Working a Minor Credit Card Offer

Recently I got a special offer on one of my credit cards that pays American Airlines miles. "Earn 2,000 additional AAdvantage® Bonus Miles!" it read. Except it read it in big, bold, red, ALL CAPS letters I won't bother to reproduce here. Okay, so the font was big and bold, but how big is the offer? You've got to (1) read the details and (2) know the value of the points to decide if the offer's worth pursuing.

1. The Details
The offer requires spending $300 per month in November, December, and January. So it's a minimum of $900 spend, with the monthly couponing. In return it pays 2,000 bonus points in additional to the normal points for that spend.

2. The Value
Round that spend up to $1,000 as I'll go a bit over $300 each month meeting the threshold with organic charges. So for about $1,000 spend I'll earn a total of 3,000 miles, or 3 miles/dollar. After a devaluation early this year I consider AA miles to be worth 1.1 cents per point (cpp), so the yield here is 3.3%. That's not great but it is better than my general-purpose 2% cash back cards.

BTW, the fact that AA miles are only worth 1.1cpp nowadays is why this card, which generally pays 1x point per dollar, has been left sitting in my desk drawer after I cinched the big sign-up bonus. (It's roughly half the value of my simple 2% cash-back cards.) In fact I expected I'd just leave it there until canceling it after 12 months. This deal is just good enough that I'll pull it out and use it for a while.

Twee Trade Show

Thursday I went to represent my company at a small conference nearby, in Palo Alto. It was designed for an audience of CxOs. There were a series of seminars throughout the day. In a separate room, we vendors had little tables for sit-down conversations with the industry execs attending.

The way these trade shows work is that vendors like my company basically pay all the bills. The attendees get to come for little or no cash payment to enter but they instead pay with their time. They have to pick at least 3 vendors from the list to sit down with for a 30-40 minute conversation.

I arrived at the venue, a nice meeting center on Stanford University's campus, a bit early as I had to carve out 8-8:30 for a time-critical teleconference meeting with a prospective customer. The customer emailed us a few minutes before 8 apologizing that he wouldn't be able to join at 8. At least he offered two reasonable, close-in alternatives: Thursday afternoon or Friday morning. And my colleagues and I made good use of the time on our calendars by repurposing the meeting to be an internal alignment call. It even ran long, taking a full hour to get all of us on the same page.

While I was sitting taking the call in an easy chair with a small fold-out writing panel a la college lecture halls (hey, it is a university!) I amused myself people-watching the folks passing by the registration desk ten steps away. Let me just say, I have never seen such a concentration of otherwise dowdy middle-age men all dressed so twee. I saw a mixture of popped collars, crazy wide ties that were in style 50 or even 100 years ago, and formal jackets with loud patterns. Tight pants and exaggeratedly large shoes, the two combining amusingly to make people look a bit like clowns dressed for the boardroom, were plentiful. And among those who weren't wearing oversized pointy shoes, I saw enough pairs of the same Johnston & Murphy light-brown wing-tip Italian loafers to open a shoe store. (To be fair, I own the same shoes, which is why I recognize them. 🤣 I didn't wear them yesterday, though.)

I was also amused by the name badge the conference staff had prepared for me. It was nice, if oversized, with a sleek, gray-on-black motif. But the spot where they printed my name was black. Yes, black printing on black cardstock. That kind of set the tone for the day that this conference was run by people still learning how to run a conference. But, gosh, did they look quaintly stylish!

Starting Thanksgiving with a Red-eye

Thanksgiving Travelog #1
SFO Airport - Fri, 17 Nov 2023. 10:15pm.

We're headed out tonight for our Thanksgiving vacation. Yes, Thanksgiving is still 6 days away. And yes, it's late at night for starting a trip. We're taking a red-eye flight tonight.

We'll spend the next few days in the Washington, DC suburbs. A bunch of my relatives live there; we'll be visiting them. A few of Hawk's friends from college live there, too; we'll see them also. And we'll spend at least one day visiting museums in DC.

Wednesday night we'll drive north to central Pennsylvania, where Hawk's parents live. We'll stay with them for a few days, enjoying Thanksgiving dinner(s) with them and family friends. Yes, I pluralized dinners because they have two. Thursday evening is the big, main Thanksgiving dinner, at the friends' house. Friday evening is Second Thanksgiving, smaller and slightly less formal, hosted by my inlaws.

That's all in the more distant future, though. In the immediate future is this red-eye flight. Flying overnight isn't my favorite thing, as I'll be lucky if I get even 4 hours of sleep and I have a full day of visiting relatives and friends planned for tomorrow. But spending all of tomorrow flying instead of visiting, which is the alternative to spending all of tonight flying, is not my favorite, either. All I get to choose is the lesser evil. Red-eye flying, it is!