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Gary Leff has a hilarious story today about a self-proclaimed "social media influencer" who faked a letter from Cathay Pacific claiming she was entitled to free upgrades to Business Class due to her large number of followers on social media. Well, the staff at the airport in New York didn't buy it and straight-up kicked her off the flight . We've all seen these days how your follower count can greatly increase your chance of landing jobs, winning online contests, and even help you get acting gigs. Horror stories of entitled "influencers" abound, as do everyman hero stories of shops and inns who defiantly stand up to this entitlement. I feel like some of this social engineering is up wrapped around people's own egos – like it becomes a little game of measuring your looks and charm and popularity by how much you can get for free. There's heaps of crappy advice online about how to use this approach for free upgrades on airlines, but it looks l

Yes, I was grumpy a while back and wanted to get rid of my Amex Platinum because its ever-shrinking benefits just weren't worth the high annual fee. Then, when I called to cancel, they just straight-up offered me 50,000 points to keep the card. Today they announced they'll be adding trip delay coverage starting the the first of January. This great news on top of the 5 points per dollar on airfare will finally make this my no-brainer card for charging all of my paid flying. I wonder if they're going to pull back on the 50k retention bonuses now that new card features are being announced... Feels to me like that big bonus was just to hold on to people until Amex could come up with some ways to revamp the card a bit.

Some good news for people with the new Apple Card – Uber, Walgreens , and Duane Reade all get you 3% cash back now! I actually just bought a new iMac this week and had to do some math – use my husband's Apple Card for 3% or try to earn points on another card? If you take the widely-accepted average point value of 2¢ each, the Apple Card is getting you the equivalent of 6 points per dollar spent , making it fairly unbeatable. I've mentioned before that I keep a Google spreadsheet of all of my rewards and that I track two values for each reward: CPM high (Cents per mile/point) and CPM low – the former based on the cash cost of the flight I actually took, and the latter based on the flight I would have taken if I'd actually had to pay with my own money. I've always valued the "true" CPM to be somewhere in between the two numbers. Well, just for fun, I decided to add a few columns to my spreadsheet to calculate the overall average CPM of my reward fligh