Tag Archives for credit card.
Wyndham can be useful for home rental stays (generally 15,000 points per bedroom per night). Aeromexico is limited use, but there are some use cases. The most useful promotion here is with LifeMiles – reasonable award chart, no fuel surcharges, and awards across Star Alliance.
The Westin Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort has been charging guests a 2% fee for paying their bills by credit card.
A year ago I offered advice on sanitizing credit cards. Since then I learned that your credit cards are actually dirtier than the bathrooms at New York’s Penn Station.
Now as we try to sanitize our hands, and everything we touch, especially the few times we go outside this has greater relevance than ever. Did you hand your card over to a store clerk? Did you stick it inside a card reader machine, and what was on the last card that was in there? I actually sanitized my cards, even before the current crisis.
Many rewards credit cards come not just with travel protections like delayed flight and delayed baggage coverage, but also with protections for the things you buy.
Cyberkit resells items that have been returned. That’s interesting because it reduces the cost of honoring return protection. And if you’re so inclined you can buy returned items online at a discount.
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.
All of marketing, perhaps, boils down to a simple idea: figure out who your customers are, and how to find more people like them.
Too often though products get developed without the first part clearly in mind: the customer. What does your customer need that they aren’t getting now or at least are not getting as well as they could? The most important question to ask when new credit cards come out is: who is the customer for this product?
A year ago we learned that Apple was dropping its co-brand relationship with Barclays and launching a new Mastercard with Goldman Sachs. That didn’t matter much since their existing card wasn’t particularly strong. There was hope the new card would be much better!
It isn’t.
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).…
More consumers are receiving card offers in the mail — up “from 54% to 67% over nine months last year” including an increase in applications from consumers with annual incomes between $20,000 and $50,000.
Fewer card applications, an increase in reaching down to lower income and possibly lower credit score consumers, combined with data like auto loan delinquencies at their highest level since 2010 (during the Great Recession) seem to raise some economic flags.
Recently the Wall Street Journal wrote about banks trying to control rapidly spiraling rewards costs. I didn’t take seriously the idea that banks would cut back on rewards to consumers to do this because they are offering rich rewards for a reason: they need to do so to attract consumers which earn them a piece of every transaction (plus annual fees, and interest when they don’t pay off their bills).
Josh Barro though takes on the broader claim about banks backing off of big rewards in New York magazine.
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 »
