MTM Travel July 23, 2026
Both Hyatt cards have increased welcome offers, and we explain why the personal card’s 75,000 point headline is a little misleading since a chunk of it is just base earning you would get anyway. Frequent Miler is reporting that Chase quietly added new terms to Chase Offers warning that abuse may get you excluded from future offers, which leads into a real conversation about where the line sits between an error in your favor and outright fraud. Bank of America is now handing out retention offers through its Erica chatbot, so you can click through your cards quickly without ever talking to a person, though accepting one offer appears to lock you out on the rest. United also has new targeted MilePlay promotions, some of them worth 20,000 plus bonus miles just for getting the credit card and opting into notifications. We close with a real problem on Bilt travel, where a hotel showing $279 a night turned into an $800 plus bill at checkout because resort fees were not disclosed up front, something Expedia’s own site does correctly. Let us know in the comments what the craziest abuse story you have heard is.
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The Mother of All offer abuses has to be the Air Canada card’s Pay Yourself Back thing that happened a few years ago. When it was unrestricted and uncapped. A guy MSed Rakuten points to feed into Amex, which were then transferred to Air Canada. The guy did grocery PYB on 6+ million points. I think it was 1.25 CPP at the time. That’s what precipitated that card’s restrictions.
During COVID, Amex was hungry and had an uncapped referral bonus. 3x on all spending. I ran my company payroll through it and racked up millions of points.
As for Bilt, clearly it’s an issue that needs to be fixed. My wife and I use each of our semi-annual credits (plus $100 Bilt Cash) to book a specific property. We have not seen the pricing issue you mentioned. The all-in price is almost completely covered. Admittedly, we don’t look to book any other property via Bilt. But, we feel we’re getting our money’s worth.