Chase's Eye Opening Card Strategy, IHG Refreshes Everything & The 2 Browser Trick?!

Shawn Coomer (0:00)

Chase is trying to get people to upgrade. They also raised annual fees and made huge changes to the IHG cards. More Rakuten offers are here, and a lot more coming up right now on MTM Travel.

Mark Ostermann (0:12)

We're going to try to dig through without having people fall asleep.

Shawn Coomer (0:16)

Good luck.

So happy Thursday, everyone. Hope you guys are having a good time. We got a lot of fun travel stuff to talk about in the next couple of weeks with canceled flights and then my trip to Asia. So a lot to look forward to with that, but this is our Miles and Points show. So we're going to talk more about that stuff. One of the things that we've been talking for a while now is those Rakuten Bank of America deals with built points and how they can, in many cases, more than double your bonus with that, with the highly valuable built points. And you saw a new record, right? A new increased offer that you hadn't seen before.

Mark Ostermann (0:58)

Yeah, this is a new card. It started with like two Bank of America cards, the two no-fee, two of the no-fee cards. And there were like 25,000 built points or 250 bucks. And that was cool. And then you get also the Bank of America bonus. Then they added a third no-fee card. And then this week, they added the $95 card, the Premium Rewards, not the Elite. That's like the 550 card or whatever. But this is like that mid-tier card. And it's an OK card. It usually comes with the 60,000 point bonus, which is $600.

It has a couple of perks for the $95 annual fee that you can offset it.

If you do it on a calendar year, you can dip, double dip that annual fee, basically, with the airline incidental. But now, all of a sudden, they rolled it out onto Rakuten and at 42,500 points. Bill points are $425.

Some people are seeing it for $400 or 40,000 points. Go incognito and I think it would pop up or try in the app versus online. You should be able to get that $425. But that's just insane. $600 plus 42,500 bill points?

Shawn Coomer (2:05)

Yeah, I happened to come across this yesterday. I didn't even know we were going to talk about it on the show. I had a $400 offer, so I'm going to go back. I didn't apply for it. But because I guess we should talk about it. I just got the bill card. So the one question I had was, I'm still blue status. I will get upgraded to gold once I hit the welcome offer.

How it all transfers. We think that if you earned it now and then whenever it transfers to built, they do that quarterly then it bases on your status then. That's our guess. We'll get confirmation on that. But this is a great deal. Like you said, these are juicing in. People should be checking these and then the incognito thing is interesting too because I hadn't done that before. And I just logged in right now. I'm seeing $375 for it. I saw $400 and like you said, you saw $425. So yeah, play around and see what you can get.

Mark Ostermann (2:50)

And they come in and out too and they go up and down. And we saw the City Strata Premier get added to it. And it was at $100 and then it went down to $50. And then it goes up to $150 like every other week, it seems like now and then drops down like the next day. So you have to be a little bit nimble with it, but they do come back and I applied for both of us, but we were both denied. I'm not too surprised because we had just grabbed the No Annual Fee Travel card from Bank of America to grab on Rakuten and all that stuff. So it was only a couple months, we've added a couple more hard pulls since then, Bank of America doesn't necessarily love that. So planning to take a little bit of a breather, hopefully this deal comes back towards the end of the year and then maybe we can do the triple dip and get the Rakuten points and line it all up. But yeah, and then we have to wait and see, can you get both of these and get the Rakuten bonus? I haven't noticed anything in the terms. It says you can only get one of them.

But I know some people have signed up for this that did previous Bank of America cards. So at least we'll get those data points over the next week or so to see if those are posting as pending.