The best milage sign-up bonus for a credit card. Ever.

lswswein said:
Hi Fuego
I also signed up for the Card. The appln says an annual fee of $75. Did you get accessed the annual fee? They applied it to me. I am debating waiting for the miles to show up in my account before calling them up and asking if they will waive the annual fee. Have you heard anything about the annual fee being waived?

Thanks
-h
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Yes; I was charged the $75 annual fee Jan 1 2010. It is kind of screwy how they assess it. They only apply it on the 1st of the month.

I'd check flyertalk.com to see if others are getting out of the $75 fee. I think the consensus was that they were not waiving it. But it is worth a shot. I'll probably just pay it unless the flyertalk people say it is likely to be waived. Let me know if you get it waived.
 
Fuego, what's your handle on FT? I spend a good portion of my day there and am "mikeef."

Mike
 
mef623 said:
Fuego, what's your handle on FT? I spend a good portion of my day there and am "mikeef."

Mike
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I'm a lurker there, never signed up, never posted. Yet. I just figured out this mileage stuff a few months ago. Started churning the citicards for 30,000 miles a pop, and now the deal ended. Between the cards I obtained from citicards and the BA 100,000 offer, we got somewhere around 410,000 miles. Though 80,000 is already spent on a March trip to Buenos Aires and Uruguay. Just booked our hotel in Buenos Aires using a 30 pound off 2 nights coupon x2 (four nights total). Nice hotel for $36 a night.

That's another slick deal - thomascook.com has 30 pound off 2 nt reservations for hotels. You can book multiple reservations back to back too. Some places, like Las Vegas, you can find free rooms (actually, about 60 pence a night ;) ).
 
FT is a great site. I find it especially useful for finding out what the latest is on hotel deals. If I am thinking about going anywhere that's the first place I stop by to see if someone has a deal going that I may benefit from.
 
I tried to get the $75 fees waived on our 2 BA cards. I sent a message through their secure email at chase. I told them a phone CSR had previously informed me that the fee would be waived.

No go on both cards. One card I got a generic "can't waive fee, it was properly disclosed in application". Other card, the CSR wrote back a lengthy form email that basically said the same thing, but explained how generous the 100,000 pts was and that trying to get out of the fee now is trying to go against the terms of the agreement.

Fair enough. I pay $150 and got 200,000 points, the deal I bargained for. The points are in my account now.
 
Thanks for the note Fuego. I just signed up for the card this past weekend and it looks like I'm already approved. I should have signed up DW too, but didn't and now it looks like they have removed the link. :( Hopefully they'll reopen it.

BA's website leaves a lot to desired.

Edit: Actually, it's reduced to 30K miles.
 
WanderALot said:
BA's website leaves a lot to desired.
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Yes, it isn't the best. Just wait for the "fun" of trying to find flights you can redeem for a reward. There's no easy way to tell what city pairs have flights at all. I search and get the "no flights" message, but I can search different dates. However I can't tell if the problem is "no flights between my two city pairs" or "no flights on the dates I selected in particular". Probably gonna require some serious reading on flyertalk and then calling BA customer service to figure this out.
 
FUEGO said:
Yes, it isn't the best. Just wait for the "fun" of trying to find flights you can redeem for a reward. There's no easy way to tell what city pairs have flights at all. I search and get the "no flights" message, but I can search different dates.
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Yeah, I've been trying to run some scenarios for Buenos Aires and kept getting rejected until I realized it's because they had the outgoing flight on one airline and the returning flight on another. I had about 20K miles on BA about 4 years back that expired. That would have been nice to have back with this offer!
 
WanderALot said:
Yeah, I've been trying to run some scenarios for Buenos Aires and kept getting rejected until I realized it's because they had the outgoing flight on one airline and the returning flight on another. I had about 20K miles on BA about 4 years back that expired. That would have been nice to have back with this offer!
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I know flights to BA connect through Miami and they are on American (at least from my home airport on the east coast).

But the way the British Air rewards booking works, if it is American down there and then Mexicana or something else coming back, then that is 2 partner airlines and you have to book the oneworld award for more points.
 
An update on the fees... from my sister who signed up ....

the guy on the phone to her said they can not waive the fees based on the contract they signed with BA... maybe the script has changed... or maybe he is telling the truth...

Is there ANYONE who actually has had the fee removed:confused: Not, I heard from someone whos aunts, sisters nephew got it waived...
 
Using the miles.

Thanks for the heads up on this great deal. I got the card and the 100,000 miles. I used it for 2 tickets IAH to BUD/PRG to IAH in April. It was 48000 points per ticket plus $195 each because I did not have enough points. Western Europe is 50,000 and Eastern Europe is 60000 miles per ticket. The taxes were $303:eek: each. Yikes! Still for under $1000 we got 2 open jaw US to EU tickets. I was not finding them for under $2400 anywhere so I am a happy camper.
I did have to call customer service to make the reservation as there is no way to book open jaw on the internet. We also have to drive to Houston to fly out of IAH as all the Dallas flights were full on the days we wanted. No big deal for the savings. The rep I got was in Florida, she was very helpful, pleasant and I could understand every word she said.

Thanks again,
2FER
 
Good to know the live person CSR's are good and easy to deal with. I have a mix of AA miles and BA miles, so need to figure out what I can actually get on BA in order to use AA miles for everything else (in order to optimize point usage).
 
We applied for DW's call yesterday and I asked about the waiver (the web link doesn't work anymore but there's a toll free number that still does; I can dig it up if someone is interested). The guy said there was no way to waive the fee. It looks like certain cards have a way of getting the fees waived by the CSR but this card doesn't have the option.

Can't wait to get our 200K miles! Does anyone know how the mileage rewards work for traveling with a 2 year old? Do we pay the mileage that a regular adult would work?

With all these people getting 100K miles, there's probably some mileage dilution going on!
 
WanderALot said:
With all these people getting 100K miles, there's probably some mileage dilution going on!
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That's what I'm afraid of. Apparently Japan Airlines is filing bankruptcy Tuesday. They are the major asian carrier on the oneworld alliance that includes BA and American Airlines. Rumor has it that Japan Air may leave oneworld and join Delta's international alliance. Meaning my plans to use the BA 100,000 miles for asian travel may be severely limited.
 
FUEGO said:
That's what I'm afraid of. Apparently Japan Airlines is filing bankruptcy Tuesday. They are the major asian carrier on the oneworld alliance that includes BA and American Airlines. Rumor has it that Japan Air may leave oneworld and join Delta's international alliance. Meaning my plans to use the BA 100,000 miles for asian travel may be severely limited.
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Cathay Pacific is still part of oneworld and they fly to a lot of places in Asia.

Jimnjana, we were able to sign up for the 50K+50K card by calling 888-593-5212. There is no working web link for the 50K+50K card, only the 30K card.
 
We were able to use BA points to purchase our Cathay Pacific FF flights at Xmas time without any problem. Also their fees are low, unlike BA.
 
DangerMouse said:
We were able to use BA points to purchase our Cathay Pacific FF flights at Xmas time without any problem. Also their fees are low, unlike BA.
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Good to hear about Cathay Pacific. I'll have to look more into where they fly for my BA points. From a quick read a while back at flyertalk forums they made it sound like JAL leaving the oneworld alliance would really hurt potential rewards flights in Asia.
 
Well I would assume that it would become more difficult as there will be less seats available for flights to Asia. I know that on the West Coast Cathay goes out of both SFO & LAX to Hong Kong. From there you can connect to virtually anywhere in Asia.
 
WanderALot said:
Cathay Pacific is still part of oneworld and they fly to a lot of places in Asia.

Jimnjana, we were able to sign up for the 50K+50K card by calling 888-593-5212. There is no working web link for the 50K+50K card, only the 30K card.
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Thanks! Just called, got the card! Now wondering if I should have gotten two...
 
DangerMouse said:
Well I would assume that it would become more difficult as there will be less seats available for flights to Asia. I know that on the West Coast Cathay goes out of both SFO & LAX to Hong Kong. From there you can connect to virtually anywhere in Asia.
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I just checked and had a really hard time finding round trip flights even to/from Hong Kong, Cathay's hub. And that was from JFK and LAX, not even my own home airport.
 
Hmm, there are a bunch of flights from LAX (my home airport) to HKG, or are you saying that you had trouble finding award tickets for that? In fact, I know people who are flying to HKG using Cathay next month.

I had an unnerving call with Chase about 10 mins back. I received my card in the mail and called to activate it, the CSR activated it and congratulated me on "30000 miles". I informed him that I should have been awarded 50K and he told me that offer ended Dec 11th. We went back and forth and eventually he said he wasn't sure :crazy: I signed up for this card using the 50K web link around Jan 9th, when it was working so who knows! If I only get 30K, I'm canceling the card right away. We'll see what happens, I'm going to make my first purchase tomorrow.
 
WanderALot said:
Hmm, there are a bunch of flights from LAX (my home airport) to HKG, or are you saying that you had trouble finding award tickets for that? In fact, I know people who are flying to HKG using Cathay next month.
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I had trouble finding reward tickets.

Seems like flights through American Airlines (using BA points) are fairly easy to get. No problem finding East Coast to Hawaii flights with just 1 short layover. Seem to recall AA flights to South America were similarly available.
 
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