If you’ve been following my posts, you’ll know I’ve been writing some advice to my friends on how to get started collecting points. The first post advised to start with a “keeper” card, such as the TD Aeroplan Visa Infinite card, then I proceeded to explain how to use the card in ways that maximized the number of points you’d receive while you’re working to complete your minimum spend requirement (MSR) which, upon reaching before the deadline, earns the largest chunk of points to you. This article will discuss what to do after you’ve reached your MSR on the keeper card.
The reason I choose the TD Aeroplan Infinite Visa card as the perfect keeper card, is because their policies allow you to essentially earn 20,000 points every year for free. The problem with this is that it’ll take a lot of time to earn enough points for a decent trip if that’s the only card you use. For example, with just this card and modest spending of $2000 a month, it would take roughly 7 years to earn enough points to fly you and your partner round-trip from Canada to Japan in business class (110,000 points each).
The MSR on the TD Aeroplan Infinite Visa card (or any similar Visa) is usually around $1,000, which can easily be met in under a month by most people. That leaves 11 months in a year where your spending could be put towards other MSR’s to earn massive amounts of bonus points. TD won’t let you get 12 Infinite Visa’s a year, and even if they did, they would only pay out the sign up bonus on one of them, so the solution is you have to find a different credit card.
There are plenty of options for credit cards, and travel points programs, but in my opinion there’s only 3 main financial institutions TD, CIBC and as you’ve guessed from the title of this article, American Express. Each of these companies offer cards that allow you to earn points directly (and some indirectly) into my points program of choice, the Aeroplan program.
Both CIBC and TD offer essentially the same cards and it’s worthwhile to take advantage of them, as they often offer “first year free” sign up deals which is fantastic, but the number of points you earn are, as you see above, somewhat limited. Amex on the other hand not only has cards comparable to TD and CIBC, they also have some cards that offer some astounding sign up bonuses (100,000 points is not uncommon) and amazing perks you just can’t find with the other company’s cards.
Amex generally doesn’t offer “first year free” promotions, so their cards do come with fees, and some of those fees are substantial, but as I hope to show, the benefits you receive more than make up for them if you like to travel, and really, if you didn’t like travel you probably wouldn’t be reading this.
Here’s the key concept. The points game isn’t about earning free travel, it’s about subsidizing your travel costs and improving the travel experience. Let’s say, for example, you want to visit Europe. A quick look at flights at time of writing shows a round trip fare in economy class next summer Calgary to London is about CAD$750. That’s actually a pretty amazing fare, it’s usually more. But by getting a single American Express card that has a $600 fee, you can earn the points required for that exact same round-trip flight, IN BUSINESS CLASS. This particular flight is an overnight 8.5hr flight. Trust me, you want to be in business class in a lie-flat bed.
Pretty fantastic, right? It actually gets a lot better. If you bought the $750 economy ticket, you’ll have to pay extra for checked bags, extra to select a decent seat and if your plans change, the fare is non-refundable. The Business Class fare purchased using Aeroplan points on the other hand, includes seat selection, includes checked bags, includes free food and drinks at the airport lounge, priority check-in line, and when you arrive in London, refreshed from your relaxing sleep in your lie-flat bed, you are first off the plane, you get priority baggage handling so your checked bags come off the carousel first, and you have access to the Arrivals Lounge where you can have a shower before you start your day in London. And should your plans change, Aeroplan reward tickets are fully refundable up to just a couple hours prior to the flight! There may or may not be a small fee to get the points back, depending on what reward you chose, but in all cases, you CAN get all your points back, unlike a cash fare that forces you to use up any credit within a year of the date purchased (not ideal if you purchased the ticket 11.5 months ago).
Super-fantastic, right? But wait, there’s more! That $600 fee for the Amex card isn’t really $600. What? On premium Amex cards, like the one I’m using to illustrate this, you get special offers several times a year that you can opt into that earn you statement credits. On my card, in just the last 6 months, I have earned $260 in statement credits and will earn $100 more next month during a trip we have planned. So in my case, my $600 fee was actually only $240 (and I could reduce that even further with future offers). In addition to cash credits, you’ll also get offers that can earn multiple points per dollar on specific purchases. At time of writing, as you can see below, this card has a 10 points-per-dollar offer for “eats & drinks”, so restaurants, groceries, bars, food delivery, and so forth. In fact, if you were to get this card right now, you’d probably earn enough points for the trip to London (140,000 points) I refer to above and then some.
Super-Mega-Fantastic! Could it get any better? Well, yes, actually. Amex cards have a special perk that lets you earn bonus points through referrals. The card I keep using in this example, the Aeroplan Reserve Amex, will give you 20,000 points for referring someone to the card and give the person referred a larger sign up bonus as well (This is where a normal credit card/points blogger would post their referral link. I don’t do that. But if you know me, I’m happy to provide you a link). This particular aspect can earn you a ton of extra points, especially when you do this as a couple because you can refer each other to various cards.
Let’s just recap for a moment. Here are the choices you have for your Europe flight:
- Take a non-refundable round trip flight to Europe for $750 + checked bag fees + seat selection fees in a cramped 17″ wide, non-reclining, economy seat, or,
- Take a refundable round trip flight to Europe in 20″ wide lie-flat beds with all the business class perks, for $240.
Option 2 just takes a little time and effort. Some Amex cards pay out the sign up bonus all at once as soon as you meet the MSR, but the Aeroplan Reserve Card spreads it out so the time involved to earn all this takes 6 months and is based on $1,000 each month in spending. If you’re a couple, then at any point you can refer your partner, earn bonus points for the referral, and do it again for double the points. Depending on your income and spending habits, you could do this concurrently or sequentially, whichever works best for you. The effort involved is simply going through one or two online credit card applications.
Once you’ve both earned all those points, you simply apply for a different Amex card (there’s a bunch of them) and start the process again and cancel the cards you’re done with before the annual fee kicks in on the renewal date. This way all of your regular spending (groceries, utility bills, gas, tv, phone or anything else that’s payable by credit card) is always building towards a MSR to qualify for the sign up bonus. You can have up to 4 concurrent Amex credit cards per person (you can also have “charge” cards like the Platinum or Gold cards, on top of that).
While the Aeroplan Reserve Amex earns Aeroplan points directly, some Amex cards earn different types of points, but many of those are convertible to Aeroplan points. One of those cards, the Platinum Card, is worthy of additional gushing.
In addition to similar sign up bonuses, statement credit offers, referral bonuses and fees as the Aeroplan Reserve Card, the Platinum Card also provides additional perks, the most notable of which include access to business class lounges in just about every airport that has them, even when flying on an economy ticket on any airline, as well as premium status for hotel and car rental loyalty programs. The perks with those programs are significant. For example, you could book the lowest fare room in a hotel and get upgraded to a nicer room or even a suite, get free drinks and food in the executive lounge, free internet, extra points and late checkout.
The points earned on the Platinum Card are also a bit more versatile than Aeroplan points. You can think of them as Aeroplan points, because you can transfer them at a 1:1 ratio to Aeroplan instantly, but you also can transfer them to other airline programs as well. Sometimes you may want to put points into other airline programs to take advantage of special offers on select routes. The “sweet spots” for various routes on the different airline alliances is outside the scope of this article, but it goes without saying, more options is a good thing.
Some of the other Amex cards available offer points directly into the Marriott Bonvoy program or are transferable into that program, which can be used for hotel stays. Marriott Bonvoy points can also be converted into Aeroplan points.
The Marriott Bonvoy Amex Card is also a great card with excellent perks and unlike the premium cards, has small annual fees ($120). The points are geared for hotel stays but the amount of points you earn during the MSR can be converted to about 25,000-30,000 Aeroplan points so it’s on par with the TD and CIBC Visa cards. This card is good as a keeper card too as the renewal fee each year entitles you to a free night certificate that is easily worth twice what the fee is, although I personally prefer cancelling this card every 14 months so I get the best of both worlds, a big sign up bonus and a free night certificate, followed 7 months later by another sign up bonus. Rinse and repeat.
The Amex family of cards is so large and offers so many options to earn, it can take a couple years to cycle through them all. By the time you’re done, you’ll be ready to start all over. Even though the terms and conditions indicate repeated bonus points may not be awarded if you previously held the card, it is common that with the right intervals between applications, you can indeed earn bonuses multiple times. Details on that process, how to space out applications and maintain your credit score will come in a different blog post, but I hope I made the case that once you’ve got the TD Aeroplan Infinite Visa MSR behind you, you should set your sights on Amex.
While I don’t post referral links here, if you know me, then you’ll want to have me send you a referral link as you’ll earn more points from a referral than you will applying directly at American Express’s website. If you don’t know me, you could find a friend who has one of these cards for a referral or just start off directly at the American Express website because even the public offer right now is pretty awesome.
Just one last thing, at time of writing, the current offer on the Aeroplan Reserve Amex (the one I used for my flight example above) is set to expire August 03, 2021 so if you want to take advantage, you have until then. The offer that follows it may not be as good. If you miss it though, that’s fine, there will be other deals. This one though is the best I’ve seen in 20 years.