Travelogues

We visited Mauritius for a 9 day trip in 2022. To reach Mauritius, we flew Vistara and Air Mauritius business class from India. Booking We booked all the flights via Aeroplan. This is due to its partnership with both Vistara and Air Mauritius which allowed us to stitch the journey together from Delhi to Mauritius and from Mauritius to Amritsar on return. There can be issues with flying with partners though, as we ran into, which I will get to in another post. If we had needed to fly Air India as part of the journey, we would have had that option via Air Canada as well, because both Air India and Air Canada are part of the Star Alliance. Air Canada has gone out of its way to form partnerships with airlines around the world outside of Star Alliance, which makes its points very attractive because of their ability to be used over a huge network of airlines. We booked Business Class service each way for a total of 45,000 Aeroplan points + CAD 22.20 (taxes) + CAD 39 (partner booking fee)...

giftcards.com is one of the few websites that sells Visa and Mastercard e-Gift cards online. It has been useful to me multiple times to meet spending offers, buying discounted gift cards and earning tons of cashback and miles via portals while doing so. They charge a high fee of $5.95 for these gift cards. If you buy the maximum of $250 per gift card, then the fee comes out to 2.4% per dollar spent. What makes this still interesting is when they either run discount offers, or when they partner with online portals to give cashback or miles on these purchases. For example, they used to partner with AAdvantageeShopping portal to earn 3 AA loyalty points & miles on these purchases, which equated to buying AA loyalty points & miles at .8 cent per mile before even considering the rewards earned on the credit card used for the purchase. Alas, it is no longer a partner of AA's portal. But some other shopping portals, like the CapitalOne card offers and CapitalOne shopping portal, h...