@Anonymous wrote:I am guessing uber is paying for those bonuses.. I think merchant Amex offers are paid by merchants, uber is only going to appeal to a small segment of citi customers. I don't know what uber pool is but ipseems like sharing a ride with strangers from the title. Seems like a way for Uber to get a new product to be used.
We don't know that the merchants are paying for all of it, through probably some. But if it were, by the same token, it can be argued that a cobranded card's rewards are often paid by the merchant doing the cobranding, but that doesn't necessarily make it less valuable. Who is paying for the rewards is less important than whether the rewards are useful.
As for appealing to a limited audience, that may be the point. I may well have gotten this offer from Citi because I already use my Double Cash to pay for Uber rides (though before now that was through Android Pay). The only question is whether the person the offer is being made to finds it useful. In my case I did. That may not be popularly exploitable in the sense that you do A, B, and C and you get a retention offer of X, but for people who use a product long term and are not constantly looking to jump ship, it works.
