Via Frequent Flyer Bonuses, Alitalia is offering a status match program through October 31. Status lasts through the end of the year and details are here.

In addition to a status match, you get 20,000 bonus miles after reaching 20,000 qualifying miles. And they’re throwing in reduced elite requalification criteria: 10,000 qualifying miles for the initial tier, 25,000 for mid-tier, and 40,000 for top-tier.

If you aren’t already a member but are looking to take advantage of this promo, check out their member-get-member offer and find a buddy to refer you.

Lucky discusses this morning the documents he prepares to take with him on his international travels.

In sum:

• itineraries and receipts with seat assignments and operating carriers’ record locators (the ticketing carrier will give youa reservation number but each operating carrier will have their own, it’s useful because that’s the number that will let the airline pull up your reservation, you call each airline individually to get that number and usually call each airline indiivdually to get seat assignments or at least the best seats). 

• hotel reservations and printed copies of any hotel correspondence. I’ve more than once arrived and a hotel couldn’t immediately find my resevation, back in April it was my fault as I had booked for the wrong date! But the printed confirmation let me through the relevant security door at the airport and onto the airport hotel’s shuttle, and also let us sort out what I had done when I got to the checkin desk and they didn’t know who I was. I’ve also been promised upgrades and gotten it in writing, only not to be assigned that room when I arrived, and the printed correspondence saved the day. Like Lucky I find it useful to have printouts so I can just hand the page over rather than booting up my compuer and showing it on the screen or futzing around for a printer.  

• copy of your passport, which you keep in a place separate from your passport 

• any rules you may need such as for lounge access, for an upcoming trip for instance I’m currently scheduled to arrive in first class and depart internationally on a short flight in business and I have an email from the airline telling me that I do have first class lounge access during my layover. I can hand over the correspondence if I get any pushback at the lounge, and I really do want to use the first class rather than business class showers in this case, there’s a huge difference.

All makes good sense, and pretty much matches my own practice. I guess the overall question, though, is how do you prepare for an international trip? And how does that differ from a domestic trip?

For each trip I have planned I make an Outlook folder. Active upcoming trips are easily viewable. Past trips are archived, sometimes I do find it useful to go back to an old trip to find email correspondence to share with others or to find contact information for a tour company. A standard domestic trip usually has my flight itinerary, hotel reservation, and car rental reservation. That may be it, and I probably don’t even print those things.

A quick international trip is much the same, I have an upcoming Europe trip of just about four days where I have just flight and hotel, and I know how to navigate the city without car. I do have some notes and copied Flyertalk threads that will be useful to refer back to for dining suggestions, but I’ll manage those once I’m across the pond.

But a two-week international trip involving multiple cities is a different matter. I might have half a dozen or more different hotel reservations, bookings for car services, plans for a tour and a cooking class, and instructions on how to acquire train tickets. It all needs to stay organized. And as much as I hate paper generally, electronic and paper are the way to go.

Probably the biggest single item I suggest adding to the list of predeparture printed items is the name and address of each hotel in the local language rather than English. If I don’t speak the langauge I don’t want to count on my ability to find the property. I don’t want to count on an airport cab dispatcher to understand my English and communicate to the driver in the local language. I want to be able to hand the cab driver a piece of paper they’ll understand, which will get me to the hotel. I usually email the hotel asking for this, and it’s never a problem.

In addition to printed items, my packing is slightly different for a long international trip than a short domestic one.

Standard domestic items include a wireless pocket router (in case my hotel has only wired internet) and power adapters for laptop and phone,
Internationally I’ll add an empower adapter if the planes I may be flying have seat power that requires it, power adapters so I can use my US devices wherever I am, an unlocked GSM phone where I’ll use either a local SIM card or a cheap European SIM, and a small medicine kit. One of my old ANA first class amenity bags stores single dose packs of tylenol, pepto bismol, cold medicines, etc.

What are your standard packing items, short domestic hop or international?

Lucky writes about his experience opening a Chase checking account for 25,000 miles. It just takes a $100 deposit and 5 debit card transactions run as a credit card (i.e. without use of a PIN) to earn the 25,000 miles. Next he’ll go open a business account the same way, bam 50,000 miles.  And this can be done each year, apparently.

Believe it or not I still haven’t done this, I don’t have a nearby Chase branch although presumably I could go into one and open an account when I’m in a city where a physical branch is convenient. Sadly this is not a promotion for an online account.

I’ve made some oblique references (and soe less oblique ones, it was my #2 way to earn miles here) to earning miles by funding Citibank online checking and savings accounts with a credit card. Many times in the past I’ve been asked not to post about the deal by folks who were benefiting from it, the theory was that extra exposure was likely to kill it because the deal was just so good and not sustainable.

Citibank has been cracking down on many of the people taking uber advantage, and I suspect many of the folks who used to email me asking not to write about it are no longer able to use it themselves. Hence when I’ve written briefly about it on the blog here in the past few months I haven’t gotten such nastygrams.

And in fact there is now a thread on Flyertalk openly discussing the offer, and I’ve been a major contributor to that thread. There hasn’t been a pile-on of “please do not discuss this in the open or you’ll kill it” postings. Thus I’m pretty confident the only time banking churners have been put out to pasture by Citi. (Although I’m actually surprised that the thread hasn’t gotten more discussion than it has, considering how lucrative the technique actually is.)

Still, this is a great opportunity so I wasnted to describe it in greater depth for my readers while it’s still possible to take advantage of.

Several banks let you fund your initial deposit into an account opened online using a credit card. Usually they cap the amountof the deposit at $1000 or $2000. Citibank does not cap the amount of your initial deposit funded by a credit card. Thus your only limit is your credit limit.

They don’t accept American Express, only Visa and Mastercard. It doesn’t have to be a Citibank Visa or Mastercard, any will do.

They code the charge as a purchase, rather than a cash advance. This is crucial. Cash advances generally do not earn miles (or cash back, depending on the card), and come with hefty fees. They do warn on their funding form about the possibility of the charge being treated as a cash advance, so just to be 100% safe I set the cash advance limit of my credit card that I’m using to zero. And I print out online where it shows that cash advance limit as zero. That way if the coding of charges should ever change then the charge would simply be rejected. And in the extreme if it was accepted in spite of the limit being zero I have it in writing that it should not have been approved in order to argue later. But this has never been a problem.

So you open an online checking or savings account, and during the process there is an option to fund the account with a credit card. It’s kind of hidden, but they provide a form to fax in with your credit card information. (If you do not find the form, e-mail me and I can send it to you.) The form strangely does not have a place to fill in your newly opened account information, and this is necessary, so make sure to write it somewhere on the form. And then fax in the form.

Very large charges are sometimes flagged as potential fraud. Twice I’ve opened a Citi checking account using a Chase-issued credit card and my $50,000 deposit was flagged by their security group. I had to call Chase and tell them the charge was ok, and ask them to clear it. (Once it was flagged twice, and they had to give it the ‘highest priority’). Then I had to call Citi and ask them to run the charge again.

Once they run the charge, you earn the miles for the charge and you have a big deposit in your account. You then use the funds in that account to pay off your credit card.

If you’ve opened a Citi checking account, you can just write a check to your credit card company. But be aware that Citi requires you to activate your checks once you receive them otherwise the checks will be returned. Similarly, until you activeate your checks any payment initiated through your credit card company’s website may be rejected. Personally I get around waiting for the checks by just using Citi’s online billpay feature. They limit you to paying a single merchant $10,000 per day so I space the payments out $10,000 per day for several days, making sure to start this early enough that all the payments are in before the due date. Note that in the meantime if you sign up for an intereat-earning account you are earning interest on this free money. Some people even move the money out to a higher interest account in the meantime, but the short duration tends not to make it worth my trouble. I do tend to time my account openings so that the charge hits my credit card right after a billing cycle closes, in order to maximize the amount of time the free money sits in my account.

Bottom-line is rinse, repeat, and you earn a whole lot of miles. There are varying reports of whether Citi even pulls a credit report on customers when opening new online checking accounts, alhtough it’s hard to imagine that they do not.

How many times can you do this? Results vary. There are some people who have done it as many as ten times that I’m aware of, but Citi has finally started cracking down. Some people are being told “three times in a lifetime” while others space out their account openings and manage to open six or seven perhaps by flying under Citi’s radar. The number of times you can successfully do this is unclear.

Note that Citi accounts often come with fees if you do not maintain a sufficient balance. So you’ll want to close the account quickly rather than keeping it open, unless you’re going for an account opening bonus. The most recent Citi checking that I opened simply required two direct deposits per month in order to avoid fees. I decided to keep that account open, and I shoot over two $1 paypal transfers per month and that works for my direct deposits to avoid fees.

It is possible to have more than one Citi checking open at the same time, so you don’t even have to cancel.

Questions? Anything unclear? Ask away in the comments and I will do my best to answer. Consider getting in on this deal if you have a nice high credit limit on a cashback or mileage-earning Visa or Mastercard, who knows how long this opportunity will last before Citi cuts it out entirely or handicaps it further.

This must be a mistake, but take advantage of it while it lasts.  The full fare business class roundtrip is $2581+tax, the discounted business is $148? Perhaps this was intended as $1480.  (For comparison the discounted Mexicana business class fare departing San Francisco is $2865, from Chicago $2763, and from Newark $2731.)

It’s a non-refundable fare, but without date or time restrictions, the only issue is that discounted business inventory needs for be available for the flights in question.

This won’t last, jump on it if interested.

Frugal Travel Guy‘s post for today was titled “Which Credit Cards for the US MInt Deal?” but it’s really a generalized comparison of credit cards. He likes the Starwood American Express and Citibank American Express Platinum which earns Thank You Points the best.

Both are respectable choices. I recommend the Starwood American Express in my much larger discussion of how to choose the best credit card. I can’t really complain about the 5 points per dollar from the Citi Platinum Amex though I long for the days when those points were worth three cents apiece (or the days when they were worth even more…) rather than just one.

Rick both recognizes and dismisses the Asiana American Express, an explanation of which I provided recently — 2 points per dollar on all spend, and a mileage-based chart that it either a great value (e.g. business class trips under 10,000 flown miles) or a terrible one (longer first class awards). From the East Coast of the U.S. to most points in Europe roundtrip in business class would take only $40,000 in spending on this card. Try matching that with any other credit card!

An explanation of the Presidential Dollar Coins Deal, which is referenced in the title of the Frugal Travel Guy post, can be found here. It amounts to buying money on your credit card, depositing that money into the bank, and paying off your credit card. But since these are metal coins they’re heavy to lug around and can annoy your local bank tellers.

Meanwhile, One Mile at a Time discussed today the new United co-branded cards from Chase.

So now there’s a card which gets you access to the Red Carpet Club for a $375 annual fee, a card that gets you Economy Plus for a $275 annual fee, and a card that gets you triple miles on United purchases and double miles on gas, groceries, dining, and Star Alliance purchases, for a $130 annual fee.

It’s now cheaper to buy Red Carpet Club access by getting a Visa than to pay for a membership, even with the discounts accruing on paid memberships for a 100,000 mile flyer.

Here’s also a paper on advanced credit card churning techniques. It desribes the timeframe in which ‘hard pulls’ such as new credit card applications affect your credit score, how ‘bumpage’ works and with which credit reporting agencies (requesting soft pulls of your own credit report every day to ‘bump’ the hard pulls from new applications off your repot), and more.

I’ve never been big on the balance transfer game or freezing individual credit reports myself. But I’ve been a modest churner for many years, and have benefited immensely from it. In particular, I love churning Citibank American AAdvantage card both because they have long permitted earning the signup bonus for the same card many many times and because all miles earned in the AAdvantage program regardless of source count towards million miler lifetime elite status.

I described credit card churning generally, and discussed the mileage cards it works with and those it does not, in my longer discussion of the best credit cards.