Update: Looks like this has been the case since at least 2016. I’m not sure why the 3x on grocery wasn’t listed on any of our reviews but it is now. Sorry about that!
City National Bank has made some minor positive changes to the Crystal Visa Infinite card.
- Card now earns 3x points per $1 spent on grocery store purchases (in addition to 3x on airline, hotel, taxi, limousine, rental car, train, bus, gas, restaurant, fast food and takeout food dining establishment purchases)
- Points can now be redeemed for hotel (previously only airfrare). Value seems to be similar to airfare (1¢ per point) but you can sometimes get slightly better value. One example is a hotel costing 16,500 points or $179 for the cash rate.
- Points can be redeemed for the following activities: custom tours, helicopter & balloon tours, day trips & excursions, spa tours, viator VIP & exclusive tours, multi-day & extended tours, shore excursions, theme parks, shows & concerts, water sports, food wine & nightlife. Seems to be a similar 1¢ per point in value
- Rewards Plus. I think this is just a shopping portal, rates don’t seem to be anything fantastic.
This card is definitely worth keeping long term due to how the airline credits work with authorized users so these additions are nice. I probably wouldn’t risk MSing a high amount of grocery store spend on this card, but that’s up to you.
William, I think your confusion about groceries being added as a 3% bonus category even though it has always been that way might stem from the fact that ONE of the official descriptions of this card was missing the grocery category. However, this is not a change, so please retract this posting.
We don’t really retract postings, we will just make an update that it isn’t new.
Can you redeem the points for cash?
Yes, one cent per point.
That is not true. I came in here to put this in a new post, but instead I will reply to yours. Under statement credit, it comes out to 1 point = 0.833 cents.
I was extremely disappointed when I first discovered this. I thought it was the same as CHASE, AMEX, etc, but it’s not.
For everyone telling Will “these aren’t new” changes while you’re right, that’s hardly helpful. Maybe this post has to do with the fact that when they initially posted their review of the credit card they weren’t aware of the 3X on groceries and didn’t include it in the post.
Just adding to what others said. 3X grocery is definitely not new. https://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/2016/01/13/crystal-visa-infinite-the-best-card-you-cant-get/
Thanks, not sure why we didn’t have it listed on any of our posts.
Don’t forget to add this to your master list of cards that give 3% or better on the grocery category.
Doc, these aren’t new changes. The first two have existed for the 2 years I’ve had the card.
Yeah, I’m an idiot.
Will you be able to use the visa infinte portal with this card?
Yes. You can get $100 flight discount for roundtrip flight tickets
Does the AU get the flight discount as well? That is can you get $200 off on four tickets?
Yes. Each AU card can get $100 discount
Hard to justify any MS. You make about $8 in a depreciating currency on $500 spend. Too much work. There are MS deals that people are hiding.
>> There are MS deals that people are hiding.>>
The reason for this is to prevent the companies from closing the loopholes that still exist that they haven’t patched/fixed. Can’t blame people for going underground. There’s lots of fragile deals discussed exclusively in app discussion groups (slack, telegram, whatsapp, etc) although it’s NOT EASY to get into one of those since the admin vets those they take in and no moochers/lurkers are allowed. One is lucky to get invited to one of these and only then do they realize there’s still so many MS avenues to be explored.
Yeah true. But it doesn’t speak too highly of my intelligence if I can’t find a few myself.
Your comment history speaks to that as well.
Nobody is privy to all these MS deals. I know a few and scale them up as much as I can. Start here: http://www.saverocity.com/forum
I don’t think any of those are new, they’ve all been around in the 2 years I’ve had the card.
agreed – not sure why this is considered new when 3x on groceries with the Crystal has been around for a fair bit (for example)
Grocery category is there for long time. Hotels and flight redemption gets you around 1.1cents per point and Rental car is most valuable redemption( more than 1.5cents). Booked $900 (Costco price) worth rental using 39k CNB points. Reward Plus has lot of good Instore offers(Lowes, Home Depot, Kohls – 5 points per dollar).
This makes me want to drive to Brazil now.
Sometimes hotel redemptions will be far beyond 1.1 cpm (I think I’ve seen at least 2 cpm before). It depends on the time and place. Of course, as with all travel purchases, it’s only worth X cpm if you were actually going to purchase the hotel/flight/car/etc at the retail price otherwise.
How do the flight redemptions work? Can you pick any publicly available fare? I don’t really understand how it isn’t a set redemption rate, like the other flight portals I’m familiar with.
You have to search on cnbrewards.com. In general they seem to have most publicly available fares. Maybe not some BE fares. It usually works out to around 1.2 cents per point.
Thanks. They won’t let me see the flight portal without a login ID as far as I can tell. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how the redemption rate varies on flights. Are some flights better deals than others? Or do they change the redemption rate from time to time?
There’s some variation, but it’s pretty trivial (i.e. on the order of 0.05 cents). Basically you should assume ~1.2 cents per pt on flights. If getting 1.16 cpp vs 1.21 cpp determines whether you get the card, then I respectfully suggest that perhaps you’re cutting it too close.
Thanks again. It’s peculiar that they don’t just make it 1.2 cpp so you can evaluate exactly what bonus you are getting, what the category bonuses work out to. Just reading the website it is basically “50,000 Bonus points and 3X points, but you have to get the card to find out exactly what that means.”
For a while they were showing BE fares as the only option without saying they were BE. I was one who complained that they should give the option and specify what is what. The measure they took instead was to pull BE fares entirely as far as I know.
I want this card
I applied for and was approved at the Minneapolis branch at the end of July. Nothing unusual about the process … besides requiring the in-person application. All I had to provide was a copy of a recent paystub. It is making me wonder if I should continue to pay the AF on any of my other premium cards since most of the benefits overlap.
How many days did they take to process the application and updating status? I applied today, they needed paystub.