Frenchie Flyer

One way to squeeze more value out of it would be to make the travel purchase through a rebate site like big crumbs, ebates, or fatwallet. That would yield maybe 5% or less.
What about buying Amex gift cards through a rebate site? I can't access the areas of the C.O. site that show that.

philemer

I've been thinking about a Caribbean cruise.

longleaf

Really. Do u mean gift certificates in general, or airline gift cards as well? You would think anything charged from a site like AA.com would show up as a travel expense.

wolberine

Man, this move is totally the winner..can't believe I haven't thought of it before. I typically look for travel costs as close to $150 or $350 levels as possible to maximize yield. If I go this route I should be able to find something right at the thresholds.

babyshark31

But if you don't have the $1,100 in credits to pay of the $1,100 you spent on the miles, then you can't buy the miles unless you have an extra $1,100 lying around. If you don't have $1,100 lying around and buy the miles now, you'll be forced to pay interest on that until you get the $1,100 in credit.

So it seems to me that the timing would matter, but I could just not be understanding something completely

ExitRowAisle

Anyone who is willing to speculatively buy 80,000 US Airways miles should either A) have $1,100 in their bank account to pay the bill while he/she waits for the Venture bonus points to post, or B) be willing to pay $18 per month in interest while he/she waits for the Venture bonus points to post. The other alternative is to just wait for the bonus points to post before you dive head-first into this purchase, but if you can't afford to pursue either of the first two choices, I have to wonder whether going long in airline funny money is the best use of apparently scarce resources.

4Health

I don't know that I would count on being able to use the Venture "miles" to pay for a US airways points purchase because your credit card isn't charged by US Airways, but rather by points.com.

swag

So I get 10K for opening the account, and then 100K for the miles match once I spend $1000. But that $1000 will generate another 2K miles. So now I have 112K miles, not 110K.

Do the miles post promptly, and can you both earn miles as well as use miles to pay off the same purchase? If I then spend $1120 on travel, that normally generates another 2240 miles. So if I could spend $1142 instead and earn 2284, giving me 114284 total to pay off the balance.

So is this offer worth not $1100 but $1142?

HoKo

You can't do that. He was talking about using Cap1 points for the cash portion of SPG cash and points redemptions, thereby making it a "free" hotel stay.

USAFAN

swag:

I think you are correct! I had a Capital One card ... which I canceled some month ago. And I believe your calculation is correct. And yes, the miles post promptly!
Has somebody had a (canceled) Capital One card and still got this 110K offer?

babyshark31

That's exactly why I said that timing does matter unless you have $1,100 to pay off the points purchase or are willing to pay the interest.

bthobe

I hope that JetBlue brings back another AYCJ pass for this year so I can use my 110,000 points on that ticket, the taxes on the international locales I plan to visit and maybe a few cheap hotels. For me, that seems to be the best way to spend all the points and get the max value out of them.

johnep1

This transaction would go through points.com. Not sure if that could get the travel reimbursement.

pshuang

It seems to me that many of the responses on this thread are perhaps not properly emphasizing one of the greatest benefits of the Capital One Venture promotion -- its extreme flexibility and relative independence of what exactly you're spending money on (other than that it is with a travel merchant). You do want to be sure to direct enough of your travel spending here to use up your promotional points (and remember that spending itself earns 2% also), preferably before the annual fee of the second year is billed. But IMO, exactly which subset of your travel spending you direct here only matters insofar as whether that spending might have earned you more elsewhere.

For example, suppose in general you spend a lot of money on travel, but you know you need to spend $1,000 on Southwest tickets, and you have both the Capital One Venture card and one of the Chase Southwest Visa cards. If you spend the $1,000 on the Capital One Venture card, that earns you 2,000 points, good for a further $20.00 rebate on future travel expenses to this card. If you spend the $1,000 on the Chase Southwest Visa card instead, you earn 2,000 Rapid Rewards 2.0 points, good for $33.40 rebate specifically against additional Southwest Wanna-Get-Away fares in the future. If you expect plenty of other travel expenses in general in the future, and also expect plenty of Southwest travel expenses specifically in the future, then you'd want to direct the Southwest spending to the Chase Southwest Visa card.

Whether the $1,000 in Southwest tickets was a "good deal" or not doesn't really matter AS LONG AS YOU HAD DECIDED YOU WERE GOING TO HAVE TO MAKE THAT PURCHASE. You may feel very differently about the "value" you got if you were able to spend the $1,000 on 10 round trip tickets to your favorite vacation destination versus on a single last-minute family medical emergency trip. But the net impact on your wallet remains exactly the same.

Or take the jetBlue All-You-Can-Jet pass as an example. Suppose jetBlue offers it again this year for $500, and you buy two for $1,000 total. Because you have the time and the inclination, you use the passes to the max and get what you feel is $10,000 "worth" of travel out of it. You also have have to make a non-business trip this year where you are furious that you have to spend $500 per night for a 2-night hotel stay in a crummy hotel property because there's a college football game that weekend and alumni fans had nearly filled all of the hotels. You certainly don't feel like you got $1,000 "worth" out of your hotel stay. But assuming you don't carry a jetBlue-affiliated credit card or a credit card affiliated with that hotel, whether you direct the $1,000 in jetBlue spending or the $1,000 in hotel spending to your Capital One Venture card doesn't affect the net impact on your wallet -- Capital One will rebate either purchase, leaving you to pay for the other purchase. Again, the subjective value of your spending doesn't matter so long as you had decided you were going to have to spend.

FrozenFlyer

Ah, the transitive law of mileage redemption!