Will it pour this year?
 

Remember the spate of amazing credit card offers that came up last year, starting with Cap 1? Anyone think it will follow? For the first time in my life I just could not keep up with credit card applications, there was just too much to eat and drink, too many min spends to meet. I felt like I was drowning and at one point was getting annoyed with the offers. That was one reason that I started the master CC thread. Couldn't they have just spaced things out a tad? :)

IMHO, card marketers think folks are desperate for new cards in the post Xmas season to late Spring season. Whether they are right or not many of them try to hit this period with offers.

Don't let this annoy you. :D

Instead, take the low hanging fruit and enjoy the taste. @:-)

I eagerly await the (completely speculative) new 200K offer from Cap1. :rolleyes:

Give me a couple of months, my credit report needs a breather :D

However, I have managed to get my parents to believe in the game, and they are fresh for some good deals. I just got them on the Sapphire Preferred since the 50K is going away (and if it goes up to 100K, I'll try to bump them since they are new cardholders).

My feeling is that last year blitz offers will be one of the best in recent memory. This year will be very calm but always hoping I'm proven wrong as I'll gladly put on my speed skates again:)

But sadly, even if this year proves to be better than last yr, most of us who enter the frenzy last yr will still miss out if they still keep the dreaded "1st timer rules in effect". Just my thoughts on this

FZ

I hope you're wrong. But last spring was very unusual when it came to offers. My wife and I haven't opened any new cards since 11/11. We want to be ready if the unusual happens again. @:-) :)

+1

I'm hoping for another great AA opportunity, missed out on the 75k offers last year. Maybe they'll do 100k offers and not fix the two browser hole so I can get 200k! *fingers crossed*

Man, I hope it pours! What month have the most lucrative offers tended to hit the market historically?

Monthly trends don't really exist. Marketers don't care what month it is. They care what the budget is, the corporate goals, the competitive landscape, etc.

Anyone who says, "The best deals always come out in ________" probably doesn't know what s/he is talking about.

Looks like Forbes believes so....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybui...-card-issuers/

I don't want heavy rain..i want a light sprinkle every morning..instead of a one time heaving dosing then nothing for months...

What I can say is that all the best offers have come out in the past year. Most offers were either tying previous bests or setting new standards for what we look for from Credit Card bonus offers.

But on a month to month basis, we do not know.

Reverse
 

The cc bonus binge was a result of the recession and following slow use of credit cards. Banks did everything to get people using credit cards again they could think of. Now they're not so desperate.

The exception may be AA which will probably come out of bankruptcy with many more miles sold cheaply to Citi.

+2 April would be good for us

I'm new to this game, but I'll chime in:
In the past week, I've been targeted for two offers, one for UA Barclay card (spend 1250/month for 3 months for 15k points) and one for Discover (spend 1500/month for 5 months and get $250). If this is any indication, it looks like we have a busy year ahead of us.

that's junk. never sign up for anything less than 50k points, except for SPG AMEX

I agree about the 50k, but those two offers that were discussed were promos for current cardholders. They're throwing more at us to keep using our cards. The US Promo is a really nice one, 15k on top of whatever bonus you got for signing up for the card. Wish I had taken the plunge before the GS.

Personally I see this as a being a slower year, there's just too many miles out there, something's got to give. Can't keep offering big points forever. Eventually the "average" users will be saturated and the only people applying will be FT'ers. :P

My gut is for a slow year as well.

Fact remains we know Airlines make bucket loads of cash off of these programs.

These are profitable arms of companies that are in an industry with very low-to-nonexistent profit margins.

Will the offers slow down? possibly. Will the offers increase? eventually. Will they stay the same this year? most likely.

Do not assume that airlines are losing money on their loyalty programs because you would be wrong.

"No less than 50K" isn't always good advice, especially with the US Barclay Card.

1) It pulls Transunion, which is the forgotten middle child of the 3 credit bureaus. It was a gimme approval for me, since my TU had only 1 pull on it in 24 months.

2) It gives 40K on first purchase. I used it for $2 at a fast-food place, and got 40,002 miles. Also, when US runs their GS, it's an easy hit.

3) Annual fee was waived first year; $89/yr after that but you get 10K bonus miles each year (.89 cpm). If you hold the card, US metal redemptions are 5K cheaper.

4) Reports are that it is churnable, so if the offer goes up to 50K or 60K in the future, I'll just sign up for another one!

5) The targeted offer is for current cardholders, and equates to 5mi/$. If you don't have any other spend requirements, that's a great return if you have a lot of 1x purchases.

amen on that.

jpm/citi will probably just hang up on me if i apply again

I agree, especially since I still have a few inquiries.

The Discover offer isn't bad, $250 for $7500 spend (plus the standard up to 1% cash back) is close to 4% return, and as an existing cardholder, there's no credit pull. If you have the spend to spare, that's pretty good. But yeah, if a 50K plus offer presents itself that can't wait until July, and if you can only spend on one or the other, the miles would be better.


I think the cause is different. It's not that spend declined so much as that credit standards increased. Before mid-2008, almost anyone could qualify for almost any card. With the credit crisis, lending standards got much tighter, resulting in a much smaller pool of prospective customers. So competition for those customers increased, thus the more generous signup offers.

just came in:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...-targeted.html

I hope for some great offers. Like BA 100K and Citi 75K X 2.

I think the odds on good promotions will be much higher if people don't haul the whole promotion game onto national TV or the mainstream press.

For right now I am just slowly churning new citi hilton visa's waiting for the next big thing to come along.

AGREED!

Yeah, we certainly don't want anything like Alec Baldwin screaming about 100K CapOne points all over TV.

Oh, that's right, he did. . .

Cards with big bonuses are promotions intended for the general public. Banks want credit card customers. And not just customers off FT. Publicity about big offers is, in fact, what the banks want.

Bumping bonuses and "two browser" tricks, on the other hand, are ways to use promotions in ways the companies may not have intended for the general public. Still, with all the publicity here and in the travel blogs, those loopholes have not been completely closed although bumping has clearly been curtailed.

And, believe me, if somebody hadn't posted about these techniques here on FT or in the travel blogs, 99% of the people who took advantage of them would never have known about them.

High credit score customers are still incredibly valuable spenders to CC companies and you'll still see card issuers competing over them. With debit cards becoming a unprofitable business due to the Durbin amendment, card issuers will push their credit card products even harder.

There was just a thread post about a 75K Chase Sapphire offer. . . that would be awesome! The thread was closed with no explanation I could see, however, and so perhaps it was determined it wasn't authentic or something. . .

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...-75-000-a.html

The 50K Sapphire Peferred offer is going away? I've been on the fence about applying due to meeting spend limits on my other new cards. I hope the mileage offer goes up, and there's a different thread posted saying a 75K offer is out, but is there more info out there? Opinions on if I should apply or wait...

When I say "going away," I mean that the travel bloggers got a notice that it is now a "limited time offer." I got the SP in June 2011, so the offer has been going for a while.

Still, my family needed the extra UA miles and couldn't apply for more UA cards, so convinced them to go SP.

It was closed? Does anyone know why?

i think you misunderstood my post-I mentioned exposure in the national press, and I was speaking not just about bragging about card bonuses but moreover conveying the impression that people just sign up for bonuses, cancel cards and churn.

Posting on FT might reach several thousand people but a spot on national tv reaches millions. And when the national press starts to make the banks look like rubes, the deals will go away.

Which they may have already-is it just coincidence that there have been few new fat bonus offers since October?

Gosh, I just got the 50K UAL Chase card bonus (no spend requirement!) which seemed pretty generous to me. And that's a new offer in the last few weeks.

I'm glad there are still good offers out there, but there's little doubt that the overall field is much less than it was for most of last year.

And no one can prove that mass publicity has changed anything but I still don't think it helps to go on TV and outline a scheme that makes the banks look dumb.

Because it was a targeted offer one person (not even the poster, but someone they know) supposedly got which cannot be used by anyone else, but the thread quickly degenerated into just the usual "how do I get these targeted offers" which has been endlessly asked before.

There was no concrete information on the offer except that someone had supposedly gotten it and it had a targeted invite code. So you either get the offer or you don't. End of story! (At least as needing a specific thread for the offer. There are axisting threads for the public 50k offer.)

Basically, the purpose of thread was to tell you to not throw away mail that might be this offer. That purpose was already accomplished.

I hope it pours...right after my AARP 5% CB is expired.

I was curious about this too. Anyone know what the scoop is??