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Old Aug 23, 2020 | 8:25 pm
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sdsearch
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Originally Posted by Chris2013
Most recent cards were:

Hyatt Visa in June 2020

Amex Platinum in October 2019

Marriott Boundless in February 2019

Everything else in my wallet is 4+ years old.

How would anti-churning policies effect card collectors? I mean if I'm not opening/closing cards every year. I wouldn't think there would be any negative consequences for holding them would there?
No, but you haven't said how many cards you want to open soon.

You have two cards opened in the past 24 months. So if you open 2 more personal cards at any bank, you then won't able to open a third card at Chase until your count of opened in the past 24 month (personal) cards drops back to 4 (which it will in a couple months for the card you got in October 2019).

Most banks' anti-churning rules are only about how many cards opened in a certain amount of time, nothing about whether they were closed or not. So that's why a "collector" doing "fast buildup" can run into that just as much as a true "churner" can. But it sounds like your collecting is slow enough that it you may not have an issue as long as you keep going this slowly (and/or start opening business cards, which in most cases don't appear on personal credit reports).

Now, back to your original question, your don't have all the effectively "net negative AF" hotel cards yet. As you mentioned, you're missing IHG. You're also missing Hilton, where depending on your specifics, the most expensive card ($450 AF Hilton Aspire) might actually be the cheapest (since it gives up to $250 resort credit a year, up to $250 airline incidental credit a year, Priority Pass, and a free weekend uncapped hotel night cert a year (and temporarily those can be used any day of the week). So depending on how much hotel you redeem for costs, you may not even need to be able to use all of those credits to offset the AF completely. Oh, and you also get Hilton's top elite status, Diamond, with the card, while no other hotel program that I know gives either top or even second-from-top elite status with any card any more.

And there's also the Radisson Rewards card to consider. It gives many thousands of points, instead of an expiring cert, every renewal year, which can be good in that case, because the good hotels worth redeeming for in Radisson Rewards are only found in some countries overseas, so you may go a few years between being in locations where redeeming Radisson Rewards makes sense.

Of note: The IHG, Marriott, and Hyatt free night certs are all capped at some level, so they can't be used for absolutely any hotel in the program. Hilton's certs are not capped per se, but you can only redeem for "standard" rooms, so once those sell out, you can't use a cert. And like I aid, the Radisson Rewards card gives points instead of a cert, so there's no worrying about whether the cert works differently than points.

Last edited by sdsearch; Aug 23, 2020 at 8:33 pm
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