I love credit cards so much!

[wendow]

I'm thinking 119 might be the deal breaker with Amazon. I spend so much time making sure the items I want aren't a cheap knockoff anymore I'm about ready to be done.

We renew in Feb so I have until 2019 to decide. The 119 is a lot to me considering I've been a prime member since they began way back when and it's almost twice as high now.

My biggest hold out on cancelling is that we have been Prime so long that we are grandfathered into the old plan where your Prime membership covered 4 accounts. My mom is on ours as is my dh's company. Not that they could not afford the Prime but they are a non-profit and money is scarce. They 'ride' on our membership (as does my mom) and I am really hesitant to take that away. And once you stop the membership, you can never go back. I have a feeling we will pay the $20 more per year.

 

[wendow]

@mfly Hey friend! So your parents need to decide on the CSP/CSR double dip or the CIP. In thinking about this, I'd suggest the CIP. One at 80k and you get a referral (assuming that...) and then 100k for the other. SO, 180k UR points for them for $95x2 AF ( $190). The double dip would be 230UR point but it would cost $545 x2 AF ($1090). Yes, there is the $300 travel credit per card but the CIP is cleaner and easier. They can hit the CSR/CSP duo later if they choose.

Just my thoughts

 

[GlamMistress]

Regarding the Amazon Prime hike - I'm disappointed too. I've had Prime since it was first available, I think at $49 a year! I'm hoping this hike comes with something like Kroger Clicklist but for Whole Foods or something. I haven't had issues with 2 day delivery but I know that's been an issue for most. Wish they would drop some of the extra crap that comes with Prime - don't need it, don't want it. I never stream Prime. I have Hulu, etc.

I also have Music Unlimited - that's another $99 a year. THAT is money well spent for me. Basically every song in the world, available at my fingertips.

 

[WVMomof3]

Two questions about the PP lounges...
Do you tip? I felt really bad that we did not. We didn't have any small bills, used to putting everything on the CC and tipping on there. But was not sure if you are expected to? She did bring us a couple drinks.

Must you have the same boarding pass to get the guest in? My MIL is flying in for a visit next month. She happens to be flying out at the same time my DH is leaving for a business trip. Just wondering if he will be able to get her in since they do not have the same flight. He can not leave her, she is disabled. He will be crushed if he cant use the lounge, lol. He really enjoys it.

 

[Alexle2007]

We renew in Feb so I have until 2019 to decide. The 119 is a lot to me considering I've been a prime member since they began way back when and it's almost twice as high now.

My biggest hold out on cancelling is that we have been Prime so long that we are grandfathered into the old plan where your Prime membership covered 4 accounts. My mom is on ours as is my dh's company. Not that they could not afford the Prime but they are a non-profit and money is scarce. They 'ride' on our membership (as does my mom) and I am really hesitant to take that away. And once you stop the membership, you can never go back. I have a feeling we will pay the $20 more per year.

I didn't realize Amazon had changed the number of accounts covered by the membership. I split the cost of the membership with a friend so that will make the increase more tolerable since it will only be $10 more for me. Plus between my DH and I, we do shop a lot on Amazon. We are in the middle of replacing all of our brass fixtures to brass. All purchased on Amazon. What a small fortune that is with 30 doors (hinges, handles, stoppers), 7 faucets, 4 tubs, a gazillion knobs, etc.

 

[amalone1013]

We stayed at the Hyatt Place Las Vegas for one night in February and it was perfectly fine. We used points plus cash.

We go to Vegas tonight, but I switched gears on everyone and started looking at Nashville. I might do a night at the Hyatt by the airport there

 

[Lain]

Since Amazon is raising the Prime membership fee to 119 annually, and our renewal isn't up until later this year, can I buy the gift of membership now and just not redeem it until it's time to renew to get the current rate then?
We've got the Amazon Prime rewards card so if we drop prime we'd just drop back to a regular card, which in itself is not enough to keep Prime. For 99 hubby had been ok with keeping it but I noticed we don't shop amazon as much as before so now have to weigh if the increase is worth it. Last year we got the AmEx offers for it so he decided to keep it again since we got 7000 MR at least. If I can do the gift to lock in the 99 he'd probably keep it again and we'd have a while yet before decision-day.

Although if he drops it he'd be losing the metal CC game. Now that I have the CSR/CSP we both have 2 each. I told him I had metal now and he has to win by saying his Marriott is still heavier

Maybe, maybe not: "The fine print on gift memberships says that redeeming them with an existing Prime account will net a gift card for the amount you paid, rather than an additional year of Prime, so you’ll need to remember to cancel your membership before you redeem the gift... [W]hile this trick worked the last time Amazon raised the price of Prime, it’s entirely possible it won’t this time."

https://deals.kinja.com/heres-how-to-lock-in-another-year-of-prime-for-99-1825582003

Worst case scenario, you end up with a $99 Amazon gift card.

Like @wendow, however, I've been an Amazon Prime member since 2005 so my plan is grandfathered and there's no canceling for me. We also do a lot of shopping on Amazon and watch Amazon Prime, so there's still value for us at $119/year. A $20/year increase is not going to break us. This kind of reminds me of the big fuss everyone made back in ~2012 or so when Netflix announced they were raising their monthly subscription by $2 ($24/year). People swore they'd cancel Netflix, Netflix stock went crashing, but five years later Netflix is reporting quarter-after-quarter subscription growth and their stock has hit all time highs. Some people will cancel, but I think too many are used to all-you-can-eat free shipping on Amazon that carries just about everything.

 

[Lain]

This is what gets me. I can have three items in my cart when I go to check out and it says "Two day delivery" on each item and they are all three different delivery days with only one "two days" out... When we first signed up years ago it was true 2nd day air service. I have gotten many free months tho out of holding them to their guaranteed delivery date!

Yeah, a while back, Amazon changed what "Two Day Shipping" means to 2 days once your order has shipped from the warehouse or vendor, but that doesn't include any additional time it takes to prepare items for shipment and delivery is then subject to the courier's delivery schedule.

 

[speedyfishy]

I used to love prime, but it went down hill so I cancelled around the holidays. They would always ship my packages via USPS and USPS would never be able to get it to me in two days. USPS would start to leave attempted delivery slips in my mailbox even though I was home all day. (You needed to be buzzed in to my old apartment) (there were a few reports of USPS also marking things as delivered so they could keep their Amazon contract when they weren’t delivered.)

I had enough when I would try and schedule a redelivery and again the packages wouldn’t come. So I’d go to my post office. I swear I spent over 45 mins on line at my post office waiting to get my packages multiple times. They would have one person working at the package window and my post office always had a huge line. (It was great walking into my post office here in VA and I was helped right away lol) I lost it one day when I went there after waiting 45 mins on line and they couldn’t find my package. (Amazon sent me a new item, but USPS delivered the found item 8 weeks later lol) Not really Amazon’s fault that USPS is incompetent by me, but USPS did nothing with my complaints so I complained to Amazon they eventually switched my deliveries to UPS. This was after months and months of me complaining and getting free prime. The UPS guy always managed to get in my building even if I wasn’t home lol.

I ended up canceling prime when I wanted to order gifts for the holidays. Nothing was coming in 2 days. I ordered one item and the next day day I realized I needed two of the same item. The item I ordered second was coming before the item I ordered the day before. I was just so frustrated with always having to call Amazon to complain after months and months of issues.

SO misses prime, but really we order so much less on Amazon now. With prime we had at least an order every week of some item that we probably didn’t really need. Now we order things maybe once every 6 weeks and leave the things in the cart for awhile. sometimes the items will come before five days for free, which is nice.

 

[elgerber]

The Amazon thing is a double whammy to me. I have been paying half price with Amazon Student for 7 years!! Well my dd is graduating college in two weeks, so when we renew in the fall, it will no longer be half price.
That said I order a TON from Amazon and we do watch Prime Video. I will have to give some thought to the gift of Prime, because we could just put it on my Amazon account, I haven't had Prime for more than a 30 day trial in years.

 

[Jen and Ashwin]

I will definitely keep my Prime subscription. We shop a lot from Amazon. I placed 120 orders in 2017 alone. We also stream Prime video, use Prime Music and use the free Prime photo storage. We find a lot of value in it. I often don't use the Prime shipping, but rather pick the no rush shipping option. My packages often come in the same time as if I had shipped with Prime, but I get a bonus. I have purchased several digital movies this year using the credit. Just got Star Wars last week. And recently, they were offering a $5 credit towards a print book. I used that 4 times to get DD 4 new baby board books. Using the no rush shipping has actually almost paid for my subscription, which means that I get everything else for very little cost.

I have been a member since 2005 and at that time, the cost was $79. In 2017 value, that is the equivalent of $99, so honestly, the price hasn't gone up by much over time.

 

[Jen and Ashwin]

Booked our shore excursions for our October cruise. We will be visiting an olive grove and olive oil factory, ancient greek ruins, a winery, hiking to a volcano, swimming in hot springs and walking tours of several cities. I am super excited! I got to pay for half the cost to finish off the spend on my CIP and then I put the other half on DH's IHG. We have about $1200 left on that card.

We are planning to go this weekend to buy Lowes and Home Depot gift cards on DH's CIC so that we can buy interior doors for our basement. They are on sale right now, so getting the bonus 5% from the CIC plus working towards the spend on that card will be nice.

And I also booked our Delta reward tickets for our March Disney trip! The price dropped from 42k to 28k per ticket. The price could potentially drop a bit more, but probably not much. I don't really want to keep checking the site everyday for months, so I decided just to book now. Our flight home will be at 6pm, so now I get to devise a plan for that morning, since we won't have park tickets. Maybe it would be a great morning for a character breakfast.

 

[liloca]

I think I might book the Hyatt in Nashville just in case... surely I'll find a use for those points if something comes up.

But now another question... it looks like our flight (arriving Friday evening) would land at either 9:20pm or 11:05pm. There's a Hyatt by the airport for 8k points or 4k plus $55. And it's got a shuttle. So we could stay there the first night, since we're getting in late-ish, and in the morning drop our stuff at the downtown Hyatt (15k points, no cash plus points coming up) and go be touristy for the day. I'm pretty tempted by this plan... since we're two adults with no kids and probably just backpacks since it's a weekend trip, it'd be easy to move.




Good thing I'm using the hidden computer at work today so no one saw me silently losing it when I came to this post.

I did choke on my coffee when I saw this!

 

[Jaime4004]

Coming out of my lurkerhood to ask for some Disneyland help. I recently came up with a grand plan of going to California next summer. Planning on 5 or so days in San Francisco and another 5 or so days in Disneyland area. Flying from the Northeast. Have not decided on flying or driving between the 2 cities. I have about 100K UR and 40K SWA RR. Close to enough to fly us there and back from the northeast. My plan is for DH, who is at 4/24 to open the two SW cards at the end of the year and hopefully get the CP for 19/20.
Here's some info:
DH
CSP 1/17
Freedom 2/17
AU IHG 4/17 (yeah, wish we didn't do AUs, but done now)
AU Amex hilton 7/17
CIP 3/18
also has an old amazon card and AU on Disney from years ago

Me:
AU on the above CSP and Freedom 1/17, 2/17
IHG 4/17
Amex hilton 7/17
SW plus 1/18
also Disney from years ago and AU on amazon from years ago

I opened SW to get enough points to fly my son and I for a weekend trip to WDW in June. I had no intention of trying for the CP because we only fly about once/year. Until I had the grand plan for California. Also have a cruise booked for 2020, so it would help with that also.

So, to make a long story longer, the airfare should be covered with some (but not a lot) UR left over. I'm mostly looking for Disneyland (or San Francisco) hotel recommendations and the best way to earn points for them. I'm guessing I don't enough time to earn meaningful hotel points with a hotel card, maybe go for more URs? Thinking of CIP for myself in Jan? Any recommendations on Disneyland hotels within walking distance?

 

[Ngwira]

I’m done with Amazon prime. Will cancel in November of this year instead of renewing.

 

[SouthFayetteFan]

DISchurners Naughty List may be coming...
Hey all - we still have SPG links posted and Southwest links saying '50,000 points'... Can we get those fixed I may have to release a naughty list this weekend OR just remove the comments which means you couldn't get clicks until you fixed it. Thanks!!

I don't want to sound like a nag but we don't want to confused people when they're trying to support other DISers!

 

[Tikitoi]

Playing catch up here. So not sure if this has been discussed. But saw something for a $200 MasterCard GC purchases from Staples and with no fee. Thinking this would be perfect for my MSR on my CIC. Any reason to be concerned about this since it would be involving a Chase card and that is a big amount to be buying a gift card with a cc. Should I be concerned. Thanks

 

[Alexle2007]

Coming out of my lurkerhood to ask for some Disneyland help. I recently came up with a grand plan of going to California next summer. Planning on 5 or so days in San Francisco and another 5 or so days in Disneyland area. Flying from the Northeast. Have not decided on flying or driving between the 2 cities. I have about 100K UR and 40K SWA RR. Close to enough to fly us there and back from the northeast. My plan is for DH, who is at 4/24 to open the two SW cards at the end of the year and hopefully get the CP for 19/20.
Here's some info:
DH
CSP 1/17
Freedom 2/17
AU IHG 4/17 (yeah, wish we didn't do AUs, but done now)
AU Amex hilton 7/17
CIP 3/18
also has an old amazon card and AU on Disney from years ago

Me:
AU on the above CSP and Freedom 1/17, 2/17
IHG 4/17
Amex hilton 7/17
SW plus 1/18
also Disney from years ago and AU on amazon from years ago

I opened SW to get enough points to fly my son and I for a weekend trip to WDW in June. I had no intention of trying for the CP because we only fly about once/year. Until I had the grand plan for California. Also have a cruise booked for 2020, so it would help with that also.

So, to make a long story longer, the airfare should be covered with some (but not a lot) UR left over. I'm mostly looking for Disneyland (or San Francisco) hotel recommendations and the best way to earn points for them. I'm guessing I don't enough time to earn meaningful hotel points with a hotel card, maybe go for more URs? Thinking of CIP for myself in Jan? Any recommendations on Disneyland hotels within walking distance?

DH and I had made that mistake also of adding each other as AU but I contacted all 3 of the credit bureaus and had them remove the AU from our records. There was online dispute form that I used. All 3 agencies removed the AUs for us so we now only have the ones that we are primary on our report. (I only did this for the AUs that were new not longstanding AU like Discover, Disney and Amazon.) I took about a month to complete since one of the credit agencies moved slower than the other 2.

 

[miztressuz]

Maybe, maybe not: "The fine print on gift memberships says that redeeming them with an existing Prime account will net a gift card for the amount you paid, rather than an additional year of Prime, so you’ll need to remember to cancel your membership before you redeem the gift... [W]hile this trick worked the last time Amazon raised the price of Prime, it’s entirely possible it won’t this time."

https://deals.kinja.com/heres-how-to-lock-in-another-year-of-prime-for-99-1825582003

Worst case scenario, you end up with a $99 Amazon gift card.

Like @wendow, however, I've been an Amazon Prime member since 2005 so my plan is grandfathered and there's no canceling for me. We also do a lot of shopping on Amazon and watch Amazon Prime, so there's still value for us at $119/year. A $20/year increase is not going to break us. This kind of reminds me of the big fuss everyone made back in ~2012 or so when Netflix announced they were raising their monthly subscription by $2 ($24/year). People swore they'd cancel Netflix, Netflix stock went crashing, but five years later Netflix is reporting quarter-after-quarter subscription growth and their stock has hit all time highs. Some people will cancel, but I think too many are used to all-you-can-eat free shipping on Amazon that carries just about everything.

Yeah, some article I found while searching around had a comment from Amazon that there wouldn't be a way to prepay. BUT I also wouldn't expect an Amazon rep to confirm a work around. It's possible I buy it and then come time to redeem they only apply it as a credit and my 'recipient' still has to pay the extra $20. So I thought I'd just buy it anyway since, as you said, worse case is we just bought a $99 gift card; but, I'm not sure what the restriction on "not eligible for promotional offers. " is all about on gift memberships. Seems kind of rude to take full price for a membership but only give the gift recipient a restricted product. Unless Amazon does promotions that discounts prime itself and gift memberships are excluded from those? Does anyone know? I'm obviously not searching the right phrases because I can't find good info on that

For us we use some of the other features, like video, but only because we already paid for the membership. That wasn't a deciding factor on actually getting the membership. In the beginning it was really for the 2 day shipping. I'm pretty sure the hubby signed up for the free 1 month trial and then forgot to cancel (yes, that marketing totally works and he used to get snared often). But there were some things we realized we would have paid for shipping anyway so paying $79 was a wash; and then I think a pattern was born. So when it went to $99 we thought about dropping it but I think that was around the time we got some real deals on Prime day so we pretty much paid for it in savings on things I planned to buy anyway. So again a wash and then a new pattern is born But while I've gotten some good stuff the last few Prime days the savings have not been close enough to pay for the current price let alone an increase. There were very few things I bought around the holidays and mostly that was just to finish off Discover's 4th qtr category. That said, I wasn't planning on deciding the fate of the membership until the fall after I see how it got used this year so this increase now puts a crimp in that.

 

[hsmamato2]

From reading on FlyerTalk this is what i've found out.
The hotel has to have award availability (search using points). You can make the reservation now and then call to have the certificate applied to the reservation.
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/marriott-rewards/1403715-marriott-travel-packages-51.html

Do you need the airline miles now? or can you wait until closer to august? If I were you, I would go ahead and make the Marriott reservation using points now. Keep your Sheraton reservation - and not make a decision until closer to August. Just keep earning those Marriott points.

Thanks for that first detail,I read absolutely everything I could find,and I couldn't find that detail! So I don't need the airline miles at the moment,which is why I ended up using Marriott just for the room,which still saves me points on either currency.I don;t have enough spg to keep the other res. tho that's ok, I think we'll like this other hotel just fine too! I'm going to wait and see what happens to the categories after August, but no matter what at least the room is set.