I urge my fellow Fodorites to add their own wisdom (and correct mine where errors are spotted.) We could suggest to the mods to make this a sticky if it works out.

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Rules of thumb on 'bonus' credit cards - Zero Foreign transaction fees, Airline points cards, etc.

1. Zero forex fee cards. As for ‘mileage accrual’ cards, the annual fee on zero exchange fee credit cards is of the order of $120 to $150, on the cards I checked.

First, these cards save you nothing on a significant part of foreign travel expense which is your roundtrip airfare departing from your home, domestic airport, to the gateway in question and back. That airfare will be priced in domestic currency.

2. The annual fee puts you in the position of having to make back that investment before you benefit. So, you save nothing until you spend down the first $2500 or so in foreign currency.

3. This seems easy enough except many people will be running a 'balance' now of annual fees that added up over the pandemic, when they couldn't travel. Even if you got your airfare in 2020 refunded, it is doubtful that card fee was refunded. And most of us have lost two foreign travel seasons and many of us will forego this year because the backlog is insane.

Even when pandemics don't happen, life does. Again, insurance might cover cancelled trips, but it won't cover no fee forex card annual fees.

3. Mileage accrual cards.These for the casual leisure traveler (maybe one major trip a year) are not in my opinion good investments.

You are once again charged $130 to $150 a year for the privilege of spending your own money. If you are casual traveler, you may need to combine balances of several years to earn enough of a balance to buy seats on the flights you want. The 'price' of those seats in miles is pretty high for what you get. Let me explain.

It costs roughly about the same to fly across Canada as it does to fly from the East to London, England. That is not the proportional difference in points required to fly domestic versus transAtlantic. Nor is the same inventory of seats available to you versus a cash customer. Your inventory selection will be smaller, especially on popular flights at popular times of the year.

If you use a mileage card, you have incurred a lot of opportunity costs. Such as the opportunity to use a different credit card to make the same purchases, such as a cashback card to earn dollars to apply against your balance right now, on stuff you actually need, versus a trip you may or may not take.

You forfeit your consumer choice to pick which airline offers not just the best price, but the best flight time and possibly best seat choice. Air Canada points can’t be used on WestJet and vice versa; Starlink and OneWorld points aren’t interchangeable. But cash is fungible, you can use it on any airline.

All I’m saying is, be careful out there. A recent thread teaches us that travel is complicated enough as it is. Keep your money in your pocket till the last minute, because once vendors have it, getting the value out of it can sometimes prove tricky even with well known vendors of good reputation. They are in business to make money for them, not you.

And then there is the whole "issue" of how much each of the various FF miles are actually worth and that varies. But perhaps we might start with trying to get folks to realize that NONE of them are free.

I don't think this merits as anything but your personal opinion. There are professional finance or consumer websites that are better suited to this, this certainly should not be a sticky as it isn't factual. Your language is extremely biased, also. The subject heading is not even accurate as all you talk about are "mileage cards", I gather you have a beef with them. So you checked a few cards and found a fee, so what. There are other cards, as I have one, with lower fees and I got it exactly because I used that airline a lot and thus want to accrue miles on them. In fact, I have two on the main airlines I use and both have fees of only $95-99. This may be a surprise to you, but you can use miles on airlines for domestic travel, also.

I don't know what you mean about a "balance" of annual fees.

Your (1) and (3) are duplicative.

You didn't do much checking did you? If your point one means what it seems to mean, it is incorrect. I have two Capital One credit cards and one PenFed with NO annual fee and they do not charge foreign conversion fees. I suggest that you ask the mods to delete this thread. People interested in info on credit cards can visit https://thepointsguy.com/.

Oh, I also have an American Airlines Citibank card that has no annual fees and claims to have no foreign exchange fees either.

{Keep your money in your pocket till the last minute, because once vendors have it, getting the value out of it can sometimes prove tricky even with well known vendors of good reputation.}

What the heck does that mean?

And no this should not be made a 'sticky'.

Okay, I gather there is a lot of criticism, fair enough.

Christina, you are correct that I've given a lot of opinion, so that means it can't work as a sticky, but I disagree that none of I said is factual.
I agree that it is my opinion that with the caveat I was talking about casual leisure travelers, it is a bad deal to invest in 'loyalty' cards; that said, that points across airline alliances are not transferable is factual.

Opinion by its nature is biased - so too are the goals of banks and airlines. They have bias, and it not surprisingly favours their own goals. This is the way of things, but surely it can't hurt to be reminded of it. (I have a good reason to remind myself of this, I signed up for a 'teaser' rate subscription to a newspaper knowing full well I could easily forget when the 'teaser' rate expired. )

I concede my post spent more time on mileage cards than on zero foreign exchange rate cards but I think I did mention the second. There are probably others, I didn't intend for my post to be all inclusive.

Fair point as well about the balance of annual fees, I didn't explain where I was headed with that one very well. The point I was trying to make is that the payback time to one's investment in the card may take a series of fee cycles and not just one. This is especially true of leisure travelers, less so for business ones. So whether the card issuer acknowledges the 'balance' of total fees one has invested in between trips or not, there is, for all intents and purposes, such a balance. ( A similar principle applies to rental storage units. One does get the opportunity to store items in said unit, and to that extent one is getting a return, but it also could help to keep a running tally of the rent invested in the unit - at some point, what one has invested could exceed the market value of the objects stored therein. Maybe the rent/fee payer is fine with that, maybe not, but it's a moot point if they don't bear it in mind. )

You are totally correct Christina that there are financial websites that explore this issue. There are also other travel websites that explore many of the same travel matters discussed on Fodors. Are you proposing Fodors be deemed redundant and the whole board be shut down as a waste of the public's time? Seems pretty drastic! Especially since the folks at Fodors could just as easily claim that the financial websites are the redundant ones, especially if those websites were started up after Fodors (and in many cases that is probably true!)

Thursdaysd. I agree there are no annual fee zero exchange fee (and other) cards out there - I didn't mention them because there are often other conditions attached to compensate the card issuer for offering the free exchange rate. Such as the condition that the annual income of the cardholder has to meet or exceed a certain minimum that is higher than the minimum income required to qualify for more 'ordinary' cards. While Iwe all know this is the way of things - that the business of those who have more to spend is a market generally more highly sought after than those who have less, such that the former are given incentives that less wealthy people are not - this is a general travel forum, open to anyone who can scrounge together enough pennies to travel. (As you know, Eugene Fodor made his name by catering to that market, with his signature travel books X country on X$ a day.)

Thursdaysd. I cannot claim to read the mods' minds, but they pm'd me to say they were moving my thread, not deleting it. They felt it was suited to 'travel tips' and not the more specific Europe forum, which call I can certainly understand.

As for what you and Christina are suggesting, Let me restate what you are proposing to be sure I've understood. You - and apparently Christina as well - want me to instruct the moderators to act in a fashion that insinuates that their travel forum is a waste of time and is less worth visiting than a rival website catering to the travel industry. Which rival website's link, you have so helpfully provided.

Look, we are none of us defined as people by what's in our wallets, that silly credit card ad to the contrary notwithstanding. Criticism of travel services, be it a hotel, an airline, a bank card seeking to attract the business of travelers - this is all grist for the mill of travel websites like this one. Such criticism is not personal - if I thought a hotel's service was terrible but someone else thought it wonderful, that doesn't constitute my personally insulting the party of different view.

C'mon guys, it's a travel board. It is supposed to be fun and maybe sometimes useful, but in most cases, a harmless enough thing. Try not to take life - and threads - quite so seriously.

Oh nuts, that was Arthur Frommer, not Eugene Fodor, who wrote Europe on $5 a day. I'm getting old...

But I think the point was still apt, nonetheless...

Financial advice should be factual and accurate. Yours was not.

Thursday, every post here is open to ‘peer review’ i.e. criticism, which gives you the chance to note, specifically, where there is inaccuracy or error. Criticizing my points is fair, and maybe someone will benefit from your criticism, but not if you demand that I have the thread deleted. How can people read your criticism if it's deleted?

As it is, your advice also is inaccurate. You were correct to point out that there are premium credit cards available that do not charge annual fees, while offering this or that benefit, but this was imprecise advice, since for all intents and purposes these cards are NOT available to the huge swath of the population that cannot get a premium credit card, because they do not earn a premium level income at either the personal or household income level.

You also need to acknowledge, first, that you may have made an honest mistake in linking to a commercial website, but it is a mistake; it violates the terms of participation on the Fodors board to do so. You also make mistakes, which ought to make you a little more gracious and generous in your criticism of others' mistakes.

That website you linked may include facts but it is far from exclusively factual, and it is reeking with conflict of interest.
In the case of ‘point credit card review websites’, a recent article in one of them was actually titled “Credit card showdown.” Look, I know CC are now a fact of our lives, but please, an article comparing two credit cards from the same hotel chain is hardly a ‘showdown.’ No matter which hired gun shoots first, one and the same hotel chain wins, LOL. Especially if you read this quiet little notice written by the reviewer:

This post contains references to products from one or more of our advertisers. We may receive compensation when you click on links to those products.

Now that is factual all right; it is a fact that the owners of the website in question have sold their souls to the issuers of the credit cards that they are 'advising' on. Advice that also consists of a sales tactic has to include, by definition, a lot of opinion and not just fact.


In contrast, how much compensation are you, me, or any other Fodors poster getting for starting this thread or posting on it? LIke I said. I am assuming you made an honest mistake when you posted to a commercial website full of links designed to get clicks paid by the companies in question.

The relevant part of the FAQ reads:

"Commercial postings (including links by advertisers to business emails and commercial sites or blogs) or any type of advertising or promotion, including but not limited to solicitations for financial or charitable contribution, are not allowed here, and will be immediately removed."

Since I am not associated with the website in question I am not prohibited from linking to it, any more than posters are prohibited from linking to the commercial sites of businesses they have patronized.

The cards in question are NOT "premium" cards. You need to do more research.

I have a Delta Blue Skymiles Card. No annual fee, no forex. This card is still available. It isn't a "premium card" whatever that is.

I just cancelled a flight reservation made with miles and got my $5.60 back as well as the miles redeposited.

I converted from an annual fee card which came with a bunch of miles and was free for the first year.

I also have several cash back cards with no forex fee.

It would be absolutely pointless making this into a sticky. Even were the original post not full of bias and personal opinions, rather than hard facts, those facts that are there, may be correct today but will almost certainly be out of date tomorrow. Making this into a sticky would be absolutely pointless.

The world of consumer finance and retail banking is a complex and extremely dynamic market place and every individual will have there own personal preferences, likes and dislike and we all have a tendency to believe we make the right decisions.

i have spent my entire career in financial services and have written articles on many difference subjects for numerous U.K. newspapers and believe me, it would be a pointless exercise (no pun intended), to attempt to write an article or post trying to analyse this market. Probably easier to rewrite something on the relative merits of different types of cryptocurrencies.

It is important to stick to the basics. Look at the charges and fees and keep checking them. I have changed the cards I have used for travelling every year for the last five years as they became uncompetitive or new options come to market. I appreciate that loyalty points are a far bigger factor in the US than the U.K. but it is too easy to be seduced by the prospect of "free" stuff. Remember the old adage…Years ago, one of my clients was responsible for "inventing" one of the first loyalty card schemes in the U.K. , if not the world. I remember him telling me that it cost the company very little but provided them with invaluable customer data and, unsurprisingly, engendered customer loyalty. In other words, way more valuable to the company than the customer.

An important consideration for those of you in the USA that card technology there is way behind Europe and much of the rest of the world. Contactless technology, whether it be via card or ApplePay or similar is everywhere and in many places you may find if not difficult, then certainly inconvenient not to have access to that technology.

Looking at the title of this thread I really though I would be reading a tread about tipping! Now that would have been fun 🤩

Her "facts" only apply to the few cards that she checked wherever it is that she lives. Moving it to Tips actually opened it up to more inaccuracy as it does not apply to many US fee-free cards with no forex charge and which also accrue miles, points or cash back. Some of which are transferrable.

I normally would "churn" the airline cards every few years to collect the new cardholder bonus miles with minimum spend, no annual fee the first year, free checked luggage etc. Another benefit is removing blackout dates.Very little opportunity cost to put the spend on those cards ($15-20 per $1000) for 20,000 miles as an example.

I always compare whether it is worth "spending" miles or buying a cheap Southwest Airlines ticket for domestic flights.