Best Posts This Week: Club Carlson Removes & Adds Benefits, Compensation, Retention Bonuses, Wyndham Changes & More

The biggest news of the week was that U.S Bank have decided to cripple the Club Carlson credit card by removing the last night free benefit. Originally they tried to sneak this update in, but as soon as the community found out about it there were a lot of angry cardholders. In the end U.S Bank communicated with cardholders slightly better and also added a free night benefit and 30,000 points on your next paid stay. This doesn’t make up for the benefit cardholders will be loosing, but at least it’s something.

This brings us to our next point, if your card loses a benefit you should definitely call in and ask for compensation. People have reported receiving 5,000 Chase UR points by complaining about the Chase Ink lounge benefit going away for example. In addition to this, you should be regularly calling in and asking if there are any retention offers/spending bonuses tied to your account. Chuck did this recently and shared his impressive results, he also shared some lessons he learned from the whole process. People have also reported a lot of success when doing this with Discover as well.

The other big bit of news is that Wyndham is moving to an easier to understand rewards program. All nights will cost 15,000 points and there will be no blackout dates. This is great news if you want to stay at the more expensive Wyndham properties as these used to cost 50,000 points. Because of this we also had a quick look at the Wyndham credit cards, although it might be worth waiting as Wyndham have stated that they plan to launch their biggest sign up bonus ever sometime this summer.

American Express went on a bit of a bonus binge this week. The sign up bonus on the Premier Rewards Gold card was again increased to 50,000 Membership Rewards points, which is a great deal but given that you can only get this bonus once I’m waiting for a 75,000 point offer. They also increased the sign up bonus on their Hilton cards to 60,000 on the no annual fee card and 80,000 points on the Surpass card which also comes with gold status. If you’re new to American Express, you might want to read our post on 15 things everybody should know about AmEx.

Chase also added a $200 + 10,000 point sign up bonus on their Chase Southwest Premier card. There are so many different Chase Southwest bonuses currently available that we decided to do a quick roundup of what is available and the best offer for each card. U.S Bank also added a $100 cash sign up bonus to their Cash+ card, which offers 5% cash back in categories that you can choose. It’s a shame that most of these categories now suck, but it’s still useful if you loan money on Kiva.

Contents

1 All Of Our Posts This Week
2 Deals Dying Next Week

All Of Our Posts This Week

This time we’re trying something a bit different, some sections will be split into “featured” and “the rest” (props to Miles to Memories for the idea). If you’re short on time just focus on the featured articles. All of them are also ordered in what I think is most important to least important.