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The Amex Platinum has gotten better since the last time I wrote about retention bonuses , but the fee has also gone up, too.  I'd heard that they were now allowing you to request a retention bonus via the online chat app on their website so I gave that a try. Long story short, after 5 minutes of chatting in my web browser with a rep, my card has a "spend $4000 in 90 days, get 55,000 points" bonus/challenge on it.  It seemed like the rep was required to inform me about all of the new options on the card that made it worth the annual fee, but I just politely said things like "well, I don't actually use that very much" to each of the things they rattled off. After about a minute of that they sent me the spending challenge retention bonus, which I had to officially consent to.  We're definitely planning on doing that much spending in the next couple of months, so we're not going to need to do anything crazy to meet that goal. Yes, I could have just gotte

The beauty of transferrable points (like Chase Ultimate Rewards and Amex Membership Rewards) is that you can shop around a variety of airlines for an award seat and then instantly transfer your points to the airline where you've found a good itinerary. Given how competitive the battle for award seats is (especially this year!), a delay of even an hour can mean your seats are long gone by the time your points show up.  Chase Marketing (and the travel bloggers who make a large share of their revenue from credit card affiliate links) like to sell you on the idea that these transfers are instant. But if you search through the FlyerTalk forums , it's clear that they're only instant some of the time. In my case, I needed to transfer some points to United for a Business Class flight from New York to Seoul, so I transferred the points, logged out of United.com and logged back in (the usual procedure to make the miles show up), and... nothing. So I waited, and waited... made dinner

I've seen a bunch of marketing hype from United about how they'll intentionally delay a departure so connecting customers on delayed flights won't miss their plane. I figured it was mostly just hot air and didn't give it much thought. Until Sunday.  Rain delayed the Newark-SFO leg of Tim's trip back to Sydney. His connection was tight to begin with, and once the delay hit 45 minutes, he was certain he'd misconnect. He asks a United agent in the lounge if he could just switch to the next day but she said "we're expecting storms tomorrow too, so that likely won't fix anything."  He decides to just wait it out, and they end up taking off at 8:12 instead of 6:30. He's 99% certain he's going to miss his connection to Sydney, but then he checks his United app as they're about to land in SFO and it has a banner at the top saying "We're about to save the day for a few customers with a tight connection. Thanks for standing by while