We bring you the ways Marriott Rewards devalues, how to do a Hilton status match, traveling while Asian, AA keeps sinking and changes to Blogs I Like, see some awesome drone pics, travel to Athens, Uzbekistan and Ukraine, go inside North Korea’s hacker army and a lot of stuff in the one and only no BS Blog Buzz!
TBB Blog Mission: To Entertain. Educate. Inspire. In That Order!
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There WILL be a Sunday post. It will be similar to the “Best of Web” type posts I used to do on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Some links that really blew my mind that will not do them justice if I buried them in one of the Monday/Wednesday/Friday posts. I miss you guys here on Tuesdays and Thursdays but must keep my word to Mrs. TBB. There was a technicality I am taking the liberty to post on Sundays again as I had promised her I will post three WEEKdays if this blog did not have ten conversions per month three months in a row. So I am keeping my word 🙂
Hilton Honors still does elite status matches.
Loyalty Lobby was again first posting about the SPG 2018 Award Category Changes and every other “expert” blogger followed along, sigh. 145 hotels go up, 131 go down. Book by March 6 to take advantage of lower rates. Loyalty Traveler has more detailed observations. Some of my own observations:
Down: Egypt, United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Argentina, Brazil, Panama, Turkey
Up: Israel, Bhutan, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Canada
The Sheraton in Frankfurt Airport goes from 3 to 4.
The Westin Palace in Madrid goes from 5 to 6.
Greece: The King George in Athens and the property in Rhodes go up one category. I now see two Design Hotels available, anyone stayed in them?
Michigan: Westin Southfield and Four Points by Sheraton Detroit Novi go up one category.
It’s the same story with the 2018 Marriott category changes. Loyalty Lobby posts first, every other expert in credit card sales follows…In a typical Marriott screw you move, 21% of hotels (!!!!) go up and just 5% go down, sad! You were warned here about Marriott, the Delta of hotels. The sweet period for the SPG merger appears over, prepare to be devalued even more going forward!
This is okay: 22 Things to Know Before You Go to Athens.
Interesting, sure to be controversial so I will just drop it here and not make any comments:Â Traveling While Asian and Sexual Fetishes by How Not to Travel Like a Basic Bitch
This is good news: Traveling to Uzbekistan is finally getting easier.
Wow, Inside North Korea’s Hacker Army.
Fantastic personal finance blog post: Cutting the Gordian Knot.
Your actions will be far more important than your intellect over your investment lifetime. Your behavior will matter more than your fees, asset allocation, or your analytical abilities because it only takes one bad choice, one mistake to undo years of good financial decisions. [ Amen]
The most difficult problem in finance is yourself. The Gordian Knot is your mind [Amen again]
The most incredible photos taken by drones in 2017.
This is a kind of post I really love. We are talking about talent here folks! Great writing, great pictures, the essence of travel writing. These blogs here are the essence of selling you plastic non stop. Reward the worthy ones with your clicks, together we can move mountains. Okay, I need to come down. Maybe move some Alexa rankings instead lol. Oh, that post is by Megan Starr and is titled: Ukraine Uncovered: The Kharkiv Metro System. Enjoy it!
BLOG BUZZThis section is for advanced level hobbyists and veteran blog readers & personal rants & stuff.
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This post pretty much summarizes what happened to American Airlines, thanks a lot Doug Parker, sad!
If you get AA gift cards be careful of the restrictions how you can use them.
A play by play of a Wyndham Timeshare Presentation. Make sure you know what you are signing up for.
I don’t do gift card reselling. Just be careful out there.
Rapid Travel Chai recommends the Million Mile Guy about MS. Hmm, I had never heard of it so I added it to my too long Feedly list. Wait! I went to add the feed to Feedly and it did not come up and then these were suggested, seriously? Never mind then…
We find out who Brandon is over at Milenomics finally. And for the record I tweet my feelings 🙂
I think the guys at Miles to Memories are suffering from exclamation mark syndrome, WTF!
$1,060 Bonus!!! Start Investing and Invite 12 Friends
Oh, I could spam my friends to make money but I choose not to…
Me when I see another blog post about an airline’s livery:
So, we did a little experiment to see who posts the breaking news about a hamster and Spirit Airlines. You know, required reading for frequent travelers hideous click-bait designed to keep you a moron or something like that…Amazingly, it was Miles to Memories who posted about it first and then of course followed by View From The Wing and some minutes later One Mile at a Time. This is just a very sad state of affairs. Plastic and clickbait with Kardashian style news involving “incidents”….so many do it lately.
And you have other blogs linking to these blogs. Of course Pizza in Motion will link to his idol View From The Wing and to the hamster story, smh.
So, phuck it, here we go, changes in the TBB Blogs I Like:
Out: Doctor of Credit
In: Milenomics, The Lazy Traveler, Frequent Miler, Megan Starr and The Garfors Globe (the Norwegian dude Gunnar).
Update: Very early am today Friday I was shocked to see Milenomics interview at Million Mile Secrets. WTF! So, I deleted it from my Blogs I Like list making it the shortest ever stay in this prestigious list. Why? Exsqueeze me? You give FREE content to a blog that is the biggest pumping credit card machine (after its sister blog The Points Guy, both proudly owned by Bankrate), is responsible for hideously with no shame killing so many deals in this hobby, some questionable and ethically challenged advice, with horrific repeated pictures of staff holding credit cards, with two founders who used to be love birds (or so they were saying) and the moronic mother in law rule of thumb now bothering us with boring stories about meditations and Buddhist retreats and home birthing, the level of writing appealing to seven year olds, the atrocious pics and arrows appealing to six year olds, the super boring stock pictures, the use of exclamation marks (that Miles to Memories is now copying, WTF!). And don’t get me started about Emily’s holding credit cards everywhere, WTF is that about? And D’s new look reminds me of ISIS #nojoke! And, oh by the way, my blog is the greatest blog not yours Milenomics, lets see if you have the stamina to keep it up this time. And change the “Brandon Asks” title, it just sounds dumb! But the rationale of it is still great I must admit and will be linking to it…maybe. After I get over the trauma of seeing you at MMS, sooooo disappointed. You need to stand for something, enabling a blog in the Ignore list to use you as fodder to keep pumping its readers is SUPER sad. To the Bankrate employees looking for free content: Stay the phuck away from me!
Ok, I feel better now. It is snow day, we are all home on a weekday. Which is rare, maybe we go sledding y’all.
Maybe one day I convince Mrs. TBB to hold credit cards to show Emily how it should be done #dreaming 🙂
And I leave you with this…
TBB
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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 timeshare article and comments is great! Thanks.
Everything is great. This correction too #exciting
I wouldn’t have pulled the plug on Milenomics so quickly. Good guy, good blog, his heart’s in the right place. There are a lot of things worse than getting free publicity from a shill. Like being a shill.
Also, tell your son it’s no use going to Marrakech. They stopped selling gift cards at the end of 2017.
Good catch on that mall in Morocco…
I looked out the window, snow is coming down way fast. Then I checked Feedly and bang there it was the Milenomics interview at MMS very early Friday am. I got angry, rushed downstairs, and did what I did. I am not going to enable shills. Could be an even better guy and blog if it did not provide free content to shills. I stand by my decision. It is my blog and I can do what I want….wait, that sounds like a song…was it by The Clash?
And now the Live and Let’s Fly dude has to say something…
Did Spirit Airlines Really Advise a Woman to Flush Her Emotional Support Hamster Down Toilet?
WTF am I doing here going through all this crap for you guys….I am buried in BS, help!
Knowing him, he probably has plans to sue Spirit!
I hoped you would cover the BA hamster-fest and was not disappointed! What a shit-show BA has become.
Anyone know how the Hilton match deals with IHG platinum? I’m guessing it would match to gold?
http://statusmatcher.com/company/hilton-hotels-resorts
No idea…
I had issues matching Fairmont Platinum the first time….I had to escalate. Tried for another time and gave up as I did not have the patience…besides it was not free as it required paid stays after a while.
Question for all:
Has anyone gotten the 100k HH points for getting the Ascend card if they had the Surpass. Asking for a friend…
I got diamond from it 2 yrs ago fyi
Me too-oops, bad phrasing. Hilton matched my IHG Platinum to Diamond two years ago. Then they took it away a few months later. I really miss that extra bottle of water.
Sam and Brenton:
There were some issues with the status matches back then. Some got it all the way for two years, some expired after one year (like mine), etc. Mine did not mean much at the Tokyo Conrad but the extra bottle of water was indeed used. PER DAY #wow
Still waiting to hear from former Surpass holder who Ascended…anyone?
Buzz-
In 2016, Hilton matched me to Diamond, and said it was good through 2018. I still hve the email saying 2018.
A few months later I got an Amex Platinum card and registered for all the various benefits, which included HH Gold. Hilton downgraded me from Diamond to Gold, and started the tough emials saying ‘no appeal is possible’. Ok, I know when to quit.
PM me for information about my ongoing sale of Hilton towels, glasses and mattresses. We also have a few lampshades and clock radios at prices that are-dare I say-a real steal.
Maybe I can give away some Hilton lampshades here in my blog, thanks Sam! 🙂
I wonder if they matched it 2 years ago to Diamond because Spire was still new-ish. We were looking at booking a curio hotel in London, which overnight went from 70k/night to 171k/night, so we ended up booking with Marriott (St Ermin’s). And that was really my only potential Hilton booking this year. If I could just find a good use to burn 500k points…
Bit Harsh on milenomics really. The entire interview is about how miles can be great but also being realistic that they aren’t always useful or usable. Precisely the message MMS readers need..
The message I got was…it provided free content to one of the top two shills in the blogosphere.
Good post by Adam about AA. They’ve sure been going down the tubes. Course they’re not alone – still hate that Marriott bought SPG.
Neat to see Uzbekistan loosening up. Haven’t been to any of the ‘Stans yet but would like to.
At the end of the day Doug Parker is delivering to the shareholders and not us free loaders.
Me too on the Stans!
George it’s all about the pageviews! Doc links to the titans so they will link to him…
Now the irony of Brandon’s inventor talking trash about a king shill, then doing an interview piece with the same shill that posts the next day, is some next level shh. I don’t think your decision to remove him is harsh at all.
>>>>>>>George it’s all about the pageviews! Doc links to the titans so they will link to him…
Correct.
Thank you for confirming the validity of my decision 🙂
King shill…
Ingy was the one…and then he sold too early lol.
Exactly. Hopefully that wasn’t an attempt to make DOC look good. That explanation makes him look even worse.
I reluctantly shifted to Feedly despite disliking features of its browser version because the alternatives have no or terrible mobile apps. Searching Feedly is hit or miss, by habit I past in a blog’s RSS feed to subscribe.
I could not add that blog you suggested into Feedly. Not sure what you mean in your last sentence….
I’ve had the same with Feedly not discovering feeds from a number of blogs, as backup in the Feedly add box instead of typing a blog’s name to search, you can paste the URL of the blog’s RSS feed, as in http://millionmileguy.com/feed/, most pages either have /feed or /rss, and since you are a Firefox user, you can also click the Bookmarks menu, Subscribe to Page, and Firefox is good at detecting RSS for pages. I am not sure what leads Feedly to recognize a page or not.
Great, that worked! I had given up on some blogs that I could not add them to Feedly…I will try this from now on, thank you!
Well just more evidence that we’re destined to be best friends… liveries are my favorite thing to write about. Honestly more research and effort goes into my posts about airline design than anything else I write. Blogs to ignore!
Are we having a laugh?
Nope, dead serious. My post about Lufthansa took me three days to write, including research.
I was not thinking of your blog when I typed that.
But seriously, what the phuck is all the fuss about this livery crap? What good does it do for me to learn about something so….standard? We are all busy and I see so many blog posts I am not going to waste my time about livery for crying out loud. It’s up there with Rene reviewing a Delta lunch sandwich 🙂
I used to enjoy looking to see which animal was on the frontier planes. Like a 3/10 on the amusement scale, which was damm interesting in the days before current smartphones and free data…
I think most people don’t care about the livery, which is what AA’s CEO said back when they unveiled their new one. I’m really interested in airline design overall – not just the livery, but the history of their advertising, annual reports, route maps, boarding pass sleeves, etc. It’s a niche, but I love it. I know you weren’t referring to me, since everyone and their mother wrote about LH this week… I just got a laugh when I saw your WTF gif.
AA’s CEO was right 🙂
Those are fine but…boarding pass sleeves too, come on man! Or maybe you can make it more exciting with a headline “Six Shocking Facts about Boarding Pass Sleeves You Wish You Knew Before Boarding” or something like that…
Looking at the Autograph Collection hotel in Lisbon. Currently Cat 7 and moving to Cat 8. Goes for 100 EUR per night and they want 45,000 points. Marriott is challenging Hilton for lowest point value.
We will all miss SPG, sad!
I really wish AnGangBang would have bought them instead of Marriott. Im kinda depressed about it like I was went Continental, Northwest, USAir AmWest and VirginAmerica all got eliminated. Less is worse for the consumer
Ah , the AnGangBang lol. I still think they were in bed with the Starwood execs to trick the moron Marriott execs and drive up the buyout price!
If they had bought SPG instead, it would be like the Trump presidency. Not boring, always WTFs 🙂
not to be confused with AnusBang LLC
Arrival of fembots at the Olympic games:
“200-strong ‘army of beauties’ from North Korea arrive in South Korea to cheer Winter Olympics”
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/200strong-army-of-beauties-from-north-korea-arrive-in-south-korea-to-cheer-winter-olympics-a3760061.html
I will not touch any reselling with a 10 foot poll! No thank you!
Risk profiles: bank acct funding < VGC < product reselling < GC reselling