Best Posts Last Week: Chase Southwest 60k Points, 150k Membership Rewards, New Wyndham Program Sweetspots + More

The big news this week was that it was briefly possible to get 150,000 points on the American Express business platinum card, although it required a total of $20,000 in spend within three months. This deal had been floating around for awhile with people sharing it via e-mail and other methods. I decided to share it when I noticed there was only a little over a day left and it was being posted on public forums. Thanks to everybody who sent me abusive e-mails, that really made my day. It’s still possible to get 100,000 points on this card (or 75,000 if you want a lower spend requirement). Yes me posting probably caused the deal to die several hours before it naturally would have, but I think it was a net gain as so many more people were able to access the deal. Did I get it wrong? Let me know (try to keep the abuse to a minimum).

Wyndham finally introduced their new rewards program which gives you a free night at any of their properties for 15,000 points. We had a look at some of the best properties to redeem your points for. There was two pieces of good news for existing cardholders: you’ll automatically receive an anniversary bonus of 15,000 points (previously was 5,500) and you can still access the old award chart if you like (making lower tier properties much cheaper). The current sign up bonus of 45,000 points is as good as it’s going to get, so have a read through our review of the Wyndham credit cards to see if they make any sense for you.

Chase increased the sign up bonus on all three of the Southwest credit cards to 50,000 points. This wasn’t really that interesting though as it was already possible to get the personal premier with 50,000 points and it’s possible to get 60,000 points on the business premier (making it much easier to get the companion pass).

We also ran a series of posts about different rules for credit card issuers, all are must reads and reference articles:

SunTrust has a new 5% card, but the limits don’t make it very useful. You can also get the 25,000 + $100 offer on the Alaska Airlines card again, there is also a 50,000 point targeted offer going around.

There was a lot of good deals, out of the ones that are still available there are three that are well worth having a look at. You can currently get two years free of regus gold membership, you can also get 500 free La Quinta points (unfortunately these won’t extend your points anymore) and there is an AmEx offer for $5-$10 with iTunes. On the 21st, you’ll also be able to get up to 2.1% cash back on American Express gift cards.

It was a pretty good week for bank account bonuses as well, Santander keeps the good times rolling with a $500 bonus on their business checking account (they also offer $20 per month on their personal account). Capital One extended their $250 business bonus and FirstBank (CA, CO & AZ), MB Financial (IL, IN & PA) and KeyBank [AK, CO, ID, IN, ME, MI, NY, OH, OR, UT, VT, or WA only] are all offering $200 personal bonuses.

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