Travel

by Robert McGarvey

Regular readers know I have long been gnashing my teeth over what has emerged as the annual question: Amex Plat, to renew or no?  

My most recent vote is yes, I will continue to shell out $550/year, even tho I have not been in a Centurion Club in a year and that had become my primary touch point with American Express. But in an era where I am not flying – and do not envision travel for perhaps another three months and maybe longer – I began looking for new perks from the Platinum card and Amex has responded.

Currently on the docket is a credit of up to $30/monthly on PayPal charges billed to the card. That replaces 2020 credits for streaming video and cell phones that expired at year-end. In my case, it is paying for my New York Times subscription and most of what I pay Netflix.

There’s also a continuing $15/monthly Uber credit (also applicable to Uber eats, which is how I have used it).

There also are miscellaneous and unexpected credits such as $100 annually ($50 max, every six months) against Saks charges.

There’s a similar $100 credit against HomeDepot charges (online only).  $100 at BestBuy (online only). And literally 90+ more that pop up on my screen.

But now Amex has rolled out a new perk for Plat that in effect offers cellphone protection to cardholders who bill their monthly wireless charges to Amex.  Similar protection costs $10 to $12 per month via Apple and various other carriers and retailers.

It takes effect April 1.

Here’s what it delivers: “Reimbursement for the actual cost to repair or replace a Stolen or damaged Eligible Cellular Wireless Telephone.”

There’s some fine print but surprisingly little. The coverage is reasonably generous:  “The maximum liability is $ 800, per claim, per Eligible Card Account. Each claim is subject to a $ 50 deductible. Coverage is limited to two (2) claims per Eligible Card Account per 12 month period.”

The only curious exclusion I noted is this: “Eligible Cellular Wireless Telephones that are lost or Mysterious Disappearance.”  That’s something of a bummer because I know many who have lost a phone in a taxi or an Uber.

But I have never lost a phone so I am personally unbothered by this exclusion.

Mind you, I have two phones that will fall under this protective umbrella on April 1: a presently uncovered Pixel 3 and an iPhone 8.  So I call this a good deal worth perhaps $20/monthly to me.

Add that to the PayPal credit and the annual $200 Uber credit and the card, as the cliche goes, pays for itself.  And it truly does.  

Do note that Amex Plat continues to offer a “purchase protection plan” that essentially gives you 90 days free from worry after buying something with the card.

There’s a $10,000 cap on the purchase amount.

Also still in effect is the American Express Extended Warranty Coverage which adds a year to the standard manufacturer’s warranty for most items purchased with the card. That’s useful because many warranties run just a year, so this doubles the coverage at no cost to the cardholder. Personally I have used it a couple times – with computers – and will say I was pleased with the service.

Yes, many cards offer similar extended warranty coverage – the only network without this perk is Discover, which had it but discontinued it – so the Amex plan isn’t unique. But I know from experience it does work.

Look, I understand: in many ways I too would prefer to be regularly stopping into the Centurion (and there now is one in my home airport, Phoenix, that I have yet to step into).

But I am glad to see Amex tossing new perks our way, to keep us in the ranks despite the absence of the travel perks that just about all of us signed up for Platinum to get.

Stay tuned. There will be more perks.  

And then, poof, they will vanish when most of us are back on the road again in perhaps six to 12 months.  Will we then kvetch about this absence?

I think I will when the cellphone protection times out.  What about you?

by Robert McGarvey

First came the jab in my upper arm and ten days later came my startling wish that a meeting agenda I was looking at – a virtual meeting of course – was for an in person meeting.  I had not had such a thought in a year and in that year 500,000+ of us have died from Covid-19, I myself had the disease (mercifully, a milder form), and just about everything I do outside my home today is different.

But there I caught myself sniffing at the inadequacies of some virtual meeting formats and thinking that I was ready to resume in-person meetings. Thinking that was triggered by my having gotten the first Pfizer injection on Feb. 19.  

Of course I was deep into delusion.  In point of fact, just the first Pfizer shot delivers about 90% immunity after 21 days – but note I only have 10 days and also note that other studies put the immunity from one shot nearer 50%.  Note 3: I may have some additional immunity from having had the disease – but nobody knows how much or how long it lasts (and I had it about a year ago).  

I am scheduled for the second shot on March 12 and you can bet that morning is blocked off on my calendar.  

Even so, a question popped into my mind: will I start traveling come April 1 (fool’s day of course)?

The full vaccination immunity for me will kick in around then.

And are others planning likewise? Are we in fact on the cusp of a boom in travel, including business travel?

I know many in this venue are cheering on the idea of a business travel boom.  So far I have pooh-poohed the prospect but am I now changing my mind?

Not exactly.

The more I noodled the facts knowable by me, the more my initial skepticism seemed the likeliest outcome.

I started with vaccination data.  In Maricopa County, where I live, 15% of us now have gotten at least one shot.  

Only 5% of us have gotten both shots.

What’s more, there aren’t a lot of business travelers in the vaccinated population.  Those 75 and older are the most vaccinated group – 53% of them have gotten a shot.

About half of all those vaccinated in Maricopa County are 65 or older. Again, not a group known for lots of business travel.

Might these numbers fuel a boomlet in leisure travel?  Arnie Weissman, editor at Travel Weekly, thinks as much and I am coming over to that point of view. I definitely can see seniors buying cruises, flying to visit grandchildren, and probably getting busy ticking off bucket list travels. Probably in Q2 of this year.

But I don’t see younger demographics soon joining the traveling public.

They just won’t have been jabbed.

It will take until Q3 – possibly Q4 – to have vaccinated perhaps 75% of us, which probably is as high as we will go.  

It will take years – estimates go as high as seven years – to vaccinate the world.

As for the revival of business travel, certainly not before Q4. Vaccines just won’t have been jabbed into the arms.  The majority of US business travelers are 30 to 49 and, nope, that is not a demographic that is prioritized for vaccinations. They will be lucky to have been jabbed by September.

Yes, some companies have the money to put their employees at the front of the line – but right now the negative publicity that would surely trigger outweighs the benefits of vaccinated employees. Impfneid, vaccine envy, is real.  

Gartner research found that only 11% of companies have resumed business travel or plan to in the next six months. 61% of companies told Gartner they “just don’t know” when they will resume business travel.

Odds are high, too, that even when it returns, business travel will be shrunken version of its former self as organizations realize they can function, well and more profitably, without traveling much at all. That realization is not vanishing.  

Employment lawyers indicate that many organizations are – rightly – worried about legal consequences of employee travels in a Covid era, and even if the legal issues vanish (there continue to be state and federal efforts to protect organizations from Covid triggered litigation).  But the lawyers also say that, litigation aside, many employees will simply refuse to take business trips now.  Fear of the disease is high.

My advice regarding business travel remains the same: unpack.  We ain’t going anywhere anytime soon on business. I know I’m not.

by Robert McGarvey

“It is nice to know that everybody’s kind of in their trackies, apart from those b*****s who went to Dubai.”

So Jake Quickenden moaned to the Manchester Evening News. He’s a Dancing on Ice winner and something of a UK celeb. The Dubai incident – where a bunch of British social media influencers and reality TV stars were treated to a junket and as they posted snaps of their holidays online, the British, indeed the global, public roared in angry resentment – has got to give anybody pause before jetting off to anyplace exotic.

Quickenden continued: “We’re all trying to get through this lockdown at the end of the day so that we can get on with our lives.

“People can rebuild their businesses, people can rebuild their relationships and their mates. We’re all trying to do that, apart from the ones who went to Dubai.”

Ouch.

This is flygskam – flight shaming – on steroids.

Know that Quickenden is just one of literally thousands of voices raised in condemnation of the skin flaunting influencers in Dubai and therefore you might think that the brands and locations that have tossed junkets to influencers might have pulled away from this marketing tactic, if not out of disgust at unnecessary travel in a pandemic but simply out of a survival instinct.

Which raises a key question: Are the brands that sponsor and host such events morally irresponsible?

The British influencers, by the way, traveled legally in that they claimed their Dubai hop was business travel and, for them, it was.

Sure, the British public, much of it, did not see the junket in the same light. But if you are earning money by showing some skin in the sun then, yes, such trips are business for you.

Legalities aside, however, the PR blowback was intense and negative. So it has seemed.

But appearances may deceive.

Indeed The Drum – an online pub that covers digital marketing – now reports that Dubai may not be forgotten but brands nonetheless are pushing forward with marketing plans built around influencers traveling abroad.

Is this nuts? Maybe not, says UK web design firm Rouge, which relates:

“we analysed the Instagram accounts of 50 popular social media stars who have been pictured abroad this Winter. And the results are somewhat surprising…

Likes per post for influencers abroad are up a staggering 144 percent compared to their average.” 

The Drum added: “The influencer marketing landscape is forecast to grow by 15% in 2021 to a whopping $5.86bn.”

The New Statesman elaborated: “Kaz Crossley, one of the Love Island stars currently in Dubai, gets 50k-60k likes per post on holiday versus nearly half that (roughly 30k likes) on posts she shares of herself in the UK. Another example is Molly Mae Hague – a Love Island 2019 runner-up… – who posts regularly to YouTube…. While her video stats vary, ranging anywhere between half a million and a million views, her travel vlogs in the pandemic have been some of her most successful ever. Her vlog from Crete this summer has 1.4 million views and a trip to Ibiza has a whopping 1.9 million; a trip to the Maldives in December has 1.3 million and – you guessed it – a vlog of her trip to Dubai that same month has 1.2 million.”

We – you and I – are drawn to this content and therefore the influencers and their sponsors are simply serving up what we apparently crave. As we are in lockdown – by government fiat in the UK, or simply by personal choice for many US travelers – we have our eyes on those who have broken out.

But a money question for the hosts and sponsors of these junkets: Yes, visits to influencer posts and content went up but did any visitor actually make any purchases? My guess is no, especially not among the core UK travelers who remain in lockdown.

Never confuse site visits with end results. I should have thought that part of the Marketing 101 class. But, evidently, it isn’t.

Just because we surf to a site doesn’t mean we are transacting.

Site visitor counts be damned, the Dubai campaign failed. Period.

If we ain’t buying tickets to fly there, or booking hotel rooms to stay, it’s one big fail.

by Robert McGarvey

Maybe the better question is, will business travel ever rebound?

I am on record as a skeptic about the rebounding of business travel but another day, another report or poll or prediction that the rebound is just around the bend and of course I read the stuff.

Case in point: the quarterly report from the European Travel Commission which is downright optimistic about the brisk rebound of business travel. Just what is the European Travel Commission? Here is the organization’s self description: “Established in 1948, the European Travel Commission is a unique association in the travel sector, representing the National Tourism Organisations of the countries of Europe. Its mission is to strengthen the sustainable development of Europe as a tourist destination.”

You might think that an organization of this kind is inherently biased, that is, its job is to encourage tourism and travel, not to deflate travel or even to objectively analyze the facts. However, the report was produced by Tourism Economics which is allied with Oxford Economics, an economics forecasting company with a glittering client roster.

Here are the two big bullet points made in the report:

*92% of business travellers expect their company to experience negative outcomes (e.g., reduced ability to generate new business opportunities) due to travel restrictions around Covid-19.
* Tourism Economics expect global international business spend to recover to pre-coronavirus levels by 2024, and domestic business travel by 2023.

Let’s start with the thesis that “travel restrictions” caused “negative outcomes” such as reduced new business. In logic there is a fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc which fits the claim that reduced business opportunity followed travel restrictions and, therefore, travel restrictions caused the reduced new business reduction.

Uh…I’d say that the uncertainties bred by the pandemic coupled with significant economic contraction in multiple sectors (travel, restaurants notably but also gyms, beauty parlors, spas and a long line of industries that are struggling to survive) have done more to directly reduce new business opportunities.

And I’d say coincidence is not causality.

Meantime, Tourism Economics even points to yet another reason why business travel will be years in rebounding and may never achieve the volume of 2019. The environment, i.e, Greta Thunberg. Wrote TE: “there is an increasing desire for businesses to be more conscious of their activity
within the context of environmental sustainability.”

Absolutely, Many, many companies will take hard looks at their carbon output and jet travel just is a big producer of carbon.

Add the two other factors that are leading many organizations to severely reduce business travel – cost savings and tech tools that eliminate the need to travel, i.e. Zoom, Microsoft Teams – and it’s a powerful trifecta that spells longterm struggles for the business travel sector.

TE believes otherwise. It says: “The importance of in-person meetings is supported by surveys of business travellers, such as in FCM Travel’s State of the Market report from mid-2020. The majority of respondents expected to see a phased resumption of business travel starting with domestic trips. Digital activities will not be a viable alternative to travel over time.”

The FCM data are a cornerstone of the TE argument.

That’s, shall we say, a bit of a problem.

The FCM numbers are especially Panglossian. 40% expect domestic business travel to recover in 1 to 3 months. 32% expect international travel to recover in 6 to 12 months.

Exactly who offered these forecasts? FCM tells us: “We asked our customers and clients from around the world to give us their perspective on when travel will return. Over 1600 individuals responded from multiple sectors.”

FCM is a global travel management company and therefore the people surveyed are people engaged in the business of travel. Are their forecasts analytical – or wishful thinking?

Sigh.

Imagine a beef wholesaler surveying its butcher customers on veganism: passing fad or here to stay? Would you expect accuracy from that survey?

Right now, it just is very difficult to envision a return to significant business travel this year. It is hard to see much internal business travel happening at all – that is inhouse meetings. It is hard to see longhaul travel returning this year, possibly at reduced levels in a year or three.

Will we be traveling at a 2019 pace by, say, 2024? Maybe. As TE predicts.

But if 2020 taught me anything it is that we have entered an era where we lack precedents and, absent precedents, it just is tricky to issue coherent forecasts about the future, particularly several years out.

Guesses, sure. But analytical and grounded forecasts – not so much.

TE’s guess is that business travel will be buoyant in 2024. Mine is that it won’t.

At least I know I am just guessing.

.

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?

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’

The headline in hotel trade pub Hotel News Now made me wince: “Personalization, Tight Budgets Dictate Hotel Tech in 2021.”

The sub-head was the face slap: Lack of Funds Hamper Tech Improvements.

Here’s the problem: pre-Covid most hotels I stayed in desperately need significant tech upgrades.

In the Covid era that has not changed. In fact, hotels need more tech because of Covid such as touchless, keyless room entry, apps that permit self-check in and checkout without interacting with a front desk, and – ideally – I want just about everything in the room controllable by an Alexa or Google device and, yes, I have both apps on my phone and both kinds of devices around my home.

Just as I can turn on a light, or a TV, without touching the device at home I now want that same interface in shared spaces such as a hotel room.

Sure, the Covid crisis will pass and probably by mid 2022 just about all of us who will get vaccinated will have been. Business travel will substantially pick up, possibly in Q4 2021. It will never reach the heights it achieved in 2019 but pick up it will.

But we’ll be wanting all that touchless and remote interface tools in hotels even once Covid begins its slow vanishing act because we have gotten used to them.

There goes a good chunk of hotel tech monies.

The money pile will definitely not be tall because hotel analytics company STR has officially declared 2020 the “worst year on record.” How bad is it? So bad that already bottom feeders are circling, looking to pick up failing hotels for pennies on the dollar.

Here’s the problem: there already was a stack of critical hotel tech upgrades that had seemed to be on permanent pause, despite their being needed.

Such as?

In case it has been so long since you have been in a hotel that you have forgotten the tech miseries they inflicted on us, here are the three worst.

Dramatically better hotel WiFi is necessary. Zoom recommends a minimum speed of 1.5 MBPS – but personally I want many times that.  I usually connect at around 350 MBPS – 346 this a.m. – via Google mesh and still I have recurring sound issues on Zoom.  

How fast is hotel WiFi? A website hotelwifitest says it has the data and, in a glance at Phoenix, the fastest wifi I saw was 26.9 at Aloft Airport.  The slowest was 4.6 at Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort.  

I cannot vouch for the recency of these data but it doesn’t matter. Those who have used a lot of hotel wifi don’t need a website to tell us the obvious: hotel wifi sucks.

Wifi at events and meetings is if anything worse than in-room wifi.

Remember, use VPN and your speed loss may be 10 to 30%, sometimes more.  

These speeds are abysmal.  Why so slow? Hoteliers have simply been reluctant to invest in the gear needed to up the speed – even as guests stumble with connections to everything from Netflix to Zoom to corporate servers.

We live online, in the cloud, and yet hoteliers are foisting antiquated and slow Internet at us.

It has to stop and, very probably, as travelers return to hotels one of the first things they notice is the lack of Internet speed.  Complaints will be loud, angry and possibly online (if the users can get online). Get in line and be ready to yell.

Improved cellular access is a must.  When my home WiFi goes out, I shrug, pick up a T-Mobile phone and create a hotspot (and the cellular data is free on that account).  How easy is that?

Except it often doesn’t work in hotels where bad cellular is a longstanding problem.  Here’s a 2004 New York Times article headlined: The Cellphone That Doesn’t Work at the Hotel.  

Nothing has improved in 17 years.

Often, too, the voice connections also falter. How often have you had dropped calls at a hotel?

There are fixes, they are known – but hoteliers haven’t wanted to spend the money and that was before the pandemic.  Their willingness to part with the cash for reliable cellular is no higher now.  

Maybe they still hope we will pick up their inroom phone and use it (although I cannot remember the last time I did).

So shall we must and will yell about bad cellular when we are back on the road.

Porous hotel cyber security.  I have written about this so often I have little left to say except that our personal data – everything from credit card numbers to loyalty account log ins – has been leaking out of hotels for decades.  

Hotels need to take this seriously and agree to a hotel safe data pledge.  

We need to yell, loudly and often, to remind hotels they are compromising our Internet security by not taking their own security seriously.

That’s three big tech steps forward, on top of the Covid related steps. Will hoteliers heed any of our demands?  What I can say with certainty  is that if we don’t lift our voices they will do the same exact nothing about these three tech frailties for a decade.

Speak up or suffer in silence.

By Robert McGarvey

Already I am getting hopeful emails from business traveler buddies, all of whom want me to tell them that the revival is right around the corner. Get jabbed with the vaccine and you are good to go, they believe, and therefore some have started concocting wish lists of business travel destinations they plan to visit in 2021.

Word of advice: unpack.  There is every sign that the revival of business travel will be slow.

Count me in the Bill Gates camp where the Microsoft co-founder predicted 50% of business travel will not return. The key reason: organizations have realized they can keep the business going without travel.  And it is a whole lot cheaper to close a deal via Microsoft Teams than in person. Amazon alone has pegged its 2020 savings at $1 billion.

Lots of travelers hope Gates is right because a sizable chunk of frequent fliers have always complained about the grind and there also are the many medical studies that correlate frequent travel with impaired health.  

Of course there are optimists. Delta for instance predicts a vigorous rebound in the second half of this year 

At least some experts predict 70% or more of us will be vaccinated by June.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is more cautious, predicting we may reach “herd immunity” by fall and something like “normalcy” by year end.  

The Rebound in Leisure Travel

I believe the vaccine will stimulate a rebound in leisure travel in 2021, probably by early summer.  Business travel will lag, and usually that is what happens. Leisure travel gets strong sooner, says consulting firm McKinsey.  

Drive vacations will come back first – and already are in some parts of the country. I am hearing about booms in holidays in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts and the Hudson River Valley in New York and in Phoenix, where I live, there already are strong signs of much travel to Sedona and Flagstaff.

As more of us get vaccinated, more will also climb on airplanes for leisure trips – at least domestically – before year end.  

As for international leisure travel, I am more gloomy.  A UN panel has predicted it will come back in Q3 2021 but at least as regards longhaul trips across oceans I don’t see an international leisure travel rebound until 2022.  Mainly because many of us just don’t feel safe flying, even though the evidence for Covid spread on planes is not bountiful.  

Of course, with international, there also are the ever changing restrictions on travelers and entry.  

Those reasons are why many believe international travel just isn’t on for 2021, not even for leisure.  

Casting Gloom on 2021 Business Travel

As for business travel, I do see it rebounding in 2021 but I see this as a fractionalized recovery. Some kinds of travel will rebound much faster. Some may never come back (remember Gates!).

As for what won’t come back, I see instructional events – where employees are briefed on the how to of using a new software tool, for instance.  Pretty much all of that travel will be nixed because it is easier and much cheaper to learn at one’s desk.

I see many sales calls no longer happening in person – preliminary calls can just as well be done over Zoom. Instead of spending a day traveling to Pittsburgh, and home, and in a 30 minute meeting, a salesperson can do a quick Zoom call – and maybe five more in the time that day trip would have consumed.  It just has not been a good use of time.

I see many “getting to know each other” trips stopped.  We have all done these – where an employer or client packs us on a plane to Midland, Texas and we have a day of meetings with local executives and, yes, we can now associate a face with a name. But so what?  I have done too many of these trips and, in retrospect, think just about all could have been done as effectively (and cheaper and more time efficiently) via Zoom.

You are right – low cost, easy to use video calling did not exist when I made most of those trips. But that’s what has changed. Technology has enabled behavior changes.  

Business Travel That Is Coming Back in 2021

Some business travel will pick up, certainly by Q3 when many employees will have been vaccinated and employers can put them on the road again with some confidence they will stay healthy.

And with some kinds of travel, employees will see the reason to be on the road.

Like what?

*Service calls.  When a customer needs help – the damn widget just isn’t working! – and online troubleshooting hasn’t worked, a body will be put on a plane to fix it.

*Buzzy, big events. We like them, we meet useful people, we build personal neworks, we may even meet possible new clients.  Send me to a meeting of 1000 in Las Vegas and count me as happy to go.  The big shows are energizing. I see good years ahead for everything from CES to Money2020 and Finovate. Maybe not 2021, but definitely 2022.

*Sales closings.  The preliminary work will shift to video calls but when a signature is wanted on the line that is dotted, an in-person call will happen.  

Are there other kinds of business trips that will rebound later in 2021? Sure. The year will not be a wipe out, as the last nine months of 2020 were for many of us.  But we – companies and workers alike – learned much in that forced break from business travel.  We will return to what is needed.

But what can be eliminated will be. Just remember, historically business trips got approved if they complied with organizational travel policies (class of air, grade of hotel, etc).  In 2021 there now is a wholly new question: Is the trip necessary – can the goal be achieved with zero travel?  That changes the equation. And we all will travel a lot less.

*

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.