Staying at 1-star hotels, screwing up travel bookings, a 15,000 mile spend offer, and free money

I hope that you’ve enjoyed the past week of travel information – here’s a recap of what you may have missed from Points With a Crew over the past week or so

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It’s the worst feeling in the world I think – screwing up a travel booking

I seem to do it all the time – last time it was at the Morrison hotel in Dublin (sold out before I bothered booking)

This time it was trying to add my son as a companion for a Southwest flight I already booked.

Thankfully though this time I was able to resolve everything with no problems – phew!

Barclay sent my wife a pretty sweet spending offer in the mail

For spending $500 in each of the next 3 months, they’ll give 15,000 bonus AAdvantage miles!!

This offer is targeted, and not new (many people have gotten it), but I did a bit of research to try and figure out who is getting it and when (it seems to have to do with an upcoming annual fee)

There are some pretty sweet Amex Offers out there now.  Here’s an example of some of them

$15 off Amazon,

$50 off airbnb,

$20 off cable or cell phone bills, $20 off at Best Buy and more

I’m on record saying that so-called “budget” hotels DESTROY the fancy ones,

I even presented about that at the recent Family Travel for Real Life conference.

So when planning an upcoming trip – let’s see how many cheap (1 star?) hotels I can stay at?

Here are the rest of this week’s stories:

• San Francisco voted on Proposition F – an effort to legislate airbnb and other vacation rentals.  Here are the arguments for and against (the vote failed by a comfortable margin)
• What’s better than cheap one-way car rentals?  How about a few sites where you can get FREE one-way car rentals (including RV rentals!)
• Amex Platinum card holders going to LaGuardia airport in New York can get 2 free Uber rides through the end of the year
• Here’s how to change your Southwest Companion Pass companion (why can’t you do this online??!?)
• Review of the Holiday Inn Washington Dulles Intl Airport
• Citi ThankYou points is upping the transfer ratio to 2:1 for one of its transfer partners
• Before heading to the Family Travel for Real Life conference, I spent a few hours picking up counties in Eastern Virginia and Southern Maryland
• Anyone else having trouble with their IHG Accelerate promo stays not showing up?

If you’re still up for more travel reading, here’s last week’s recap: “Worthless” Avios, family travel, a Point Breaks map, and some manufactured spending tips or the best of October: eBay weirdness, Point Breaks Map, park #fail, and 62 airports with cheap award tickets

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