BA AMEX Premium Plus or Virgin Atlantic Reward+

Sandtree

The_Urbanite said:

ccdorset said:

2ilent8cho said:

The Virgin credit card won't let you earn more reward points from spend than your credit limit per month. See point 3 here https://uk.virginmoney.com/virgin/credit-cards/vaa-cards/terms/reward.jsp . The Amex does not have this weird restriction. 

Personally I have the BA Premium Amex and for those few places i cannot use Amex the Barclays Avios Reward Mastercard. Don't forget to use the eStores for extra points both BA and Virgin have them, the BA one is http://shopping.ba.com Virgin is https://shop.virgin-atlantic.com/en/ 

That is a strange restriction with the Virgin card, though I think it possibly wouldn't affect me as I don't think I'll be spending much more than £800-£1k a month, unless they give me a very low credit limit of course.

I hadn't considered the Barclaycard Avios options, I'll take a look at those. Thanks for the links to the eStores as well!

I guess it’s all about keeping the card sustainable. They have to limit the amount of points they issue, because that’s an outlay. Presumably the model relies on them earning more from interest, annual fees and forex than the amount they pay for the points.

If you get a load of savvy people running £100k+ a month through the card and rinsing hundreds from the cashback programme, which is what was happening, it soon becomes a loss maker.

Your missing the transaction fees which will be a notable income stream.

Obviously there is the unknown aspect of the deal between the brand (Virgin, BA etc) and the card company (AmEx, Barclays, Clydesdale). These can be a flat fee per card issued, a profit share, miles may or may not be paid for by the bank etc. Some of these partnership deals can become very unbalanced with one company doing fantastic out of it and the other company making massive losses (like the tie up with Direct Line and Citroen which inc "free insurance" on Citroen Saxos for which Citroen paid DL a tiny per policy amount).