Best of 2014 #1-5: Getting an Amex live chat, unlimited travel to 10 countries, IHG Point Breaks map, Chase refer a friend and Freedom categories

With 2014 coming to a close, we also are coming up on the 1 year anniversary of Points With a Crew, which started in January of this year.  It’s been a great year and I could not be more excited about the future as we look into 2015 and beyond.

Looking back at the top posts of 2014, I thought I’d run a short series of the top posts of 2014 at Points With a Crew.  These more or less are the most visited posts by blog visitors in 2014, and are pretty highly correlated with a list of my most popular posts.  Things are slightly skewed by the posts that ran in the week in September that I was featured on the main page of Boarding Area, where I got a ton more traffic.

So, here we are with the top 5 posts in the Top PWaC Posts of 2014:

#5 –  AirAsia is offering what they call the ASEAN Air pass, which offers unlimited travel to 10 Southeast Asia countries (Brunei, Camboida, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Phillipines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam).  Details are still forthcoming, but it will be sold starting January 15th and cost $148 for travel between those 10 countries.  Of course, the one downside is that this is excluding airport taxes and fees, which can be a substantial portion of the fare

#4 – IHG has a promotion that they run every couple of months where a select number (usually around 100) are made available for only 5,000 points a night – called Point Breaks.  This past time, for the Point Breaks hotels that are active for December, January and February, to help me visualize where the Point Breaks hotels were located, I made a map of the Point Breaks locations

#3 – For some reason, American Express does not make it easy to do a live chat with a customer service representative.  Fortunately, there is an easy workaround in order to get a live chat.  I use this all the time especially since oftentimes I am chatting about one of my wife’s accounts, and this makes it a lot easier to manage her accounts

#2 – Chase periodically offers a refer a friend bonus, where you can get 5000 miles or points for referring someone else to sign up for one of the Chase-branded credit cards.  In the 4th quarter of this year, the Chase Freedom offered an increased signup (for 20,000 Ultimate Rewards points) as well as the ability to refer friends for 5000 points.  That offer is no longer valid, though there are a few Chase refer a friend offers still ongoing.  American Express is also currently offering refer a friend bonuses.

#1 – The number #1 most popular post from PWaC in 2014 was one introducing the Chase Freedom 2015 categories.  The categories for the 1st quarter are grocery stores, movie theaters and Starbucks.  You can earn 5% on purchases at those places in the first quarter of 2015, up to a maximum of $1500 in spend.

So there you have it!  Hopefully you had fun looking back at 2014 with me and here’s to even more fun in 2015!!

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