Pop quiz, hotshot! I’m going to give you two mystery credit cards, and you’re going to tell me what credit card I’m talking about, what airline I’m talking about, and which card is better. Ready?
CREDIT CARD A: Earns 1.25 miles with Airline X per dollar spent on all purchases. $95 annual fee.
CREDIT CARD B: Earns 1.30 miles with Airline X per dollar spent on all purchases. $0 annual fee.
You can probably guess what card A is, since not too many airline cards give you 1.25 miles per dollar. It’s the Chase British Airways card, of course! (Note: this is not an affiliate link, and I get no money if you click through.)
And credit card B? It’s the American Express Blue for Business (Note: this is not an affiliate link either):
The card earns 1 Membership Reward point per dollar spent. MR points can be exchanged for Avios at a 1:1 ratio, plus you get a 30% bonus on all purchase-related points earned each year. Voilà, 1.3 points per dollar spent. (Though before you rush out to get this card, please note that you do need to have a more premium Amex card, e.g. a Gold card, in order to be able to transfer points from this card to one of the MR partners.)
So which card is better? That’s a trick question. The answer, as always with these things, is it depends. The Chase card comes with 50,000-point sign-up bonus, vs 10,000 for the Amex Blue, so clearly if you’re looking for a big one-time gain, the BA card wins.
But the Amex Blue for Business belongs in the conversation. You can actually earn more Avios with it than you can with the branded card, and there’s no annual fee. There are many cases where you can get two cents of value or more per Avios, so you’re talking about a 2.5%+ card with no annual fee. I could get a CLT-LGA roundtrip ticket with seven months of Amazon payments.
Another pop quiz: why don’t other bloggers in the points and miles community talk about this card? It’s not an amazing card, but like I said, it belongs in the conversation since there are some people and some situations for which it would be useful.
Frequent Miler, to his credit, is the only major points-n-miles blogger I know of who has mentioned this card (he even has it on his best credit card deals page). I wasn’t able to find any mentions of this card by the rest of the boardingarea.com crew, or by Points Guy or Frugal Travel Guy. If I’m missing one, by all means let me know and I’ll gladly correct the record.
This goes back to what Matt wrote about the other day regarding the economics of blogging. The incentives of big league bloggers are not aligned with the incentives of their readers. This doesn’t mean that they’re bad people, or that there’s anything wrong with getting paid to sell, just that most of them are sacrificing the quality of their product in exchange for card-whoring. They get paid to push certain cards, and they don’t write about other potentially useful cards since they’re not getting paid to do so.
I don’t mind if a blog has advertisements, or if they promote a really good deal, or if they subtly work a relevant link into an article, or if they ask me to use their links to help support the blog. Bloggers have to eat, right? Just be honest about it and don’t punish your readers with irrelevant and/or subpar affiliate links.
There are some who still produce a good blog despite the temptation to do otherwise, and hats off to them, because it’s got to be awfully tough to resist the temptation to cash in for a substantial short-term gain. Those of you who merely read and don’t blog should be aware of the incentives underlying some of the content you’re reading.
Hey now — be fair to PM&M, the referral credit he gets is “small”, as he conspicuously states in every disclaimer! That way you know he’s not in it for the cash, as he might be if the referral credit were, say, “large”!
Ok, I have never heard of that card till now. Probably because I only focus on decent sign-up bonuses. I’m not even sure if this card is listed on my affiliate site, will have to check. However, there is one thing I wanted to mention. If you spend 30000 per year on Amex Gold, you do get 15000 points bonus.
Of course, there is an annual fee of 175 dollars, but we would have to pay it anyway to be able to perform the transfer from another card. Assuming your business spends that much per year and most do, wouldn’t it make more sense to concentrate on Gold card?
Not to mention, it has some category bonuses. I just don’t see much value here, to be honest. If you don’t put much business expenses on your cards, than you really should not have Amex Gold to begin with. Otherwise charge the 30 grand to get the 50 percent bonus and forget the other card.
Mephistopheles must be crying. Why won’t you sell your soul? Everybody has s price.
I already sold my soul to Saverocity. Briefcases filled with money, etc.
LOL, I stand corrected.
Good points all, and I’d put up more of an argument except it’s bedtime for me. 🙂
Which means I’m a bit light on cash now myself. Luckily I have the recipe for success:
Part 2 Mix two parts bourbon a dash of Angostura Bitters, a sprinkle of sugar, garnish with a slice orange rind and a macerated cherry. Serve in a rocks glass.
Part 1:
Apply for the DiscoverIT card
Apply for the Arrival Card
Apply for the NFL Giants Card (I don’t care if you are a fan)
Apply for the no fee Arrival card.
Apply for 2 other cards using CardMatch
Part 1b buy all ingredients using a separate card because it is good to keep your finances in this manner for tracking purposes.
Briefcases..with an s? Really? And you offered me only one, I feel so hurt right now I am going to drown my sorrow in a big bowl of Vanilla ice cream lol.
Oh, I am here for the backlink 😉
2.5%+ cash back card? Sold! Where do I sign up to sell MR for 2 cents, lol.
I think if you are solely after Membership rewards and spend a ton of money beyond the 30k per year, it may make sense to get that card. My personal choice would be cash back or possibly Club Carlson business visa. Especially if I had a trip to Europe in mind. But I focus on bonuses, so none of it applies to me anyway.
Yawn. You’re just angry that you didn’t cash in on time. So angry you are!
On a serious note, it’s not frequently discussed that some of us who live outside big metropolitan areas often encounter businesses that won’t take Amex. On other occasions, I don’t feel like sticking my local friendly businessperson with Amex’s higher swipe fees. For that reason, we’re always more reliant on Visa/MC than on our Amex cards.
Great post, enjoyed the read. Wish there were more articles like this starting early last year, so readers would have been far more aware and kill the affiliate murkiness that plagued the scene. Several big blogs were just constantly bombarding links on a daily basis and still are struggling to write anything since their styles have permanently changed. If Chase Ink Bold increases signup by 500 points for a week, it will get shoved down everyone’s throats like there is no tomorrow.
A blog that could have exposed all of these things and be powerful enough to help readers constantly is what we needed. We keep reading that some banks are shutting off affiliations with bloggers. Hope that happens soon.
@ABC, totally agree with your point! If you go back and see the blog where Frequent Miler posted that he will no longer link affiliate cards in the body of the posts, a lot of regular credit card pimps posted on “why are you doing this!, you are succumbing to pressure!” etc etc. That was hilarious.
I clicked on your link to get more traffic from Saverocity to make it seem worthwhile 😉