Credit Card Rewards

[Patrick A]

Wife and I are having a year where we need to travel across the country to my home state (Oregon to Michigan) 3 times for family events/weddings/Christmas.  This is much more than our ideal 1 long trip as a vacation, but necessary this year.  To mitigate the extra costs of these annoyingly expensive flights --

(which have NOT decreased in price even as price per barrel of oil has essentially been cut in half . . . price fixing by airlines anyone?)

-- we signed up for two United credit cards that gave 50,000 point bonuses, plus another 5,000 for adding someone to your card (we added each other).  After meeting the spending goal for the first 3 months on both cards, we were able to book our ridiculously expensive flights around Christmas FOR FREE (except for mandatory fees to fund security theater, of course).  Total savings according to the actual costs of our flights:  ~$1,700.  Booyah. 

We are already looking for our next CC churning opportunity.  Love it. 

[daverobev]

People like you are why airlines don't cut prices ;)

Actually it's probably just that things have been tight for airlines lately, and this allows them to be a bit more profitable; plus fuel isn't all the cost of a flight. Significant, of course, but like buying fuel for your car, the price of the raw input isn't the full story.

But good job, anyway!

[Patrick A]

People like you are why airlines don't cut prices ;)

Actually it's probably just that things have been tight for airlines lately, and this allows them to be a bit more profitable; plus fuel isn't all the cost of a flight. Significant, of course, but like buying fuel for your car, the price of the raw input isn't the full story.

But good job, anyway!

I'll just leave this here

http://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-probes-airlines-for-collusion-1435775547

I don't disagree with anything you said, guess I should have cited something like this article when I suggested it.  Could not find a better source or article, but the justice dept. is indeed looking into it.

[Mississippi Mudstache]

People like you are why airlines don't cut prices ;)

Actually it's probably just that things have been tight for airlines lately, and this allows them to be a bit more profitable; plus fuel isn't all the cost of a flight. Significant, of course, but like buying fuel for your car, the price of the raw input isn't the full story.

But good job, anyway!

Interestingly, if you have a subscription to the WSJ, you can read yesterday's article about how "U.S. airlines are producing their biggest profits ever":

Airlines have benefited from years of restructuring and consolidation, a tighter focus by management on profitability, and a roughly 55% drop since mid-2014 in the price of oil, which has gone from the industry’s biggest cost to its second biggest after labor... But a decline in ticket prices has hurt the companies’ unit revenue, which measures the amount of money taken in for each passenger flown a mile.

[kpd905]

Nice grab on the United cards.  You may want to grab a Chase Sapphire Preferred card for each of you now, with 45,000 points each that can be transferred to United miles.

[Patrick A]

Nice grab on the United cards.  You may want to grab a Chase Sapphire Preferred card for each of you now, with 45,000 points each that can be transferred to United miles.

the cards we just finished with are Chase, think it will still work?

[daverobev]

Nice grab on the United cards.  You may want to grab a Chase Sapphire Preferred card for each of you now, with 45,000 points each that can be transferred to United miles.

the cards we just finished with are Chase, think it will still work?

Check reddit's churning sub. Chase have some new rules around number of apps per time period.