Changes To Frontier Credit Card – Family Pooling, Elite Status & 5x

Frontier has announced that they have made some changes to the rewards program and revamped the credit card. The revamped card offers:

• Ability to pool points with family members. The primary cardholder can pool points with up to eight others (including friends & family)
• Elite status. You receive one qualifying mile for every dollar you spend on the card. Status levels are at 20k, 50k & 100k.
• Card will earn at the following rates:
  • 5x miles on Frontier purchases
  • 3x miles on restaurant purchases
  • 1x miles on all other purchases

The card will continue to

• Have a $79 annual fee
• Sign up bonus will remain at 40,000 miles
• $100 frontier voucher annually if you spend $2,500 or more within the previous card member year
• Keep your Frontier miles from expiring as long as you make one purchase every six months
• Give you zone two boarding
• Redemption fee waiver

Our Verdict

Frontier has also made a number of changes to their rewards program, including the three new loyalty tiers. You can see the full benefits listed here (or in the table below).

Frontier is pushing these changes as family friendly and obviously trying to find some of the success that Southwest has been able to manage but are these new benefits actually that useful? Putting spend on the card really doesn’t make sense on the 1x category as you could be earning 2%+ on those purchases anyway, similarly you could be earning 4% on the restaurant purchases. It might make sense to put your Frontier flights on the card, but realistically how many paid Frontier flights are you making annually? In addition some people will find they get better value from putting that spend on a card that earns at lower rate, but more valuable points (e.g Chase Sapphire Reserve). The elite status benefit is innovation, but if you’re not putting any spend on the card is it really that useful? I’d also argue that spending a huge amount for meager benefits isn’t really that good in the first place.

I can see the family pooling feature being useful, especially if you have orphaned points in an account but I don’t think the card makes any sense to keep long term at all. My overall thoughts on these changes are that they might be useful for a very niche market segment, but I suspect we will see these benefits being oversold as better than they really are for consumers. I don’t think the card is realistically anymore attractive than it was previously and given that Barclays makes it difficult to get approved in the first place, I’d be waiting for the Barclays Arrival Plus 60,000 point offer to come along instead. $600 buys a lot of Frontier flights after all.