by Robert McGarvey

Press releases flew and they carry the breathtaking message that the Sheraton brand has been reborn. Reinvented. And maybe it should have been noted reincarnated because Sheraton was a brand one could be forgiven for thinking had died.

Six Sheratons are undergoing the renovation – in Phoenix, Denver, Dubai, Tel Aviv, Guangzhou and Minyang, China.

I often walk by the Sheraton in downtown Phoenix where the work has been in progress for what seems like forever. And it isn’t finished yet.

Are you anxious for the work to be done so you can rush to stay there?

That’s doubtful.

Read the Adweek headline for its Sheraton story: Sheraton Rebrand Aims to Bring Hotel Chain ‘Up to Date’ With a Focus on Communal Spaces.

Uh, forgive me for bringing it up but hasn’t this pandemic – which has killed over 400,000 of us, will kill a few more hundreds of thousands of us before it runs its course, and will not be a memory until maybe mid 2022 – put the hex on “communal” spaces?

Flip through the photos of the new Sheraton and the furniture is too close together, the room arrangements entirely too cozy.

Here’s another shot of the lobby from the Marriott press release. Way too close for comfort in a Covid era.

Here’s a guest room and it looks, well, like many others I have seen.

Ho hum.

Trade pub Travel Weekly prattled on: “Each property has received myriad updates, including a reimagined ‘Public Square’ lobby design, which Sheraton describes as the ‘heart of the Sheraton experience.’ The new lobbies feature elements like a communal table designed to serve as a shared workspace as well as flexible, tech-enabled Studio areas, which are enclosed in glass and can be used for small meetings or private dining experiences.”

Also central to the refreshed lobby experience is the introduction of Coffee Bar Bar, a new food-and-beverage concept that is ‘part bar, part coffee bar, part market.'”

I am pretty sure it is going to take many months before many of us will welcome the hurly burly of crowded public spaces and yet that is the hook on which Marriott wants to hang its buffed up Sheraton hat.

How out of touch is that?

But that’s not the only problem. The Adweek subhead threw a dart at it: One problem: The brand doesn’t seem to have a defined audience in mind.

Exactly who wants the new Sheraton? Nobody seems to know and, very likely, the answer is nobody wants it.

The strangeness goes on. The Arizona Republic, with a focus on the downtown Sheraton Grand which has been closed since March, reported that the hotel won’t open until May. It quoted a spokesperson: “‘For a hotel the size of the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown, we are reliant on groups coming to Arizona and coming to Phoenix specifically,’ hotel spokesman Jon Erickson said of the decision to postpone the reopening date for several months.”

Uh…downtown and in particular the Convention Center area where the Sheraton Grand sits roll up and wait out the long Phoenix summer months. Group bookings are sparse until Labor Day and the ones that come are from school groups, religious groups, and, well, not big spenders. They are unlikely to flock to the Sheraton Grand unless the summer room rates hover around $100 per night because there are plenty of rooms downtown that can be had for that amount.

And for the quants among us, there are around 445 Sheraton hotels worldwide, exactly six have undergone this transformation, some 36 more are said to be on schedule to finish renovations by 2022, but there is no timetable for when the remaining 400 or so to get the facelift. You can bet that hotel asset owners, who have been through a year that is the worst in hospitality history, per STR, and 2021 won’t be much better, will not clap their hands with glee at the prospect of pouring huge sums into their Sheraton to transform it to better suit, well, we don’t know who.

Especially not when many thousands of hotels across the country are expected not to reopen even once Covid is a memory. How many that shutter will be Sheratons?

And will any tears be shed for the departed?

by Robert McGarvey

 Overdraft fees are big business for most financial institutions and it’s estimated that 20% of credit union members, one in five, have an NSF annually.

The worse news is that the credit union’s NSF fee is just the start of the consumer’s pain.  Joel Schwartz, founder and co-CEO of DoubleCheck, a Los Angeles company with an innovative spin on how to best handle NSFs, estimates that the NSF can lead to perhaps $175 in ripple charges such as a returned item fee imposed by the payee of the bounced check.

Ouch.

DoubleCheck has an alternative – and, hold on you protest, your institution wants to maintain its NSF income, especially in today’s economy where loan interest rates are anemic.  

Schwartz gets that. He describes DoubleCheck as the financial equivalent of traffic school in the context of a speeding ticket.  Go to traffic school and, usually, that wipes out the pain of an increase in insurance premiums.

What DoubleCheck’s tool does is offer the consumer realtime options for dealing with the consequences of an NSF such as offering the opportunity to use a credit card to make good on the check or ACH, therefore it doesn’t look like a bounced item to the payee. Whoosh, that $175 in ripple charges may vanish.

DoubleCheck charges $20, an amount it typically splits with the credit union – so in fact the credit union income goes up.

Sounds good? It gets better. The DoubleCheck tools – which make the NSF process transparent to the consumer – may help a credit union duck class action suits that claim discriminatory processing of NSFs.   

There’s a link in the show notes to a recent Navy Federal $16 million settlement involving NSF charges.

There’s also a class action suit in progress. Link in the show notes.  

Meantime, Schwartz predicts there will be Congressional action to limit NSF charges, a topic of much interest to Senator Cory Booker. See the link in the show notes.  

DoubleCheck tools may help a credit union recoup some income that may be capped by federal action.

Mentioned in the show is SECU’s NSF policies. The charge is $12 but the member gets a two day window without charge to clear up the issue.  (Here’s a link to a podcast with Jim Blaine, the retired SECU CEO.) 

Listen up.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available. Email rjmcgarvey@gmail.com

And like this podcast on whatever service you use to stream it. That matters.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It’s a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

Part 2

Hint: Two Surprises

By Robert McGarvey

The rethink I never saw coming continues to unfold in my wallet.  And new cards have joined the party.

Of course, for years, I have thought Amex – Platinum in particular – had the starring role in my pocket. Regular readers will recall that as I bemoaned the lack of travel related perks in the Covid era – and they have been the main attraction for Platinum – I found myself making dramatically more use of the Amazon Prime card, which delivers 5% rewards on purchases at Amazon and Whole Foods, and also Discover, which offers a rotating cast of 5% cashback rewards.  Presently it is on groceries and chain drug stores.

Amex meantime has rolled out new Plat rewards, notably a $30/monthly refund of PayPal purchases funded with the card, and there is a continuing $15/monthly credit on Uber and Uber Eats. Of course I shifted Netflix and the NY Times to PayPal and that’s a quick $30 in my pocket.

But as I feasted on different rewards I got hungry for more and new in my wallet is the Venmo Credit Card.  What’s Venmo? A cool person to person payment service owned by PayPal, Venmo moved $100 billion in 2019 and it is fantastically popular with Gen Z (people ages 6 to 24).  I signed up a few years ago because it works to send gifts to young relatives (some of whom don’t know what a paper check is).

It’s a good thing I did because I have a multi-year track record with Venmo.  And when I heard about the new Venmo credit card, I wanted one.

Right now it is open only to a limited audience, and only via the Venmo mobile app, and when I checked, I discovered I was eligible to apply. So I did.

Why? It’s fee free and it pays cashback – 3% on your largest purchase category, 2% on the next largest, 1% on everything else. I see no caps on spending amounts. (Discover, by contrast, caps a 5% category spend at $1500, meaning $75 back.)

The percentages are dynamic. They will shift as your spending shifts.

We’ll see how much I use the Venmo card but, in principle, I like it because as I spend I earn a few dollars in rewards. Sure, I know there may be cashback cards with richer rewards, but remember Venmo is on point for me, in part because I have written about it before and probably will again. It’s a company I follow.

You want one?  Download the Venmo app, from the Apple or Google app store, sign up for a new account and keep checking the app. You may see an invitation to apply.

But now I am on a roll of new cards and also in my wallet is Lili, a new mobile bank card that bills itself as the ideal card for gig economy workers (meaning me).  And one afternoon, in under three minutes, I opened the account and funded it.

Partly I did that because in my other life I talk and write a lot about credit unions in particular and financial services in general (remember my tracking Venmo) – and a continuing obstacle in the digital transformation of credit unions has been a slowness to embrace online and mobile account opening.  Often a new account means a visit to a branch and that is just so 1950.

When I saw Lili’s promise that a new account could be mine in under three minutes I had to take the plunge – and, voila, it worked.  Interested in signing up? Go here.

Lili is free and it provides a free checking account, a Visa business debit card, and expense reports that make tax filing easier.

And the Visa business debit card also is a boom to tax filing. Just use it only for tax deductible expenses and that saves time right there.

OK, by now you are probably guessing that because I no longer have any interest in counting my air miles (what miles?) I have time on my hands and I am putting it to use playing with new credit and debit cards.

I cannot dispute that.  Nor can I dispute that I now occasionally read geeky credit card advice articles on the Points Guy that I never would have spent a second on a year ago.

But, you know, saving money by using the right credit card is proving to be fun – and it is a lot easier than I had thought.  And yet I still goof with inattention. I picked up a $6 prescription at Walgreens this a.m and paid with the Amazon Prime card (1% rewards). But I should have paid with Discover and gotten this month’s 5% reward. That’s 30 cents versus 6 cents.

It adds up, my mother used to tell me, and, yes, I ignored her. But now she’d be proud of me.

by Robert McGarvey

Used to be, mainly I used the American Express Platinum card, and I still am a fan but my usage is way down. Other, surprising cards have sprinted to top of my wallet and with each there is a reason. Times have changed. So do my cards.

Case in point: my most used card in the last quarter is the Amazon Prime card via Chase which is fee free. I use this card only at Amazon and Whole Foods where it delivers a 5% refund on purchases. The refund comes as points that are redeemable at Amazon and in December alone I got around $125 to spend via that route (and bought the cool Simple Human kitchen trash can with it because who wants to shell out a c note in cash for a garbage bin?)

For Amazon the card works because it converted this occasional Whole Foods shopper into a regular. And it works for me because the 5% makes it seem like Partial Paycheck.

In 2020 I got back $870.41, just for shopping at Amazon and Whole Foods (actually $8.62 came from elsewhere, per a year-end summary).

Incidentally, via Chase, there is a way to convert the refund points into cash. I have never done it – I spend several hundred monthly at Amazon, month in, month out – so don’t ask for details. Just know that for those who want to cash out, there’s a way.

Next month my refund on that card will be down because in January and into February I switch to Sprouts to cash in on the Discover 5% cashback at grocers program. Discover caps the refund at $75 – which I always apply towards the credit card bill – so that will cover not quite two month’s of shopping. But I like exploring this Whole Foods lookalike and this is my time to do it.

In April the Discover 5% shifts to gas stations, wholesale clubs, and streaming services. I especially like the last bit because I feel the sting of losing the Amex $20 monthly credit on streaming services at year end 2020. It will be good to get a few pennies on Netflix and Hulu from Discover and, sure, I’ll buy some gas too (but who drives much these days?).

July-September the 5% shifts to restaurants and PayPal and my eyes lit up when I saw PayPal because the Amex $30 PayPal credit is set to expire June 30 so I will carry the discount forward a few more months with Discover. And come summer we just may be eating out more (tho I personally think that isn’t happening until 2022).

The last quarter the 5% shifts to Amazon, WalMart and Target and I don’t expect to use it much – but I will probably get around $150 from Discover by playing their 5% game this year.

Those three – Amex Plat, Amazon Prime, and Discover – are the three cards that claim 90% of my credit card spend. The quest in banking circles is to make their card top of wallet but, in my case, dream on.

There are three more cards in my wallet, probably one of which will go.

United Explorer. I’ve had this since it was Continental and it delivers many of the perks of low level elite status: free checked bag, priority boarding, 25% back on inflight purchases, and the real plum is reimbursement for Global Entry. There are also two club passes. At $95 a year it makes sense only when I am flying which, right now, I am not.

Barclay’s AAdvantage card. At $99, it delivers some of the perks of the United card but not all. There’s 25% back on inflight purchases, priority boarding, and a free checked bag. No TSA or Global Entry reimbursement. Mileage awards are doubled — a nice perk when I’m flying but of course I’m not.

Diners Club. The main get is the network of 1000 airport lounges globally and, in Europe, many of the lounges I have been to are swank indeed. An intriguing wrinkle is personalized rewards where members with over 50,000 points – I have 38,000 – can bag something they really want. Like what? Diners Club offers for instances: “Orthodontia: Nothing’s cheerier than your child’s bright smile. Bring a smile to your face too!
Purchase of land: A spread in Texas; a ranch in New Mexico? Your dream can come true. Down payment on a car: Drive away with an easy deal. Getting into your dream car is easier than you think. Condo rental for two months: Escape to a luxury condo on the beach — your home away from home. Personal wine cellar: Have you always wanted a custom wine cellar? Or, perhaps help selecting your own private collection? Now you can have it. Choose a premium wine rack system for 200 to 2,000 bottles or secure the services of a wine connoisseur.”

Diners Club is $95 annually, I’ve had it since 1985 (only Amex has been on my body longer) and, call me nostalgic, I am not giving it up.

A last card in my wallet is Lili, a Visa business debit card associated with a neo bank of the same name that is aimed at gig economy workers such as me. It’s free and Lili positions it as a painless way to track business expenses – just use Lili for tax deductible purchases and nothing else and that simplifies your life. I’m sold. It may not save me any money but time is money and it saves time.

Will I have all these cards a year from now? I doubt if I will have both the AAdvantage card and the United Card. If travel suddenly resumed, I would. But I don’t expect that to happen in 2021.

Now, what about you? What’s in your wallet? What can you close and not miss?

by Robert McGarvey

Regular readers know I have long been a fan of Amex Platinum but in a new year, I find myself again looking into the wisdom of the $550 annual fee card. The big hit: at the end of 2020, the $20 per month Amex credit against cell phone bills and also streaming video fees vanished. Amex had always said those were temporary perks. There was no surprise here. But that cut my Plat benefits $40/month.

The good news is that when I dug – more on the process later – I found numerous perks that go to cardholders. But you do have to hunt. Amex does not give them to you unless you ask.

I say do likewise with any premium travel rewards card in your wallet. You just may find that the card has added new, tasty perks. Chase Sapphire Reserve, Plat’s doppelganger, is a case in point. It too has lot of perks cardholders may not know about.

And of course the backdrop to this quest is the other, huge loss for Plat cardholders, at least for me: the sheer lack of travel raises questions about any card conceived as a travel perks card and the Amex Plat has to be at the head of that pack.

A travel perks card that stays in your wallet is obviously of little apparent benefit. Thus, my new quest for value in the Platinum card. I have had one for some years. Only now have I become a perks hunter.

Understand, I see no near-term changes in my air travel appetite. Clients aren’t requesting my presence (Zoom works for them and for me at present).

Besides, air travel continues to have too many maskless cretins who deny medical evidence. That lack of masks is especially worrisome once you’ve read Hugo Martin’s horrifying piece headlined Coughing, sneezing, vomiting: Visibly ill people aren’t being kept off planes.

I expect we will get more rational policies in the Biden Administration, but how soon will it be implemented and how many maskless morons will have to be physically thrown off planes?

Until we have mask clarity, and until the vaccines are widely distributed (so far the distribution has been a failure of Trumpian girth – “incomprehensible,” said Mitt Romney who added that it was “inexcusable”), count me as a deeply hesitant flyer – and probably I will make no use of the Amex Centurion clubs in the first half of 2021.

Mind you, Centurion clubs for some years alone persuaded me to keep renewing Plat. So their lack is a big issue for me.

Another Plat perk has been a $200 airline credit (good for incidentals with an airline selected by the cardholder in January – this is for snack boxes, beer, etc in coach). But I may not fly American – the airline I selected – at all, not in the first half of 2020.

What now are the benefits of a Platinum card?

I did recently get the $85 TSA Precheck renewal fee covered by Amex.

There’s a $15/month Uber credit which is also applicable to Uber Eats and I will admit I have been derelict about using that, but in December – when the credit is upped to $35 – I used it to cover half of a meal delivery from a local Vietnamese restaurant, Rice Paper. I count that meal a success. I will use the Uber Eats credit again.

But I need more perks to justify the $550 fee for my card plus $175 for my wife’s card.

And so I visited the Amex Plat Offer and Benefits page which lists 100 deals and some are good. A favorite has been $50 off any purchase at Saks, useable twice yearly for $100 total.

$50 off a $250 purchase at Johnny Was.

Spend $45 at Teleflora, get $20 back, up to 10 times. That’s $200.

Spend $50 at Home Depot, get $50 back, up to two times.

Spend $50 at BestBuy, get $50 back, up to two times.

Those offers total $550 and there are 96 more that I see. Everything from the Container Store to Samsung (spend $1000, get $200 back) and Loews Hotels (spend $200 get $50 back).

Keep hunting for perks. New ones are popping up. For instance: OneMileAtaTime has found a $30 monthly PayPal credit, good through June. That’s $180. And no enrollment is needed. Just use Amex to pay via PayPal and you qualify, on most purchases, for the $30.

Whew. Yes, this is a bit of work. I’ll be glad when the Centurion and the $200 airline credit are ample for me.

But until then, stay alert. Amex (and its competitors) will be fiddling with their rewards. Be ready to pounce.

By Robert McGarvey

Reality check:  I did not in fact eat with Chris Bianco, the legendary Beard award winning Phoenix chef, but I did eat Sunday night at his restaurant Tratto in downtown Phoenix.

Am I insane? Arguably so.  But I think we did this cautiously, thoughtfully, and safely.  So that is the story I am telling.

The stakes are high. Life or death in fact. On that same day Arizona added 11795 new Covid-19 cases, with 3677 hospitalizations, and hospital beds are just about stuffed to capacity.  We are in a bad space and it will only worsen over the next two or three months.

I’m also aware that many places – New York included – have again shut indoor dining.  There is no denying the risks are real, especially indoors.

So why did the wife and I decide to go out to eat Sunday?  It was a birthday celebration, we honestly have not been to a table cloth restaurant in 9 months (and just two casual joints in that time span), and we both had immense curiosity about what Bianco is doing at Tratto, his fine dining establishment (he mainly is known for pizza).

The question came into focus because a few months ago Bianco moved Tratto from an upscale midtown location to a down at its heels location on Van Buren in downtown Phoenix where the eatery is surrounded by used car lots (“Your job is your credit report!”).  It’s not a dangerous location, just bleak.

But the restaurant Bianco has created is gorgeous.  Big, sprawling, a lovely setting for socially distanced dining.

There’s also – and this sold us on eating there – a big patio. No indoor dining for us.

We also got a 5:10p dining time, when our best guess was that the place would still be empty.

Even so, we did not go there without much thought.  And we decided to walk there – 3.7 miles distant from our home – because that just seemed safer than Uber or the lightrail (and we knew we’d have a couple tipples so driving was crossed off the options list). 

The walk was in lovely 60 degree weather, few on the streets, no need to wear a mask because we saw pretty much no one.

At the restaurant, the staffer at the reservations desk quickly takes the temperatures of diners.  We passed that muster and were shown to our table.

Out in the big patio there was only one other two top with diners.   

(Inside, in the huge restaurant, I believe three two tops were occupied. There was ample space for social distancing.)

Mask wearing on the patio was observed, except when eating or drinking.

What if there had been many more diners and mask scofflaws reigned? The feet that had taken us there would just as surely take us home and so they would have.

But that wasn’t necessary. Not with few diners and mask wearing.

This is about a restaurant meal so, yes, there was food. Lots of it.

To start a negroni. I do not know what Bianco’s mixologist uses – it’s not the standard recipe (gin, Campari, sweet vermouth) but it is damn good.  So good I had two waiting for the food to come to table and I do not usually drink cocktails.  

I’m sure Bianco would accommodate a traditionalist who insisted on the regular negroni recipe. But don’t.  Go with this alternative.  It’s a more sophisticated drink.

The Tratto negroni sets the tone. What’s served is familiar but, well, different.

For starters, we had “Little Gem Lettuce in Roasted Shallot Vinaigrette with Shave four-year Parmigiano Reggiano” and “Blue Sky Farms Fennel & Radicchio in Crow’s Dairy Quark with Persimmon, Pomegranate, AZ Pistachios & Honey.”

Bianco likes local products, but isn’t slavish about it, and he likes to mix unlikely ingredients (persimmon, pomegranate, pistachio). The salads are fresh, familiar but also exotic.  No tomato, you notice, but how hackneyed is that combo?

Servings are plentiful for sharing.

Followed by tagliatelle with braised short rib ragu. Thick, lovely ribbons of what I believe is housemade pasta.  The short rib is a condimento, the pasta is not drowned in the ragu, it is sparingly sauced to let the noodles star.  Lovely shaved parm on top.

Followed by “Roasted Blue Sky Farms Carrots with Grilled Spring Onion, Honey, Dill Salsa Verde, Quark, Crispy Garlic, Chili Oil” and a second dish of “Poached Blue Sky Farms Cabbage with Aioli & Bread Crumbs.”

The cabbage is charred, the carrots are poached to a natural sweetness. Get the dishes together. It’s a perfect vegetable plate when paired.

What for dessert? Nothing.  We were full and it was time to hit the road before more diners trickled in. And we had a walk in front of us.

Are we still healthy and Covid free? So far and I doubt that will change. If it does, you will hear about it.  Promised.

But here’s the takeaway.  Restaurant dining may still be safe when you pick the right venue – with an outdoor option! – and the right, slow time slot.  Wear a mask except when eating and drinking.

None of this is rocket science.  But it just may keep us safe while we still enjoy a well chosen restaurant outing.

by Robert McGarvey

Call me a travel optimist. Last Saturday, after thinking on the matter for a few days, I renewed TSA Precheck despite having not been on a plane in six months. But I wanted to see how the process worked – smooth? bumpy? – and I also have started a new project that may require cross-country flights and for that I wanted to know I had Precheck in hand.

Besides, I had no money to lose. Amex Plat will pick up the cost.

Know this: it took just a couple minutes to fill in the forms online and within four hours I had a notification that it was being renewed. No need for an appearance in person.

None of my identifying facts had changed in four and one-half years: same address, same name, same cellphone number, even the same credit card. So there was nothing to trigger curiosity about me. But, still, I have to say: the process is smooth.

Covid-19 makes PreCheck more useful, too, according to reporting in the Washington Post: “What we have seen is that wait times in general are in the neighborhood of five minutes or less, and PreCheck can go even quicker,” Lisa Farbstein, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration, told Wapo.

Additionally, with PreCheck, you don’t have to touch and remove a bunch of things such as your shoes, a light jacket, and most electronics (which can go through the inspection tucked inside your bag).

That makes PreCheck a terrific buy at the price I pay.

Now, why do I think I will be flying more soon? Of course it’s not just the project I mentioned, it’s my own readiness to consider air travel mainly because the vaccines that are speeding down the pike are plenty to raise confidence.

According to a New York Times widget that predicts when a person will get the vaccine – it asks age, residence, pre-existing conditions – 118 million of my fellow Americans are ahead of me but a good guess is that I will be vaccinated by mid year. I will probably get it then, too, because there will be plenty of arms injected before mine and that will raise my confidence in the drugs.

Besides, I may already have some degree of immunity because I had the disease last March, which was corroborated by a June antibody test. I am not banking on that immunity but the probability that I have some lets me stay relaxed with 118 million in front of me. Others may need it sooner, let them have it.

Then, too, as s many as one-third of us are saying nothing doing, they say they will refuse the vaccine. I imagine that number will dip as (and if) we see vaccinations are proceeding with few significant side-effects. But the line may move even faster than some think if there are plenty of anti-vaxxers.

Remember, too, that in 1955, as the US speeded to inoculate the nation’s children against polio, there was the so-called Cutter Incident, named after the lab that produced bad doses, which resulted in some 250 cases of polio. That is, the vaccine caused the very disease it was intended to prevent,

Yes, that number of cases was small but it was large for those who were crippled and their images haunted many leading edge Baby Boomers. The images persist today.

My other concern is that the vaccines in the final stages of approval require multiple doses, delivered at rather specific time intervals, and the drugs also require extremely cold storage. We shall see how good we as a people are at remembering to go for the follow up shot and we shall also see how good pharmacies, physicians’ offices, and hospitals are at cold storage. A lot of moving parts are involved in delivering something that looks like a national immunity.

We will get all that sorted. I cannot say by when. But we will.

And we will be flying again. Probably not as much as before – I believe the predictions that business travel will be down by one-third for some years to come – but we will fly again.

Are you ready? You know I am. The Precheck renewal proves it.

by Robert McGarvey

Just do it: decide that this year’s December festivities – Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or whatever you wish to celebrate with gatherings of family and friends – is a no go in 2020, a kind of unawares suicide mission.

The CDC is not mincing words in its advice. “The best thing for Americans to do during the holiday season is to stay at home and not travel,” said Dr. Henry Walke, who is in charge of day to day management of the response to the pandemic.

That could not be plainer. Stay home.

But my additional advice is this: cancel big family 2020 holiday get togethers but make firm – and glorious – plans for a huge December 2021 celebration.

2020 is a bust. But 2021 is a different, cheerier reality.

Still, we have to start with this blunt truth: this December offers no basis for partying in groups.

We missed that message in November and now we are paying the price.

Some 9.4 million of us passed through TSA airport screening over the 10 days of Thanksgiving season. Yes, that volume is way down from 2019 when a record 2.9 million of us were screened on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and just 1.17 million were screened on that day this year.

But our travel numbers were way too high for a nation fighting a losing battle with a pandemic.

So now the virus surges. As experts knew it would.

As the Mississippi Free Press headline trumpeted: “After Big Thanksgiving Dinners, Plan Small Christmas Funerals, Health Experts Warn.”

White House coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx told CBS, “We know people may have made mistakes … over the Thanksgiving time period. If your family traveled, you have to assume that you are exposed and you became infected and you really need to get tested in the next week.”

Right now, 13.8 million of us are known to have had the disease. 271,000 of us have died with more than 2500 new deaths daily. The death total likely will be near 350,000 by the end of December.

It may eclipse 400,000 by Inauguration Day.

We are in a killing season. In Arizona, hospitals admit they are scrambling to try to cope with surging Covid-19 cases. “The number one limiting factor is staffing right now,” Ann-Marie Alameddin, president and CEO of the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, told the Arizona Republic. “It’s a much tighter supply because the whole country is in need of the same skill set.”

In New York, the state is implementing “emergency” hospital measures to try to keep pace with Covid-19 cases.

In California the alert is out that ICUs may soon be “overwhelmed.”

In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti has declared “it’s time to cancel everything.”

What we don’t need is a surge in cases triggered by December holiday festivities.

And we also don’t need a wave of cases triggered by so-called Covid fatigue where some of us seemingly have tired of masks and social distancing.

And yet, where I live in central Phoenix, ever more people seem determined to exercise an erroneously claimed “right” not to wear a mask.

As Helena Rosenblatt, a history professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, wrote in a Washington Post piece, “Do individuals have a constitutional right not to wear masks? They do not.

“Are such mandates undermining American democratic government? They are not.”

And similarly there are those who insist they have a Constitutional right to celebrate their holidays as they wish.

But I have every right to steer clear of them and I will exercise my right.

It’s not just the United States that is grappling with this problem. Across Europe, the alarms are ringing that bustling family holiday gatherings will represent a risk not just to the immediate attendees but to their communities. This is a highly infectious disease.

In Belgium, the prime minister even invokes a stark and graphic metaphor. Leave empty chairs around the dining table this year or risk having permanently empty chairs in years to come.

That is a gruesome image. But it also is relevant because the pandemic has regained velocity in much of the US and in parts of Europe.

That is why we are in for sedate, subdued, low key holiday festivities. There is no other sanity in our present moment.

But think of the bright side – 2021 is coming and with it a vaccine that may be “widely available” by mid year and will probably be in every arm in the US that wants it by Q4.

Which puts us squarely in the holiday season.

Tell me that you are planning a holiday 2020 blowout and I will tell you it is a terrible idea.

But tell me you are planning a 2021 celebration that may be your life’s best and I will ask for an invite.

That’s a celebration we will all deserve because we will have been through so much getting there and when we do get there, a year from now, it’s time to pop the good champagne and yell a merry cheers. I know I will.

By Robert McGarvey

By Robert McGarvey

If you don’t know where your frequent flier miles and hotel loyalty points are the bad news is that cyber crooks just may. That’s because, with most of us traveling so much less in the last eight months, we have become less focused on our loyalty totals – why check a balance that is inert? Add in the deep economic hits suffered by travel providers in the pandemic, and resulting slashing of staffing, and a perfect invitation was in effect extended to cyber criminals.  Call this invitation accepted.

According to research out of Akamai, “Between July 2018 and June 2020, Akamai observed more than 100 billion credential stuffing attacks, and more than 63 billion of them targeted retail, travel, and hospitality.”

Chew on the magnitude of this attack. Billions and billions of them! And Akamai numbers show the number of attacks increasing in the pandemic.

Criminals have gotten smarter about how to cash in on the full value of our points and miles. Used to be a cyber criminal did a simple smash and grab once he/she had log-in credentials.  He’d empty the points balance, cashing them in for readily monetized goods (Apple gear has been a favorite).  

Today’s hacker might still do that. But many are seeking out other ways to cash in on our loyalty.

Nowadays that hacker is likely to monetize the information about you that they steal in the hack. Usually there’s a name, an address, a phone number, possibly a passport number, often a credit card number, etc.  Said Steve Ragan, an Akamai security researcher, “Retail and loyalty profiles contain a smorgasbord of personal information, and in some cases financial information too. All of this data can be collected, sold, and traded or even compiled for extensive profiles that can later be used for crimes such as identity theft.”

Back up a second. In case you stumbled over the infosec geek term “credential stuffing” this is where where crooks try a log in that’s been stolen from one site – say from the Starwood breach where some 500 million guest records were stolen – at random sites.  Computers do the work. Crooks collect the winnings when the log ins work at more sites and often they do because we all know we shouldn’t reuse log ins but we all do anyway.

In recent years criminals have harvested bounties of credentials from various programs, Hilton, United, and American included as well as Starwood. There are mountains of travel related data already in the hands of cyber criminals. And the crooks are credential stuffing at a pace that has never before been seen.

Today, too, there are still more ways to monetize our data.  For instance: Now some hackers prefer to sell your account to another crook, inclusive of any miles or points in the kitty. Reports Akamai, “Hotel rewards are also popular, including those from major chains like Hilton. Accounts are sorted and sold based on their point value.”  How much? In its report Akamai shows an ad where one seller offers Hilton accounts with at least 10,000 points for $3 apiece and accounts with 40,000 points sell for $40.  Accounts with million point balances fetch $850.

Still others actually sell travel on the dark web. Noted Akamai: “Many of the travel listings on the darknet charge a percentage of the overall trip cost, anywhere from 25% to 35% — meaning a $2,000 booking on a well-known travel comparison/booking website would cost about $700 on the darknet.”

You’ve gotten the message: your loyalty stashes are in peril?  

Here’s what you need to do: Right now, go to your top travel loyalty sites and change the passwords. Use a password manager – I use Google’s but there are many – to generate a long, random string. And use a different password at every site. Then set a reminder in your calendar to change the passwords every three or six months.

That isn’t perfect protection. But it is pretty good.  

What about accounts with trivial balances? I ignore them for now. I have 2, or is it 3, nights in the Hilton program from a meeting I attended but I installed the app only because I have status via Amex and the status got me a few perks.  On a very slow day I will log in and use a random password.  But it’s not a priority.

The takeaway here is that our loyalty miles and points are under attack.  It’s up to us to protect them – and if we don’t they just may be stolen when next we look for them.

By Robert McGarvey

In a very few minutes—under three—on a slow Friday afternoon, I opened and funded a banking account with Lili. Lili is a startup that has won a lot of buzz (plus $25 million in venture funding) in the space of a few short months.

Read all about Lili here and here and here.

Finextra describes Lili this way: “Lili is one of several startups targeting a huge and fast-growing market: there are nearly 60 million freelancers in the US and Covid-19 has seen 12% of the workforce going solo this year.

Lili is offering these people an app that combines banking services with real-time expense tracking, tax tools, and financial insights.”

Lili, it is said, already has 100,000 users.

Frictionless Banking Is Today’s Must-Have

Think frictionless, niche, and something that sets out to solve an obvious problem (tracking tax deductible expenses). Lili wants not to be all things to all people, but to target a specific segment with a problem. That is brilliant new business development strategizing.

Keep reading at the CU2.0 blog