Every year I like to make some predictions for the following year. I thought it would be fun to take a look at the predictions I made for 2017 to see how I did, a number of other bloggers also made predictions for 2017 so I thought I’d see how they did as well.
Contents
- 1 My Predictions 2.5/6
- 2 Frequent Miler 4/4
- 3 Tagging Miles 2/4
- 4 PFDigest 3/6
- 5 Travel With Grant 3/9
- 5.1 Chase will tighten the 5/24 rule even more. Chase will add a new hotel transfer partner and remove an existing airline partner.
- 5.2 Citi will stop issuing the Citi Prestige and focus more on improving the Citi Premier
- 5.3 American Express will add new transfer partners and remove the once per lifetime ban
- 5.4 Bank of America will introduce a high end travel rewards credit card
- 5.5 Barclays will introduce a high end travel rewards credit card (Barclays Arrival Prestige?)
- 5.6 US Bank will introduce a high end travel rewards credit card (US Bank FlexPerks Travel Rewards Visa Infinite?)
- 5.7 Discover will introduce a credit card with an annual fee to compete against the Citi Premier and Chase Sapphire Preferred (Discover It Feels Good to Travel Credit Card?)
- 5.8 A new quarterly rewards credit card will compete against Chase Freedom and Discover It
- 5.9 Some random bank that no one has heard of will introduce an awesome travel credit card, but too many people will be approved for the card so the offer will disappear quickly.
- 6 Final Thoughts
My Predictions 2.5/6
Original predictions found here
Bank of America To Add New Rule
Bank of America did introduce a new application rule that we called the 2/3/4 rule. The reason I made this prediction was that Chase has the 5/24 rule, Citi has the 1/24 family rule and American Express has the once per lifetime rule. I knew that a lot of people were signing up for multiples of Bank of America cards and that there would be more and more unprofitable customers hitting Bank of America with those other card issuers drying up. I’m going to give myself a full point for this prediction.
Mobile Payments To Add Loyalty Programs & Increase Competition
Samsung Pay is still the only mobile payment with a rewards program. That being said Chase is/has spent $100 million marketing their Chase Pay platform and we are seeing more & more promotions from Samsung Pay as well. Apple really hasn’t done much, it seems any promotion they have is actually card issuer lead rather than lead by them or a specific merchant. They did just launch their person to person payment system for Apple Pay though, so maybe we will see more promotions in the future.
This one is pretty subjective, I’m going to give myself 0.5 a point. As I said no new loyalty programs were added by competition has increased.
Additional Benefits To American Express Platinum
They increased the annual fee to $550, added a $200 Uber credit and also added 5x on hotels booked through amextravel.com and a bunch of other smaller benefits. I had some insider knowledge on this one, so I wasn’t surprised to see it come true. Easy 1 point here.
American Express Will Cut Back On AmEx Offers ‘Abuses’
Haven’t really see any changes in this department. Although it has been some time since we’ve seen an offer available via Twitter and the new login sucks so much that using the old login is usually necessary. 0 points.
New Premium Chase Business Card
Sadly not. I think the major issue is that while the Chase Sapphire Reserve was well received it doesn’t actually look like it’s made a positive impact on Chase’s bottom line. 0 points.
Chase To Restrict Bank Account Bonuses
There has been a few reports of rogue bankers not allowing accounts to be opened due to multiple years of opening and closing for the bonus but nothing widespread and we’ve seen the same reports in previous years as well. 0 points
Frequent Miler 4/4
Original predictions found here
Citi will add significant new benefits to the Prestige card
Citi added some benefits in July, after cutting benefits earlier in the month. Not sure I’d classify the changes as significant but I’ll give Frequent Miler a point here.
Alaska won’t significantly devalue their Mileage Plan program
Alaska miles were devalued when making a redemption on American Airlines, but apart from that there wasn’t any real devaluation in the program. Another point.
Marriott won’t devalue their travel packages
No change to these travel packages as far as I know. Another point.
The promise of Digital Wallet Cards will die
I don’t think these cards actually ever really showed any promise, especially with the failure to account for EMV chips becoming standard. I think a lot more of these digital wallet cards died in 2017, so another point here.
Tagging Miles 2/4
Original predictions found here
Originally I was going to look at all of the predictions, but I’ll just focus on the four credit card predictions.
New Barclaycard Premium
This didn’t happen. 0 points
Chase will add 1 airline Ultimate Rewards Partner
Chase did add Iberia/Aer Lingus. 1 point
Platinum Enhancement
See above. 1 point
Wells Fargo will fade away. Bank of America will continue to grow in prominence, but still fairly low value sign-on bonuses.
Don’t think there has been much movement either way to be far. 0 points.
PFDigest 3/6
Original predictions found here
PFD made a lot of predictions, so I just picked 6 of them.
New Bank of America Rule
See above. 1 point
American Express Platinum New Benefits
See above. 1 point
Marriott/SPG Travel Packages Being Nerfed
See above. 0 points
Wells Fargo Buzz Worthy Offer
This never materialized, unless you count $200 cash bonuses as buzz worthy.
Hyatt Devaluation
Nope. 0 points
Points & Miles Blogger Consolidation
Seems like more and more of the bigger bloggers are adding extra writers rather than new blogs popping up. 1 point.
Travel With Grant 3/9
Original predictions found here
Again I’m only going to look at the credit card predictions otherwise there is too many.
Chase will tighten the 5/24 rule even more. Chase will add a new hotel transfer partner and remove an existing airline partner.
Chase 5/24 rule has remained consistent. They have added an airline partner and hotel partners have remained consistent. 0 points
Citi will stop issuing the Citi Prestige and focus more on improving the Citi Premier
Still issuing both cards. What is interesting is that Citi is focusing more on non rewards offers due to the competitive heat, so this one isn’t far from being right. 0 points
American Express will add new transfer partners and remove the once per lifetime ban
Once per lifetime ban still definitely exists unfortunately. I don’t think they have added any new transfer partners either. 0 points
Bank of America will introduce a high end travel rewards credit card
They did add the Premium Rewards travel card. It only has a $95 annual fee, but it’s still marketed as a premium card. 1 point
Barclays will introduce a high end travel rewards credit card (Barclays Arrival Prestige?)
No addition by Barclaycard (see above). 0 point
US Bank will introduce a high end travel rewards credit card (US Bank FlexPerks Travel Rewards Visa Infinite?)
Grant didn’t get the name right, but they did add the Altitude Reserve. 1 point
Discover will introduce a credit card with an annual fee to compete against the Citi Premier and Chase Sapphire Preferred (Discover It Feels Good to Travel Credit Card?)
No addition by Discover. 0 points
A new quarterly rewards credit card will compete against Chase Freedom and Discover It
No addition in this space. 0 points
Some random bank that no one has heard of will introduce an awesome travel credit card, but too many people will be approved for the card so the offer will disappear quickly.
Tech CU offered a card with a $500 sign up bonus, basically nobody was approved. Not exactly a travel card, bI’lut close enough for me. 1 point.
Final Thoughts
I think in general it’s easier to make negative predictions (e.g nothing will change) than other types of predictions. I really like coming up with a list of predictions each year, I actually haven’t thought about my predictions for 2018 too much yet. I hope to have something together for that in early January. If other bloggers want to make their predictions, let me know and I’ll add them to my 2018 prediction post when it goes live. Feel free to discuss the predictions for 2017 below!
I always enjoy reading these posts. My personal prediction for 2018, less people applying for Amex cards due to recent RAT team activities.
“I had some insider knowledge on this one, so I wasn’t surprised to see it come true”
do you work for AMEX?
No
Link to PFDigest’s predictions goes to Tagging Miles.
Haha, I love this. Looks like my success rate (3 / 9 = 33%) was the worst. I think I made too many predictions. Either way, fun to look back and see how close or off I was 1 year later.
P.S. There is still 26 days left in the year for stuff to happen…
This is very true, I have some vacation days coming up so didn’t think I’d have time later in the year.
Marriott Travel Packages were arguably devalued with the loss of point transfers to Southwest counting for the companion pass, although I realize the actual value of the packages themselves hasn’t changed.
Have to disagree with Citi adding significant benefits to the Prestige. Still personally disappointed about this.
Yeah, I agree but I was in a generous mood.
“American Express Will Cut Back On AmEx Offers ‘Abuses’”
They did make a lot more of the offers ‘Limit 1 statement credit(s) per American Express® online account.’ or ‘Limit 1 enrolled Card per American Express Card online account’ which nullifies the multi-tab trick. It now requires more legwork to have every card set up with a different online account.
It used to be that almost all offers were ‘Limit 1 statement credit(s) per American Express® Card across all American Express offer channels.’, which was much more permissive.
I didn’t realize that was hapoening. So it actively blocks adding offers to multiple cards on same online account?
Sometimes it gives you an error when you try to add the offer to multiple cards. Other times, it lets you add the offer but you don’t get multiple credits. If you ask for manual intervention, they may point to the T&C and say you’re SOL.
Have to agree here. Compared to last year the overall value of amex offers has been completely underwhelming.
Amex did cut back on abuse by basically starving us out of the really good offers and instead we get highly YMMV offers and zero twitter.
On an unrelated note I’d also say the increase in AF to the Platinum didn’t create an overall added value to the card. I know this one is subjective but that’s my take.