new JFK flight…
For all the blustering OMAT is doing about his hotel living, he treats it as if he’s some pioneer in this space. To the best of my knowledge, he has not once acknowledged the fact that Drew has been doing this and writing about it for years already. And does it far more impressively since he doesn’t have the luxury of using all the affiliate commission to fund some of those nights at high end hotels
Agree, Drew is the king of efficient mile-spending. Not really my kind of life style,
but you have to give him credit.
Who is this Drew?
Drew is the Great Drew Macomber from TRAVELISFREE.com (a daily must read) and former ghost writer (alleged) for MMS. The brightest mind in the blogging space and also NOT a credit card salesman/ he’s honest, and Carrie is his cute lady (wife?)……..They travel and live in hotels together, a wonderful and exciting thing to share with each other. OMAAT, Lucky ( God I hate that name), no Ben, seems like he does all this on his own (Am I wrong here?) that seems like a very lonely thing to do. To quote the great Ernie McCracken “Travel is best when you share it with someone you love.”
Drew is travelisfree.com along with the sister (spouse?) blog his wife runs to keep track of all the costs and extra details.
Like TBB VFTW is smart enough to know that era of champagne and campaign is quickly coming to an end. He is just not prepared to turn right and spend the time with the masses. His incoherent and cringe worthy ramblings are now moving into there so bad they are good tier. So like the rest of us pull up a nice chair and, grab some cheap popcorn and enjoy the show.
As for good blogs, Cranky has been dropping is usual bits of knowledge. Loyalty Travel dropped some great knowledge on using AA miles on Air Berlin to get to secondary places in Europe, plus the usual great takes on promos and using BRG to actually travel frugal. Matt had a very interesting take on loyalty from the owner/business point of view that needs more discussion. And most importantly Jared Destroying the over entitled Flyertalker and blogger crowd and trying to bring some sanity back to the hobby.
Anyway enough of the ramblings the point is the blogs that are good continue to be good and the blogs that suck well they continue to suck and maybe they also start to fold.
I like how Gary is fighting hard every day to preserve and influence the loyalty program execs that even marginal and cheapskate loophole seeking members do matter when, in fact, we do not really in the big picture when so much of the landscape has changed. Of course they will make changes and reward the member who spends more, this is the way it was supposed to work and it is finally working this way. Did everyone see the Detla latest quarterly results? Of course Smisek wants to be like Delta, every airline does! The frequent flyer program is an after thought; it does matter for the big corporate spenders of course and it should!
I agree with your last paragraph.I hope TBB is on the good side of the equation hehe
Drew is TravelisFree.com
who is Ramsey?
Ramsey is the Great Charles Ramsey from NOOBITUP.com (a daily must read) and former guest host(by popular vote) for TBB. The craziest mind in the TBB comment space and the rumored love child of Gary Busey and Nick Nolte. After many years working as an FA in the skies (and watching many celebs getting handys under the blanket) he is now the full-time president of the TBB Fan Club and is the world’s leading expert on avatars. He was reportedly last seen putting up “no selfies, please” stickers in first-class lavs of all major carriers in an effort to prevent VFTW’s innocent readers from getting any more nightmares.
You are a riot!
I am truly touched, Common Man…..Can I use that on my tombstone?
@ Jamison: You are number One!
@ jettyboy: You should be Number One if you are posting aboard a plane!
@ Simon: Bronze! You are moving up in the world!
@ Ramsey: I also thought Gary’s article wondering about the “dilemma” of HH Gold status was a bunch of BS. Someway, somehow it felt…hypocritical. I am glad to see I was not the only one!
@ Heathers: True.
@ Sam: I wonder if he would get the goodies if he had come out and said “I don’t trust you guys any longer” 🙂
@ Grant: You have a long time to “develop” that groupie attractor mode ahead of you. Next step is laying on a flat bed seat with two Singapore Air flight attendants serving you champagne and caviar and a big headline “You can do this for free!’. Or something like that 😉
@smittytabb: Rogert Ebert’s film festival sounds wonderful! I managed to sneak away to watch two films this week.RAID 2 is AWESOME but I would not recommend it to the youth or to any law abiding citizen 🙂 But if you want to see mega action FULL OF NONSTOP VIOLENCE, this flick is IT! Indonesian film. The first one he did was awesome too but this one had a better plot. Makes the Hollywood violence lovers look like child’s play! I repeat. Totally not recommended if you abhor violence. But if you appreciate directing skills and invigorating heart pounding mayhem, this is IT!
Last night I went to see “Under the Skin”. Science fiction about a gorgeous looking alien wondering around and messing with men. Very slow. But the ending is very impactful. I still think about it…what if they are among us? Was that love she felt? The inhumane animals we humans are. Don’t bother….I almost felt asleep 🙂
@ Anonymous: NOBODY mentions how they make money in this space. You see articles like this http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-travel-using-credit-card-points-2014-4
about our friend MMS that portray them as “experts” and not a word about they make the majority of their money from pushing credit cards. I guarantee you most of their readers have no clue either! I wonder if these journalists even have a clue! As some “expert” said…”it’s all about marketing and conversions”
@ William Charles: Something else will pop up when Serve goes down 🙂
@ McFadden: So, what’s u saying?
@ Tara: Birds over Guns? Really? I am shocked, just shocked 🙂
@ Nick PFD: That’s a great suggestion. I have no idea. It would be great to quantify this and I suspect it won’t be pretty!
@ Steve: Judging from the sudden turn of popularity of all Amex cards… 🙂
@ Ted: I saw the headline this morning and my first thought was this” Oh boy, this guy must be running low on money these days…”
@ Andrew: You sound angry. If you had said something about FTG (the blog) we would get the troll here to defend himself and call us all whiners or worse lol. Your line about MV getting a job was priceless. And thank God for the Frontier card everyone LOL. Who are you to doubt the expertise of MMS? Read the article by Business Insider quoted earlier, if he got in there he must be a true expert. Not all experts in mass media are true experts (self pun intended LOL).
@ Andrew and Heathers: I refuse to fly airlines and pay fuel surcharges. And BA’s to London are the most punitive and confiscatory. I just won’t play that game out of principle. How come the so consumer friendly EEC allows this crap…it’s ludicrous!
Steve/Andrew/Ramsey/Ted/KennyB: I was getting ready to add Ben’s blog to the Blogs I Like list. But the Fairmont series turned me off. You do not see the freaking Fairmont Visa link and you saw so many other cc links, how ludicrous is that! And you bet that if there was an affiliate Fairmont Visa link we would see it MANY times! And THAT my friends is what is wrong with this space. Bloggers can CHOOSE to pimp credit cards or not. I like the ones who don’t or do it in such a fashion that does not insult my intelligence. The ones in my Ignore List DO insult my intelligence and some are so salesy it makes me want to barf.
Yeah, it’s a touchy area indeed. At least Ben’s content is okay (not for me but I am sure his readers do enjoy these trip reports) and the kid does work hard at it. Maybe I am too harsh on him indeed. Maybe it is because I expect more from him. If no cc money was around I bet this is one blogger who would still be blogging.
Speaking of money and careers…You do this for several years, you could make some money if you just pump and target newbies, what do you do if this affiliate channel dries up? You go all these years by not improving your skills (say, for the degree you have) and then you decide to go back to the real world and prospective employers google you and see you spent all these years pushing credit cards and drinking champagne and going to these weird FTU things 🙂
Hmm, food for thought for you bloggers!
George, angry in a sense that those guys kind of ruined the blogging experience for me – yes.
But I’m also super excited – I just booked an AMAZING trip, my best ever by far (and you know
I’ve been to some beautiful places)! And yes, Etihad is a big part. That’s why I made a mistake
to follow the “expert” and his sorry a$$ posts about that airline…
You’re right about BA, but for me there is so few choices for the direct flights to Europe left,
that I did consider it. I thought I would pay, but use only miles for one ticket, blah, blah.
Even if I wanted to, there is no seats on BA from LA. Ever.
And your last thought – agree, it will be a real awakening for sure for those guys. But it seems
unavoidable, their “business model” is coming to an end for sure. Both credit cards AND
miles programs are gonna stop being what they are very soon. I’m 100% positive. That’s
why I’m spending my miles big time LOL. Take care!
@Andrew Here is another way to use you AA points to ,get to Europe with paying BA
yeah, but I want to fly DIRECT from LAX to Europe.
You would be surprised, but my options are very limited these days.
– Lufthansa to FRA or MUC – almost impossible to book
– Swiss to Zurich – impossible to book
– Air France – used to fly this all the time with my Delta miles – impossible now
– BA to LHR – no seats, ever and anything other than 1st sucks
– Turkish to IST – never seen any seats and this airline sucks
Sure, if I decide to connect in NY or Chicago or where-ever, I have more options…
But I hate connecting in the US and my options are pretty much gone.
When I was a Northwest Platinum I ALWAYS got the awards I wanted…ALWAYS. I simply called the Platinum line the and the nicest ladies at Chisolm, MN took care of me in just minutes. I didn’t even have to flexible lol.
It’s a whole different landscape these days. You want too much (direct to LHG from LAX). Hope you get lucky but that appears to be a very tall order. These days it is being required to be flexible A LOT to the point of people wondering “is this really worth it when I can get 2% cold cash back or 2.2% with Barclays Arrival card)…
Like I said it is a whole different landscape.
I sat down last night to look at which credit cards to go for….and I chose none. I have had them all pretty much and the bonuses are just not that enticing…And THIS is why you target newbies if you are after the big bucks lol.
C’mon. Almost all these pimp artists are 20-30 Somethings with no skill/ambition. They’ll be living hand to mouth in their 60s and learning all the ways to scam SS and whatever programs they can get handouts from.
How about that Free-quent Flyer guy going full time? How is he gonna make a living? Selling his ebook on Amazon for $5? Or pimping Uber and CC links and write second rate articles for a few shekels to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of noobs?
Not if they are smart and save/invest what they make. The big pumpy blogs make a lot of money so you do this for several years straight and you take care of the money and it does not get to your big head they can do very well. But this blogging thing takes time, a finite resource. It is something you do which takes time away from something you are not doing. I wish they had a bigger picture goal and really try to answer the question if going full time is really worth it. If it was 6 years ago I would say yes, this market was just WIDE open. Now we have so many posers fighting for clicks.
I feel for bloggers going full time now, the timing is VERY bad. But I do wish them well as it takes guts to do something like this and I do admire that. We live once and going through life having regrets is NOT the way to live it. So, I am definitely looking forward to see what Travel Summary and Free-quent Flyer do as I think they both have lots of talent and can contribute to this space.
This is a fast evolving field. Never underestimate the grand stupidity in the US Banks 🙂
What is interesting about the US market is that there is no real affiliate marketing schemes for the airlines. The hotel chains, yes, but not the airlines.
This is actually one benefit that non-US bloggers have, because most European airlines do have affiliate marketing schemes which let you benefit from airline tickets booked by readers who use your site.
Yes, there is, LH has it.
TPG is a brilliant marketer but I don’t know whether he is smart enough to think about the future. Reading his blog, it looks like he has been living quite a lavish lifestyle. Not surprising when the dude thinks that a $2k-$3k biz class ticket is an “UH-MAZING” deal. Sure is chump change when you pull half a million dollar or more from newbies.
You can’t seriously tell me that you believe someone talented enough to start a website that brings in $500k-$1m within 3 years would actually struggle to find someone to hire them, should the site go down!
I think TPG will be fine. It is other bloggers who may have put their career on hold to give this blogging thing a try (which I do admire actually). I am talking people who go to school and have skills in i.e. law, all kinds of IT engineering stuff, accounting, etc. With the speed everything is moving these days, not sure if I was to hire someone to join my legal/accounting/engineering/software development company I would want to hire these guys who spent several years selling credit cards and taking pictures in the Maldives on airplane flat beds sipping champagne and eating caviar. They have probably lost (or substantially diminished) their skills…besides, they may not be good for the company culture…they do look a bit elitist and entitled to me lol.
George , you don’t need to talk about FTG.com to be a whiner in my book.
Andrew -there is LAX -LHR on Air New Zealand to consider not sure of reward availability but Star option.
As for connecting as mentioned above consider Philly -BA usually has space and we have two flights a day to LHR (one w/first). I usually use Avios to upgrade but did just book a travel together out of JFK to Paris with return LHR to Philly for June.
I am thinking of a summer trip to Greece…for 4…using Avios. Maybe it is time to look on that Air Lingus option and then try to fetch a way with (omg,) Ryan Air or another low cost airline…
If you go the IE route via avios, I suggest buying your intra Europe tickets on IE. I didn’t find them to be much more expensive than Ryan and I don’t need the stress of learning about all of the possible gotchas from that airline. Plus if both segments are on IE, they probably would take care of you in case of irrops.
i need to tour as far and wide as possible riding this Avios….i think it is extremely energizing:)