Originally Posted by
mr_suave
Yep. The 3x mobile wallet is the best thing this card has going for it compared to the other premium travel cards. If they drop RTR to 1 cent they certainly would have to add other benefits to compensate for it. I mean pretty much every other premium travel card has transfer partners but this one. In my opinion, the 1.5 RTR rate made up for them not having any.
Without the 1.5x RTR, this one would become a head scratcher for sure as it would make their premier travel card not make sense to use for travel. That would even be true when comparing it to their own Altitude Connect which is getting 4x on travel. Assuming most would smartly move travel spend to another card for better return, you could still look at it as a 3% cash back card for mobile wallet spend with some caveats.
One could still possibly make a go of it. If you assume you would fully utilize the $325 travel credit, the $400 annual fee nets out to $75. The best way to cover that to maximize points would be to spend at least $11,667 via mobile wallet each year. That gives you 35,000 points which you use to cover the annual fee per US bank redemption - still getting 1.14ish% on redemption there vs. straight up 1%. I could see the math still working in my favor here overall, but it would not be a card I would recommend to much of anyone outside of FlyerTalk haha.