When is Sterling credit card spend treated as foreign spend, earning double points?

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• Jonny says:

  7 Dec7 December 12:46

  Recently booked a hotel room with Ebookers, then cancelled a week later and rebooked with Cheaptickets.com, as they had a better promotional code (both are owned by Orbitz).

  Ebookers was in £ and got 2x MR’s (as expected). Cheaptickets.com was in $ and got 3x MRs (base, travel, foreign spend). Though the extra MRs alone are insufficient to compensate for the FX transaction fee applied

  Incidentally, I had a 30% off code on cheaptickets, and they regularly seem to have 25% off codes, which is very decent, though doesn’t work for quite a few chains

• Jonny says:

  7 Dec7 December 12:47

  I got 4x points on an AirBNB stay in July!

• Blackberryaddict says:

  7 Dec7 December 15:32

  I only ever use my Gold for spend abroad or non-BA travel spend in the UK, and Shell. easyjet and Qatar only showed double (travel bonus only). Avianca only showed outbound.

  I use my BA Amex for the rest at 1.5. At least I get 1.5 guaranteed – I can never remember the others, and risk only getting 1.0.

  I do get around 3.3 points per pound on the Gold on average including the annual bonus.

  • Duncan S says:

    8 Dec8 December 12:12

    You know the 2.99% fee for non-Sterling transactions makes the Amex Gold much worse than something like the Halifax Clarity for foreign spend, even considering the double reward points.

    • Rob says:

      8 Dec8 December 14:40

      Yes, but you’re back to debating whether you want to bother with an extra card just for foreign spend.

      The Lloyds Avios card is better than Clarity as you get Avios AND no FX fee. £24 card fee but if you spend enough abroad it beats Clarity.

      • Duncan S says:

        8 Dec8 December 14:48

        I didn’t know the Lloyds Avios didn’t have an FX fee – not bad! I also like the fact that there’s a MC as well as the Amex for countries/shops that don’t accept Amex… although the points earned is pretty poor!

        I think my partner would prefer that we suck to just having one card but then… where’s the fun in that?!

        • Rob says:

          8 Dec8 December 20:43

          This is the new Lloyds Avios card, for clarity. Not the old ‘Duo’ card, which is now issued by TSB.

• MarkCam says:

  7 Dec7 December 19:33

  I got an outbound bonus on a Vistaprint purchase in the last few days.

• vindaloo says:

  7 Dec7 December 21:20

  I’ve recently dropped out of my first year, and I am no longer getting any bonus on Ocado. It registered only double in the first year, suggesting it earns a bonus only for being a supermarket and not FX.

  Also since I dropped out of the first year I have an easyJet booking that earned travel bonus but no further bonus, so even if it has done so before I don’t think it is doing so now (although this booking was for a UK domestic flight – I wonder whether that makes any difference).

  With Amazon, my wife and I have been doing a lot of Christmas shopping recently and it seems a bit random. A few days ago we had two transactions on the same day: one with Amazon and one with Amazon Marketplace. The Marketplace one earned the FX bonus but the other one didn’t.

  The list of places that earned triple points in the first year is too long to enumerate, but supermarket petrol stations seemed to earn both the supermarket and petrol bonus pretty reliably (whether buying petrol or not), and a huge proportion of travel spend in sterling earned triple or even quadruple (a large United Airlines booking on their UK web site and paid in sterling earned me 4x early this year).

  During my first year I used this card only for (non-BA) travel, supermarket and petrol spend, and I earned over 3 MR points per pound on average, plus the 7,500 bonus at the end of the year. I’m now going to cancel, sit it out for six months and come back for another go at the first year bonanza!

• Idrive says:

  8 Dec8 December 12:09

  I am fairly disappointed with my Gold Pref an I am going to drop it now and wait till December next year to apply again.
  In the meanwhile I have completed my 75% of my targets and I am now focussing on other loads.

  Posting the bonuses has been very random for me for a long time now…with no apparent benefit at all.

• Pierre says:

  9 Dec9 December 09:35

  Tripsta was also considered a foreign spend on my last statement.

• Nick says:

  11 Dec11 December 09:02

  My Ocado spend is only showing up as a standard UK spend, with single points earning.

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