Episode 03: Difference Between Airline-Branded and Bank-Branded Travel Credit Cards

Hey everyone, welcome back. In the last episode we had talked about kind of listing out your inspiration countries and cities where you wanted to travel. Now that you have this, we can go into figuring out which credit cards to get.  

For the purposes of this episode I want to first start out with the airline credit cards dealing with airline points. There are credit cards that also give you cash back. There are others that also give you hotel points. But for now I won't go over those. I will go over those later on in future episodes. But in this one I definitely want to go over credit cards dealing with airline points.  

Now there's two different kinds that you would want to look into. There are:  

1. Airline branded credit cards and then there's the
   
2. Generic bank credit cards that still give travel points. 

Remember that they are two completely different things. 

I just want to make sure that you guys understand the difference. So again the first kind is the airline branded credit cards and then the second one is the bank branded generic credit cards that give travel points.  

Examples of airline branded credit cards include: 

1. Chase United Mileage plus Cards.
    
2. There's also the Bank of America Alaskan Airlines Credit Cards.
   
3. There's the Citi Advantage Credit Card. 

The above would be airline credit cards.  

Now the generic credit cards include:  

1. Barclays Arrival Plus card,
    
2. the Capital One venture plus card. 

I'm just naming these off of the top of my head but those cards are offered points by the banks for travel use when you book through their actual backend bank website for airline flight redemptions. 

Airline branded credit cards mean that the bonus points will be deposited directly into your respective airline frequent flyer account (be sure to use those points before they expire, if your airline states an expiration date, there are methods to avoid losing your points by extending your expiration date).  

Bank branded travel credit cards mean that the bonus points will be deposited into your online account with that bank branded credit card. They can then be used to redeem for flights using the bank’s website travel search site.   All these banks will have a stipulation on when you receive the bonus points. One example could be to spend $1,000 in 90 days to get 35,000 points. Another example could be to spend $3,000 in 90 days to get 50,000 bonus points. These are generally the most popular bank stipulations.

The offers always vary. When you go and search online be sure to try to catch these offers of 50,000 points. Sometimes, some banks will offer even more. I’ve seen them offer upwards of 75,000 or 80,000 points on rare occasions. During these big bonus offer time periods, those are the best times to actually apply for these travel credit cards. Once you achieve the spend minimum amount, the banks will transfer the points and award them to your actual airline account or bank credit card account.  

After the points end up moving to your actual airline account, you may then be able to redeem them for flights. Every time that you use your airline branded credit card, your future spends will just continue to add up and they'll continue to deposit the airline points to your account.  

Whereas the generic bank travel credit cards will deposit those bonus points into your backend credit card accounts. Those points can be used to book flights directly on the banks backend travel search aggregator. And there are some occasions where you're able to transfer those points out directly to your choice of airline account and it might be actually more valuable to do that. But in a later episode I'll talk about some examples of doing that. There are opportunities in which it is more valuable to transfer out of the credit card account and into the airline account. 

That pretty much covers the difference between the main two different credit card types which are airline branded credit cards and the generic bank travel credit cards.  

Hopefully this helps you get a clear idea of those differences and in the next episode we will soon talk about how you can start applying to these different credit cards based on your travel city and country wish-list location preferences. It will definitely play a key factor and can help make it easy in terms of figuring out which credit cards that you should be applying to.  

_______________________

Which branded credit card do you have? 

Just comment and let me know if you guys have any questions that you want me to address.

 _______________________

If you missed, Episode 02: Decide Where You Will Travel Before Applying to Travel Credit Cards

Next, Episode 04: How to Choose Which Travel Credit Card to Apply  

Follow me @hustletoparadise to stay up to date on future episodes of Travel Hacking with Hustle to Paradise.

(Introduction photo courtesy of Andrey Larin found on Unsplash)