Category Archives for Credit Cards.
In mid-July Citibank points suddenly became transferable to American Airlines. That was a huge surprise and for many cardmembers with Prestige and Premier products a nice increase in the value of their points. Citi hadn’t had one of the large U.S. airlines as a transfer partner.
In fact, it was odd that American Airlines wasn’t a transfer partner before this. And odder still that the relationship was introduced as temporary, running only though November 13.
The Citibank and Barclays premium consumer cards get a year’s grace period on their spend threshold bonuses for elite status under the new Loyalty Points system of qualifying for AAdvantage elite. The Barclays business card, however, does not.
And, it seems, Barclays wasn’t just able to remove this benefit from its applications and instead has taken the applications down – they can’t promise something to cardmembers they aren’t going to deliver.
Rewards credit cards frequently cost merchants more money to accept than plain vanilla credit cards without rewards. Merchants want to accept credit cards – it’s good for their business – but they’d love to pay less for the service. Many associations of retailers turn to governments or the courts to try to force lower fees from Visa, Mastercard, and American Express.
One of the arguments employed by merchants, to disguise self-interested behavior, is ‘concern for the pooor’ claiming that the rich benefit from rewards while the poor face higher prices as a result.
There’s been a leak of details of the new Chase Aeroplan credit card that’s coming next month. A spokesperson for Air Canada Aeroplan confirms the details, though suggests that what has been revealed so far is only a small part of what the card’s features, and explains details of how the initial bonus will work.
Details on the new Air Canada Aeroplan credit card from Chase will come out in December. As a result of the co-brand relationship, Air Canada is already a transfer partner of Chase’s Ultimate Rewards.
Already you can get an extra 10,000 miles with the card if you sign up to be notified when it launches. Now they’re adding 10 upgrades into the mix as well and dropping a hint about a card benefit. This adds onto an easy status match for U.S. frequent flyers.
Bank of America is releasing a new Visa Infinite rewards card and details have leaked. The card will be available to the public November 22.
J.P. Morgan Chase warned that the financial performance of its card business was being dragged down by “rising costs on marketing and promotions.” This caused shares of other card issuers to drop on the day of the report, because the issue is industry-wide.
This is interesting of course for the 7x points-earning categories, though that doesn’t represent huge spending for most people (which makes 7x possible to offer!), and even with 4x on dining this is strong earn for a no annual fee card.
The Hyatt program is smaller than many of Chase’s co-brand partners, but it hits above its weight because it’s a good program and members know it. A small business card is going to be a small slice of the smaller program pie. But Chase has been willing to do smaller portfolios – we’ll be seeing the Air Canada U.S. credit card soon, they are introducing an Instacart card.
By narrowcasting it’s possible to really target what a small group of consumers want, delivering things that group values without spending to build a card that delivers well for everyone. In other words it should be possible to deliver greater subjective value at lower cost. That was my frame as I walked into an event Chase and Hyatt hosted to announce the card.
Capital One keeps doubling down on adding value to travel, and they did so in April introducing… 1:1 transfers to some airlines so you really could earn 2 airline miles per dollar on all of your spend.
It was a limited set of airlines initially. That’s changing. They’ve added several airlines to the 1:1 transfer tier, making the earn power of Capital One Venture as well as Spark Miles even better.
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 »
