👋 Hi Reader,

Happy November! Here's a quick sneak peek into today's newsletter:

• 👪 Tips, tricks, and tactics for family travel on points
• 🏰 10% off Disney gift cards this week
• 🛒 Free $40-60 with 1-year Costco membership
• 🌍 Earn 10x AA Miles for Hurricane Melissa donations
• 🔐 Up to 60% off Ring devices on Amazon
• 🔗 $600+ savings from card-linked offers
• 🤖 NEO launches a humanoid robot, and more!

If you enjoyed reading, please forward this email to a friend who might too! And if that's you, make sure to subscribe here. Thanks!

Chris

👪 Family Travel on Points: Tips, Tricks, and Tactics

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This week, Nick Reyes and I shared strategies to make family travel affordable and stress-free with points and miles. We'll share our best tips, from finding multiple award seats to booking business class for families, managing jet lag and delays, finding family-friendly hotels, must-have travel gear, and so much more.

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📋 My Past Week

Here's a quick recap of what I was up to last week:

• This year's Halloween festivities were so much fun! We started with Pumpkin carving, my wife made a spooky lunch and we had a great time trick-or-treating in our family Super Mario costumes!
• This week we tried this Creamy Butternut Squash and Coconut Noodle Soup, which was a perfect fall recipe (though we added some shrimp to give it some protein). If you don't have an NYT subscription, you can use archive.is to see the recipe.
• We had a Mexico trip planned over the holidays this year and the house we had booked is dealing with some unexpected construction. While we could just stay home, it also means that we have two weeks free for a last minute vacation. Given the holidays, cash prices are incredibly expensive, but I'm working to see if we can make the stars align on something with points for flights and hotels. The kids have two weeks off school, so we're open to going almost anywhere in the world. Stay tuned for how this plays out (both the negotiations with the current property and making new plans).
• We have some family staying with us this week because they found out they had a medical situation that warranted surgery with a team of specialists and UCSF is one of those teams. So the rest of my last week (and likely next week) will be focused on making sure everything is lined up to go smoothly there.

🛫 Travel, Points & Miles

🪪 Earn 5K United Miles for new CLEAR signups

If you’re a United MileagePlus member, you can earn 5,000 bonus miles for enrolling in CLEAR. It's a pretty quick and easy way to earn points if you’ve been meaning to sign up anyway. Or if you have extra CLEAR credits from Amex cards, now might be a good time to offer them to a friend or family member.

😢 Wyndham’s Vacasa Partnership Ending on 11/30

While I don't have any Wyndham points or credit cards, one of the best ways to get value from them (or Cap1 points) was transferring to Vacasa to book vacation rentals. Unfortunately, Wyndham is ending its partnership with Vacasa. New bookings can be booked through the end of the month, but the checkout date needs to be before 1/31/26.

🛋️ Two New Airport Lounges at Salt Lake City

If you're traveling through SLC this holiday/ski season, make sure to check out the newly opened Amex Centurion Lounge and the Delta Sky Club. Between the number of nonstop flights and proximity to great skiing, we've taken a ski trip to Utah ski trip almost every year. Unfortunately, if you're not flying Delta, there hasn't been a good lounge option at SLC, so I'm particularly excited for this Amex lounge.

In other airport lounge news, JetBlue is opening JFK & BOS next year, Southwest got approval for their first lounge at HNL, and Marriott is thinking about opening an airport lounge as well.

📣 New Hotel, Airline and Points Promos This Week

To make sure the best deals and promos stand out, I'm going to bundle the ones that are more niche in a single post, but ones that deserve more attention will continue to have their own posts.

Transferrable Points

• Bilt: For Rent Day today, you can get up to a 100% transfer bonus to Etihad. While I'm eligible for the max bonus, I'm not interested in banking any points to Etihad, so I'm skipping it.

Hotels

• Hyatt: Earn up to 30,000 bonus points (3,000/night) on Vacation Club stays when you register here and book before 3/22/26 for stays between 11/2 and 3/29/26.
• Marriott: Earn up to 6,075 bonus points (2,025/night) when you register here before 12/27 and stay between 10/28 and 1/10/26.
• Hilton: Earn 2,500 bonus points per stay when you register here and stay before 12/31.
• IHG: Save up to 30% on stays when you book before tomorrow, 11/2 and complete your stay before 12/14.
• Accor: Save up to 30% on stays across North America when you book before 3/30/26 and stay before 5/31/26.

Airlines

• Air France/KLM: Earn up to 35,000 bonus miles on select flights to/through Europe from the U.S. (book by 11/7 for travel by 1/31).
• Finnair Avios: Points sale for 1.47¢ pp with a 40% bonus (11/2)
• Alaska Atmos: Points sale for 1.88¢ pp with a 100% bonus (11/4)
• AAdvantage: Miles sale for 2.25¢ pp with up to 40% bonus

🌍 10x AA Miles for Hurricane Melissa Donations

American Airlines is offering 10x miles for every $1 donated to the American Red Cross relief for Hurricane Melissa. The offer is valid for donations made by 11/11, with a minimum donation of $25. If you value AAdvantage miles at 1.4¢, you're looking at about a 14% return before factoring in the tax deduction, so if you're already looking to make a donation, this promo makes it an even better opportunity!

🤑 Latest Deals

🏰 10% off Disney Gift Cards at Sam's Club This Week

There aren't many ways to save on a trip to Disney, but staring Thursday (11/7) or 9p EST on Wednesday (11/6) for Plus members, Sam's Club will be selling $200 Disney gift cards for $180 (10% off). This doesn't happen often and is one of the best ways I'm aware of to save on Disney.

🛒 Free $40-60 with 1-Year Costco Membership

Groupon is offering a free $40 Digital Costco Shop Card with a $65 ​Costco Gold Star Membership​ or a free $60 Digital Costco Shop Card with a $130 ​Costco Executive Membership​. Both of these deals expire on 12/21 and are available for new members or those whose memberships have been expired for 18+ months. In my experience, these offers do work for spouses who are not the primary Costco member.

🔗 Card-Linked Offers: $600+ in Savings

Here are some card-linked offers to help maximize your savings. Some of these are targeted offers, so I highly recommend using CardPointers Pro (get 30% off here) to automate them.

• CVS: 10x miles (up to 1,000 miles) for in-store purchases (11/5)
• Macy’s: $10 off $50 or $15 off $100 (11/29)
• Hyatt Regency: $100 off $300 (12/15)
• Amex Gift Cards: $50 off $750, up to 2 times (12/31)
• Best Buy: $25 off $250 (12/31)
• Gulf Oil: 10% back, up to $10 (1/8/26)
• MGM+: $7.99 off $7.99, up to 3 times (12/31)
• Radisson Blu/Cambria: $100 off $300 (12/31)
• Small Luxury Hotels of the World: $100 off $300 (12/31)

🔐 Up to 60% Off Ring Devices on Amazon

If you're looking to upgrade your home security system, there's a Halloween sale on Amazon for up to 60% off Ring products. While we don't have Ring cameras, we do use Ring for our security system and it's been great (and was easy to install). If you currently have a wired alarm system, you can use the Ring Retro Fit Kit to migrate over without needing to replace all your sensors (we did this at our last home).

🕵️ Top Finds

🤖 NEO the Humanoid Robot

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1X Technologies recently unveiled NEO, a $20K (or $499/month) home robot designed to handle household chores. At first glance I was so excited to be living in the future, but as MKBHD points out in the video above, there’s a huge gap between what these robots can actually do today, often with the help of humans, and the fully autonomous future shown in their launch video. While I'm excited to have a robot like this one day, I'm feeling like it might be farther away than I hoped.

✈️ Why American Airlines Stopped Making Money

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Wendover Productions has a fantastic YouTube channel, but when they make content on the travel industry I'm even more excited. This video dives into why American Airlines has struggled to make money despite being one of the biggest U.S. carriers and facing record travel demand.

💬 Parting Thoughts

As always, thanks so much for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s newsletter, and if you enjoyed it, please let me know why! Or if you have suggestions for a future newsletter, please share those as well. Thanks!

Chris