Why The OCBC 90°N Card Could Be The Perfect Air Miles Card For Globe-Trotting Singaporeans
In today's global landscape where airline travel has become less expensive and budget airlines are providing competitive airfares, frequent travelling has turned into a norm. People in Singapore are actually travelling once every few months, as opposed to every couple of years.
For frequent travellers, it makes sense to obtain the miles game to make your spending meet your needs. For each dollar that you invest in your charge card, you are rewarded by means of miles. These miles can be used later on to redeem a flight on business class, top class or perhaps suites class for an exotic destination of your liking.
But with so many different kind of travel cards obtainable in Singapore, how will you determine which will probably be the best airmiles card for you to accumulate the miles that you need on the neighborhood and overseas spending that you're going to be making?
With avid-travellers in mind, OCBC Bank recently launched the OCBC 90°N Card. For individuals who love to travel, here are 6 explanations why the OCBC 90°N Card suits your wallet perfectly for that globe-trotter in you.
#1 Spend In Forex To Earn 4 Miles Per Dollar
Spending using our credit card overseas nowadays is becoming more prevalent. It's not only far better to travel with less cash being carried around, but you can also earn miles in your overseas spending.
The usual earn rate for the OCBC 90°N Card is 1.2 mile per dollar (mpd) on local spending and 2.1mpd on overseas spending. This is similar to most other charge cards in Singapore. However, OCBC 90°N Card users will be glad to understand that from now till 29 February 2021, they'll be in a position to earn 4mpd (instead of the usual 2.1mpd) on all overseas spend.
While this incentivises miles lovers to make use of the OCBC 90°N Card for his or her spend overseas, it's not limited to those people who are travelling overseas. You may also spend in forex and earn the 4mpd even from Singapore, if you are paying for products online using forex.
Do note that you'll incur foreign exchange mark-up of 3%. However if you are planning to accumulate miles, this is still an excellent mile earn rate of 0.75cent/mile. Should you use your OCBC 90°N Card overseas but charge in SGD, you still generate the base rate of 2.1mpd.
#2 Earn Extra Miles On Your Travel Spend
These days, many people prefer to plan their own holiday to help make the trips more personalised. What this means is planning the whole trip, in the flight booking, to the booking of accommodation and planning from the itinerary yourself, by using the apps and websites available on the web.
Usually, the cost of flights and accommodation from the majority of the travel expenditure. A savvy miles-chaser would opt for the best charge card that gives her or him extra rewards for travel bookings for flight and accommodation.
From now till 29 February 2021, you can earn 4mpd in your flight booking on popular airlines, including both budget airlines as well as full-service carriers, such as Singapore Airlines, Scoot, SilkAir, AirAsia, Jetstar.
You will also earn 8mpd in your accommodation booking with Agoda, Airbnb, Expedia, Mr & Mrs Smith and hotels underneath the Millennium Hotels and Resorts. Using any OCBC charge card at Millennium Resorts and hotels also entitles you to 20% from the Flexible Rate for those properties.
#3 Get Rewarded For the Shopping And Entertainment
When we travel on a tight budget airline, we often have to bring along some form of entertainment. This could be music on your phone, movies you downloaded, digital books in your Kindle and more.
Many people use Spotify today for the music needs and also the company has recently hit 96 million paid subscribers – are you currently one of them? If you are a paid user of Spotify, you will be glad to know that while using OCBC 90°N Card to pay for your Spotify bill will earn you 4 miles per dollar. Netflix subscribers will even earn 4 miles per dollar when paying your Netflix bills using the OCBC 90°N Card
Even at the tail end of your trip, you receive rewarded with additional miles for the spending. A lot of us purchase alcohol, cosmetic products and much more at duty free shops in the airport. The OCBC 90°N Card rewards you for your duty free shopping with 4mpd at DFS and Shilla at Changi before 29 February 2021. This comes before DFS is taken over by Lotte from June 2021.
#4 A Card That Can Be Held For that Long Term
One from the issues when it comes to banks having their own currencies for credit cards is that there is often an expiry date, which pushes you to travel sooner than you need to so that the miles don't expire.
You may also incur costs to transform the currency into miles that can be used. If this currency are only able to be converted in large blocks, you take the chance of having leftover miles in your account, which matches to waste if you don't spend enough hitting the next block for conversion.
With the OCBC 90°N Card, OCBC introduced a brand new currency – Travel$. Travel$ is a rewards currency which has multiple perks:
– Travel$ never expire
– Could be converted in small blocks of just one,000 miles
– No conversion fee
#5 A Good Plan B Should you ever Decide To Go For Cashback Instead
For those who are still undecided between chasing the miles life in order to choose practical cashback dollars in your credit card spending, you will be glad to understand that even if you pick the OCBC 90°N card to earn miles today, you've still got the option of changing the Travel$ you earn into cash rebates.
This cash rebates is at an interest rate of just one.2%. While single.2% cashback is nothing extraordinary, it does come close to other cashback cards that provides 1.5% cashback on all purchases, without any minimum spend.
This means that your time and efforts to earn Travel$ won't be wasted even if you decide later on that you no longer want to accumulate miles!
#6 Complementing Your OCBC 360 Account
Lastly, to sweeten the deal for people who are presently using the OCBC 360 Account, having the OCBC 90°N Card helps you to satisfy the Spend category where you have to spend a minimum of $500 with an OCBC credit card. This enables current OCBC 360 Account users to achieve the option to concurrently accumulate the spend they have to earn bonus interest whilst earning miles.
Applying For that OCBC 90°N card
To apply for the OCBC 90°N Card, you need to be a minimum of 21 years old and earn a yearly salary of S$30,000 and above for Singaporeans and PRs, or S$45,000 and above for foreigners.
Similar to the annual fees of many charge cards, the OCBC 90°N Card comes with an annual fee of $192.60 a year. The first year will be free and you can get 10,000 miles when you pay your annual fee within the second year.
Find out much more about the OCBC 90°N card here.