Category Archives for Credit Cards.
Marriott’s new loyalty program doesn’t offer a lifetime status level higher than 50 nights. The old Starwood program didn’t either. However the old Marriott Rewards program offered lifetime 75 night elite status, and those who achieved that status in the legacy Marriott program, got to keep it.
Marriott carved out an exception that let some Starwood members earn it too — but said it could never be earned after 2018. That turns out not to be quite correct.
The biggest end of year miles and points news was definitely that Capital One has introduced the ability to transfer their miles to a variety of different airlines.
I’m excited to see that Capital One is running a bonus to transfer their miles to an airline at a better than standard rate. It suggests to me that transfer bonuses are on their radar, so I can’t wait to see whether another transfer bonus comes along soon.
Plastiq.com is a service that will charge your credit card and mail checks on your behalf. (With some vendors they also make electronic ACH payments.) Their usual fee for this is 2.5%. It’s worth it to incur that fee if you’re earning a signup bonus with the credit card charges, or you’re meeting a spending threshold for a bonus. However I generally advise that it’s not worth it for the ongoing miles without a spending bonus. You don’t want to incur a 2.5% fee to earn 1 mile, you’re buying that mile at 2.5 cents. No mile is worth that. This may be totally obvious but for business spending companies can generally write off the fee. If you’re paying business bills via Plastiq.com your net cost is 2.5% minus (2.5% * your marginal tax rate).…
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
Citibank should be notifying its customers today of benefits changes that go into effect May 1 for the Citi® / AAdvantage® Platinum Select® card. One is a modest positive, while the other will be disappointing to many.
Last summer Citi adjusted the benefit of their primary AAdvantage consumer card, adding two new bonus categories for spending and introducing the ability to earn a discount on American Airlines travel through card spend. So I’ve been waiting to see what sort of updates would be coming to the Barclays AAdvantage cards. There are several changes that go into effect May 1.
Marriott let me know that the hack of their systems released my unencrypted passport number and unencrypted credit card number. Even this information isn’t helpful because they don’t let me know which number or whether or not it’s expired.
The data breach compromised 383 million records including 5.25 million unencrypted passport numbers and 8.6 million payment cards. Marriott claims most credit cards were expired which means they have that information, but even though they’re telling me my credit card number was compromised they aren’t telling me the expiration date of the card.
If you have the Marriott Bonvoy American Express Card you might not even know it because you still think of it as the Starwood Preferred Guest American Express Card — and your card still says SPG on it.
One of the biggest criticisms of the new program is that the value of points earned via credit card is one third less than Starwood Amex cardmembers are accustomed to. They’ve solved that through the rest of the year.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
JonNYC tweets about American considering a change to their systemwide upgrades that are provided to Executive Platinum and ConciergeKey members: that they would only be usable by the member themselves (and presumably other passengers on the same reservation) and could no longer be gifted to family or friends. American says no such change is imminent.
This would be all about breakage, making upgrades cheaper to offer because more of them would go unused if they cannot be given away. And by the way they’d be taking away benefits and scaling back costs at the same time they are requiring more revenue from a customer to earn these in the first place.
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 »
