Thank you everyone for your participation in the recent giveaway and once again congratulations to the winner!
The feedback given was very valuable and I want to take some time to address some of the points raised about what you can expect to see more of here-
1. Reviews, reviews, reviews!
A lot of people have asked for more hotel and flight reviews (in particular airlines other than SQ). I hear you! I’m going to announce something exciting soon and will update this as soon as I do.
On the hotels side, I’ll try and cover as many different hotels as I can on my upcoming business trips.ย Fred is doing an amazing job of churning out hotel reviews from his travels, so if you haven’t had a chance to do so you should definitely check out some of his work
2. Tips for maximising spend onย weddings/banquets/bridal studios
Our guestwriter Jeriel has covered this beforeย and I think it’s well worth another read. That said, I realise the optimum solution is aย constantly changing thing, so it would be good to re-examine this a few months down the road.
3. Manufactured spending ideas
Ah, manufactured spend. You know, the first rule of manufactured spend in Singapore is you don’t talk about manufactured spend in Singapore.
The only manufactured spending opportunity I ever knew of was a time when Qoo10 let you use your credit card to top up your account and simultaneously let you transfer your Qoo10 balance to a bank account with no fee. That has since been shut down. Other suggestions include things like Oanada, but I’ve never seriously investigated any of them.
I often wonder whether MS even exists in Singapore, given how tightly the T&C of banks are written. The best I could find was an article dated June 2015, but have a read anyway
4. More coverage on award chart sweetspots
This is a great idea. I’ve already done this for SQ’sย star alliance partner award chart, but the world is bigger than just SQ and it would be interesting to explore this for Cathay (now that I realise how much more valuable its miles are than SQs)
I’ll probably do something on Cathay not too far down the road, but I think Lifemiles definitely deserves some coverage too (Spoiler: Singapore to Honolulu in business class for US$1,400 round trip? Yes please)
5. Finish the credit card omnibus
The omnibus is a monster of a thing to write because each bank has ย many credit cards to offer. Andย because the omnibusย seeks to profile (at least briefly) every card issued in Singapore, it’s difficult to ensure it stays up to date.
But I’m glad you find it useful, and I’ve just completed the AMEX editionย of the omnibus. Still to come- HSBC and Standard Chartered.
Someone offeredย a great idea to create a wiki page where people can update new details on credit cards as and when they become available. There’s definitely some merit in this but I need to give the implementation some thought. Stay tuned though.
There were many other suggestions I don’t have time to go into detail above but I want to address anyway since you did make the time to take part
- best cards for petrol spending-ย quick answer, for petrol I think the best card is the one with the biggest discount. Discounts can go as high as 20% and I think that’s better than whatever miles you would have earned otherwise
- fares/deal hunting-ย honest answer, I think others can do this much better than me. Try reading the deals section on the Flyertalk forums. Those guys are very fast to point out mistake fares/fat finger deals. I’ll be sure to post if I see anything great, but for speed nothing beats the hive mind.
- coverage on overseas credit cards– this is a bit difficult to do right now because of writing capacity constraints, but with a little bit of additional support The Milelion could cover more of South East Asia. Definitely something for the medium to long term
- private forum for sensitive topics-ย I completely understand why people would wantย to keep certain deals/tricks secret. But The Milelion is about sharing knowledge. You’re always welcome to use the questions link on the main page if there’s something you want to ask privately, or you can try PM-ing the laojiaos on Flyertalk/HWZ
- tasteful naked photos of the milelion-ย i think we need a private forum for sensitive topics
Is there anything else you’d like to see? Just let me know!
cover photo by erwinsoo
Thank you Aaron for everything so far! What do you think of the Citi Prestige card? Also side note for petrols, I’m using Shell, which ties up with HSBC/Citibank. How it works is that by using the Right Card, aka Citi/HSBC, you’ll get the basic 14% discount. to make up the “19-20%” which is consistent through the stations/cards, the remaining 6% is based on the card’s cash back. In Citi Cashback(dividends), it’s the 8% cash back capped at $25/mth, provided you hit the min spend of $888/month. In HSBC Visa Platinum, it’s 3% or 5% dependent on whether you hit… Read more »
@sh –
IMO, CitiPrestige gives just about the best benefits in the Citi corral, that is if one is able to meet its qualifying requirements.
You get a fair bit from it including airmiles, a hotel voucher, unlimited access to the priority lounges, airport-home transfers, concierge services. These should more than offset the $535 annual fee.
Hi Aaron,
Quite enjoy your blog, and really appreciate the selflessness and the effort you and your comrades make for our reading pleasure.
The unfortunate thing for Singapore is that the market for credit cards and air transport market is not broad and deep enough, leading to benefits that pale in comparison to those in the US.
Cheers,
JT
Hai Aaron,
For MS i just realize for 3.9% additional fee can use paypal and for 2.95% can use ipaymy.com . Just wonder for 3.9% you will pay 0.975 cents per miles, lower than purchasing via CC annual fee 1.92-2 cents per mile. What do you think ?
someone mentioned this to me before but i never really investigated. i can see how it would work, but i wonder if ipaymy will shutdown accounts if it can be shown you’re paying yourself. then there’s the tax issue- does ipaymy report rental income to the government? will the government consider that taxable income?
IPayMy cant pay to your own account, i already test to pay to my own account use small number, they asked the account name, i told them that this is test payment and they said for test is OK but for next payment i must pay to different account owner , so you need to make agreement with someone for this.
yeah but my question is: are there income tax obligations? if you are saying that this is a payment in the nature of rental, then IRAS would be within its rights to tax that as rental income.
Hi Aaron,
Would love to hear more redemption stories using Asia miles. Singapore airlines redemption has not been valuable these days with value of less than 1 cent for economy flights to certain cities.
to be honest i’ve not done an asiamiles redemption before. but i’ve got about 100k dbs points sitting in my account now and i feel tempted to convert to asiamiles. will post when that happens. and research the award chart somemore of course
Hi Aaron,
What do you think is the best card to use if I pump petrol at Caltex apart from the UOB one?
if you’re not going for the credit card discount then it just becomes like any general spending activity. 1.4 miles being the benchmark offered by uob+anz travel
If he isn’t going for the station discount and he has the maybank world MC, he shd be using that card.