Dining Rewards Summer Bonus (TARGETED)

Yesterday, I got an interesting offer from United Dining Rewards.

Yes, 10,000 bonus United MileagePlus miles for 10 dines before August 15. After registering for the promotion, I learned that for a dine to count, I must spend $40+.

Since I earn 3 miles per $1 spent normally with Dining Rewards, I will earn at least an additional 1,200 miles though this promotion.

                     3 x $40 = 120 miles   -  120 miles x 10 Dines = 1,200 additional miles

Will I participate?

I don't know. 11,000 miles is alot of miles to earn from a promotion, but require me spend at least $400. If I had a few client lunches or dinners, I could swing buying gift certificates to get to the 10 dines. But as a single guy, spending $40 on meals is not easy.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions to make.

Other Offers

I received another offer from Hilton HHoners Dinning Rewards. Unlike the United offer, this one was stingy.

2,500 bonus Hilton HHonors points after 10 dines of $40+ more.

If I am going to do 10 dines, its going to be for 10,000 United Miles not 2,500 HHonor Points. 

The decision between the two offers is a no brainier! Spending $400 for 10,000+ miles is not so easy.

Would you DO IT FOR THE POINTS?

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Do It For The Points: Earn 600 Miles

On Thursday's Snow Day, I decided to try my hand again at Opinion Miles Club.

As I wrote here, Opinion Miles Club is a great program to earn United miles. Take surveys and have miles deposited within a day in your MileagePlus account. Currently, they are still offering 600 miles after completing your first survey if you have the United MileagePlus credit card. Only 300 miles if you don't.

Throughout the day I took various surveys and earned 260 miles.

I qualified and finished five out of six surveys. Two of the surveys took less than 5 minutes to finish.

How long will it take you to complete your first survey? I can't say. Some people have stated it has taken 5 or 6 surveys to qualify & finish a survey. For me, it only took 2 surveys to earn my 600 points.

600 points isn't anything grand. However, add in the 750 points earned from MyPoints, wrote about here and you might be gaining momentum for your next trip.

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Current Giveaways Round-Up

Here is a quick round-up of some giveaways and promotions from around the community:

• Giddy for Points is giving away 2 United Club Passes
• BA Blogger Live From a Lounge is giving away 50,000 Hyatt Points
• Heels First Travel giving away $100 Amazon Gift Card for subscribing to their newsletter
• Starwood Hotels has an interesting promotion to win 250,000 points
• Homewood Suites has a contest to win a trip to this years Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
• American Airlines's Planes promotion to win a trip for 4 around the world or other prizes

Reminder, Do It for The Points is having our giveaway. $400+ prizes up for grabs. 

Can't win if you don't play . . . 

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Reminder: Blog Giveaway & First Clue

Reminder, I am giving away $400+ worth of prizes in the blog's first anniversary giveaway.

Go here to enter. Most of the prizes are travel or points related.

You can earn up to four entries for the contest.

Each day until the end of the contest, I will give one clue about one of the prizes.

Today's Clue:

"This airline is behind its competitors in using this company technology, so this prize can help you get your work done before your flight."

As in the word's of the Hunger Games, "may the odds be ever in your favor."

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 Follow us on Twitter @doit4thepoints! Have a question for me? E-mail me at jd@doitforthepoints.com

A Look Back @ The Best Articles of This Past Year

As the blog enters its second year, I wanted to look back at some of the best articles of our first year.

Defining which articles are "best" is not an easy task. Different metrics will produce different best articles, so I will break it down by the best articles by page view, comments and shares:

Most Page Views:

1) Earn 11 MileagePlus Miles Per $1 Spent @ Marriott
2) Delta Grandslam: Delta AMEX Gold
3) Refinance your Mortgage for Miles
4) Young People and the Chains of Credit Card Debt
5) Earning My Southwest Companion Pass
6) Millenials Attitudes Towards Credit Cards
7) Tail of Two Lounges - Dulles
8) Marriott's Unexpected Bonus is Unexpectedly Popular
9) I agree with and disagree with Mile Nerd's Rant
10) European Holiday: Zurich (Uetilberg Look Out)


Articles with Most Comments: 

1) Young People and the Chains of Credit Card Debt
2) I agree with and disagree with Mile Nerd's Rant
3) United Club Card First Year Free
4) Why I support Child Free Sections/Flights
5) Millenials Attitudes Towards Credit Cards
6) Getting to FTU DC
7) Great Article on Twitter in Points/Miles


Articles Shared the Most:

1) Men's Health 20 Guy Trips
2) End of Year Trip to Kamakura
3) Going for the Gold on United
4) Young People and the Chains of Credit Card Debt
5) I agree with and disagree with Mile Nerd's Rant


What keeps you coming back to the blog? Is there something that you want to see more?


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I Did It For The Points: Ordered an Ebook

Yes, I ordered an ebook. Normally, this would not be blog worthy except that I have no use for the ebook nor do I plan on downloading it. I simply Did It For The Points.

A little back story....

One of the first promotion I wrote about on the blog was Delta's New Member Bonus. A promotion that I have written about here, here, here and here. If you have never had a Delta Skymiles account, you can sign-up for this promotion and earn extra miles by completing tasks within one year. One of those tasks is purchasing items for Delta's partners.

My promotion year was coming to an end quickly and I had 2 partner opportunities available or 1,000 miles left. With few partner options left, I saw that I had not purchased from SkyMall. Now the question was to find an item that did not cost to much.

One of the tricks I learned from US Airways Grandslam is how to get all the products to appear in order by cost. To do this, type a quotation mark " in the search engine box:

Then choice to sort results from low to high:

After doing these steps, all of the products offered by Skymall will appear in order of price. Here is are some of the cheapest items Delta Skymall offers:

I thought of buying a adapter plug for South America, since I could use it later in the year. I even thought about buying a Bieber manual toothbrush as it would be a gag gift. The problem with both wasn't the price, but that added shipping cost. Skymall charges shipping rates by the amount you spend.

My Bieber toothbrush would cost me over $10 ($2.99 regular cost + $7.25 delivery cost) to get shipped to myself.  A little too much for a gag gift!

I started to look a little further down the list and came across three eBooks with "free delivery." This was just what I was looking for:

I choice the Change book, checked out and a few days later the points arrived into my account:

SkyMall gives you 5 miles per $1 spent with them. So, I earned 20 miles for spending $4 on the eBook.

The 500 miles came from the New Member Promotion. My $4 purchase netted me 520 miles or 105 for every $1 I spent. Not to shabby.

So I spent $4 on an eBook, I don't plan on reading. But I walked away with 520 miles.

Do It For The Points in action!

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BAcon: Thank You Randy!

This past weekend, we were invited to the first ever Boarding Area Conference: #BAcon, in Colorado Springs, as one of 10 guest bloggers. It was amazing to meet so many people dedicated to the hobby of points and miles, but more importantly, dedicated to making friends in this hobby and sharing their expertise with others. I can fully say that we both walked away with so many new friends and so many new ideas. We will be making a few changes in the next few months to take Do It For The Points! to a new level. But more on that later...

Who we really most need to thank though is Randy and the Boarding Area staff for their hospitality and generosity over the weekend. Everyone knows, or hopefully has heard, how wonderful Randy Petersen is but you have no idea until you spend some time with him. He loves this hobby and he loves everyone who participates in this community. But what is the most amazing about Randy is how much he clearly loves life. His passion, his dedication and his love is always out there and always put forward. Randy, thank you for your kindness this weekend and for everything that you do for this community.

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 Have a question for us? E-mail us at chris@doitforthepoints.com or jd@doitforthepoints.com

Do It For The Doughnuts: Voodoo Doughnut

On our quick weekend trip to Portland, I had one objective: to visit Voodoo Doughnut.  Luckily, one of their  locations was right by our hotel, detailed here. It was the first thing we did Saturday morning. At 9 am, the line was short, maybe 10 or 15 people. A few hours later, the line look like this:

The store is small inside, maybe room for 10 people. Due to the small amount of people allowed in the store, the time you have to make a decision is short. Above the registers is a large board with tons of options:

I decided to order a Voodoo Dozen, which is 12 doughnuts picked by the worker.

Yes, I got a dozen doughnuts, not the group got a dozen. I wanted to try as many doughnuts as possible. 

Now, my thoughts on each of the doughnuts that I ate. My first doughnut was the Dirt Doughnut, which is a raised yeast doughnut with vanilla frosting and Oreos! It was tasty and a great opening number.

My second choice was confusing. Miami Vice Berry, a raised yeast doughnut with vanilla frosting, blue raspberry power and pink sprinkles. I did not not like it, but I did not like it either. It was blah.

Number Three: Arnold Palmer, a plain cake doughnut with vanilla frosting and lemonade/ice tea dust on top. It tasted so so good. The doughnut tasted just like the drink. Definitely get this one . . .

Choice Four: Neapolitan Chocolate cake doughnut with vanilla frosting, strawberry dust and three marshmallows. This was an ok doughnut. Nothing to write home about . . .

Choice Five: Grape Ape, a raised yeast doughnut with vanilla frosting, grape dust and lavender sprinkles. This doughnut tasted like grape cough medicine. Super gross! One bite and I spit it out . . .

Choice Six: The Loop, a raised yeast doughnut with vanilla frosting and Fruit Loops. Very yummy...I could not wait for the picture to be taken before I dove in.

Choice Seven: Sprinkle, plain cake doughnut with vanilla frosting and sprinkles. This was one the simplest doughnut that I had, but I love sprinkles. When I worked at Dunkin Donuts, I use to eat sprinkles handful by handful. This doughnut did not disappoint.

Number 8: Mexican Hot Chocolate, a chocolate cake doughnut dusted in cinnamon sugar and cayenne pepper. I did not check to see what this doughnut was before eating it, well that lead to a big surprise. My mouth was on fire...

Doughnut 9: Marshall Matters, plain cake doughnut with vanilla frosting and mini M & M's. Do you see the number of M&M's on this doughnut? It was soooooo...goood!

Doughnut 10: Portland Cream, a raised yeast doughnut filled with Bavarian cream. Topped with chocolate and two eyeballs, representing the vision of our great city. This is a Boston Creame, on the East Coast. By #10, I was having a hard time keeping them down.

Doughnut 11: Bacon Maple Bar, a raised yeast doughnut with maple frosting and bacon to top! This was the best doughnut hands down. I talked about this doughnut for days afterwards. So, good it gets more than one picture:

Final doughnut #12: No Name, raised yeast doughnut with chocolate frosting, rice krispies and peanut butter. This doughnut was weird tasting. It had so many things going on that my senses were on overload. It could have been the sugar rush . . .

And for those of you wondering, no I did not eat all of them. I had a few bites of each, scarfed down others and spite out one. Here is the doughnut graveyard!

A list of all the Voodoo doughnuts can be found here. The cost of my dozen was just under $12. You can pick and choose the doughnuts; instead of the random pickings. Doughnuts cost somewhere between $1 -$2.50 each. Very affordable! If Voodoo Doughnut was in Washington, DC, each doughnut would cost $4.00 each and there still would be a line around the corner.

DO IT FOR THE DOUGHNUTS!!!!

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Setting Travel Goals

Why do we go to these extremes to earn points? To go on vacation, of course! Earning points just to increase your frequent flyer account balances is crazy. Hoarding points is a dangerous tactic. The frequent flyer community has seen a devaluation of points on many airlines and hotel chains. The number of miles one will need for that coveted “free ticket or stay at a hotel” has gone up. If you have the points it is best to use them sooner rather than later.

Many of my family and friends disregard frequent flyer points because they complain that there are never “any free seats for 25,000 miles” or “too many blackout dates.” (Or they have seen the Alec Baldwin Capital One Credit Card commercial one too many times). I don’t argue with them because the more people in “the game” means fewer available award tickets or nights for the rest of us. Yes, I know this statement is harsh, but it’s the truth. The airline and hotel industries purposely limit the number award inventory on any given day or plane.  If people don’t want to join the game, I’m not going to fight to get them to join.

While the chance that you will score a free ticket home for Thanksgiving or Christmas is limited, a little planning and forethought can help you score tickets to almost any destination at almost anytime through the year. How do you score those difficult tickets to go on your dream vacation? By setting vacation goals and aligning your point earning strategies to accomplish those goals.

For example, earlier this year, Chris and his girlfriend, Kelsey told me that they wanted to go to London in the fall and were searching for cheap airlines fares. My first thought was "You are going to pay to go on vacation?!" After a long discussion, I convinced them to let me help them get to London with points. Oh, and to make things more difficult, they had to fly business class. The GF told me they didn’t need to fly business class, economy was fine. I smirked and told her by the time she was flying to London her ticket would be business class, not economy. She was skeptical, but I knew better.

With Chris and his Kelsey’s destination and timeframe picked, next was to figure out how many miles they need to get to and from London. From Washington, DC, direct flights to London are easiest flown on the Star Alliance (US Airways, United, Lufthansa etc.). Next go to these airline's award charts and see how many miles you will need for the trip. US Airways is here. United is here. 

I suggested they focus on United, as they already had small balances in their United accounts. Let's take a closer look at the United award chart:

		Planning as far ahead in advance as Chris and Kelsey were, each could get a Saver Award Ticket in business class for about 100,000 miles roundtrip . Saver Award Tickets cost less, but are not offered on every flight. However, I have been able to purchase saver award tickets with less than 48 hours notices, so it is the luck of the draw.

I know some might be thinking why I pushed them to go business class when it cost 40,000 more miles with the Saver Ticket (Kelsey had the same question). I am of the belief that the airplane ride is very much a part of your vacation experience, so why not pamper yourself getting yourself there? Many people dread the thought of riding on an airplane because they know their seat in the back of the plane will be cramped and uncomfortable. Why not spend the extra miles and make yourself feel better? I don’t always sit in business and first class; you will many times see me in economy on flights shorter than 4 hours, but for my long-haul flights, I spend the extra points for comfort.

With the information that each would need 100,000 miles each for the trip, Chris and Kelsey were now ready to do the hard part: earn the miles. They sat down and created a list of ways the two of them could earn 100,000 miles on United. Did they sign-up for the 75,000 mile American Airlines Chase Credit Card? Not at that particular time, because it did not help them get points on United. However, they did apply for the Chase Sapphire because it got them 50,000 miles on United. I am going to leave Chris to explain the various methods they used to obtain the miles for their trip. All I will say is that the two of them are going to London, in business class, and have most of their nights in hotels paid for by points as well.

The first step to any great vacation starts with a dream. That dream will eventually turn into a goal, which then requires a plan to get the miles needed to accomplish that goal. Then you are halfway to your dream vacation. With a direction and a plan, you can tailor your spending habits to earn the miles needed for that dream vacation (we will talk soon about the various ways to earn miles).  Earning enough miles for your vacation will not happen overnight, but with time and persistence, the points needed will start to accumulate in your frequent flyer account.

Until next time, keep dreaming!

How I Became Addicted: JD

I have to blame my friends. Yes, this hobby of collecting points is their fault. Some might, including many members of my family, call this hobby an obsession. Yes, my friends are to blame for this obsession of mine.

It was a Friday night in January. I had plans to meet my friends in the city for dinner and drinks. However, it was one of those rainy cold nights. At the last minute, my friends bailed on me, leaving me home on a Friday night with TV. After 2 hours of flipping through 300 + channels, I was bored, to say the least. (How is it that we can have so many channels, but there is always nothing on to watch!)

My boredom led me to check the latest news on CNN.com and an article about extreme frequent flyers. I want to say this was the time George Clooney’s Up In the Air was out and everyone was talking about the frequent flyer lifestyle. This article, in particular,  caught my attention because the writer interviewed, blogger Gary Leff (View from the Wing) was talking about how he flies around the world for almost nothing. I remember thinking this can’t be true, but I was willing to take the bait.

The article linked to his blog, and so started my journey. Gary’s blog was filled with tricks, tips and amazing trip reports. I was awestruck. How did I not know this frequent flyer community existed before this night? How does this secret travel community stay so secret?

Gary’s blog had links to other bloggers, who had links to other bloggers. At one point, I had close to 20 windows open on my computer. The next morning, I went back to my bookmarks and saw 20 new blogs…to give you an idea of the magnitude of what I was reading that night. Throughout the entire time I was reading, I kept saying to myself, these bloggers make it sound so easy. This can’t be true.

At one point, I looked up and it was 4am. I had been these traveler blogs for over 6 hours. It was time to go to bed, but I was addicted like a child to candy after Halloween. I needed to read every article, every travel deal (even if it was dead), for fear that I would be somehow blocked from the community next day. Eventually, I put myself to bed and I woke up the next morning afternoon asking myself “was what happened last night a dream?”

After being the “game” for little under 18 months, this community is not a dream. What you read in this blog and others are not fairy tales. However, it is not easy. If you want to travel the world for close to nothing, it will take work. It takes reading travel blogs, some blind faith and an adventurous spirit. Looking back, I don’t blame my friends for not wanting to go out on the rainy night in January, I thank them. And some of them are thanking me now, as newly minted travel addicts.

Welcome to Do It For The Points!

Hello everyone! 

Welcome to our new blog, "Do It For the Points!" This blog is a little brainchild that we have been kicking around for awhile as we deal with our addiction to points and miles. We know that there are tons of points and miles blogs out there who provide amazing advice and have pushed us to where we are with our points and trips, so you might be asking yourself...why another blog? 

Well the answer is....we wanted to share our awesome travels with people and start a discussion of points and miles from the newbie side of things. We (JD and Chris) are both newly into the points game, JD is more of a veteran than Chris, but we are both still feeling our way into the miles and points world.  Overall, we wanted to share our perspective, trips, and just general questions we may have about points and miles that you might have but were too shy to ask. Don't worry....we don't mind embarrassing ourselves for you.

Now for a little bit about ourselves. We are both residents of the Washington, D.C. area and have lived here for a combined 16 years! We met in college where our motto was, "Do It For the Story" (thus the name for our blog) and we are always trying to live by that motto.

Chris graduated in May with his MA in public communication and now works in media and public relations for a non-profit organization. His goal in the next 7 years (before he turns 30) is to hit all 7 continents. He has already has 3 (North America, Europe and Australia) under his belt but needs to get going on the next four. 

Chris will be traveling with his girlfriend (a newly made points addict) Kelsey to London and Amsterdam in October on their first ever fully funded points and miles trip. The trip features UA Business Class, an overnight ferry to Amsterdam and a Lufthansa Business Class trip back home.

JD came to DC in pursuit of a degree in his passion, politics. As time went on, his love of politics diminished and he went to work in the mortgage industry. In his spare time, his hobby is points; collecting, hoarding, and spending. Like Chris, his goal is to travel to all 7 continents before he is 30 (in less than 3 years - eck!)

The goal of our blog is to bring you the tips and tricks along the way as we find them, and to also share our trip reports so we can hear your experiences on similar trips and start planning the next one. We also want this to be a place where we can all ask the questions we have as newbies to try and understand the points and miles world. We will then ask them to the people who are much smarter and well-versed in the points and miles world.

We hope you will tune in and have a chat with us on a regular basis so we can help grow this blog and tell all about our favorite trips and dream places we want to go. As always....Do It For the Points!