I spent some time tonight going through all the credit card links I have on my blog — both the ones that offer me an affiliate fee and those that don’t. Remember, you’re always welcome to point me to better offers than the ones you find on my site. And please do tell me if a link is dead or giving you an offer different than what you describe so I can go fix that.
It’s interesting sometimes to hear people complain about how all bloggers talk about are the cards they get paid to promote. There’s some truth to that. One advantage of being an affiliate is that you get email updates when offers change. That makes it easy to change the marketing bullets. Other times I have to do the hard work myself. Here are some of the more interesting changes I noticed while checking up on things.
Others announced earlier that the offer for the Southwest Airlines Premier card was updated to provide 50,000 Rapid Rewards points instead of the previous 25,000 points. To compensate, the minimum spend requirement also increased to $2,000 from $1,000. That’s not news.
What I don’t remember anyone mentioning is that the AirTran A+ Rewards card offer also changed. You now receive 32 A+ points instead of the previous 16, and again the minimum spend increased from $1,000 to $2,000 within 3 months. Those 32 A+ points can be used for two AirTran flights or transfered to Rapid Rewards for any two Southwest Airlines flights.
My link to the Bank of America Hawaiian Airlines card was also dead. Going to Bank of America’s website, I couldn’t find any mention of the card at all. Did the Bank of Hawaii version acquire a monopoly? Nope. It took some digging, but I finally did find a new link, so you can still apply for both versions of the Hawaiian Airlines card at the same time and get 70,000 HawaiianMiles. Lesson: just because the bank’s website doesn’t list it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
The Barclaycard Arrival, which Amol talked about earlier for its great rewards program has decreased its bonus to a $100 flight credit from the original $200. This stinks. It actually is one of my affiliate links, and no one told me about it. However, it might still be worth getting since it offers an effective 2.2% cash back on all purchases. The sign-up bonus was never the real draw.
I also collected some damning evidence on the bait-and-switch American Express likes to pull on its existing customers. I’ll have more on this later in the week. I’m not sure it gets much attention because so many other blogs have affiliate links, where the offer is pretty much fixed. But as someone who has to rely on links from the bank’s own website, all I can say is make sure you open those offers in a Google Chrome incognito window.
On the positive side, I do have some new affiliate links from American Express and MBNA if you live in Canada. Check out this page for my list of all Canadian credit card offers. I’ll try to continue expanding on this with non-affiliate offers, as well. I’m not sure how much I can really say about them since I know our northern neighbors are a small fraction of my readership. Feel free to correct me if I’ve horribly mischaracterized them in my descriptions.
Disclosure: Some of the cards mentioned in this post may provide me an affiliate fee if you use my links to apply for them and are approved. I appreciate your support.
About Scott Mackenzie
