I have to disagree with you. Amex has limitation in terms of acceptance. Visa is more widely used.

As far as Citi Premire Miles is concern, you have a few FFP you can redeem to. Also, Citi PM gives you 10K miles when you pay SGD180 annual fee + if your previous year spend >SGD50K, you get another 10K miles.

DBS Altitude Amex card can only redeem to KF.

I use the cards as follow:

Citi PremireMiles Visa: All purchases in Singapore (except those better eranings);

DBS Altitude Amex: (Reserved for promotional activities);

MayBank Horizon Visa: All overseas/travel related purchases and those merchants in Singapore under the 10x treats points;

ANZ Platinum MasterCard: For all Comfort/CityCab taxi charges in Singapore (service charges wavied whereas others need to incur 10%+GST);

Citi Rewards: All departmental/clothing/shoes stores worldwide;

Amex Platinum Charge Card: All those under 10x points and 10x+10x points merchants in Singapore;

The rest of the other cards I have would only be used when there are promotional activities by the banks.

The most disappointed (on branding) card to ever own is the Amex KrisFlyer card.

Years back, OCBC Titanium MasterCard used to have, from time to time, the 10x points for overseas charges. That was the good ole days. Now OCBC has nothing good to offer.

Well, both DBS Altitude Amex and Citi PremierMiles are the same for the first $1,000 that you spend in a month: both give 1.2 miles/$.

But once you cross the $1k threshold, DBS give you 1.6 miles per $ ^ whereas Citi... continue with their 1.2 ratio. :td:

Acceptance is not that much of an issue, it's mainly the small places that hate cards anyway which are allergic to Amex. To sum it up, I would definitely get the Altitude Amex as my main card, and then use the PremierMiles as a backup. Not the other way around.

The Maybank card is good in that the 10x merchants are actually quite useful, not to mention overseas spend. I think we're all in agreement here.

Also, regarding bonus miles, Citi might give them for renewing or spending $50k a year (10k miles bonus), but DBS have similar promos where you get a ton of extra miles. Last year they had a deal where they gave loads of extra miles for purchasing SQ tickets, and then they offered 10k extra miles as long as you spent a total of $10k during the last 3 months of the year (cake easy).

It all depends on which FFP you want to redeem to. If KF, then both cards are equal.

DBS does give you another option, Asia Miles (Cathay Pacific). So does Citi.

Citi gives you two more, Thai and Delta.

Personally I still want to redeem to KF so it's all the same to me.

Another point to note for overseas spends. DBS and Maybank have 1% forex charge. Citi has 1.5%.

just to check, dbs altitude accrues miles for all transactions including online purchases right?

Kitsura, you men in addition to quite wide currency buy/sell brackets?

Adamantine, I've never come across any mention of internet transactions being exempt.

Looking at the Maybank Rewards Infinite scheme they state that the merchants listed are seasonal and that the bonus miles apply until 31 March. I'm curious if they will extend the promo for at least some of these merchants or replace them all entirely...

aster> Yes, if you notice that every bank website has a foreign exchange rate which will vary from bank to bank. But since the actual rate is fixed at point of usage there is no way to actually compare the forex rate. But for fees there is a way to compare. Based on further research I realised my fee posted above is no longer accurate and the latest is:
Maybank: 1.25%
OCBC: 1.5%
DBS: 1.5% for Visa/MC, 2% for AMEX
Citibank: 2.5%
UOB: 2.5% including fees by VISA/MC, 3.25% for Amex (2% by bank and 1.25% by Amex)

Just a note that with Citi PM, Asia Miles is redeemed at a very poor ratio of 1 point = 0.4 miles, so if this is your FF program of choice, you wouldn't use Citi PM.

Are these fees on top of creditcard companies fees (Amex, Visa & MC)?
Credit card companies exchange rates normally about 2.5% above interbank rates.

There's no limit for normal spending, but there's a 110,000 points limit on 10x10 merchants within the anniversary of the card.

I've checked with Maybank and they said they aren't sure so I guess yes, the credit card companies fees are probably added in during conversion to USD and back to SGD. These fees are just bank admin fees which are charged on top of the card companies' fees.

Now I'm not sure if this was about my Amex card or one of the others I was considering, but I recall reading that if you do an overseas transaction then the amount will first be converted into USD before then being converted into SGD. So double conversion it seems unless you happen to be doing a purchase in USD...

Read the T&C all cards do a double conversion not just Amex.

Just trying to figure out whether it's worth getting the Citi Platinum card to complement my DBS Altitude one.

I get an average of 1.5 miles per $ from my DBS card and let's just say that I spend $1k per month in supermarkets... or let's make it $1.5k to make the case more compelling.

So when it comes to supermarkets I'd get 2,250 miles per month on my DBS card and 3,000 miles on the Citi Platinum card due to bonus miles for supermarket spend.

So 750 miles/month gives 9,000 miles per annum. Is it worth getting an additional card just for this?

In my case I'm away for a couple of months a year, so I'm not even sure the advantage would be those 9,000 miles, and I might not even qualify for the automatic fee waiver...