Booked the two hotels for the European trip in December.
Starts relatively cheap with three nights at H10 Waterloo London via Rocketmiles taking advantage of their Asia Miles promo. This stay will earn me 9000 miles instead of the usual 6000 miles from this site and cost me around S$1056. London hotels are NOT cheap at all.
The tour will end with the final two nights at The Park Tower Knightsbridge London, and in one of their Panoramic Rooms too! This differs from my usual practice of going for the cheapest or second cheapest rooms in every hotel I stay, mainly because the reviews are great about the view from those rooms. This was booked directly through SPG so I'm getting 4pm late check-out in exchange for no major promotion other than the 10% for it being prepaid and cannot be cancelled. This stay costs me 664GBP.
Hope these are worth it.
Will check out the Korean hotels soon. First, the flights though. The HSBC card gives me a small discount on my favourite airline, CX, but the welcome bonus miles just came in so it's time to cancel it. However, I'm also thinking about waiting a little just to see if there will be better promotions in the next few months since the HSBC card offer ends next year.
Haven't been swimming this week so far and it's already Thursday. Got to do something but I'm already reverted back to my slacker mode. Just can't pull myself off this chair.
Maybe I'll cook. She loved my bacon fried rice the other day when we stayed over at her friend's place while another friend baked a cake using the oven there. I only used the leftover rice from our dinner, the second packet of streaky bacon that he bought, 3 of the 6 yolks they removed from their eggs to make their cake, the last whole egg that was brought over for the cake that wasn't used in the end, and the soy sauce in the fridge.
It's just bacon fried rice with mostly leftover ingredients. I wasn't even sure it was completely edible, and it definitely wasn't hygienic. The yolks had been left in the open for 6 hours and the rice 7 hours. By the time I took the yolks, the raw broken yolk that covered the surface had already hardened into a cheese-like layer.
That was partly why it had to be fried rice, and I cooked it a little more than necessary. The only way I could cleanse this was with high heat. Although I can handle the bacteria, the toxins that are the by-products of the decomposition process was another story altogether. It turned out well though, so it's all good now. I don't think whoever scrubbed the pot was happy though. The oil wasn't hot enough I think, or it was just the problem of not using a non-stick pan.
My main concern after I cooked it, however, was that the rice wasn't dry enough. The fried rice, despite the flavour and aroma, was soggy. Immediately after turning off the heat, I googled for a way to solve that, but there was no solution to saving soggy fried rice after it was fried. I MIGHT have been able to reduce the moisture by heating the rice an hour in the "Keep Warm" mode in the rice cooker, but that was too late.
On the bright side, at least the eggs were all spread out. From what I recall, chunks of eggs in a fried rice is not a good thing because a good fried rice needs the egg to be spread evenly over every grain of rice.
However, that could be the effect of the pot not being hot enough. It's kinda hard to heat a pot as quickly as a wok due to the thick bottom. Once the bottom gets cooled down by the ingredients I pour in, it takes a while to get the temperature back up again.
Yes, I actually would prefer to cook that fried rice in a wok or, at the very least, a pan. Those reheat much faster than a pot but weren't available.
Going to get my steel quarter-heel replaced. That thing is too noisy and keeps me worried about scratching someone's floor.
And it's no use in slippery floors.
10 Oct 2015
Fixed my Broughton boots by bringing the pair to the Mr Fix at ION. However, he discovered that the steel quarter-heel was actually a much larger piece embedded into the bottom layer of the heel, so the whole bottom layer was replaced by Vibram rubber.
Oh well.
Think I'm losing weight. Been steady at 95kg these few days now. 95-96kg. Progress! More Subway subs and swimming!
My bro's gone with his wife to the US since before dawn yesterday. His last message was at 3am asking me to bring something he had left behind on his desk.
House is emptier now, but it's awesome when you can walk around naked.
Apparently the most efficient use of my mileage is to buy a Business class ticket and upgrade to First using my miles because the rate is almost twice of the Premium Economy to Business upgrade Well, fuck. I'm never going to buy a Business class ticket with cash.
12 Oct 2015
So, last night after dinner (been eating relatively more over the weekend) and the weighing scale said I was only 95.5kg.
This is awesome!
It means that in the short term, no matter how much I eat over a few days, I won't exceed 96kg!
Which means I really got to swim while in Canada. Must keep my momentum up!
Recently discovered the use of Vaseline as a lip balm. Feels the same as any other lip balm but I can control more easily the amount applied, I feel. Any excess can be spread over my hands like a lotion.
Pretty cool.
Booked my Korea trip last night for next year. Got to work! Used the HSBC Visa Infinite for a CX economy ticket with the card promo and it turned out to be slightly better than I thought.
For almost S$890, I got what I think is an Economy Flex ticket or something, V class. Basically it's changeable with no additional fee but at a promo price of 90% of the lowest undiscounted Economy price. If I had booked the lowest Economy ticket normally, they would charge a fee for any date changes, so this deal is awesome.
Only catch is that it's not upgradeable with miles, but that's ok - I have no intention to upgrade a flight of that length.
As for the hotel, I thought the Rocket Miles would be good since they give miles when I book a stay through them, but after some calculations, earning 3.5k Asia Miles for a 6 night stay at Skypark Myeongdong III at $110 a night excluding taxes is still not as good as getting 10% rebate via Shopback when booking the same hotel for 6 nights at $99 a night excluding taxes on Expedia.
I'm taking one mile at S$0.05 here though because I misremembered the value. According to my analysis above, it should have been S$0.1377 per mile at the PE-B upgrade rate, taking 1SGD = 6HKD.
If I use the correct mile value, then 3k miles would have been S$482, ie Rocket Miles was giving a $482 rebate.
Rocket Miles:
$808.62 - $482 = $326.67
Expedia via Shopback:
$653.88 * 90/100 = $588.492
Shit, I just spent an extra $261.82 for nothing.
You know what's worse? I just looked at the Expedia promotion for my credit card and it's giving 15 Citi Dollars for every S$1 spent there through the Citi promo page on Expedia.
Fuck. At 2.5 Citi Dollars per mile, that's 6 miles per dollar, or S$0.8262 rebate per dollar, or 82.62% rebate!
Fuck!
At this rate, the hotel would have effectively cost me only
$653.88 * 0.1738 = S$113.64 net
No it's not refundable. Seriously, I need a few days to consider every hotel booking I make because I keep forgetting stuff. Must never book on the same day again!
Funny thing is, if I use the B-F upgrade rate, CX would have been effectively paying me to stay in that hotel.
HK$1.50459 = S$0.25765
6 miles per dollar spent = $1.50459 per dollar spent, ie if I use my miles solely on upgrades from Business to First, CX pays me an extra 50.459% of every dollar I spend on Expedia via the Citibank promo link.
I'm not even kidding.
More specifically,
50.459% * $653 = S$329.50 assuming Citi only considers whole dollars and ignores the cents.
Basically, staying at the hotel in itself would have partially funded my First class ticket. Hilarious!
Oh...
Say, all I do is spend my time in hotels booked via Expedia, just to make enough miles to upgrade a Business ticket to a First.
What does it take to upgrade?
85,000 miles.
How much money do I need to spend on that hotel to make 85,000 miles?
S$14,167.
How much did that Business ticket cost?
HK$47,660 = S$7,943.33
Total cost of getting First class ticket by upgrading a Business seat bought with cash:
S$(7,943.33 + 14,167) = S$22,110.33
Undiscounted price of that First class seat:
HK$175,550 = S$29,258.33
Total discount: S$7148 = 24.431%
Basically there is no way I can get that seat for free because the miles and cash are not interchangeable but even a 20% discount is huge. Regardless of how much CX is paying me back in mileage value, it's still in miles that cannot be converted into cash. All it does is reduce the amount of money I have to spend to earn the same amount of miles.
This means I have been looking at this from the wrong perspective that all these ads have given me.
Instead of looking at how much value I get back from spending each dollar, I should be looking at how these promos reduce the amount I have to spend to earn the amount of mileage I want.
It has never been a rebate since whatever value I get in return cannot be converted into cash - all these are are discounts for the upgrades. Instead of seeing it as a 50% rebate, I should regard it as 33% less cash I have to spend to get the same amount of miles.
At the First class upgrade rate, it's just a 33% discount, even if I ignore the Business class fare which makes up 27% of the First class fare.
27% of the ticket is paid at 100%, and the other 73% of the ticket is paid at 67%, hence the effective payment amount is around 76% of the original price.
Although the 27% is an unchangeable amount, can the 73% be paid at an even lower rate?
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