For September, after a long time, I apped a bunch of cards from Discover It miles, club carlson, best western inn, citi cards, fairmont, choice cards from Barclays. It was fun seeing the instant approval page after a long time. The focus, as you could tell was on the hotel cards since I have got a good arsenal of airline points at the moment. The hotel cards however are a different game and often time they would give you free nights but when you go for redeeming it is hard to get those. One exception though is Marriott from Chase and they have very good deals often. The other cards such as SPG or Hyatt etc are also good. And it is not as bad as rental loyalty programs but not exactly as good as some of the airline programs out there. So it is pretty broad out there when it comes to miles programs. But not bad if you load up on both hotel and airline cards at the moment as they are having some good bonus rounds from the bank sites directly.
First up, Discover. Many blogs covered it and I think it is a good deal but not worth the hype or a dedicated post. Turns out from tomorrow, i.e. September 16, if you link a Discover card with Apple Pay app which comes with iphone 6 and above versions and use it to pay at stores where they accept Apple Pay, then Discover will give cash back upto 10% of 10,000 which is 1000. If this card is new, then you get $2000. I already had Discover It card. So I tried to app for Discover It miles card as both these cards are different and got approved for the second one. You can have both cards simulataneously. Generally the Discover IT card is good as there is rotating 5% categories. But IT miles card is not that bad and their redemptions options are good and not to mention, the points accumulate faster too. So the plan is to load up these two cards in Apple Pay tomorrow and get on the next spend of $10,000 on this. Which is what my sore point about this "deal of the year". Even if one is talking about finding some stores and getting Vanilla gift cards, $10,000 is huge. You are getting 1000 or 2000 vs a typical offer like this which nets you about 100k points. Make no mistake, this deal is nice but is also a huge spending requirement. So unless you have some expenses coming up say a deck or HVAC or something on the heavier side, there is little day to day use of this one. I would not use this towards gc of airlines or hotels. Or prepay any utilities for that matter. Which all leaves to only one or two options such as buying some other gift cards or just doing the usual spending cliche thing that is out there. So tread with care on this one. People - especially bloggers have a vested interest in pushing products. But this blog aint no shrill for no one. And even if we in future get some ad partners, we wont sell something for the sake of selling. So read up the discover deal and more importantly check out your stores whether they accept apple pay before you venture into this deal.
The other cards such as Choice and Fairmont etc are good hotel cards deals. And many of them are coming with no annual fee at the current time. I have already written about the Best Western Inn Mastercard. For residents of US, this is a new opportunity since this card was available for only canada. But now they have started issuing it in US. I would urge to fully take advantage of this card and go for the premium card and get the free nights.
The citi cards are good deals - specifically the ATT card where you have to sign up for the ATT data plan for three months minimum and you can get an iPhone 6 or Samsung 6 for free for upto $650. This is a good deal and no one knows how long it will last but I have verified that it works. If you get iphone 6 then you can use it in discover deal such as above. Once done, you can always buy something from the local best buy for much less. iPhones fall down on values pretty quickly. I got it for $700 from ATT store unlocked and now if I were to sell back I would be getting 50% off .. which is just $350. Then again you can turn to craigslist but the current going rate of $550 is still less in open markets such as eBay, Amazon, craigs among others.
Chase is back with its Southwest 50k promotions. It is a pretty common promotion for this time of the year. I would not hold back on having this card for the long haul as it gives you annual points on lesser annual fees. Bank of America is intensely promoting their cards in the wake of intensified competition from the likes of Citi and Chase. So that is pretty much it for now. As we enter mid September, this is a good time to load up on Amex cards for the upcoming Small business Saturday. But other than that, it is advisable to stay clear in October for new cards since November end and December is the time when the marketing team will go in overdrive to meet yearly targets of customer acquisitions.
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