December 7th, 2009
18 Months Later The Wall Street Journal Reports On Coins For Miles…
I believe the article was timed to coincide with this weekend’s limited release of “Up In The Air,” in which Geroge Clooney obsessively tries to hit 10 million AA miles. (I haven’t seen it but it’s got a strong 89% positive critical rating from rottentomatoes.com) At any rate it seems hard to believe it took 18 months for the WSJ to write an article about the fun. Maybe the author was a coin churner too who didn’t want to prematurely kill the deal?
I first posted about dollar coins for miles back on 06/02/08 and again this past June when ordering became unlimited.
Since then I’ve made dozens of orders for a good couple hundred thousand coins, earning a ton of Starpoints in the interim.
The deal has been basically dead as far as I’m concerned for a little bit now as they pulled the unlimited ordering option of the Native American coins and only have the $500 limit President coins.
As far as the Hyatt deal, the WSJ is also a day late and a dollar coin short. They left out the meat of the Hyatt deal from October when you were able to get 13,500 miles plus free Hyatt nights. I don’t think anyone in the world had more Hyatt stays in October than I did, plus I picked up over 300K United miles and a couple dozen free nights!
December 7th, 2009 at 11:30 am
WOW!!!
December 7th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Shoot – watch them go back and reverse all the miles for mint opuchases.
December 7th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Is there anyway one can still take advantage of this deal? I’m pretty new at mile collecting.
December 7th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
I agree, if he wasn’t a coin “collector” himself (though he does seem the type) he probably didn’t want to kill the deal.
December 8th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Dan,
Were your stays “phantom stays” as well? If so, which type of phantom- the swipe and leave or remote check in with never setting foot on the property?
December 8th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
hah. I used the coins as a free loan to buy a car. I paid with the coins (after converting them to cash), then paid the credit card bill with a new order of coins. I rolled it like that for a few months.
December 9th, 2009 at 1:03 am
it was nuts the mint was reporting such great success with the program meant to get coins into circulation. the only thing it did was stimulate business for ups with all those 43 pound overnight packages they made a killing! you will see ups will report great quarterly earnings. Every bank in the tristate area said their safe is too full of these annoying coins
December 10th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
You can still do multiple orders of pres coins 2500 at a shot. Sometimes they catch it but mostly not!
December 11th, 2009 at 12:29 am
@moish
i wouldnt call them annoying. the problem is The feds have to decide to stop printing the $1 Bill
having just gotten back from London and Rome the other week both the Euro and Pound have coins for both the 1 & 2 as well as Canada.
Its about time the US climbs on the bandwagon
these $1 coins are alot better then the thick Pound coins in the UK
December 14th, 2009 at 12:24 am
http://www.phonenews.com/sprint-to-increase-per-line-regulatory-fee-to-0.40-changes-to-tcs-on-january-10th-2010-9712/
Get Out Of Contract Free!!!! Sprint.