The best portal hack out there

Good morning from Kolkata, the food capital of India! 🇮🇳

I’m hanging out with some very cool friends who I originally met back in 2024 at a Daily Drop meetup!

I need more friends, so let me know if you live somewhere in the world and want to meet up, too!

Anyway, enough small talk. Let’s get into the good stuff:

• 🤓 Travel Trivia Tuesday

• 🛒 The best portal hack out there

• ✈️ United Mile Play is back, baby

• 🌎 Travel Trivia Reveal

🤓 Travel Trivia Tuesday

The answer is chillin’ near the bottom of today’s newsletter… keep scrolling.👇

🛒 The best portal hack out there

As you hopefully know by now, portals are one of the best and easiest ways to rack up tons of points from money you already spend.

Sometimes, these portals offer cash back. And sometimes, they offer extremely valuable transferable points.

One of those options is earning Bilt Rewards from using the Rakuten shopping portal.

Don’t forget that ANYONE can sign up for a free Bilt account, no credit card required.

Then, when you shop through Rakuten, your cash back can be converted into Bilt points.

The reason this is so valuable is that Bilt has valuable transfer partners that most other banks don’t have, like:

• World of Hyatt

• Alaska Airlines Atmos Rewards

• Emirates Airlines (with a 1:1 transfer ratio)

But here’s where things get saucy…

If you’re new to Rakuten, you can use our link to sign up and get $50 back after you spend $50.

Because of math, that’s $50 for free. Which is very good.

But also, that $50 can be converted into 5,000 Bilt Rewards points, which you could use in a number of tasty ways:

1. Book a free Delta flight

You could transfer those 5,000 free points to Flying Blue and book a short domestic flight on Delta.

2. Book a free night at tons of different Hyatt hotels

Hyatt hotels start at just 3,500 points per night for a Category 1 property. But even when the room isn’t at off-peak pricing, it still costs just 5,000 points.

This applies to various hotels in Asia, Central America, North America, and even Europe:

3. Book a domestic flight on American Airlines

Yup, that’s right! You could transfer those 5,000 points to Alaska Airlines, then use them to book domestic flights on either Alaska or American for as few as 4,500 miles each way:

So here’s the bottom line:

In general, Rakuten is a great way to rack up cash back or points. The fact that Bilt is now a partner makes that even more true…

… and the fact that you can get 5,000 Bilt points for basically free is very exciting.

The fine print

Right now, the ratio of cash back to Bilt points is good. Basically, $10 of cash back will yield 1,000 Bilt points.

But that’s only true until May. After the May Rakuten payout (Rakuten cashes out your points once every few months), that ratio will go down. 💔

So if you’ve got shopping to do, I highly recommend you take this limited-time opportunity to turn your rewards into Bilt points.

✈️ United Mile Play is back, baby

United Airlines is back with one of my favorite recurring promos. It’s called Mile Play, and it’s basically a way to fly with United and earn some extra miles.

The offers are different for everyone, so you just need to go to this page, enter your United number, and see what’s available.

My offer is actually pretty solid. Here’s the deal:

• Book and fly two trips

• Earn 14,000 bonus United miles

• Must be completed by March 9

• Each trip must cost $225

This is definitely the highest required spend I’ve seen on a Mile Play offer, but also by far the highest mileage payout.

You could leverage this for some pricier domestic premium flights.

For example, this flight from Newark to Chicago costs $278 in first class – not bad for almost three hours, and the perfect price to trigger this offer.

Do a flight like this twice, and you’ll earn those extra 14,000 miles PLUS miles you earn from the flight itself AND credit card points.

I recommend using a card like the Chase Sapphire Reserve® (which earns 4x on flights) or a United co-branded card when booking flights like this.

But there are other creative ways you could make use of this offer…

In fact, I live in Asia, and I even have ways to use this without leaving Asia. 😏

United has cool fifth freedom routes around the world where this would still apply. For example, they fly from Saigon to Hong Kong, which costs just $326 most days… in lie-flat Polaris business class.

So the bottom line is this:

Don’t go too far out of your way to jump on these offers, and definitely don’t spend much more than you normally would.

But if you can rearrange your plans to make this offer work, you could end up with a tasty stack of extra bonus miles.

🌎 Travel Trivia Reveal

We asked you which city was visited the most last year…

And if you picked Bangkok, congratulations!

You’re either with it… or a great guesser. 🙂

According to Euromonitor International’s Top 100 City Destinations Index 2025, Bangkok had 30 million international arrivals last year alone.

That’s more visitors than Paris, London, or Tokyo.

It checks out though, honestly. Bangkok is the main gateway to Thailand, meaning tons of people land there first before heading off to other spots, and many stick around for a few nights because the city is pretty freaking cool.

And with budget travel becoming more and more popular, it checks a lot of other boxes people care about right now, such as great infrastructure, easy transportation (Skytrain, subway, buses, river ferries), and an insane food scene.

Add in temples like the Grand Palace and Wat Arun, massive markets, floating vendors, and shiny new luxury hotels, and it’s not hard to see the appeal.

The study also found that cities are shifting focus from more tourists to better tourists (think people who stay longer, spend more, and travel responsibly).

Rounding out the top 10 were Hong Kong, London, Macau, Istanbul, Dubai, Mecca, Antalya, Paris, and Kuala Lumpur.

Read more about last year’s most popular cities in this article. 😌

That’s it. We’re done for the day, my friends.

I’m going to get back to eating delicious food here in India and praying to the food gods that none of it permanently destroys my stomach.

See you tomorrow,

22.5744° N, 88.3629° E

With contributions by McKay Moffitt