Question
I just received in the mail an offer by Capital One...
no annual fee
1.25 miles/$1 spent
earn 20k miles (spend $3,000/yr - 10k added after each year)
fly on any airline, anytime (no restrictions, no blackouts)
no late fees, no transfer fees, no foreign purchase fees
It seems like a great deal. Anyone else get this offer? If so, any additional insights?
Sidenote: anyone cancel a no fee/1st year card before end of 12 months and get charged a cancellation fee? If I take above offer, I'm cancelling my UA & AA cards.
Answer
Welcome to Flyertalk. There is at least one other thread on this card elsewhere on this forum (although perhaps not for this specific offer), so you may want to search for that to get additional info.
Useful for international transactions and to get the bonus, but thats about it (and you can get a better bonus by churning those UA and AA cards, and I'd rather use a Merrill+ for int. txns). And maybe the Visa Sig benefits if you would use them (but since you have the UA card already, you already have that).
You will never do better than 1.25c/$ spent, period, and will often do much worse unless you buy tickets just below $150, $350, or $600 or above (the cutoff's for the tiers. On a real miles card you can do way better than that. You can do 1.5c/$ cash back on a Fidelity card, and then spend that on whatever you want (including travel). The only time a program like this makes any sort of sense if you fly a lot of low cost routes, and the Amex Blue Sky is a better program anyways.
If you want a non-airline linked card, check out the Citi TY cards, espically the PremierPass card if you fly enough (or Driver's Edge if you don't). People on this forum have done very well with these, sometimes making TY points worth 2 or 3 cents each, and since you can get 2 TY points/$ with Driver's Edge or PremierPass, that means up to 6c/$, much better than Capital One.
I do actually have one of these cards, but I'd rather have saved my credit inquiry hit for another card. You could get a Citi TY card with a 10k point bonus once each year, and get the same deal, and not have to spend $3k on the card. Plus TY points are way more useful.
Answer
I just received in the mail an offer by Capital One...
no annual fee
1.25 miles/$1 spent
earn 20k miles (spend $3,000/yr - 10k added after each year)
fly on any airline, anytime (no restrictions, no blackouts)
no late fees, no transfer fees, no foreign purchase fees
It seems like a great deal. Anyone else get this offer? If so, any additional insights?
Sidenote: anyone cancel a no fee/1st year card before end of 12 months and get charged a cancellation fee? If I take above offer, I'm cancelling my UA & AA cards.
Do you have a link for this?
Answer
I just received in the mail an offer by Capital One...
no annual fee
1.25 miles/$1 spent
earn 20k miles (spend $3,000/yr - 10k added after each year)
fly on any airline, anytime (no restrictions, no blackouts)
no late fees, no transfer fees, no foreign purchase fees
It seems like a great deal. Anyone else get this offer? If so, any additional insights?
Sidenote: anyone cancel a no fee/1st year card before end of 12 months and get charged a cancellation fee? If I take above offer, I'm cancelling my UA & AA cards.Never been charged a cancellation fee.
The down-side of cards that offer you miles good on any airline is that the ones I have seen don't let you combine your any-airline-miles with your existing program airline miles. What good is 20,000 miles on a credit card if I can't combine it with my primary mileage accounts?
Answer
If you want a non-airline linked card, check out the Citi TY cards, espically the PremierPass card if you fly enough (or Driver's Edge if you don't). Before "Driver's Edge" there was a much better program that offered 5% back towards purchase of a Ford/Lincoln/Jaguar up to a maxium of $5000 (I think). They discontinued the program after a couple of years, probably because too many people like me were buying the $17000 loss-leader pickup for $10,995 minus the $3500 rebate that I had from Citibank for the old "driver's edge" program. I came out well in that deal. Ford and the dealer didn't. I think "driver's edge" lowered the return to 2% or something like that. Became not worth it to me and switched to being a mileage whore.
Answer
Never been charged a cancellation fee.
The down-side of cards that offer you miles good on any airline is that the ones I have seen don't let you combine your any-airline-miles with your existing program airline miles. What good is 20,000 miles on a credit card if I can't combine it with my primary mileage accounts?
20000 gets you a free ticket.
Answer
Do you have a link for this?
This is usually a targetd offer with a specific RSVP number. Check out your Capital One junk mail and you might run across it.
Before "Driver's Edge" there was a much better program that offered 5% back towards purchase of a Ford/Lincoln/Jaguar up to a maxium of $5000 (I think). They discontinued the program after a couple of years, probably because too many people like me were buying the $17000 loss-leader pickup for $10,995 minus the $3500 rebate that I had from Citibank for the old "driver's edge" program. I came out well in that deal. Ford and the dealer didn't. I think "driver's edge" lowered the return to 2% or something like that. Became not worth it to me and switched to being a mileage whore.
The new Driver's Edge program you can convert your rebates to TY points at 1c rebate = 1 TY point. It does something similar to PremierPass where you can match "drive $" (driven miles based on service reciepts, 1 mile = 1c rebate) to your purchase rebates ($1=1c rebate).
Answer
20000 gets you a free ticket.
15000 for flights up to 700/750 (UA/AA) airmiles... (or 20k inside Australia or Asia) AFAIK takes 25000 to get any distance of a free ticket within the US (unless you want to pay a $125 copay on AA).
AA also offers reduced mileage awards to select destinations as a benefit of the Citi card: http://www.citibank.com/us/cards/cardserv/worldcard/globe4.jsp
You have to book these over the phone though, which means paying an extra fee.
Answer
I just received in the mail an offer by Capital One...
no annual fee
1.25 miles/$1 spent
earn 20k miles (spend $3,000/yr - 10k added after each year)
fly on any airline, anytime (no restrictions, no blackouts)
no late fees, no transfer fees, no foreign purchase fees
It seems like a great deal. Anyone else get this offer? If so, any additional insights?
Sidenote: anyone cancel a no fee/1st year card before end of 12 months and get charged a cancellation fee? If I take above offer, I'm cancelling my UA & AA cards.
Answer
I have a Capital One No Hassle credit card with travel awards and what a hassle it is. Thirty-five thousand miles needed to fly. OK, I can live with that, BUT the cost of the ticket is limited to $350.00. Try flying to many places east to west coast on $350.00! If the ticket costs $350.01 up to $600.00 dollars, you will have to spend 60 thousand dollars. It took us several years to earn 107,000 miles and it will not even get us two tickets for the places we travel. You can purchase tickets from any source and do not have to go through Cap One's agent, but a lot of good it does at today's air costs.
I also have a Chase Bank Platinum Rewards card and in many ways it is worse.
Oh yes, it only costs 25,000 miles for a round trip within the U.S. and it has a $400.00 limit. NOW GET THIS--you have to buy through them AND they expained that they do NOT have the discounted prices you get through many on-line sites. So the $400.00 limit is no boon. Worse yet, suppose you find a ticket for $425.00. Can you pay the $25 difference in cash or pay with extra miles? Absolutely not. You simply CANNOT use Chase Reward miles within the continental U.S. if your ticket is over $400.00. You can fly to Alaska, Hawaii, the Islands, Mexico, and Canada for 35,000 miles with a $600.00 ticket limit, but you cannot use your miles to fly within the lower 48 if your ticket costs more than $400.00, period!!! So, I have 153,000 miles and can't fly to most places I visit in the U.S. SOME DEAL.
The bottom line, don't listen to the credit card companies OR the folks who claim to rate air reward cards because they leave out the most important information. Great deal-you can fly for 25,000 mile or whatever. But they NEVER tell you the ticket price or other limitations for these miles. By the way, both of these programs used to be great, but as airline tickets go up, the reward restrictions do too.
If anyone knows of an on-line credit card reward rating site that really tells you what you need to know, I'd sure like to hear about it. In the meantime, be forewarned.
Answer
I have a Capital One No Hassle credit card with travel awards and what a hassle it is. Thirty-five thousand miles needed to fly. OK, I can live with that, BUT the cost of the ticket is limited to $350.00. Try flying to many places east to west coast on $350.00! If the ticket costs $350.01 up to $600.00 dollars, you will have to spend 60 thousand dollars. It took us several years to earn 107,000 miles and it will not even get us two tickets for the places we travel. You can purchase tickets from any source and do not have to go through Cap One's agent, but a lot of good it does at today's air costs.
I also have a Chase Bank Platinum Rewards card and in many ways it is worse.
Oh yes, it only costs 25,000 miles for a round trip within the U.S. and it has a $400.00 limit. NOW GET THIS--you have to buy through them AND they expained that they do NOT have the discounted prices you get through many on-line sites. So the $400.00 limit is no boon. Worse yet, suppose you find a ticket for $425.00. Can you pay the $25 difference in cash or pay with extra miles? Absolutely not. You simply CANNOT use Chase Reward miles within the continental U.S. if your ticket is over $400.00. You can fly to Alaska, Hawaii, the Islands, Mexico, and Canada for 35,000 miles with a $600.00 ticket limit, but you cannot use your miles to fly within the lower 48 if your ticket costs more than $400.00, period!!! So, I have 153,000 miles and can't fly to most places I visit in the U.S. SOME DEAL.
The bottom line, don't listen to the credit card companies OR the folks who claim to rate air reward cards because they leave out the most important information. Great deal-you can fly for 25,000 mile or whatever. But they NEVER tell you the ticket price or other limitations for these miles. By the way, both of these programs used to be great, but as airline tickets go up, the reward restrictions do too.
If anyone knows of an on-line credit card reward rating site that really tells you what you need to know, I'd sure like to hear about it. In the meantime, be forewarned.
I had the same beef about CapitalOne. Got in contact with one of the sites that recommended it before (www.milecards.com), and they actually changed their reco. based on that new redemption level.
Stick to Starwood Amex myself...