By comparison is it fair to assume that Colombia has the crappiest LANPASS credit card?
Here are the
charges for having the card
So it is COP$55,000 per quarter, COP$220,000 per year or roughly equivalent to US$110. That is for the basic gold card that will give you a limit upto 7.99 million pesos (about 4k USD)
Each time LAN offers 1km/US$0.01 that same US$110 would buy you 11,000 kms
Each COP$2,600 earns 1.6kms US$1 currently is about $1950 so that is substantially less than 1 mile per dollar. It is actually near 1km per dollar
So to accumulate the 11,000 kms that you could have just bought, you have to spend nearly 18 million pesos on your card, that's about 9000 US dollars.
Here is
the card's page on the LANPASS website, it seems to offer no additional benefits such as bonus miles for new customers.
Long and short of it, the HELM Lanpass card only seems to be worthwhile if you can
a) Remember to pay it on time because Colombian banks aren't shy about raping you with charges
b) Plan on spending more than 18 million pesos per year on it.
Helm claims the card is ideal for travellers because it can be used POS overseas without additional overseas charges. The Davivienda checking account debit card also doesn't charge you for overseas POS transactions so it appears this is nothing special.
Contrastingly, Mrs Johnny has a BCP LANPASS card in Peru, costs peanuts for the management charge, she gets double kms on purchases via LAN.com and over the course of the last 9 months when she got it, she has received about 15,000 bonus kms in her LANPASS account and has no idea why.