Category Archives for Credit Cards.
Prior to the Durbin amendment, 76% of checking accounts were free. That declined to 39% in 2012 after the rollout of the Durbin amendment and recovered slightly to 46% in 2022. Cramming down the debit revenue stream for banks will certainly benefit retailers, but we’ve seen that it isn’t paid for entirely by banks but by consumers through higher fees.
This new TAP Miles&Go American Express® Credit Card lets your spend contribute to Star Alliance Gold status, their award chart is reasonable especially ‘extra miles’ awards that let you travel on far more TAPs flight than are available to other airline partners.
The flight discounts are available on one-way bookings not just roundtrip. So consider booking paid travel one way, award the other. Fly for.. $1?
One of the reasons you can’t get your hands on concert tickets to the best shows when Ticketmaster releases them is because of… their value in earning frequent flyer miles. But many rewards points collectors are now getting burned.
American Express is bringing back Member Week for October 9 through 13. There’s one offer that really stands out to me – all Amex personal, business and corporate cardmembers can register to receive a $25 statement credit on $75 spend at over 200 participating Resy restaurants by December 8, 2023, and this can be earned twice (for a total of $50 back).
Cardless is launching a TAP Air Portugal Miles & Go American Express card. They haven’t released a lot of the product details yet, but it’ll be interesting to have this Star Alliance airline enter the U.S. co-brand market. They had just starting making an unfortunately-timed big push for U.S. customers right at the start of the pandemic, with easy access to inexpensive miles and Star Alliance Gold status. So this could be interesting.
News about Bilt’s latest Rent Day promotion is out. As usual there’s double points on their co-brand card; free Soul Cycle classes; free points for answering trivia; and opportunities to earn free rent.
Special for October 1’s Rent Day they’re offering 5x points-earning on their credit card for sports ticket purchases (up to 10,000 bonus points), and launching Bilt Experiences with an opportunity to redeem points for NFL game tickets, including for hosted suites.
For years they’ve been taking away from the program, sometimes a little at a time and sometimes a lot. And they’ve been requiring more and more from customers to get less and less. Like the proverbial boiling lobster, SkyMiles elite members went along for the most part every step of the way. And that was very good to Delta, generating around $7 billion from American Express at around a 40% margin and accounting for the vast majority of the airline’s profit.
Delta wasn’t satisfied with that, and they got greedy.
Ultimately this is a great tool, that’s normally premium priced, but available free at no cost through the Bilt app – a way to help make the most of Bilt points or any points, the way that they’ve done with airlines and point.me.
The other possibility that was speculated two falls ago was a premium Hyatt credit card. And that’s back on the table, as a survey of possible benefits reveals. Some of the things under consideration appear to be:
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 »
