Milenomics² Episode 179: Long-Term Planning and the Struggles that Come With It

0:20 Amex Business Cards

• Login/0 MR condition continues to occur/occurs with new cards
• Turns out I was charged $50 for creating a MR account - just bonkers stuff
• There is definitely something “not right” about these cards.
• Award wallet to get the new mr account's number.

08:21 Fluz

• Unreliable 1-time use cards make the service as bad as it has ever been.
• No longer earning 1.5% on loads from checking
• Limits on Cash loads make it hard to scale and create a scarce resource where there was previously not one.
• Leading me to using the service in a more strategic way–to finish a single Min Spend and then move on.

13:39 BofA Elite Card

• Tried to use it to book United seat upgrades. Locked up with fraud (straight to jail).
• Drives me bonkers the way they don’t notify you via email and there’s no evidence of an issue on their site. I chatted with them and they’re like, “Yeah, your card is locked up. Call the fraud team.” Which I can’t do because I’m on a plane/on vacation.
• What is it with this bank?
• $300 credit for United seat upgrades attached to refundable tickets incremented the counter 2 days later. Unclear whether it’s necessary to let it simmer but this did work.
• Anyway - how are we doing on meeting min spend on our Alaska cards?

17:12 Amex Keep or Cancel: Personal Platinum

• 2+ Year old Personal Platinum on Wife’s side.
• AF charged November 25, so just shy of a triple dip
• $695 annual fee on this card.
• Retention offer 45,000 MR for $4k in spend.
• Keep? Cancel? What would you do?
• Roll into discussion of MS Platinum.

Trip Reports

27:22 Double Booked To Florida

• Initially booked JetBlue but they changed the flight time from 3p to 8p
• Delta had a flight at 3p which was ideal so I booked 2 in First and 2 in Main Cabin in an attempt to flex my Platinum status for an upgrade
• There were about 10 out of 20 seats available in First when I booked, so I thought I had a good chance, but someone bought 6 seats and I wasn’t going to make the cut on the upgrade list
• I went to see how much it would be to upgrade with points -or- buy the ticket with MRs and noticed that the flight was eligible for using an upgrade certificate
• I realized I hadn’t selected my Choice benefit for requalifying for Platinum so I selected 4 upgrade certificates and called to leapfrog those hoping for a free upgrade with higher status
• Rep said I could but it takes 24 hours for the Choice benefit to result in a useable upgrade cert she could see
• But (tip!) you can see them in your account faster than 24 hours. About an hour later I got the codes and fed them to a Delta rep over the phone and secured the upgrade for me and my son.
• I kinda liked this in a sense: Use the upgrade when you’re sure you’re not going to upgraded. Only downside is there might be any seats left, and the seats that are left might not be together. Oh well - we were close enough together and it was a nice flight.
• Stress point: Cancelling the JetBlue ticket while at the airport/on the Delta flight. JetBlue’s IT is really bad for me lately. I routinely can’t manage itineraries myself - seemingly when a flight has been rebooked (by them) after a cancellation?
• I tried everything I could think of: App, different browsers on mobile, got the laptop out. Nothing worked. Pinged them on Twitter DM who processed the refund back to Travel Bank. They said the original expiration date would remain but that wasn’t true: The expiration date was bumped out a year from the date of cancellation.

36:25 Double Booked to Boston

• Delta switched us from a direct flight to a connection through ATL some time ago. Kept it in place in case JetBlue faltered
• JetBlue informed us of a 1.5 hour delay early in the morning, which wasn’t great, but was fine enough to stick with JetBlue
• Cancelled the Delta flights…I think? Got an email for each passenger after saying “this is not a refund” basically saying “they’d look into my cancellation request.” Somewhat alarmingly, I continued to get flight updates the entire day for the flight as if the cancellation hadn’t actually gone through.
• When we went through TSA PreCheck the agent asked if we were flying Delta or JetBlue. I said JetBlue but I’d canceled a Delta flight earlier that day. He suggested it still shows in their system even if you cancel? Strange.
• Bottom line: It’s rarely straightforward to cancel a flight day-of in my limited experience.

42:18 Rental: Polestar EV from Hertz

• They say if you return it with between 10-80% battery they charge you $35. Greater than 80%? No fee. Less than 10%? Don’t do that. Ha ha.
• One Pedal Driving took some getting used to (so I disabled it). Seems to induce motion sickness for EV rookie drivers.
• Tried to charge car w/110V. First night: Didn’t charge at all since it was set to stop charging when it hit 40% (and it was at at 50%). Couldn’t catch up to > 80% the rest of the vacation.
• Overall: A bit of a nuisance for my situation. Had to displace homeowners car from their garage (not ideal) and was constantly thinking about whether it had enough charge/would charge enough. Probably wouldn’t do it again for this situation. Even more iffy if I was staying at a hotel without chargers.

45:08 Turo Hawaii troubles

• Back in episode 160 at chronicled using turo on the big island
• I mentioned how convenient finding the car parked in the airport lot was but that it was not going to be a long-term solution
• For my December trip, I just received notice that in Kauai no longer our cars allowed to be parked at the airport
• Instead, a 10 or 15 minute shuttle ride to a parking lot is mandatory
• This has me soured on the entire situation and looking for an alternative
• Just another great example that you cannot plan too far ahead because things change as time moves on

50:52  Vacasa (with Wyndham) issue on check in

• Quoted 4pm check in. Arrived and cleaning wasn't finished at 4.
• Left and came back to find place ready.
• Not a huge inconvenience and I wouldn't have pursued it at any Airbnb
• Thankfully vacasa is a professional management company so I had a company to deal with (via text!)
• So I texted and they offered a $215 refund.
• This came back not as cash (others have had luck getting checks direct from vacasa apparently) but as points based on the per cent value of my booking. So I ended up with 6500 Wyndham back.