Originally Posted by
STS-134
Hmm...I wasn't aware of that, but in the past, I guess I never checked that closely. I only looked at this year's purchases because of what's been happening (I just checked 2025's purchases and yes, the word "TRAVEL BANK" does appear in the Passenger area.) I can only go back 2 years so 2024's purchases have fallen out of my transaction history. Of course, UA could respond by coding the purchases the same as say E+ seat upgrades or WiFi purchases. In any case, I'm really curious about the volume of money we're dealing with here. We all know that Saks had $320 million of outstanding GCs as of last month, and a large portion of that was probably due to people purchasing and saving $50 GCs with their Amex cards. And that required a physical trip into a Saks store to accomplish, although the Amex Saks benefit launched in 2018 and so that total is from multiple years' worth of purchases, not a single year.
I have no idea what the numbers would be, however, I am very sure that the volume of $200 UA TBs purchased for the purpose of the airline credit fee is way higher than the $50 Saks gcs. The latter is only a total of $100 annually, is specific to the personal plat, plus the amount of card holders having multiple personal Plats is just not as many as those that have multiple Biz plats due in large part to the ability to earn large SUBs every 90+ days using NLL mailers or links.
Contrast this with $200 annually for UA TB which you can get with both personal and biz plats, plus there are loads of people with multiple Biz cards. So if someone had 2 personal and 5-6 biz across 2 players they'd be loading $1.2k-$1.6k annually (I can tell you from my own past experience that I had that many cards at different points in time during the NLL mailer influx).