Priceline Rewards credit cards
Barclays issued a priceline rewards credit card at least as far back as 2017, though it's impossible to find info on it now. Its earnings structure was quite simple:
- 5 points per dollar on Priceline purchases
- 1 point per dollar on everything else
Things got more interesting, however, once you started to redeem those points, because the redemption values were also different between priceline purchases vs. everything else:
- 1.5% dollar value for points redeemed against priceline purchases
- 1% dollar value for points redeemed against all other purchases
- 10% point redemption refund on all redemptions
This meant that the effective cash back rate on priceline purchases when redeemed against priceline purchases was 5 × 1.5 / 0.9 = 8.33%. If that sounds too good to be true, just do the math on a hypothetical $1000 priceline purchase: you earn 5000 points, which corresponds to a $75 redemption against that purchase, but when you go to use the redemption, only 4500 points are used. The remaining 500 points are worth $7.50 when redeemed against a pricelline purchase, so you effectively get $82.50 worth of rewards against a $1000 purchase (though those points would only "cost" 450, since you'd get another 10% back on that redemption, and on and on).
Note that you could also "cross-redeem", i.e. take points from a regular purchase and redeem them against a priceline purchase and vice versa. This gave you an effective rate of 1.67% for regular purchases redeemed against priceline ones and 5.5% for priceline purchases redeemed against regular ones.
Someone at Barclays probably eventually realized this was too good to be true too, and so in 2022 they introduced the new Priceline VIP Rewards credit card. The earning structure, on paper, got better, because in addition to the earnings with the original card, gas and restaurant purchases would now earn 2 points per dollar spent. They added a rather dubious VIP Gold status as a "perk", as well as reimbursement of TSA PreCheck or Global Entry application fees once your annual spend exceeds $10,000. But the all of the redemption bonuses went away — all purchases now redeemed at 1% and there was no redemption refund. So even non-priceline purchases got a worse redemption rate on this card than the old one!
Of course, the old card is no longer available. However, the reason this matters is because for those who still have the old card, Barclays will tempt you to "upgrade" with this brilliant wording:
| “ | Update your account to the Priceline VIP Rewards™ Visa® Card and enjoy extraordinary new benefits and services. | ” |
The touted "benefits" are as follows:
- Reduction of effective priceline redemption rate by 40%
- Reduction of effective other purchase redemption rate by 10%
- Increase of effective redemption rate for gas and restaurant purchases by 80%
- An additional 1% discount for the GE fee once every 5 years (since GE costs $100 and you have to put at least $10,000 of spend on the card to get it)
Given the huge devaluation in priceline redemptions and the multitude of other cards that give a straight 2% cash back on all purchases, there is absolutely no reason for anyone with the older card to "upgrade" to the new one.
