Amazing New British Airways Visa Will Still Carry Same $75 Annual Fee

by Gary Leff

I’ve gotten several questions about the new British Airways Visa offered by Chase that I wrote about yesterday.

The most common one is about the annual fee. I speculated that it would remain $75, as the card is currently priced. But it’s a good question.

Jennifer Saranow Schultz has confirmed (in the comments to her post) at the New York Times’ Bucks Blog that the card will in fact still have the same $75 annual fee.

I’ve put a question out to Chase’s reps on this whether someone who has had a British Airwaays Visa in the past, but is not a current cardholder, might be eligible for the signup bonus?

Chase cards generally restrict signup bonuses to first-time cardholders, once for each card product. So whether a former BA Visa cardholder can receive the bonus for signing up for this card may depend on whether Chase consider this to be a better offer for the same card, of a new card product. But that’s just speculation. We’ll see what they say when they get back to me — I for one am hoping to take advantage of the 100,000 mile signup bonus, but I have had a British Airways Visa at one time in the distant past…

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

More articles by Gary Leff »

Comments

  2. This is going to be even better than many people realize, by a factor of 2. I’ve been a BAEC member for a while now but am just starting to understand the unique aspects of the program. I think you can set up a household account and more or less pool miles, so your spouse could get one of these cards too, and you would have 200k miles to spend in the main account.

  5. The comments on the NYT blog show that most people don’t think like us FF junkies. They don’t realize the advantages of redeeming on partners thinking that they are locked in to using only BA and only see the miles in terms of a “free” ticket. Of course these loyalty cards are not ideal for people who carry balances and pay the sky high interest rates and other fees.

  6. I know BA used to have this rule that you couldn’t sign up for a FF account unless you actually had a BA flight…..from the website, doesn’t look like this is true anymore? Is that right?

  8. Chase are total wankers. I recently applied for their Freedom card as I wanted to take them up on their offer of a $50 cash back for new accounts. I received a generic notice (I cannot even call it a letter) to inform me that my application had been declined because I had recently applied for credit. (I was making a purchase from amazon.com and got a popup informing me of a $30 cashback if I applied for an Amazon.com visa card that is issued by Chase, which of course I took up – I’m not going to turn down free money.) This notice provided no phone number, no address to get more info, nothing, nada. I phoned Chase to try to get more info, and quite frankly I would have had more luck speaking with a kindergarten child. The Chase guy was totally unhelpful, and only kept telling me what he could not do, not a single thing about anything he might be able to do! Let’s hope Chase goes under!

Comments are closed.