Instead, one of the best ways to tackle the spending requirement is to use the refundable hotel trick to buy yourself as much time as you need to achieve the spend organically. These spending thresholds can be onerous for many individuals, and you never want to spend money that you wouldn’t otherwise have spent, since that defeats the whole purpose of using points to save money on your travels. Even the personal Platinum Card has recently seen its spending requirement raised to $5,000 in the first three months as well. These days, the Business Platinum Card has an even higher spending requirement of $7,000 in the first three months.
For example, the American Express Business Gold Card requires you to spend $5,000 in the first three months in order to avail of the welcome bonus of 40,000 MR points. Some of the credit cards with the best bonuses also tend to have the highest spending requirements in order to attain those bonuses. Now, why on earth would someone want to make dummy reservations at hotels around the world? Well, let’s see… You will eventually get your money back once you receive the refund, but the money being floated in the meantime may have some opportunity cost associated with it, such as the income it could earn if it were put into investments. Note also that if the time between creating the reservation and cancelling it spans a period of multiple months, then you may have to float the money in the meantime by paying off your credit card bill. Unlike retail goods, a hotel stay is a travel-related purchase, which is a prerequisite for some of the below-illustrated reasons that you might want to use the trick Unlike airfare, the cancellation policies are relatively straightforward, and a fully-flexible hotel stay is relatively easy to find It’s pretty easy to generate a charge for the exact amount you require However, hotel reservations tend to be the easiest for these purposes, for the following reasons: Note that the same thing can be accomplished with any refundable item, such as airfare pr retail goods. The second case is particularly interesting, since you can charge the stay to a credit card of your choice and know with 100% certainty that you can get a refund on it at any point before the date of the reservation.īooking a refundable hotel, with the intention of eventually cancelling it, therefore generates an artificial, temporary travel-related purchase on your credit card which can be used to accomplish a variety of goals, as I’ll discuss below. When booking a hotel, the cancellation policy can vary from strictly non-refundable, to prepaid but refundable at any time before check-in, to a totally flexible rate that you don’t need to pay until you arrive at the hotel. In this post, I wanted to discuss what’s known as the “refundable hotel trick”, which is essentially a way to manipulate your credit card balances in a way that’s helpful in many situations. Earning points at an advanced level is all about drawing upon a wide range of tricks and strategies to help you accomplish your goals, some of which might not be immediately intuitive and/or might require a fair bit of creative thinking.
0 kommentar(er)
