- Cinematographers Guild Finds Former Treasurer Alan Gitlin Guilty Of Absconding With $26,000 by Deadline. Caught taking $26,000 in hotel points, earlier trail caught him with $3,301 in credit card points and computer equipment.
- Timeshare Strategy: Using Timeshares for Ski Trips by The Timeshare Guru. TTG has touched on this before in his guest posts here, but here’s a more detailed look at ski seasons in particular.
- Reselling mistake – how a week cost me $200 by Miles Per Day. Especially with items like these you need to sell them quickly or you might as well not bother. I always find the first iteration of a deal more profitable as well (e.g the original NES units) as the second wave you have a lot more resellers and casuals ready to stock up.
- Credit Card Rewards by XKCD. Don’t forget to visit XKCD for the alt text.
I can’t stand people reselling the NES and SNES classics. There are plenty of children who want one but will not get one because of these shenanigans. “Supply and demand” may be a principle one learns in the first week of economics 101, but if you stay to the second week, you learn that Adam Smith himself did not actually use this economic principle to justify morality. In fact he said the opposite.
Sounds like me with banks savings and checking account promotions.
That comic resonates with me. It would be hard to justify the amount of time I research credit cards/loyalty on a purely ROI basis.
In my mind, it’s part of the hobby; a pastime that I thoroughly enjoy. The travel experiences are enhanced because of the planning time I put in: both in credit card applications and hotel/airline/destination research. As such, I’ll continue to spend more time than I should on your site.
Yeah, it’s a union, what do you expect? They need to get their “CUT” of the action, otherwise it will be ‘curtains for ya’ Mugsy, see …’ 🙂
The Cinematographers Guild post is a bit weird to me. First, it’s an internal review board for the union finding him “guilty” and not any U.S. legal system. Second, their statement is that they expect loyalty rewards to be credited to the organization and not personal accounts but they don’t provide evidence of this corporate policy in the article. I’ve never heard of a company that doesn’t allow employees to earn loyalty points into personal accounts, including hotel event bookings.
From the article:
Gitlin had maintained personal hotel program reward accounts and “caused the points generated by Local 600’s business with the hotels to be credited to his personal hotel reward accounts, rather than be credited to reward accounts held in the name of Local 600. The points credited to his personal accounts arose out of official Local 600 business with these hotels, including but not limited to room and event charges associated with Local 600 national executive board meetings, IATSE general executive board meetings, and IATSE conventions.”
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Most loyalty programs won’t even allow anything other than personal accounts.
Hotels giving meeting planners tens-of-thousands of points *is* a total racket, but it’s a well understood, accepted, and totally legal racket.