Originally Posted by
claimui
Not a Centurion cardholder, but I have a couple of comments on the EVA Platinum:
- The miles earning rate is *not* great. 1 mile per $25 is pretty low, even by Taiwan standards. You can do the same or better with other cards with zero or low annual fees. There are a bunch of blogs covering this but here's just one example: https://blog.tripplus.cc/zh/148282/b...iles_in_taiwan
- You get a bonus for overseas spending, but you pay a 2% foreign exchange fee. Most Taiwan cards only charge 1.5%.
- The upgrade vouchers do boost the earning a good amount, at least for the required spend. But the upgrade vouchers can be difficult to use, because they are only valuable for long-haul flights. Also they expire within a year, and you need to fly (not just book) before they expire.
- The hotel gym perk is limited to 4 times a month, and it needs to be reserved in advance. I assume llary is able to make good use of it because he is based in Taichung. Most cardholders are in Taipei and it is incredibly tedious to get a reservation there.
- EVA Platinum gets the same priority check-in / lounge benefit as the Cathay premium card. So it's a bit of a wasted benefit to have both.
To be honest the Evergreen hotel benefit is about the only perk I can use in Taichung, there are nicer hotel gyms available for unlimited access through Centurion but Evergreen is 5 minutes walk from my house. Apart from Zebra there are almost no restaurants here offering the 50% off but you have a ton of them in Taipei. Taipei has some really great restaurant/hotel deals but I noticed they are getting harder to use now that so many people carry the platinum credit card ($8k annual fee and almost all the same benefits as the $36k charge card).
I have all of the cards on that page except for the Cathay EVA cobrand. HSBC, Yushan only card and Cube card have all kinds of annoying restrictions/exceptions that make it difficult or impossible for me to get the claimed return rate. YMMV. DBS Travel is the non Amex card I use most because it's quite painless to earn and transfer miles to various programs. In practice half a percent here or there is moot because I often need to make large purchases (several million NT$) and it's a huge effort to get even a $1m credit limit on most Taiwan credit cards.