Category Archives for Credit Cards.
Club Premier is 49% owned by Aimia, the company that spun off Air Canada’s Aeroplan, lost 80% of its market value when Air Canada announced its intention to start a competing program, and then sold the program back to the airline. Aimia has the demonstrated capability to run a good operation. In this case however they are part of one of the worst frequent flyer programs.
American Express Membership Rewards is offering a 25% bonus on transfers to Air France KLM Flying Blue through November 30. You’ll need to log into your American Express account to see the bonus (otherwise it’ll show with the standard 1:1 transfer ratio).
I find that Air France’s availability and award pricing is very attractive for US-Europe flying.
I’m incredibly fortunate to have earned millions of miles with credit cards. The products and bank issuer policies — and best strategies — are constantly changing.
If you want to approach your credit card applications strategically — not just get the best cards, but in the right order, here are my suggestions.
Barclays has brought back their best-ever 75,000 mile offer for the AAdvantage® Aviator® Business Mastercard®. I wanted to sign my wife up for this but just missed it, so this is in the chute for me.
The economics of co-brand credit cards used to favor banks much more than airlines, though they’ve been lucrative for the airlines for years. By the time of United Airlines’ bankruptcy in 2002 the airline in some sense continued flying to support the underlying credit card business.
With banks spending more on their co-brand partnerships and more to reward consumers they’ve gone looking for ways to trim costs.
Developing the Apple Card turned out to be a huge drain on Goldman‘s IT resources: Goldman Sachs spent $300 million “to build it” and “[w]hen early testing of the software this spring revealed a security vulnerability, Goldman reassigned thousands of engineers from around the firm to patch it, people familiar with the matter said.”
Yet somehow Apple’s line on the product is “Designed by Apple, not a bank.”
American Express is increasing earn on some cards, adding new benefits, and taking away others while increasing annual fees for new cardmembers (and at renewal for existing cardmembers).
New perks will include access to Centurion lounges for Reserve cardmembers. The re-launch of benefits and earn will happen effective January 30, 2020 and the limited time offer will run October 1 – 30, 2019.
Bank of America adopted two new rules for card approval over the last two years. Now they have another one that is either stricter – or less strict – than Chase’s 5/24, depending on whether you have a banking relationship with them.
Barclays is moving away from issuing its own cards and acquiring its own consumer financial services customers, and focusing more heavily on co-brand relationships like their deal with American Airlines. As they work to grow on the back of co-brands, they need both more partnerships and to market those partnerships more aggressively. And they need to introduce new products to sell to their co-brand customers.
When Citi eliminated ancillary benefits like trip delay from their cards, including their American AAdvantage cards, several readers picked up the Barclays-issued American AAdvantage card to still earn American Airlines miles while also being able to take advantage of trip delay coverage. That turns out not to have been a good strategy.
Right after American Express announced the introduction of trip delay and cancellation benefits for some of its premium cards, I’ve learned that Barclays is eliminating trip delay and other benefits from its Aviator AAdvantage card – and similar benefits from other cards too.
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 »
