topic Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards in Credit Cards

BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

Anonymous — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 06:11:15 GMT

Would love some clarification from those in the know about the relationship bonus on these two cards. The Premium Rewards card is often referred to as an upgraded Travel Rewards but I've noticed that while the Travel Rewards card receives a 10% bonus just for having a checking account with BOA, the Premium Rewards page makes no reference to this. The only customer bonus referenced for the Premium Rewards card requires being at Preferred Rewards status. So, for those of you that have the card, does the Premium Rewards card receive the 10% checking account bonus? If it doesn't, for someone not at Preferred Rewards tier it seems it would make more sense to use the Travel Rewards card for non bonus spend.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

wasCB14 — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 20:22:48 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Would love some clarification from those in the know about the relationship bonus on these two cards. The Premium Rewards card is often referred to as an upgraded Travel Rewards but I've noticed that while the Travel Rewards card receives a 10% bonus just for having a checking account with BOA, the Premium Rewards page makes no reference to this. The only customer bonus referenced for the Premium Rewards card requires being at Preferred Rewards status. So, for those of you that have the card, does the Premium Rewards card receive the 10% checking account bonus? If it doesn't, for someone not at Preferred Rewards tier it seems it would make more sense to use the Travel Rewards card for non bonus spend.

*Edited to remove stuff I was wrong about.*

Premium is an "upgraded" version because of the extra travel/dining rewards, TSA/GE credit, and an airline extras credit that exceeds the AF by $5.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

Anonymous — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 06:59:05 GMT

I have the Travel Rewards card and a BOA checking account and I do get the 10% bonus. The 10% bonus is prominently advertised on the Travel Rewards webpage. I don't see it mentioned anywhere on the Premium Rewards page though.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

wasCB14 — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 07:29:59 GMT

https://www.bankofamerica.com/preferred-rewards/calculator/ and click the word "eligible" to see a pop-up that says:

Card eligibility guidelines

Most Bank of America® branded consumer credit cards (such as the Cash Rewards, Travel Rewards, and Premium Rewards® credit cards) are eligible to receive the Preferred Rewards bonus, as long as the card account is open and in good standing. If your credit card receives the 10% customer bonus, the Preferred Rewards bonus will replace the 10% customer bonus.

Cards not eligible for the rewards bonus:

Non-rewards credit cards
Business purpose credit cards
BankAmericard Better Balance Rewards®
Merrill Lynch branded (including MERRILL+®, Merrill Lynch® Octave®, American Express® and Private Banking and Investment Group Octave® American Express®)
U.S. Trust® Octave® American Express®
AAA® Gas Rebate
Air France KLM World Elite Mastercard®
Alaska Airlines®
Allegiant World MasterCard®
Amtrak Guest Rewards®
Amway™
Asiana Airlines®
Celebrity Cruises®
Royal Caribbean International®
Spirit Airlines®
Virgin Atlantic Airways®

This list is subject to change without prior notice.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

Anonymous — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 07:33:50 GMT

Operative statement there is "IF your credit card receives the 10% customer bonus...". It's not made clear whether or not the Premium Rewards card receives that 10% customer bonus.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

Anonymous — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 08:30:32 GMT

I have both cards. They both get the 10% bonus. For both if you then qualify for Preferred Rewards you get that instead of the 10%. It doesn't stack--you start earning 25% instead of 10%.

The biggest differences is in the way you get your cash back. With the PR card you just get cash deposited into your bank account. With the TR you have to "redeem" travel points by ticking off things on your statement that counted as travel--but since it's defined so loosely, and includes everything from Uber to Parking to restaurants, there's always something there you can credit, and then you get cash back in your bank account, so it's basically cash back with a hoop you have to jump through.

The Premium Rewards card has an annual fee but it's easy to wipe that out: the $100 for airline incidentals (in flight food, entertainment, bag fees, etc.) is more than the annual fee by itself.

One thing to consider is pairing either of them with the BoA CashBack card with is a no-AF card. Especially if you were looking for dining, you could pick dining as your 3.3% category on cash back card and use travel at 1.6% for all else. It would only make sense to go to the premium card in that case if you were going to blow past the $2500/quarter limit on the 2% and 3% categories on the CashBack card. Also note you can get a co-branded Visa version of the CashBack card if, like me, you wanted to use it at Costco in the 2.2% category. Note these grow with preferred rewards too--it can be a 5.25% back on dining card and 3.5% back at Costco, at which point you might find you want two of them (the $2500/quarter thing starts to be a real limit for groceries+dining for me).

BoA does let you re-use a hard pull so if you apped the TR or PR card, you could follow up with an app for the cashback a few days later without getting hit with a second HP (but you do get a second new account, so it's not totally "free" to your credit score.)

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

imaximous — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 11:20:30 GMT

The Premium Rewards card doesn’t offer the 10% relationship bonus.
Only the Cash Rewards and Travel Rewards cards offer that, which is increased if you’re a Preferred Rewards customer.

PR only gets the Preferred Rewards bonuses (25%, 50% or 75%) after meeting the qualification requirements, and you must average the amount for 3 months, so it’s not like you deposit $100k and immediately earn 75% more. You have to wait till the 3-month average is $100k.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

kdm31091 — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 11:48:24 GMT

The Premium card doesn't offer the 10% bonus. The Cash and Travel cards do. They seem to be downplaying the feature recently. On the revamp of the Cash card, the 10% bonus still exists, but it is only mentioned on buried portions of the site. For the Premium I see no mention of it anywhere at all.

It basically will come down to your travel and dining spend. The base earn rate on the Travel and Premium is the same. If your travel and dining spend is sufficient that the increased rewards will cover the AF, then the Premium is worth it.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

Anonymous — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 14:16:32 GMT

@kdm31091 wrote:
The Premium card doesn't offer the 10% bonus. The Cash and Travel cards do. They seem to be downplaying the feature recently. On the revamp of the Cash card, the 10% bonus still exists, but it is only mentioned on buried portions of the site. For the Premium I see no mention of it anywhere at all.

It basically will come down to your travel and dining spend. The base earn rate on the Travel and Premium is the same. If your travel and dining spend is sufficient that the increased rewards will cover the AF, then the Premium is worth it.

The PR card benefits preferred rewards clients the most.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

UpperNwGuy — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 15:11:59 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
The PR card benefits preferred rewards clients the most.

Seems like that's the direction BofA is heading. They want your retirement account too, not just your checking account, and they'll reward you accordingly.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

K-in-Boston — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 15:22:11 GMT

I have both and concur that there is no checking/savings 10% bonus for Premium Rewards, but it's still the better card as long as you can offset the AF. For Preferred clients, the other difference is that it appears on Travel Rewards you earn the bonus upon redemption while on Premium Rewards you earn the bonus on the spending.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

Anonymous — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 19:55:35 GMT

Right, I suspected this might be the case. I had originally planned to get the Premium Rewards card and close my Travel Rewards but I recently moved the bulk of my money from BOA and will eventually lose my preferred status. The Travel Rewards card will then give me slightly more back for non-bonus spend.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

kdm31091 — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 23:19:45 GMT

The travel rewards earns upon purchases just like the Premium does.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

Anonymous — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 00:54:56 GMT

I don't actually use Merrill Edge as my primary retirement savings brokerage.

Literally I just moved a 100k fund there from Vanguard and have exactly zero trades at Merrill Edge. The only transaction in my history there is the record of the fund moving in from Vanguard, and then dividend reinvestments on it since then. My 401k, IRA contributions and any other personal savings all still go to Vanguard and I moved money to Merrill Edge only to qualify for Preferred Rewards.

Point is you don't have to commit all your retirement savings to them or your investment activity, just "park" money there from an existing account and keep doing whatever you were already doing otherwise.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

Anonymous — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 00:50:44 GMT

@K-in-Boston wrote:
I have both and concur that there is no checking/savings 10% bonus for Premium Rewards, but it's still the better card as long as you can offset the AF. For Preferred clients, the other difference is that it appears on Travel Rewards you earn the bonus upon redemption while on Premium Rewards you earn the bonus on the spending.

Huh. I was pretty sure that when I opened the Premium Rewards card I was earning 10% for the first month. I might be remembering wrong, but for the first month I didn't qualify for preferred rewards and I believed at that time (April last year) was getting the 10% bonus like on my other BoA cards. Maybe I remember wrong?

I opened the card and tried to qualify for preferred rewards as the same time. However, it takes over 3 months to qualify if you didn't already have money at BoA. I moved in 100k of my retirement savings to a Merrill Edge account and thought that would immediately qualify me, but that isn't how it works.

You qualify based on your average daily balance over the last 90 days, and they only re-calcualte your eligibility once a month, so even if you drop in 100k it can take over a month to qualify at all and up to four months to get ot the top level.

As in, the first day you put 100k there your 90 day average daily balance is 100k/90=1111. After a month it's about 30k, after two it's about 60k and only sometime after the third month do you actually qualify for the top 75% rate.

Also it's completely mysterious what day they will recalculate. I called many times and the CSR's could never explain to me on exactly what day I was going to reach which tier based on my current balance. Most of them didn't even understand how the calculation works, and when I finally got to a manager who DID, he didn't know which days they would run the calculation.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

K-in-Boston — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 01:07:26 GMT

@kdm31091 wrote:
The travel rewards earns upon purchases just like the Premium does.

Sorry, I didn't clarify that better - I was specifically referring to earning the relationship bonus. When you redeem Travel Rewards, you get the 10% (or higher) bonus on your redemption. On Premium Rewards, when you look at your earnings you get the 2 points for travel/dining and an additional up to 1.5 points for relationship bonus, but you have to at least be Preferred Rewards Gold in order to earn additional points.

@Anonymous wrote:
Huh. I was pretty sure that when I opened the Premium Rewards card I was earning 10% for the first month. I might be remembering wrong, but for the first month I didn't qualify for preferred rewards and I believed at that time (April last year) was getting the 10% bonus like on my other BoA cards. Maybe I remember wrong?

No, I was slightly disappointed to discover that simply being a checking customer with an average daily balance a bit less than Gold got no additional rewards.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

kdm31091 — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 02:54:19 GMT

@K-in-Boston wrote:
@kdm31091 wrote:
The travel rewards earns upon purchases just like the Premium does.
Sorry, I didn't clarify that better - I was specifically referring to earning the relationship bonus. When you redeem Travel Rewards, you get the 10% (or higher) bonus on your redemption. On Premium Rewards, when you look at your earnings you get the 2 points for travel/dining and an additional up to 1.5 points for relationship bonus, but you have to at least be Preferred Rewards Gold in order to earn additional points.

@Anonymous wrote:
Huh. I was pretty sure that when I opened the Premium Rewards card I was earning 10% for the first month. I might be remembering wrong, but for the first month I didn't qualify for preferred rewards and I believed at that time (April last year) was getting the 10% bonus like on my other BoA cards. Maybe I remember wrong?
No, I was slightly disappointed to discover that simply being a checking customer with an average daily balance a bit less than Gold got no additional rewards.

On the Travel Rewards card, though, you do earn the points upon purchase, not upon redemption. The only card that required redeeming to get the relationship bonus was the Cash Rewards. The Travel earns upon purchase the same as the Premium. The Premium just earns a higher rate on dining and travel related purchases.

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

Anonymous — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 06:23:18 GMT

Premium also has a few of those credit card insurance "benefits" that people rarely use: trip delay/cancellation, baggage lost/delayed, purchase loss/theft and return protection, doubled warranty, rental car collision/loss (secondary).

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 18:10:21 GMT

@kdm31091 wrote:
The travel rewards earns upon purchases just like the Premium does.

I am looking at doing the Cash Rewards and Premium Combo since I am moving $200k to Merrill Edge. I was talking to a BOA banking specialist yesterday that was "100% Confident" that the cash card was upon purchase and that the Premium was upon Redemption. Big difference for me since I do not want to put a few big purchases on either of these until I qualify for the Preferred Rewards after my 90 day average balance is over the 100K threshold to qualify for the 75%...

Can anyone with the card verify...?

Re: BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

quickstrike — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 18:41:05 GMT

I have both the Cash card and the Premium Travel card. They both earn the bonus on purchase.