In late March it was announced that Cardless had partnered with LATAM to offer a credit card. They are actually launching two credit cards and details are as follows:
LATAM Airlines Mastercard
- Annual Fee: $0
- Sign-up Bonus: 15,000 miles after $1,000 spent in first three months
- Card earns at the following rates:
- 3x per dollar spent on LATAM purchases
- 2x per dollar spent on Restaurants, Ground Transportation purchases
- 1x points per $1 spent on all other purchases
- Qualifying Points: Issued at a rate of 10% of miles earned from card purchases
- No foreign transaction fees
LATAM Airlines World Elite Mastercard
- Annual Fee: $99
- Sign-up Bonus: 40,000 miles after $2,500 spent in first three months
- Card earns at the following rates:
- 4x per dollar spent on LATAM purchases
- 3x per dollar spent on Restaurants, Ground Transportation purchases
- 1x points per $1 spent on all other purchases
- Qualifying Points: Issued at a rate of 20% of miles earned from card purchases
- 3 Upgrade Coupons
- LATAM Lounge Access: 2 passes per account year
- No foreign transaction fees
Our Verdict
The qualifying points bonus doesn’t work on the sign up bonus or promotional points. Only really the World Elite card is worth considering due to the 40,000 point sign up bonus.
View Comments (8)
was researching flights down to Patagonia, looks like this card wont' be useful for a trip down south to Chile then.
I just don't see this as being a winner for Cardless. It would only work for people who constantly fly LATAM. The food is only 2X and 3X, respectively. Whereas on the PELICANS cardless card (my other post) you are getting 4X on bars, restaurants, food delivery, AND GAS, plus $300 back, which really can't be beat for a no-fee fintech!
Cardless became worthless a couple of months ago :(
The $300 back offer is gone. Now it is $50 for 500 spend which is disappointing.
Seems the only good benefit is the 3 passes the world elite card gives you
Buy a cheap round trip ticket to Brazil, use 2 passes to upgrade to first. Miles don't seem valuable
40K points or 15K points on LATAM points will get you no where with this loser airline. It takes 100's of thousand of miles to make use of these worthless points, if even you can before they expire. But, you can occasionally use your DELTA points on LATAM to pick up a 25K MIA to GRU flight.
But beware; Unlike most other airlines in the Americas, LATAM has a fairly tight expiration which is apparently only resettable by flights credited to LATAM Pass:
https://latampass.latam.com/en_us/earn-miles/expiration-of-miles
So if you apply for the credit card and get your bonus miles, but then don't do a paid flight credited to LATAM Pass, those bonus miles will apparently expire. But the terms are so confusing, the don't spell out when miles earned other ways than through flights expire, but assume two years since that's the expiration period on non-LATAM flights.
And the amount of bonus miles you earn even with the World Elite card may not even be enough for most flights. And that can be a problem, because if you don't earn enough miles for what you want by the time the miles expire, it can all get lost.
Since the LATAM website seems incredibly reluctant to provide a partner award chart, I went and Googled. Some other travel blog fished it out, and assuming you sign up for the World Elite and assuming you make the entire minimum spend on 1x categories, you'll have 42500 miles. this will only get you a one-way ticket from the US to Europe or to South America. That's not great.
And while the card does earn qualifying points, you need to actually fly a huge percentage on LATAM flights or LATAM codeshares (can't book directly with the operating airline, has to be ticketed by LATAM to count).