More about the forthcoming changes to your Lloyds Avios Rewards credit card

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• Claire says:

  8 Aug8 August 11:33

  Does anyone have any views on the Avios cash passport card? Just in light of the discussion yesterday of alternatives to these Lloyds Avios cards ….

  • New Card says:

    8 Aug8 August 11:40

    The real benefit to it (of a hush hush nature) stopped working a few weeks ago.

    • Genghis says:

      8 Aug8 August 12:44

      +1

  • Anna says:

    8 Aug8 August 12:21

    I use Cash Passport, though I’m not sure what the hush hush benefit was! It doesn’t always have the best exchange rate but it’s incredibly easy to use and serves as a debit card and cash card if you don’t want to carry too many cards around abroad. You can see your balance any time on your online account, and you can top it up any time you want to. I also use it as a little savings account, loading dollars and euros onto it each month so we have a nice little stash when it’s time to go away and not too many extra credit bills when we get home!

    • Anna says:

      8 Aug8 August 12:21

      Oh, and you get avios if you top it up via BAEC, 1 avios per £1.

      • New Card says:

        8 Aug8 August 13:00

        Downsides – poor exchange rate if loading in non-GBP; 2% load fee if loading in GBP.

        All of the benefits you mentioned could be achieved through revolut without fees.

    • Callum says:

      8 Aug8 August 22:59

      I’m disappointed!

      I assume the hush-hush benefit was some kind of manufactured spending, but using it as a normal card will NEVER be good value.

• Bill says:

  8 Aug8 August 13:00

  The annual fees just came out of my August statement. Perfect timing I guess, should trigger the voucher and also get the fee refunded.

• The Urbanite says:

  8 Aug8 August 13:20

  Thank you for the article on the no fee balance transfer deal on this card – I BT’d £14,200 and got 3550 Avios. Had the card for 3 years. And the same offer appeared again at the beginning of this month!

• flyforfun says:

  8 Aug8 August 13:25

  How can you find out when your voucher period is from/to and what balance there is to go? I’ve spent £5k on it in the last few months. Don’t want miss the opportunity for my last one!

  • Anna says:

    8 Aug8 August 16:06

    It’s your card anniversary, if you don’t know it you’ll need to contact Lloyds and ask. There’s no spend tracker so you need to add up how much you have spent, or, which I find easier, how much your statement balances/payments add up to.

• Andre says:

  8 Aug8 August 14:30

  What about the Lloyds Avios Premier? Any changes to those existing cardholders?

  • Rob says:

    8 Aug8 August 14:59

    We don’t know BUT I am guessing that the card will be closed entirely and you will downgraded to the free card. This is what is happening with the TSB Premier card.

    • Julian says:

      8 Aug8 August 17:43

      A Rep on the dedicated Lloyds enquiry line has just told me that all five of their current Avios earning cards are being closed down and all customers are only being offered the same fee free Mastercard 0.4 Avios per pounds spent deal other than that Club Lloyds people, who get the extra Avios bonus. Nobody will continue to get a flight upgrade voucher or foreign exchange rate levy fee free overseas use.

      However at the same time they seemed totally unable to answer my questions about why I was issued with my flight upgrade voucher by Avios at the beginning of June this year (20178) when my membership year actually starts at the end of August each year (so may be it is actually a rolling 12 months spend that really qualifies as in my first membership year I did not hit the £7,000 spend target as my mother was dieing of cancer and so I was not travelling or spending much but I began spending at much higher levels just after she died, last October, and June would have then been a rolling 12 month period by which I had already exceeded the £7,000 spending amount) and in particular they could not answer for how long might I still have my Lloyds Amex card and be able to still earn 1.25 Avios per pound spent to try and get another upgrade voucher. However it appears they possibly plan to withdraw the Amex card from different customers on different dates but that makes no sense unless they plan to withdraw the card at the very moment when each customer would otherwise be due to pay another 12 months of membership fees? And that date would of course in theory also be the same as the end of the 12 month period in which you can earn a flight upgrade voucher (except that in practice this actually seems to be tripped on a rolling last 12 months of expenditure basis).

      So in other words following that school of thought everyone will lose their card at the end of a full year of spending towards the £7,000 target to get the upgrade voucher and at that point you will get the free Mastercard and that won’t qualify for a flight upgrade voucher and nor will you pay any fee to have it. But then of course there should be no need to refund fees on the Rewards card membership fee if that is their intended plan of action?

      Staff on this Lloyds product change line are a new team who are quite clearly very badly trained and also seemingly badly paid (as the adviser material seems of very poor quality) and with no scripted answers or any form of human answer on things like why didn’t they also keep a higher fee paying version of the Avios Mastercard with a better Avios reward rate and still offering fee free overseas use and/or still offering a flight upgrade voucher.

      On a related phone (not online chat) call to the customer service team of avios.com I have also discovered that the whole of their customer service department are losing their jobs at the end of August (2018) but there will still be a telephone sales booking team for avios.com open until well in to next year to make bookings using the flight upgrade voucher and they will transfer however many BA Exec Club Avios are needed to make that booking back to avios.com (now otherwise closed down) from BA Exec Club so that you get the free one class upgrade using the voucher.

      Neither the Lloyds product change line or the advisers at avios.com seem to have any clue at all why fresh spend on the Lloyds Rewards cards is still causing fresh avios points awarded to be credited to our avios.com accounts and not our accounts with BA Executive Club. I have moved the last three months of Lloyds credit card Avios awarded to avios.com over to my BA Exec Club account just now (having previously moved all the other points in my avios.com account before the end of May 2018) but more points will be awarded there just before the whole platform is completely shut down so what will happen to those Avios points on avios.com?

      In summary the whole set of changes they are making to avios.com and the Lloyds credit card has been both very badly thought through and executed.

      • Callum says:

        8 Aug8 August 23:12

        Firstly, please don’t take this as a personal attack, but your posts really are a bit too long for a comments section like this!

        To answer some of your questions. I wouldn’t expect any company to specifically train it’s staff in how to answer questions like “why don’t you offer a card at £X offering XYZ”. You just need to accept that they don’t offer it and move on. Having previously worked in a call centre, I have to say that kind of questioning used to greatly irritate me! I don’t know why the company doesn’t do what you want them to do and talking about it with me is completely irrelevant and just wastes my time!

        Are you 100% sure you didn’t spend £7k from August 2017 to June 2018? The system is automated and definitely runs on account year, not a rolling 12 month period. Their IT is famously dodgy though so could be a weird glitch.

        Cards aren’t necessarily closing at the end of everyone’s account year. My year starts in a couple of weeks so it will be shut part way through my year.

        Fresh spend on the Avios card is meant to be being paid into your Avios account so I have no idea why they’d be confused. It will continue to do so until your account is closed.

      • John says:

        9 Aug9 August 05:54

        As the company was paying for your time regardless of what questions you were asked, it wasn’t wasted, unless perhaps it was the last call before the end of your shift?

      • callum says:

        9 Aug9 August 10:45

        Of course it was a waste of my time. Best case scenario – all my other work was done and that was filling up time I could have been looking stuff up on line or having a chat with others. Normal case scenario – I spend extra time on the phone and then have less time to do the rest of my work, increasing my stress levels!

      • callum says:

        9 Aug9 August 12:00

        What Julian doesn’t seem to realise is that when he hangs up the phone, the call centre agent tells everyone else there about how annoying and ridiculous the customer just was – and then they all laugh at them, manager included…

        And for the record, I wouldn’t hang up on you. I’d humour you by pretending to note it down then steering the conversation towards a swift close if you’re being particularly annoying – as encouraged to do by the managers you think would somehow discipline me…

        (Obviously this doesn’t apply for every bit of feedback I’m offered, but certainly for those who think they’re enlightening me with astounding facts like “the more stuff you give people, the more they like it” – well duhhhhhh)

• Adrian says:

  8 Aug8 August 15:23

  I spoke to Lloyds earlier and they told me my account open date was 12th August 2017, the £24 fee was charged on 4th September. They could not tell me which date would be classed as my anniversary date. I’d love to get in another voucher before it’s too late. Any idea on which date I should go by?

  • KevMc says:

    8 Aug8 August 15:25

    If in doubt, I’d say use 4th September to be on the safe side – maybe hold off any any large expenditure for an extra couple of weeks if possible?

• Stephen says:

  8 Aug8 August 15:26

  Does anyone know what the retention offers are yet, and does the upgrade voucher work on a calendar OR card year? Thanks

  • John says:

    9 Aug9 August 05:54

    Card year and no retention offers

  • RIccatti says:

    9 Aug9 August 08:39

    No retention offers.

    • Rob says:

      9 Aug9 August 09:14

      Lloyds staffer told me there will be retention offers for the most profitable customers.

      • ADS says:

        9 Aug9 August 11:01

        are profitable customers mainly those that don’t pay off their balance in full each month ?

        if so, not offer for me 🙁

        • Rob says:

          9 Aug9 August 11:12

          These days, yes.

          All the talk at the last card conference I attended was about capping rewards for high spenders, so for eg you’d get 0.4 Avios per £1 up to £50k per year and then 0.2 Avios thereafter. Whilst this makes perfect sense from the card company point of view when there is an annual fee – because the fee subsidises the Avios – the view is that customers won’t accept it.

• heran_xp says:

  8 Aug8 August 15:49

  The Lloyds’ web page says “You’ll receive a new Lloyds Bank Avios Rewards MasterCard® to replace your existing card(s), which gives you 2 Avios for every £5 of eligible spend, and has no annual fee.”

  So the new Lloyds card is even worse in terms of rounding.

  BTW anyone knows what would happened to the Lloyds Choice Rewards cards?

  • Rob says:

    8 Aug8 August 15:58

    It remains to be seen whether they really are rounding it per transaction or per statement. This may just be marketing speak and, in reality, they are going to do it off your monthly balance.

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