A new site, Feecation.com, offers to reimburse you for the fees you incur with airlines, hotels, rental cars, and Wi-Fi service providers.
This deal seems too good to be true. My guess is it relies on the fact that most people never bother to claim rebates. But if you can motivate yourself to claim the rebates offered, you can make a huge profit out of this new online startup’s service.
You pay a monthly fee ($15/month which totals $180/year) and in return, Feecation will reimburse you for up to $1250 of fees you spend during the year. You simply send in (by email if you like) proofs of payments of the fees, and they will send you your refund back.
Better still, one membership works for your spouse and children, too. You are still limited to the $1250 annual maximum (in return for your $180 membership fee each year) but this means you’ll be able to get to that maximum limit more quickly. For example, if you travel with your spouse, and you both pay a baggage fee at the airport, you’ll get two fee refunds.
Let’s look at a typical travel itinerary and see some examples of what you’d get back from Feecation.
Day 1 You take two flights from your home city to your destination. You rent a car. You spend the night in a hotel. You spend the following on fees :
- Airline baggage fee $50
- Airline inflight Wi-Fi on first flight $10
- Airline inflight Wi-Fi on second flight $10
- Airline meal $8
- Airline seat upgrade $50
- Rental car airport concession surcharge $15
- Hotel internet fee $15
- Hotel mandatory resort fee $12
- Hotel parking fee $25
Day 2 You travel around doing business (or having fun). You spend more on the following fees :
- Hotel internet fee again $15
- Hotel parking fee again $25
- Hotel movie watching charge $8
Day 3 You return to the airport and fly home again. You spend more on the following fees :
- Airline baggage fee $50
- Airline ticket change fee $200
- Airline priority boarding fee $25
- Airline inflight Wi-Fi $10
- Airline meal $8
This is a reasonably realistic list of fees and extra charges. In total, there is $536 in costs listed above.
So guess how much of this you can claim back from Feecation? They will pay up to a maximum of $10 on every one of those charges, except for the hotel movie which they quite rightly point out is not a fee but actually a payment for an additional optional service.
Add up all their reimbursements and you’ve received $156 back. You’ve almost paid for a full year of membership in a single journey.
We should add that this is far from an exhaustive list of the fees that Feecation will reimburse you for. Go check out their website for more details on more of the reimbursable fees, including early and late checkout fees at hotels, GPS, car seat and other type of rental fees from rental car companies, and a whole raft of airline fees.
Note also that you don’t need to book your travel through Feecation. There don’t seem to be any ‘gotcha!’ type catches to this deal at all – except for the obvious one, discussed next.
How it Works
Feecation say they don’t get any rebates on the fees they reimburse from the companies charging the fees, and that’s sort of obvious when you think about it.
Instead they rather blankly say
Our business plan is based on a subscription model. Here at Clarus Marketing Group, we have successfully run other subscription based products and Feecation will be managed the same way.
Our translation of that is they hope you’ll never get around to claiming the fee rebates you could receive. In truth, most mail-in type rebate programs have extremely low response rates – some figures suggest as low as 1% – 5%, which is how some of the deals can seem so amazingly generous. We’ve occasionally bought something due to the amazing rebate offered, but then have never sent in the paperwork, and it seems the same is true of most of us, most of the time.
You know, yourself, how good you are about such things. If you’re usually on top of paperwork challenges, and if you travel from time to time, this would work well for you.
Don’t you love the thought of now being able to buy an airline meal and get the cost reimbursed; of not griping so much about the cost of Wi-Fi connectivity charges because the first $10 is reimbursed, and so on through all the little pinpricks of fees which are now so omnipresent.
If this sounds good to you too, why not give it a try. They even give you free 30 day trial.
Very cool, I hope it lasts!
Feevacation sound ok – not as great as you make it our to be. First and foremost, their web site does not have as much detail as I would like. Always a concern. For example, if I stay at a hotel for 5 nights, does the WiFi cost of $10 each day get reimbursed, or only $10 for the stay. How does one submit receipts? They say it could take up to 6 weeks from time they get documentation? And most of us (I assume you as well David), rarely pay bag fees, WiFi (with cell phones or free WiFi in many hotels), air seat upgrade (not sure how this is done, but I fly SWA mostly), parking fees at hotels except in large cities, etc.
Hope if works for some, but I think the time and effort may not be worth the excess over the monthly fee for me.
Wasn’t the 100,000 mi. on BA or the Capt One 100,00 mi Credit card a better deal – by far??
Hi, Mike
As per the worked example, you can claim each day for Wi-Fi.
As for submitting, this is explained in their Terms & Conditions. You can send the receipts in by email – one reader suggested taking pictures with your phone then emailing them direct from your phone.
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Sounds worth giving a try. I wonder what exactly they mean by “Ineligible charges…international travel providers…” For example, since Hilton is a U.S. provider, can I get reimbursed for the Hilton Paris? (probably not). On the other hand, what about the Sofitel in New York (since it’s a French travel provider operating in New York)?
I would assume they mean charges that occur in the United States, but why don’t they say that?
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How could the airline meal and seat upgrade be eligible if the hotel movie is not? In both airline examples I’m also paying for an optional product or service, same as with the hotel movie.
What about for the international traveller – fees such as ridiculous airport taxes etc.
Not sure I understand the logic that watching a movie is an optional additional service, but surfing the Internet, buying a meal, getting priority boarding or more legroom are not optional services? Are you sure Bernie Madoff is not running this from prison? In any case an awful name. Sounds like a bodily function.
I’m not too worried about either the logic or the company stability.
I can’t/won’t defend why an airline meal is included, but not a hotel movie, although the ‘logic’ seems fairly obvious. Airline meals used to be included, and if you’re on a plane for X hours, eating becomes a fairly attractive proposition, whereas feature movies in hotels have always been a totally optional extra.
As for the other airline fees, you’ll not see me complaining that most of the time, where there is a judgment call as to if a fee is included or not, the company chooses to include them. I see that as a positive, not negative. 🙂
Lastly, the question about it being some sort of a rip-off Bernie Madoff type scheme. As I stated in the article already, it is clearly what it is – a hope that people will sign up and then not actually do what they had originally resolved to do – send in claims for all the $10 expense items. You know yourself – if you are (almost said ‘anal’ but that might be riffing on the Feecation name a bit much!) always on top of paperwork and rebates, then you’ll win on the deal. If you almost never travel, and/or lose rebate claim forms and never send them in, you’ll lose on the deal.
Maybe the company will find that too many people are claiming too much, in which case I’m sure they’ll close. But you’re only into this for $15/month. Wait until you see a claim opportunity appearing before you join, and if you have no further travel planned, maybe then end the service. There’s not a lot of downside risk associated with this – unlike Bernie Madoff, all they are asking for is $15/month, a sum you can stop paying at any time.