I Bought Points!

A few days ago, for the first time ever, I bought points in one of my frequent traveler programs. 😦

"Why is that 😦?" you might ask. It's because buying points with airline and hotel frequent flyer/frequent guest programs is usually a bad deal. Airlines and hotels generally sell their points for 2x - 3x the value you can typically redeem them for. Thus even when they offer a "Get up to 100% more free!" sale they're still making a profit on the transaction.

While I've said before, "Don't buy points," you can imagine that the "Don't" comes with a little ^† after it pointing to a disclaimer in the fine print. Like a lot of don'ts in life such as "Don't jump off a bridge", it's actually okay if you know what you're doing and the conditions are right.

"Know what you're doing" means understanding the cost of the points and the value you can redeem them for. "Conditions are right" means having a specific, near-term plan for redemption. Specific, because otherwise you really don't know what your redemption value will be; and near-term because if you buy points speculatively because they seem like a great deal, you might find after months of sitting on them their value has deteriorated.

I purchased 20,000 points with IHG hotels. I did it to augment my points balance to book a specific award stay I was otherwise short about 20k points on. On that stay I was getting a redemption value a bit above 0.7 cents per point (cpp), and I bought the points at 0.6cpp.

Note that paying a rate of 0.6cpp required knowing what I was doing. "Professional driver on closed course," as all the car ads on TV say. If you go to IHG's website and look to buy 20k points, you'll see they're selling at 1.15cpp normally, currently on sale for 0.92. The rates are even higher for smaller quantities, a bit lower if you're buying more... but not as low as 0.6.

I paid 0.6cpp by not buying points directly but by using a loophole in the reservations system for points-and-cash reservations. That "loophole" has been there for several years and it's even documented in their policies, so I don't feel like I cheated them or exploited a software bug. And this is the first time in several years I've actually used that trick. I've never needed to top off my IHG points balance before.

George Santos Steps Down from Committees

Representative George Santos, elected to Congress in November after lying about... basically everything... in his qualifications for office, has chosen to step down from the two committees Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy had assigned him to.

It's notable that McCarthy refused calls not to assign Santos any roles after his utter lack of ethics became known. McCarthy cited the will of the 160,000 voters who voted for Santos in November's election. How ironic that is after McCarthy voted on January 6, along with 146 other Republicans in Congress, to overturn the will of 80,000,000 voters who voted to elect President Joe Biden.

How ironic also that McCarthy's refusal to act against Santos comes just days after he used his unilateral power as Speaker to boot two Democrats, Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, from the powerful House Intelligence Committee. McCarthy, acting sadly in the form of his namesake Sen. Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957), made transparently phony accusations against Schiff and Swalwell he refuses to provide any evidence for. Furthermore, with the Santos issue now out of the way (at least in terms of committee assignments), McCarthy now thinks he has the votes to boot another Democrat, Rep. Ilhan Omar, from her seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, on spurious charges.

The narrative of the 2022 election from many pollsters is that Republicans won a narrow majority in Congress by flipping suburban voters swing districts with moderate-sounding messages about addressing inflation, the budget, and crime. Attention suburban swing voters: You were duped.

The modern Republican party is a den of liars, conspiracy theorists, and unscrupulous power-seekers. What we've been seeing the past few weeks are the opening rounds in putting conspiracy crackpots in leadership roles to waste everyone's time on bad-faith investigations, and subverting the levers of power to punish their political opponents. Republicans crow about how our form of government is a republic. They're making it a banana republic.