Neo Financial took over the co-branded partnership with Cathay Pacific from RBC. RBC discontinued its partnership with Cathay Pacific in 2023. Today, I will do a comparison review of the new card with Neo Financial. Highlights Here are the highlights…
RBC has discontinued one of its co-branded airline credit cards, the RBC Cathay Pacific Visa Platinum. Part of it might have to do with its merged with HSBC Canada.
Some BIG NEWS from Neo Financial. They have partnered with Cathay Pacific to launch a new card program for Canadian. The goal is to launch in the fall of 2023.
People can now register to join the wait-list for this new card. Below are the planned highlights of the card:
See also: COVID-19 Updates for our most up-to-date tracking.
Things have evolved quite a bit since March 2020 when the coronavirus lockdowns hit the travel industry. As time went on, airline and hotel program made adjustments to stay afloat. They also tried to make things more generous for customers, while trying to juggle their balance sheet.
Many people would argue that airlines would get government bailouts anyway, so all they really need to do is sit back and relax. Whether true or not, today’s post focuses on extensions given to member account balances. Several of those extensions have now expired, while some programs made some more permanent changes to their expiry policies.
Due to the current coronavirus pandemic, airline and hotel loyalty programs have paused/extended expiry policies to their miles and points. Today’s post is a current snapshot of the state of these programs.
Please note that we ongoingly update our COVID-19 updates page as well for most up-to-date information.
Keep in mind that we a frequently updated COVID-19 page.
With so much negativity surrounding the news, I would like to share some positive airline and hotel company YouTube videos. We posted a list a few weeks ago, so you can see the previous videos on that list. Today’s list are more recent videos since then.
Airlines and hotels have been putting together some positive videos together on YouTube, so I wanted to give them a shout out for putting these videos together. The videos range from: Thank you message Giving passengers assurance message (e.g. being…
Loyalty programs across the board have implemented temporary solutions to deal with any COVID-19 related matters. Below is a list of hyperlinks to useful information. I also included a small blurb for each company that may be more commonly relevant.
I tried to include companies more relevant to Canadians, but please let us know in the comment section below if you see any other links that we can add to the list (in alphabetical order).
The frequent flyer program, Asia Miles, made a significant change to its expiry policy this year. This change has increased the value of its program and I think it’s worth a deeper look. Furthermore, it’s been a while since I last updated this post, so it was due for one.
Expiry Policy
In the past, Asia Miles has a frustrating expiry policy whereby your miles expire within 36 months after they are deposited, regardless of activity. Effective January 1, 2020, there is a new expiry policy, but there is a transition period.
It has been over a year since this post was lasted updated. With some changes to their airline partners and an upgrade to the co-branded RBC credit card, this post is due for an update.
Expiry Policy
First of all, one change that I was hoping for has yet to occur. The expiry policy for Asia Miles continues to be 36 months after your miles are deposited. This means that you need to redeem your miles within 36 months of being deposited unless the member pays $40 USD for every 2,000 miles to renew for another 3 years. That means, you will be paying 2 cents for every mile that you want to renew. Not worth it to me.