I lose out with MBNA’s replacement for Diamond Club

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• James67 says:

  8 Oct8 October 08:25

  I am absolutely delighted with an offer I have received from mbna and it arrived by secure message! I have not yet received any letter through the post. I’ve been a customer with them since I was 18 and I think I have held every airline card they have excepting Luffthansa.

• Mark says:

  8 Oct8 October 08:29

  1% cash back on AMEX, 0.5% on VISA for me. I currently have the bog standard, free MBNA card and have probably spent a total of about 10k on it over the 3yrs I’ve had it.

  There system for allocating the cash back perk seems completely random!

  • Volker says:

    8 Oct8 October 08:37

    Yes, that is the impression I am getting from the comments so far. My free AMEX/Visa double will be replaced with the no frills (no rewards) VISA. In the past few years, I spent between 1 and 4K every month, will look elsewhere now.

  • Andrew says:

    8 Oct8 October 09:05

    That’s the one I got, and I was quite happy with it.

    Now that I’ve discovered that a lot of other HfP readers and MBNA customers didn’t get one… I’m absolutely thrilled!

    Assessment of shopping & card use…

    I put around £10,000 on it every year – about 95% of which is on Amex.
    I use it in the USA for 2 weeks a year, yes there are better deals but I find MBNA’s text-messaging security systems convenient and reassuring.
    I don’t pay any interest around 8 months of the year, delayed expenses payments and retail enticements account ahead of a bonus accounts for the rest.

    I’ve also got an M&S and JLP card – but they aren’t worth using outside their respective stores and if the Tesco Avios offer on Gift Cards continues, then clearly I’m far better off buying gift cards and getting 1p back on Amex spend and Avios…

    My Barclaycard at 9.9% APR with regular 0% on purchase deals is what I use to buy annual products like House and Car insurance – the rate is substantially less than what most insurers take on monthly payments.

    • Yuff says:

      8 Oct8 October 09:40

      Gloat, why don’t you 😉
      I never had the card anyway 🙁
      HSBC Avios bonus posts with the transfer.
      I transferred 50k on Wednesday/Thursday, 75k in our HHA account this morning 😉
      Going to wait and see if an Etihad transfer bonus turns up before the end of the offer, otherwise I’ll transfer the remaining balances to Avios.

• Hugh says:

  8 Oct8 October 09:14

  if i was a conspiracy theorist, i’d say they seem to have gotten the readership list for HfP and just given us the no frills basic card 🙂

  • Rob says:

    8 Oct8 October 09:57

    HFP readers in general pay no interest and spend a lot ….. bad news for MBNA. I had a beer with a reader last night who does £40k per month (has his own business) on cards.

    • Yuff says:

      8 Oct8 October 10:15

      Don’t we all spend that just on gift cards 😉

    • HAM76 says:

      11 Oct11 October 21:33

      I’ve a small business and 15K is easy to do, even in Germany where I can’t pay taxes, utilities or salaries by credit card. Some of my payments are in foreign currencies. Transferwise has been great for this, because only charge a 0.4% fee for using a credit card. Alas, they just announced to increase the credit card fee to 1.7% for business cards. So two more month to generate status miles with my airberlin card. I should have switched earlier from Barclay’s.

• Kipto says:

  8 Oct8 October 09:43

  “”GOTTEN”” !! Correct grammar please. This is not an American blog.

  • Hugh says:

    8 Oct8 October 10:32

    How do you know i’m not American

    • SB says:

      8 Oct8 October 10:53

      Deliberate lack of a ?

  • @mkcol says:

    8 Oct8 October 13:58

    Oh dear Kipto – seems like you’re not up to speed with the background of “gotten” and that it actually originates here in the UK, just that it’s fallen out of favour a few centuries ago. Or should I say it fell out of favour? 😉

    http://grammarist.com/usage/got-gotten/

    Toodle-pip!

    • Kipto says:

      8 Oct8 October 23:56

      Your photo attached says it all. Nobody likes a smart arse

• ThinkSquare says:

  8 Oct8 October 10:04

  No rewards for me either.

  I do have an offer of MBNA Priceless Experiences. Henceforth to be known as “Worthless”

• EvilGazebo says:

  8 Oct8 October 10:13

  I wonder whether the logic for no offer vs cash back offer is whether you hold other MBNA reward cards. e.g. I have the VS White, VS Black and AA cards. So logically OK would just switch spend to those (in reality I put all spend through the VS Black already). Whereas they would lose biz from those that only hold the bmi card so they are trying to retain. Is my theory undermined by other readers card holding patterns?

  • Rob says:

    8 Oct8 October 10:20

    I only have the BMI card, so they will lose my business entirely unless I get a Lufthansa card.

    • EvilGazebo says:

      8 Oct8 October 10:28

      Scrub that theory then. And my spend on the bmi card has been close to zero since they dropped the earning rate. So they aren’t trying to incentivise me to start spending. And can’t imagine people on here maintain interest incurring balances that they would want to retain. Odd.

  • ADS says:

    8 Oct8 October 14:48

    I wondered whether having other MBNA cards reduced your chance of getting a decent card.

    I too received my letter this morning with the “worthless” card – i’ve hold the United Airlines cards with them, so I wonder if they’re trying to push me to use them?

    I just phoned them up to ask why I got given the “worthless” offer – after quite a wait whilst the CS person found out, i was told that the “credit team decided” after looking at the “statistics on each account” … and that there was no point trying to speak to the credit team (whose working hours she didn’t know) as they never change their decision !

    i will be cancelling this card after i’ve transferred my points and paid off the balance – i has another credit card that i’ve had for years, so i don’t need to keep the history.

• Rob says:

  8 Oct8 October 10:21

  True. I do always mention this to people who email me to ask about card churning. Keeping one card open, long term, gives lenders a huge amount of confidence in you.

  • Yuff says:

    8 Oct8 October 10:32

    Should you reduce the credit limits on those cards?
    Amex were starting to increase our limits and I asked them to reduce them a couple of years ago, but they have started to increase them again.

  • Andrew says:

    8 Oct8 October 11:11

    Just make sure it’s the right brand of card to keep open long-term.

    Where credit goes for manual sanctioning and review, some brands are more conducive than others.

    It’s a shame really, the brands that describe themselves as “good for building credit” tend to red-flag with people like me.

    • Genghis says:

      8 Oct8 October 11:19

      Could you please give us some examples

      • Andrew says:

        8 Oct8 October 11:28

        Red-flags?

        Well, just google search for “credit cards for bad credit history” and all but the Supermarket Bank that appears on the first page would red-flag for me.

        • Callum says:

          8 Oct8 October 17:55

          Who is “someone like you” – an underwriter or just a random person? If the former then when did they start getting access to who the creditors are (except those who post in a full copy of their credit report on appeal)?

          I also can’t see why they’d “red flag” anyone anyway… You can surely see from the original credit search whether they have a bad or nonexistent credit history (pretty much the only reason to have those cards), so how does learning the brand names help? It just sounds like brand snobbery to me – not a trait I’d hope to find in someone who’s supposedly educated well enough to be making these decisions!

  • RIccati says:

    9 Oct9 October 12:34

    Keeping one current and one credit account a very long term, is indeed hugely helpful.

    I have a case study when early this year I had to cancel a Barclaycard of 11+ years running due to their “one card rule” — the rule has now been reversed in Sep 2016 — I have not opened any account with Barclaycard since.

    I experienced no detriment in applying for the credit cards including ones from AMEX.

• Irish lad says:

  8 Oct8 October 10:26

  Definitely seems to be a theme.. I have put a lot through my card over the years but paid in full every month. No rewards in my offer!

  • Genghis says:

    8 Oct8 October 10:40

    Perhaps how much you have earned MBNA over the years is the yardstick? Got our annual statement through the other day. We paid MBNA about £3 (£2.49 cash fee and some interest) when I was testing out some MS opportunities earlier this year. Other than that, they’ve had nothing from us over the years. We were offered the basic no rewards Visa.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.