Category Archives for Credit Cards.
American Express just refreshed their Premier Rewards Gold Card and renamed it “American Express Gold Card.”
Most importantly the card raises the bar for points-earning at US restaurants and US grocery stores, while retaining strong points-earning on airline spend. And they’ve added a new monthly credit for dining. Today’s changes to the product – for me – make it the most rewarding card for ongoing spend.
For many Chase cards you can only get approved if you’ve had fewer than 5 new credit card accounts in the last 24 months.
If you’ve had 5 or more new cards in the last 24 months, and you take a break from any new cards and fall back under 5/24, here’s the first card you should get.
While credit cards are generally less expensive for a merchant than taking cash, retailers push back on the cost of accepting cards.
The latest salvo comes from Amazon, along with Home Depot and Target. They want to be able to accept lower-tier Visa and Mastercard products, and not accept premium cards.
American Express offers its Global Dining Collection program to The Platinum Card from American Express cardholders and to Centurion (Black Card) customers.
These are top restaurants where American Express has an arrangement to set aside some tables for cardmembers. You’ve had to make bookings through their concierge service. They’ll be launching searches for reservations, including special set-aside availability, through the American Express mobile app first in the UK starting next month and then in the US next 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.
In late August I wrote that Chase was about to introduce their new Sapphire Banking product — but not to sign up right away because a bonus would be on its way that you should wait for. They’ve now shared what that bonus will be.
Aeroplan shared that there is going to be a 35% bonus on transfers from the Marriott programs (Marriott Rewards, Starwood Preferred Guest, Ritz-Carlton Rewards) running September 13-17. The offer will not appear on the Aeroplan website until Thursday, September 13 but the information is solid and hopefully this extra day gives you more time to think through whether you want to take advantage of this.
Last month Chase added JetBlue as a transfer partner. Chase transfers are one-to-one.
Responding to this competition Citi is introducing improved transfer ratios to JetBlue effective September 13.
Virgin Atlantic miles aren’t worth as much as other miles. However they do have strategic uses and I believe the single best one is ANA first class roundtrip from the Central U.S. and East Coast for just 120,000 miles per person. (San Francisco and Los Angeles is just 110,000 miles roundtrip, while business class runs 90,000 or 95,000 miles depending on the city.)
Another strong use of Virgin Atlantic miles is Delta business class between the US and Europe for 50,000 points each way, which becomes an amazing deal witht he 30% tansfer bonus. There are other award chart sweet spots, like Australia and New Zealand.
A couple of weeks ago we learned that if you have an Android phone, Google tracks you even when you turn location history off. Although Google says that when you turn location history off “the places you go are no longer stored” an Associated Press investigation found that isn’t true and “turning off your Location History only stops Google from creating a timeline of your location that you can view. Some apps will still track you and store time-stamped location data from your devices.” Now we know that Google has a deal with Mastercard – and possibly with other payment networks – to track retail purchases and compare those to online ad clicks in order to help determine the effectiveness of online advertising beyond immediate online purchases. Google then shares date with a test group…
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 »
