Rapid Travel Chai

My FlexPerks Visa annual fee came due, and like ‘Good morning, everyone’ Grant, I had a to make the call to keep or cancel.

My situation:

• 24,000 point balance, struggling to have a good use of points for air ticket for my current travels inWest Africa because most airlines I am using are not bookable with FlexPerks (not even with calling);
• My planned 2016 charity donations already done, so will not take advantage of that category 3x until 2017;
• Still waiting for 2 $25 airline allowance credits from recent award tickets, per Grant, this really takes 6-8 weeks as they say and I am in week 6;
• Grocery category change likely means Target is out of 2x, but my Serve card was closed anyway;
• New limit of transferring 20,000 points per year would have me abandon some of my points;
• I haven’t been approved for any new US Bank cards since getting 2 Club Carlson (personal and business) and 2 FlexPerks (again, personal and business) in 2013/2014.

Grant called US Bank and a supervisor was able to give him 3,500 points each for Visa and Amex versions, to post in 6-8 weeks. 3,500 is the amount needed to credit the annual fee, should you choose that option.

I then called and was offered an immediate reversal of the $49 annual fee. Since I am still planning to close my account in the next month or two once I clear out the points and get my airline credits, I took this rather than waiting for 3,500 and hoping to find an optimal use. For reference, I did put about $19k spend on the card last year thanks to charity and grocery (Target).

Contrast to my experience and others last year when US Bank seemed to not be offering much of anything in the way of retention offers, and this is good news.

If this hadn’t worked, I may have seen about converting to the no annual fee FlexPerks Select+ Amex just to keep the points alive. I am hoping that by closing another account I might get approved for a new FlexPerks or Korean Air card.

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Now about my Club Carlson US certs for $10k annual spend…still trying to get to the bottom of that now 3 months after annual fees were billed. One agent said, “I can only go back 9 months but it looks like you only spend $7,000.” Then how about you go back 12 months? 🙂 They are supposed to respond in 7-10 days by mail.