BOA Premium Rewards vs Travel Rewards

[K-in-Boston]

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.

[Anonymous]

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.

[kdm31091]

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

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

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@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.

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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.

[K-in-Boston]

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

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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.

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@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?

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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.

[kdm31091]

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@K-in-Boston wrote:

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

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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.

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@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?

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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.

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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.

[Anonymous]

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).

[Anonymous]

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

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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...? 

[quickstrike]

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