Marriott Bonvoy American Express – can it be better than Barclaycard or BAPP ?
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I am revisiting the Marriott Bonvoy American Express card and I have about £150k+ a year of card expenses which could go onto any card.
I have the BAPP but never usually use the 241 voucher. I have the Barclaycard Avios card.
If one Avios is worth 1p and one Bonvoy is worth 0.5p then doesn’t this devalue the Bonvoy earnings by 33% if I switch spending from BAPP as I’d lose 1.5p of Avios and gain 1p of Bonvoy ?
Or am I missing something ?
Have you looked at the Amex bus plat? £10k spend per month nets additional 10 MR
Or am I missing something ?
Yes, the difference in annual fee.
Setting aside the voucher, you need to spend 40k more on BAPP than the bonvoy card, just to recoup the incremental cost.
But if you value the voucher at £200, then yes, you gain more avios but lose the flexibility of bonvoy points.For most people Bonvoy is a heck of a lot easier to spend than Avios. This year I’m doing a lot of long haul flight redemptions for the little sweepers, and one for me, so lots of Avios have been spent, but most years I don’t travel far/often. The chances of finding a nice Marriott property where I want to stay when I want to travel is much higher than the chances of BA having redemption availability for my dates — assuming they are even flying where I want to go. Bonvoy bookings can usually be upgraded to nicer/bigger rooms too.
Ideal is a pile of both Avios and Bonvoy. For the last nine months I’ve been focussing on earning Avios as I had run down to nearly zero. I’ll likely switch back to the Bonvoy card later this year, and continue to use the Barclays Avios card too. After a two year lull I might go back to the BAPP if a suitably attractive bonus is offered. I doubt I’ll get to use the BAPP companion voucher I have in my BA account.
The earning rate of the Marriott Bonvoy American Express is not great. For each £1 you spend, you generally only get 0.67 miles. If you redeem 60,000 Bonvoy points for airline miles in one go, you get a 25% bonus but this still only takes the rate up to 0.83 miles per £1 spend. I would not recommend this card for points collecting if Avios is your chosen scheme.
The earn rate on the HSBC Premier World Elite is 1.5 miles per £1 of spend. It also offers some flexibility over which airlines you can redeem with.
Amex Membership Rewards is another choice. You get 1 mile per £1 spent for most of the airlines.
If you are committed to earning Avios, stick with BAPP or Barclaycard, or give HSBC a go.
Have you looked at the Amex bus plat? £10k spend per month nets additional 10 MR
Yes, I did see that one and of course it takes earnings up to 2MR / 2 Avios per £1 but looking at my history, I don’t hit £10k every month and though I could micromanage some things, I’m not sure I’d get much past 6 to 8 months a year when I’d hit the additional 10k MR so my net would probably only be 1.5 to 1.75 at best and my BA Accelerating Business Amex give me 30k Avios every year when I hit £20k, £40k and £60k spend, which at the margins gives 90+30=120k for £60k spend and of course the earnings rate decays after that.
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