Apple FCU credit card: a good deal for travelers?

Every now and then I like to explore the vast, uncharted regions of the internet to see what kinds of cool stuff I might find. It was on just such a journey that I found the Apple Federal Credit Union Platinum Visa, which may or may not be a good deal for some of you.

Apple FCU is one of the nation’s 100 biggest credit unions and primarily serves people in Northern Virginia, with membership being limited to residents and employees in the area, or to members of the Northern Virginia Athletic Directors Administrators & Coaches Association, which costs $20 to join.

The thing that caught my eye is that the card gives 3X rewards on gas, which is uncommon for credit unions. The rewards come in the form of points administered by CURewards.com, a company which manages rewards programs for a lot of credit unions.

If you look on the CURewards website, you’ll see that their travel rewards include flights, and instead of redeeming for a ticket at one cent per point, they ins let you redeem based on where you’re flying to. For example, one of the lowest classes of tickets is a roundtrip domestic lower 48 ticket.

What the website does not tell you is how many points are required to redeem for a flight. I called CU Rewards to ask, but the associate told me she can’t say for sure how many points any given redemption would be without logging in to somebody’s account. She did say that she thought that lower 48 ticket would be 30,000 points, which matches this example on the Altra CU website.

So crunching the numbers, we see that if you buy $10,000 worth of gasoline and redeem 30,000 points for a fare valued at $500, you’re getting 5% back on your purchases. I don’t travel very much, but I would imagine there may be domestic routes out there that price out at more than $500, in which case your credit card rewards rise correspondingly.

Obviously, any program like this will have terms and conditions, so here they are:

1. Airline tickets may be ordered through Program’s travel agency for one roundtrip Coach Class ticket on a scheduled carrier. No one-way, open jaw, open return, standby, stopover or circle trips are allowed. This ticket offer is not applicable to full fare Economy, Business or First Class fares and may not be combined with certain special or promotional fare offer or any other discount, certificate, coupon, Senior Citizen discount, off-tariff, non-published or other privately negotiated discount fares, group or block discounts, meeting fares, military or other government fares.
2. Travel reservations and ticketing must be completed twenty-one (21) days prior to actual departure date, but not more than 330 days in advance. Certain blackout dates may apply.
3. A Saturday night stay must be included in the travel itinerary. Return travel must be initiated within 30 days of departure.
4. Program reserves the right to choose the airline and routing on which to reserve and ticket redemptions. Program has the right to book the lowest fare.
5. Travel must be via the most direct, valid routing and in markets for which airlines publish adult excursion fares. In some instances, codeshares (flights marketed by one airline, but operated by another airline) may not be allowed.
6. For international destinations, travel is only valid to major international gateway cities that are supported by participating carriers.
7. Airline tickets are only valid for the destinations identified at www.curewards.com. Travel to any other destination requires usage of the Unrestricted Ticket Credit option.
8. Reservations shall also be subject to airline availability for 21 day advance booking, non-refundable type tickets for the travel dates specified. The following classes of service must be available for redemption:

Airline	Destination	Class of Service
American	US48 / Hawaii International	O / S Q / N
Delta/KLM	US48 / Hawaii International	T / U T / U
United	US48 / Hawaii International	S / W S / W
Continental	US48 / Hawaii International	S / W S / W

So is this a good deal? Darned if I know! There’s no booking engine to play with, so it’s hard to tell how restrictive they’d be in letting you maximize reward values.

I haven’t been able to find much info beyond what I’ve posted here. If anybody has any experience with CU Rewards, by all means chime in. I could see this potentially being a great deal, but I could also see it as potentially being a huge waste of time and money.

That’s all for today…. have a great weekend!