Saturday, August 1, 2015

Capital One may discontinue the IHG Rewards Club World MC


There is a online rumor that Capital One may discontinue the IHG Rewards Club World MasterCard in the near future.  From my point of view, this is actually a quite good card.

IHG REWARDS CLUB WORLD MASTERCARD:
  • Annual fee $120 (authorized user is free)
  • 60,000 bonus IHG Rewards Club points with your first purchase
  • 5 points for every $1 spent at any IHG hotel
  • 2 points for every $1 on all other purchases
  • 5,000 bonus points for every $10,000 you spend 
  • Platinum Elite status for the life of the account
  • World MasterCard benefits, including all types of travel insurance
With IHG Platinum status, you can get good benefits from IHG group (see table below). Plus, if you spend $30000 per year on this card, you will get $30000*2+5000*3=75,000 IHG points. These points are Elite Qualifying Points. With that, you can reach IHG Rewards Club’s new top membership level: Spire Elite, which can bring 100% bonus points on stays and an exclusive Choice Benefit of either receiving 25,000 points or upgrading a friend or family member to Platinum status.
Therefore, you can get 100,000 points + SPIRE Elite membership on this card every year. If you use this 100,000 points on PointsBreak, you can get 20 nights in IHG hotels. This is a quite amazing return rate, as long as you can spend at least $30,000 per year on this card (as this is a MasterCard, you can use it in Costco).