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saintonan posted:No problem. My only reason for commenting is that lots of people read this thread and, being goons, are more focused on the min max part. The combination of CSR, CF, and CFU will in most redemption cases be better than BoA but there is added effort needed to manage travel on one card, quarterly bonuses on another card, etc. If someone told me to trade away my BofA 2.6%+ on everything card to category swap stuff around to maybe get another 1% on my spend I'd be tempted to slap them. I'm about tempted to shut down all my cards and just standardize on the BofA cards. loving gently caress trying transfer into reward miles on airlines I don't fly normally to see if I can get the award to issue out on just the right dates then I just match it up with the other card and transfer their points to a hotel chain to get a blackout free award hotel and gently caress it. Cash. I can manage cash and then just buy tickets to places I want to go.
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Oct 7, 2019 21:40
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I get the hassle dealing with travel rewards and the appeal of a single card, but min/maxing cashback isn't a problem once you recognize which cards go with which merchants, or swapping an everyday card during a 0% APR period to farm checking/savings APY (then BT 0% period for the balance you've accrued), or a card for online merchants like Amazon which you don't even need to carry in your wallet. Collecting cards literally makes life cheaper with minimal effort but mileage will vary person to person, if you'll excuse the pun. Churning especially isn't for everyone but some consider it to even be a hobby like min/maxing in video games. To each their own and 2% plus is better than a lot of people even bother with.
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Oct 7, 2019 22:26
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Where I like the points-based cards is there is no situation in which I would pay cash for a business or first class ticket. I will absolutely redeem a bunch of points valid for that though, since the redemption cost is much lower than the cash price for seat. Variable award chart pricing is going to make that a lot harder in the future though, so cash rewards is still super valid! Doubly so if you just have zero interest in spending any mental load on which card is the most appropriate at a given moment.
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Oct 8, 2019 02:32
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I asked the biz traveler thread but want to source some other opinions before making a decision - I have a CSP or CSR (the 90$ annual one) and a high 700s credit score. I am a buisness traveler and spend a significant amount of time in airports and expense dining and airline tickets on my personal card that I am reimbursed for. I fly generally americna when possible (70% of the time) I would like another card that will give me a good network of lounge access as well as points multipliers on dining and airfare. I am open to downgrading the chase and going AMEX Plat/AA Exec or upgrading the Chase and taking a lower tier second card, however, the CSP will not give me a sign up bonus. I'll hit whatever the signup is on biz expenses easily so would like to capitalize if possible. I am teetering between AMEX Plat and downgrading chase to chase freedom or ink or whatever but a big negative is the priority pass removal from AMEX for me. On the other side the upper tier chase has priority pass but no sign up bonus and point multiplier is only 3x on dining and airfair. I'm not sure what Lower or entry tier card I would get here. (Guidance please?) My conditional I'm having trouble squaring all this logic with is I dont want to be in for 900$ a year in cc fee's if I did both an AMEX Plat and the upper tier chase. (550+450 respectively) I'd like to keep it 500/600max. I'm IHG Spire Elite and stay IHG nearly exclusively when I travel so I could maybe get their card to double down on points but I dont feel like the benefits are there. Any opinions?
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Oct 8, 2019 02:52
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With the new benefits (Trip Delay + Trip Cancellation/Interruption) coming to the Plat (and other super premium Amex cards) on Jan 1, and the Plat's earning rate of 5X on directly-or-portal-booked flights, I daresay there's never been a better time to take it on as your premium travel card in general. As for lounges, you have to examine where you're typically flying through and which lounges/restaurants are available - theoretically and practically. Also, you get back $300 of that $450 AF on the CSR as a travel credit, so make sure to factor that into your calculations.
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Oct 8, 2019 02:59
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I'd only go Amex Plat if you're heavy delta. The AA lounge access card plus some hotel card would probably be your best bet. Hotel cards give you insane points if you can book with them.
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Oct 8, 2019 03:01
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Waroduce posted:Any opinions? The Amex Plat seems to be your best bet, especially if you Uber at all. You still get PP lounges, just not restaurants anymore, and Plat also gets you Centurion lounges. Your major expenses sound like hotels and airfare, and if you value MR at 2 cents each, that means an effective 10% back on those expenses. $200 in Uber credits and $200 in misc airline credits means the effective AF is just $150. Do the math but I'd give the Amex Plat strong consideration.
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Oct 8, 2019 03:14
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Yeah that sounds better. My bad I was considering Amex corporate Plat. I don't think Mr are worth 2 cents each I'd heard its more like 0.75?
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Oct 8, 2019 03:53
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https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/ https://onemileatatime.com/value-miles-points/ Everyone's values will be slightly different because people redeem points for different things. Those two articles will help you find your own number.
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Oct 8, 2019 04:00
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You guys make a convincing case for AMEX Plat espc with the sign up bonus. The AA Admirals Club footprint is not as bad as I thought it was when I dug into it and it is generally what I fly. I was surprised there was only like 10 Centurion lounges..... but the AMEX Plat is much more flexible if I ever have to fly off brand and still gets me into PP Lounges without the restaurant benefit. I also didn't factor the CSR travel credit which makes the effective 150$ fee tempting, but probably redundant considering the heavier multiplier both the AMEX and AA Exec have on flights... Im not super tempted to do the hotel card because I have points out the rear end on volume alone and have already reached the highest status tier. I may keep the CSP for the dining 2x multiplier and go with AMEX for the hotel/air multiplier and lounge access puts me at 650 fee wise (550 AMEX + 100$ CSP) or CSR + AA Exec for an all in of 600 (CSR 150 effective + AA 450) is also semi tempting for the widespread lounge access and flexibility of the CSR, but i feel like i'm kind of wasting a credit card with the AA. Idk if the value of AA Lounges is worth giving up everything the AMEX Plat and its sign up bonus gives me. >.< Leaning AMEX right now because those 5x multipliers are super tempting and the rest of the benefits are pretty nice my only concern is the Centurion footprint but the PP lounges staying as a benefit is pretty nice and the sign up pop is pretty solid. How does AMEX Point system compare to Chase's UR? saintonan posted:https://thepointsguy.com/guide/monthly-valuations/ thank you for this e2: eh did I misinterpret the strong recommendation for AMEX? Waroduce fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Oct 8, 2019 |
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Oct 8, 2019 04:11
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saintonan posted:Your major expenses sound like hotels and airfare, and if you value MR at 2 cents each, that means an effective 10% back on those expenses.
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Oct 8, 2019 04:34
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When do people actually use airport lounges? Mostly long connections or delayed flights? We don’t usually get to the airport hours early or anything.
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Oct 8, 2019 12:02
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Weekly when I’m traveling for work. Work pays for my annual membership fee, and waiting there is usually a little nicer than at the gate for the 40 minutes I usually have to kill. I’d guess that 90% of the people in there are business travelers. If that’s not you, I wouldn’t place too high a value on lounges. Most of the airline branded cards have rules where you must be flying that specific airline in order to use their lounge benefit. The Priority Pass and Centurion networks are fairly limited in the US. So you end up paying a lot of money for something you may not even be able to use.
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Oct 8, 2019 12:44
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Thanks, that’s what I thought. Trip report on using Apple Card in Europe: 90% of places use handheld readers that support contactless payment so you get the 2% cash back and there is no foreign transaction fee. And Ubers were super cheap (in Portugal at least) and you get 3% on them. Not a bad choice for a free card, if you have an iPhone.
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Oct 8, 2019 13:00
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Small White Dragon posted:The 5x on hotels for the Amex Plat is limited to bookings through Amex, which is considered an OTA and not eligible for elite benefits and point accrual. So I'd ignore that unless you stay at a lot of off-brand hotels. This is true but OP says he already has max status, so OTAs would save him a bunch of money at least through the end of 2020. My experience with IHG (though I'm plat, not Spire) is that they honor status at checkin even when I bought through an OTA (either Hotels.com or Chase's travel portal). I didn't get points but got the other benefits of status. This probably varies from hotel to hotel. OP can also put hotels on his CSP to get full IHG points if needed.
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Oct 8, 2019 13:31
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Waroduce posted:Leaning AMEX right now because those 5x multipliers are super tempting and the rest of the benefits are pretty nice my only concern is the Centurion footprint but the PP lounges staying as a benefit is pretty nice and the sign up pop is pretty solid. Not sure how often you are in JFK but they're building a massive Centurion there that's supposed to be open 1st half of 2020.
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Oct 8, 2019 19:03
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A co-worker just asked me, "I am booking a flight to Germany for me and my family for the holidays, what's the best rewards card?". It will be 5 plane tickets, so he will come close to any $5,000 spend on that one purchase. I really don't want to overwhelm him with combining three or more cards (I think he'd just tune it out and put it on his Chase Slate or whatever). If I were to recommend one card, maybe two, for purchases in the very near future what's the best combo at the moment? CSR + CFU?
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Oct 8, 2019 19:16
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Sock The Great posted:A co-worked just asked me, "I am booking a flight to Germany for me and my family for the holidays, what's the best rewards card?". It will be 5 plane tickets, so he will come close to any $5,000 spend on that one purchase. He'll want to use that purchase to meet a min spend requirement, so he should pick the best signup bonus that he qualifies for. A lot depends on credit score, what cards he has open, etc., as well as what his ongoing spending patterns are and what he wants to use the rewards for. CSR and Amex Plat are two cards to recommend, but may or may not be the best specifically for him.
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Oct 8, 2019 19:19
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saintonan posted:This is true but OP says he already has max status, so OTAs would save him a bunch of money at least through the end of 2020. My experience with IHG (though I'm plat, not Spire) is that they honor status at checkin even when I bought through an OTA (either Hotels.com or Chase's travel portal). I didn't get points but got the other benefits of status. This probably varies from hotel to hotel. OP can also put hotels on his CSP to get full IHG points if needed. Also, in addition to no elite benefits, you lose the points accrual, which probably more than negates the extra couple of points earned by going this route.
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Oct 9, 2019 00:07
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I think im going to upgrade the CSR and get the AA Exec. Now just order of operations,which first or can my 750+ credit score eat 2 hard pulls at the same time Probably a bad idea. Hm
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Oct 9, 2019 04:45
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Unless you've had a large number of hard pulls recently already, 2 hard pulls isn't much of an issue.
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Oct 9, 2019 05:01
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Waroduce posted:I think im going to upgrade the CSR and get the AA Exec.  Product changes aren't a hard pull
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Oct 9, 2019 05:08
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smackfu posted:When do people actually use airport lounges? Mostly long connections or delayed flights? We don’t usually get to the airport hours early or anything. Even if I have a short lay-over or get through security with only a short wait before departure I usually try to hit up an available lounge for the free food/drink. Also, it's universally a better place to wait - even if it's only 30 minutes.
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Oct 9, 2019 05:16
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astral posted:
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Oct 9, 2019 05:57
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Small White Dragon posted:Unless a larger credit line is needed. (I think the CSR has a $10k minimum credit line, while the CSP is $5k.) Chase normally hard pulls for CLIs, yes; an excellent note.
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Oct 9, 2019 06:24
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I called about upgrading maybe 3 months ago to find out if I was elidgile for the sign up bonus and I was told my credit limit wasn't high enough and No I wasn't going to recieve a sign up pop since it'd been less than 2 years since I got the CSP. Like literally the next week I got an notification that they increased my credit limit on the CSP to a bit past 10K. It was odd, but maybe they were letting me know I'd get approved? I hadn't decided on if to grab the AMEX or not so I haven't yet pulled the trigger but I will be now after my credit updates on the 12th  e: unless a hard pull updates your credit? I just lump paid off like 2K and should get a nice bump
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Oct 9, 2019 13:29
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Waroduce posted:I called about upgrading maybe 3 months ago to find out if I was elidgile for the sign up bonus and I was told my credit limit wasn't high enough and No I wasn't going to recieve a sign up pop since it'd been less than 2 years since I got the CSP. Like literally the next week I got an notification that they increased my credit limit on the CSP to a bit past 10K. It was odd, but maybe they were letting me know I'd get approved? Who do you call to see if you’re eligible for a bonus on a product change from CSP —> CSR? We might do that since the CSP is our major usage card and we (mostly I) can take advantage of the PP benefits.
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Oct 9, 2019 13:49
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Cacafuego posted:Who do you call to see if you’re eligible for a bonus on a product change from CSP —> CSR? We might do that since the CSP is our major usage card and we (mostly I) can take advantage of the PP benefits. There are no bonuses for product changes. If you want the bonus, you need to apply for a new card. Specifically in CSR/CSP's case, you also need to not have gotten a Sapphire bonus in the last 48 months.
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Oct 9, 2019 13:51
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saintonan posted:There are no bonuses for product changes. If you want the bonus, you need to apply for a new card. Specifically in CSR/CSP's case, you also need to not have gotten a Sapphire bonus in the last 48 months. Argh, ok, well maybe we’ll do that instead then. Got the bonus a while ago, so that’s not an issue. Thanks
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Oct 9, 2019 13:53
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Also specifically in CSR/CSP's case, you can't hold CSP and apply for a CSR (except for a specific technical loophole that involves applying for one the exact day after you're approved for the other), so when you apply and presumably are approved for the CSR, you'll need to product change your CSP into another card (CF or CFU are recommended for this). It's not a big deal, just something you should be aware of.
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Oct 9, 2019 13:59
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MrBond posted:I will absolutely redeem a bunch of points valid for that though, since the redemption cost is much lower than the cash price for seat. For example, I recently purchased a premium ticket to Asia using miles. AA miles of 175k bought a ticket for ~2600 USD. Not bad, but if I earned those on CC spend (I didn't), that'd be about 1.5 cents/$. So in that case, 2.6% cash would've been much better. On those same flights I could've purchased business for ~7k, and that would've been I think 375k miles. Again only 1.8% if I had earned the miles via spend. Still plenty of places to grab some outsized value, but I'm not finding as many super-discount round trip tickets instead of super-expensive purchase tickets available. My AA Exec card is for lounge access, not buying things. Not after they removed the price rewind feature. That was worth its weight in gold.
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Oct 9, 2019 15:13
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FunOne posted:For example, I recently purchased a premium ticket to Asia using miles. AA miles of 175k bought a ticket for ~2600 USD. Not bad, but if I earned those on CC spend (I didn't), that'd be about 1.5 cents/$. So in that case, 2.6% cash would've been much better. Ooof. You have me calculating my own redemptions and it's not great. We stayed at the Hyatt in Paris this spring. 6 nights, 180k points, which would have been about $5k or so. That works out to about 2.7-3 cents per point. I have a csr and a decent amount of those points were earned on travel/restaurant spend, so 3x, but I'm wondering if a cash back card wouldn't make more sense.
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Oct 9, 2019 15:30
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I don't travel a ton (I have two little kids) and when I do I'm usually value hunting (I don't have any strong allegiance to any one carrier versus another) so recently when we bought tickets to Australia as a family instead of playing the miles game I just paid with our main credit card (Costco Citi) which was 3% cash back. On the other hand, I got some free miles for saving a person's life in flight the last time I flew to Miami (thanks American) and tried to redeem them to fly to NYC recently only to deal with blackout dates on any of the flights I wanted. So I again bought in cash and got 3% back. I find the consistent cash back to be a much better deal. I can eat where I want, stay where I want, fly with whoever I want, whenever I want and it even pays back if something's already on sale or cheap.
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Oct 9, 2019 15:53
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EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:I got some free miles for saving a person's life in flight the last time I flew to Miami (thanks American) and tried to redeem them to fly to NYC recently only to deal with blackout dates on any of the flights I wanted. lol airlines
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Oct 9, 2019 16:03
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pzy posted:lol airlines This wasn't an exaggeration either - like this guy had stopped breathing and turned gray after he removed his significant personal oxygen supply and by the time they "is there a doctor aboard?" and I got to him he was (to my palpation) pulseless. I told the flight attendant we needed to divert (which the pilot did not do) and I mask ventilated the guy and (extremely) fortunately felt a pulse; I was five to ten seconds away from starting chest compressions in flight in front of his wife and 100 other passengers. When the fire department eventually wheeled him off the plane onto an ambulance (now very much alive) the pilot came back to yell at me about why I hadn't communicated that we needed to divert, the immediate response to which was all the flight attendants yelling at him. Three weeks later I got 25k bonus miles. Enough for an economy saver round trip that I haven't even been able to use. I did get a round of applause though, which was nice.
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Oct 9, 2019 16:17
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gently caress that pilot forever and gently caress AA for not literally gifting you and your entire family tickets to wherever just from the legal fees you saved them.
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Oct 9, 2019 16:32
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Someone on Reddit created a lounge map: https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/comments/dehwqq/discussion_thread_october_07_2019/f2vcs2c/ Also, gently caress AA.
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Oct 9, 2019 16:52
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25k loving miles for saving a dude’s life this is making me irrationally angry.
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Oct 9, 2019 17:05
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EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:This wasn't an exaggeration either - like this guy had stopped breathing and turned gray after he removed his significant personal oxygen supply and by the time they "is there a doctor aboard?" and I got to him he was (to my palpation) pulseless. I told the flight attendant we needed to divert (which the pilot did not do) and I mask ventilated the guy and (extremely) fortunately felt a pulse; I was five to ten seconds away from starting chest compressions in flight in front of his wife and 100 other passengers. When the fire department eventually wheeled him off the plane onto an ambulance (now very much alive) the pilot came back to yell at me about why I hadn't communicated that we needed to divert, the immediate response to which was all the flight attendants yelling at him. Lol fuckin a. I’m not getting up for 25k miles. because as if I could help.
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Oct 9, 2019 17:20
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Ur Getting Fatter posted:25k loving miles for saving a dude’s life this is making me irrationally angry. Me and the other FF on a flight a couple years ago got the same thing when we were called to respond to a diabetic emergency. We got there just in time to stop the FA from feeding a hyperglycemic patent orange juice.
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Oct 9, 2019 17:26
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