Amex to start charging for reward point -> airline mile transfers!! (Are Amex reward points useless?)

[LordJezo]

Bah..

For each transfer of points into the Frequent Flyer program of a US airline, a fee of $0.0004 per point*, with a maximum fee of $50, will be charged to your Card account. We charge this fee to offset the federal excise tax we must pay on such transfers. The fee may be more or less than the actual amount of the excise tax we pay on any individual transfer.

What kind of cards have good benefits? The Amex rewards program is a bit worthless ($1,000,000 for a ride on a train in England? Bah)

 

[RossMAN]

Airlines are really starting to crack down on frequent flier programs so I don't think they're as good as they used to be.

Credit Cards thread

I like the CitiBank Dividend Platinum Select and Chase Perfect Card.

 

[Parrotheader]

Well that sucks a little although not as horrible as I thought it was going to be judging by your title.

Personally, I don't use air travel all that much so the mileage transfer fees aren't that big a deal to me. Just so long as I can keep cashing in my reward points for things like Home Depot gift cards and other useful day-to-day goodies I'll be happy. Whenever possible a gift certificate (or some sort of non-specific equivalent with a company offering rewards) usually provides twice the bang for the buck than for a specific item/trip. For 20,000 points I could get $100 cash. Or for 20,000 points I could get some ~$100 item like a grill from their rewards catalog. OR for only 10,000 points I could get a $100 Home Depot gift certificate that I could turn around and use to get the same grill for half the points. I just wish they'd expand their partners to include someone like Best Buy so I could get better points deals on electronics.

 

[LordJezo]

From Amex you get the gift cards?

 

[Parrotheader]

Originally posted by: LordJezo
From Amex you get the gift cards?

Yeah. Like I said, I don't use air travel as much so while I'm registered for most of the frequent flyer programs I've rarely used them.

When I was looking through the AmEx Rewards partners list I noticed a few places my wife and I shop at regularly included in there (mainly Home Depot and Linens & Things.) And then I noticed that the gift cards offered MUCH better bang for the reward points buck. We've already used the Home Depot cards to buy about $400 worth of stuff for ourselves and then turned around and used another $300 worth of gift cards as Xmas presents for friends and family. Note that my AmEx is a corporate card that's in my name so I get the points for it (and have to pay the annual fee myself) but I get fully reimbursed from my company since it's all business expenses. I do a lot of online media buys with it so I usually spend at least $10k a month on it (might be going up to $30k a month next year since business is expanding.) So the points add up REAL quickly in my case. It's been a great non-salary benefit.

For my personal card we use Marriott Rewards Visa. I've got my rewards program there linked in with my AmEx rewards so I can transfer points from my much larger AmEx points pool when necessary.