The blogosphere slows way down over the weekends! Even over two days finding material worthy of featuring here is quite hard. I may start doing these promotions or add guest bloggers in the weekends. We shall see.
Did you enter the TBB $50 Marriott Gift Card giveaway yet? Please do so now. You can’t win if you can’t enter!
MVP POST OF THE DAY
An absolutely fascinating post by Eric (Google) Schmidt’s daughter from their recent visit to North Korea. This is a must read. And I love her style of writing, such a great amount of good natured sarcasm! Or I am just one of the few sick individuals fascinated by the incredibly bizarreness of this land. Oh how I wish them to be liberated from the Great Leaders cult of personality one day soon!
BEST OF MILES/POINTS
Only Dan at DansDeals can get his 185th Amex card approved AND receive the signing bonus! When we mere mortals try it we get stonewalled or shut down by Amex. Hey Dan, do you have a relative in that Amex Dept or something? 🙂 He now has 10 active Amex and 13 Chase cards!! Wow, and you are all wondering if you can go for your fourth or fifth card respectively! #muststepupgame
Gary Leff tells us how Sun Trust now allows everyone to apply for its Debit card. Whenever I see Sun Trust mentioned I get a bit depressed thinking what happened there. I never participated in any dealing with the bank and I feel great about it! Yes, I gave up some major Delta Skypesos in the process. You need to pick your spots. I chose not to mess with this as I am busy enough earning more valuable miles/points in other ways with less hassle. I am actually surprised Sun Trust is still offering Skypesos and debit cards!
Million Mile Secrets finds and prominently features a non affiliate Marriott credit card. It offers 50,000 Marriott points after spending just $1k within 3 months, 1 free night in a category 1 to 4 hotel AND a $75 statement credit and no annual fee in the first year! The disclosure at the very TOP is…beautiful! Well done, let’s hope this disclosure is imitated!
“[Disclosure:Â The Chase Marriott credit card with the $75 statement credit in this post is better than my referral link to the Chase Marriott Premier credit card which doesn’t offer the $75 statement credit.]”
Loyalty Lobby has the best analysis of the Priority Club Recategorization/Devaluation. Cosmopolitan cities got hammered pretty hard. Other than that, it was not too bad! You can check the mega chart showing old & new redemption rates: In a nutshell:
– Number of properties that moved down 1313
– Number of properties moving up 1192
– Average number of points required for an award night 20174 vs 20219
Seen this handle on a comment by one of ThePointsGuy readers: “Mileswhore” and I flashed my evil smile!
BEST OF TRAVEL
The world’s five most romantic restaurants.
Matador Network’s Video Ode to 2012Â WOW!
An awesome video by Trans Maldivian Aiways I found at the Luxury Travel Blog that shows the sheer beauty of the Maldives!
NOT SO BEST OF
Nothing that made TBB lose it over the weekend. I just want to state for the record that I think censoring comments absolutely sucks! Either allow comments or don’t. Handpicking comments to publish is very North Korean like to do! Of course spam and pure personal irrelevant attacks should  not be tolerated. If those attacks had a point they are okay!
In my own opinion of course as always.
ODDZ & ENDZ
From boredpanda, a very heart warming story “Window Cleaners Dress up as Super Heroes to Cheer Up Kids at Hospital“. Amazing pictures too! I am a sucker for stories like this!
0 Not so best of? Thats really bad.
Yeah I know…I tried believe me. Weekend time the bloggers don’t go all out pushing affiliate links as readers are kid of busy off line.
FTG wants everyone to know that he’s going to amend his Churners Challenge from last week to reflect the better, non-affiliate Marriott CC over the one he posted
Either that, or expect Dariaus to become one of us angries
Kind of makes me want to give some affiliate hits to MMS, even though I don’t think his blog is all that good (as you might imagine from my summaries of his trip reports :))
I am running behind on my blog reviews today. If what you say is true about FTG amending, I think it’s great.
I think MMS disclosure policies are one of the best, if not the best in the blogosphere. I wish other bloggers will imitate him but I won’t bet any money on that happening anytime soon!
TBB,
I barely have time to read the key blogs, let along all the others. Thank you for reading and highlighting those (low level) blogs. Who knows, one or two may become important one of these days … like this one.
dhammer53
Thanks a lot for the kind words, very appreciated! Yeah, I think I need to keep focusing on the content and ride this wave & enjoy the ride, wherever it may lead. It is time consuming but I must admit I…enjoy it. If it stops being fun I won’t do it anymore.
I would give this advice on the other thread, but I already entered once –
You need to expand your horizons on the “worst of” posts. Don’t try to keep it tame just for the sake of not being a “meanie”
You are in fact allowed to call out people for things other than pushing the inferior US Air offer.
If you think someone put up an obvious filler post to stick links in (and it’s not just Gary), call them out.
If you think someone is taking other peoples work without proper H/T’ing (happens especially with Frequent Milers work), call them out
If someone creates a blog post to “walk people through” something they can easily find on the homepage of that programs website, just so they can get a link in, call them out
And most of all, if someone creates a post where you just wonder to yourself “why did their parents allow them to start a travel blog”…. call them out
Don’t hold back just because a bitter blogger who owes you about 12 Marriott GC’s calls you an “angry”. For every bitter FTG post, there are a dozen more by other bloggers who provide constructive posts (or at least take your criticism in stride)
I will take all that into consideration, thank you for reading and commenting. If I did call out every single “callable” thing other bloggers do I could be on my computer 24/7:-) I pick the worst to feature. I am becoming a bit immune and, how shall I say this, “used to” the crap I see each day unfortunately!
So please feel free to help me out on worthy posts;-)
Enjoy reading your blog daily 🙂 Is there a way to comment with name and email option? Thanks.
There is an arrow next to “Reply as” and you should log in to any of the accounts listed (google or wordpress or AIM etc). If not, you can pick name/URL and type in the name and a URL (and u can replace the URL with your email).
I realize this format here totally sucks. I apologize. But for now this must be tolerated. Eventually it will get to a better platform…things move way slow on the tech background at TBB, too busy reviewing blogs, lol.
Thanks for the “Best of Travel” videos.
Thank you for reading & commenting. I just try to post stuff I find that is worthy and may have been overlooked!
Yes, one more thank you for the video links. Loved that dude in Greenland!
I have receive other positive comments about the video links. I had no idea they were so liked, so I will make a stronger effort to keep an eye for them!
Thanks for reading & commenting!