Category Archives for Credit Cards.
Earlier in the month I wrote that Chase is expected to introduce ‘Sapphire Banking’ on August 27. Chase is now confirming the project.
You don’t pay fees for most things — checks, foreign transaction fees, out of network ATM withdrawals (and the other ATM’s fee gets reimbursed), wire transfers or stop payments.
Chase points are one of my favorite currencies, and their transfer partner Korean Air SkyPass is one of my favorite frequent flyer programs.
Chase points will only transfer to Korean through August 24. So I have to decide how many points I want to transfer before the clock strikes midnight and I turn into a pumpkin.
Rocketmiles is one booking site for the toolkit where you earn your preferred currency for your hotel bookings (and frequently a lot of them) and where you can especially earn miles for reservations you make for other people. And the new Membership Rewards partnership is especially useful.
Chase shared with me that Ultimate Rewards would no longer partner with Korean Air SkyPass after August 24. You have through August 24 to make these transfers.
After Chase introduced their Sapphire Reserve Card they immediately took a $200 – $300 million hit to their bottom line. They took another $330 million charge in the just-completed second quarter for rewards expense.
The strategy then for making money on affluent customers moves to cross-selling, which is why they’ve offered points bonuses for new mortgages. Here’s the next stage.
American Express tells me that their Membership Rewards program will be adding Aer Lingus as a 1:1 points transfer “at the end of this month.”
Here’s what that will mean for your redemptions
American Express is running a 30% bonus on transfers from Membership Rewards to Virgin Atlantic through September 12. It only appears when logged into your American Express Membership Rewards account, so it’s possible that members with certain cards won’t have this bonus offer available.
There are some amazing award values even though Virgin Atlantic is a generally weak program, you can hold awards before even making your instant transfer to lock in success.
When it comes to domestic awards airlines are rarely going to give you 2 cents a point in value. And you’re still stuck hunting and pecking for award space rather than taking the flights you want.
As award charts devalue, and airlines charge more and more points for awards (especially when saver seats aren’t available) while paid tickets have often gotten cheaper using points to directly pay for travel makes more and more sense. In an era of regular $300-$400 roundtrips to Europe it can still make sense to pay for travel with credit card points even when it no longer makes sense to do so with airline miles.
Bill payment service Plastiq charges your credit card and then pays the bills you ask them to. That way you can earn credit card rewards for bills you might otherwise pay by check (currently only Mastercards allowed for mortgages), and benefit from convenience and float, charging something at the beginning of a credit card billing cycle and paying it off at the due date weeks after the end of the cycle.
Their CEO did an AMA on Reddit and offered some interesting insights into payments and their business plans.
I just signed up for the CitiBusiness® / AAdvantage® Platinum Select® World Mastercard®, taking advantage of the best-ever offer of 70,000 miles after spending $4,000 within the first 4 months of account opening.
Citibank just launched improvements and faster points-earning fro the Citi® / AAdvantage® Platinum Select® World Elite™ Mastercard®. Now they’ve improved earning and benefits on the business card, 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 »
