@Sharif This. BA charge YR fees AKA a fuel surcharge and is known to have some of the highest fuel surcharges. Booking with a different carrier is the easiest route.
1 Like
BA does have astronomical YQ surcharges but LHR also has a departure tax(forgot what it’s called)which is applied no matter which airline you fly. If it’s a business flight $300 makes sense. Economy should be closer to $200.
If you book with UR or MR it’s essentially a revenue ticket so the tax will be included in the price.
Some people fly out from a nearby city (Dublin, Paris) to avoid this.
1 Like
I was thinking of flying back from Paris for this reason! Hopefully i will find award availability!
1 Like
Ok guys I finally gave in and got the amex plat for 150k signup bonus!! They been emailing about this for a while and im planning my euro trip in September! I guess it will come in handy and i have a csp as well for backup!
Is there a special way to get this? I keep seeing the standard 100k offer but would very well pull the trigger for 150k
It looks like the 150,000 is available via referral offer. Either find a friend who can refer you or use @Sharif referral code. You can read more about it on this article and see people with referral codes at the bottom in the comments.
Sweet thanks! Was able to get 125k from card match tool so I’ll just end up using the referrals from your link.
Edit - RIP looks like 10x restaurants offer is toast now.
It a great site to review credit card and bank account bonus offers. The owners / authors are pretty unbiased and similar to LH, it has a great forum in the “comments” section at the bottom of every post with user generated comments / questions / experiences.
How bad is it to close a credit card after a year? If I were to start with the Delta Gold could I upgrade to the Delta Platinum after a year and still get the bonus miles? Or do I have to open it separately and be stuck with Delta Gold card as well
What do you mean by “bad”?
The main negatives to your credit would be:
-
If you have largish balances reporting relative to your total credit card limits (looking across all of your cards combined), and losing the available credit would spike your overall utilization significantly higher;
-
if you close the account with a balance, the closed account will report the balance but the available credit will show as $0… which to FICO will appear that the card is maxed out until the whole balance is repaid and reports as $0.
It’s a myth that closing an account by itself drops your score, and the most cited fake reason is the average length of your credit history will go down.
The only score models that I’m aware of that only average the age of your OPEN accounts are the worthless free garbage scores that you get from places like Kredit Carmex. Common FICO models average the ages of all of your accounts, regardless of whether they’re opened or closed.
There may be an upgrade offer from Gold to Platinum, but I wouldn’t recommend that unless the offer is really enticing. I would either close the gold or downgrade to a blue and apply for the platinum separately. If you take the route of upgrading your card, you’re no longer eligible to get the welcome bonus on the platinum.
Thanks. I’m interested in the Air France credit card but theres no downgrade path and not worth the annual fee. So as long as I keep my credit utilization at the same level and have it paid off before closing im good. Going to start the 2 player mode with my wife to collect these bonuses.
After a year no problem with Amex, but never cancel them in the first 12 months. Month 13 when the fee hits they’ll reverse it.
Most Amex cards are one bonus per lifetime so keep that in mind. Business cards are enticing with them because they don’t count against your 5/24 limit with Chase which is great for churning points.
1 Like
Thanks. I was thinking of downgrading to the Blue after the Reserve. Ill explore upgrade and retention offers before closing a card. Chase wise if im correct I can only hold one Sapphire card at a time and have to wait 2 years after closing the Preferred before getting the bonus on the Reserve. At least they have a $0 downgrade path.
Hello, my AMEX 0% intro APR is expiring and I have a rather large balance on it. Any recommendations on the best 0% APR balance transfer card ?
You want no balance transfer fee and a promo rate. Usually you get one and not the other.
Saw this on a quick search https://wallethub.com/credit-cards/no-balance-transfer-fee/
Old post, but still interesting. I was unaware that the closed accounts are really looked at. In my experience (and my opinion until now), closing a long-standing account often has a negative impact on your credit score. I remember specifically a card of mine was closed because I failed to uphold the company’s policy (lack of usage). My score dropped around 5 points IIRC, obviously a short term effect, but it still nearly made me sick. 
The shitty/useless Vantage scores that you get from WalletHub, Kredit Kangaroo and sites like that weigh the age of open accounts.
Almost no one uses Vantage Scores to evaluate your creditworthiness, though, those are for consumer amusement and are essentially worthless for understanding how you’d be evaluated by a lender.
Most/all common FICO models (which are actually used to decision credit applications, determine your interest rate, etc.) look at open and closed for the average age of accounts metric.
One significant factor that makes it difficult to understand actual impacts like the one you describe is that your credit report changes all the time, but monitoring sites only call out certain changes.
So just because your score was 788 last week and it’s 783 this week, and the only change noted by Credit Catheter is a closed account, in reality it’s all of the changes to your report combined since you last looked at your score that comprise the reasons for the score difference.
Most of the changes to your report itself are never called out at all.
1 Like