How We Maximize Our Cost per Mile

This year can be dubbed the Year of the Great Nerfing of miles credit cards. HSBC Revolution removed bonuses towards grocery, fast food and some travel; UOB Lady’s Solitaire reduced from 6mpd to 4mpd and cut bonus cap to $2,000 (from $3,000); DBS WWMC also cut bonus cap to $1,500 (from $2,000).

Our favourite way to purchase miles, Citi Payall, hiked their fees to 2.6%, increasing the cost per mile (cpm) significantly. Are the heydays of collecting miles over? We remain hopeful.

We have been using HSBC Revolution, Citi Premier Miles and Citi Payall for miles collection and purchase for the past 2 years. The nerfings are unnerving for us. And it prompted us to relook our miles strategy, approaching it from scratch. If this is your first or early foray into the miles game, we hope this is a useful guide for you.

Read This First

We refer to blogs like MileLion and MainlyMiles for their excellent analysis of various cards and lobangs. Kudos to MileLion’s telegram community for being super helpful with specific questions. These resources are essential for the Singaporean traveller or SQ fans. We also refer to TPG and OMAAT occasionally for places SQ doesn’t fly to.

MileLion wrote an excellent “Before We Start” for his updated credit card strategy and we will not repeat that here.

Our goal is to maximize our collection of miles as much as possible using specialised credit cards (for 4mpd or more), even at the expense of not using cashback cards that could give better value. We do the research work upfront now so that we can keep things simple. The desire is to keep the minimum amount of credit cards needed between the 2 of us, so that we won’t spread our spending too thin and end up having orphaned points.

Also, we will not be considering cards that require payment of first year annual fees and high spending levels. If you consider yourself a high spender (which we aren’t) or expect to have a huge expense (eg. renovation, wedding, etc) in the near term, check out what other blogs’ reviews of such cards.

Take Stock of Credit Card Spending

The first thing to do is to understand our spending patterns. We pulled out our actual credit card spending over the past 6 months. This gave us a better gauge of:

1. What Do We Spend On - To discern between monthly spending areas which incur every month, and adhoc spending that incurs once in a while. Monthly spending could be Dining, Groceries, Transport, Telcos. Adhoc spending could be Travel, Shopping, Wellness, Entertainment.

2. How Much Are We Spending - To decide how best to work with the bonus cap of various cards, and to identify areas best for specialised credit cards usage.

There are some common spending areas that no specialised cards offer bonus miles (eg. Utilities and Insurance). If you are willing to pay a fee for the miles, you may consider using Citi Payall or CardUp. We do not recommend these options as they don’t usually offer good cpm, and would consider cards with cashback/rebates instead.

What about other goods and services or subscriptions like Telco or Netflix? How do we check if the banks offer bonus miles for your specific transaction with the merchant?

Understanding Merchant Category Code (MCC)

This is the trickiest part of understanding the miles game. Payment brands (ie. Visa, Mastercard) assigns a 4-digit MCC to the merchants they work with, and the banks offer bonuses based on these MCCs.

Some merchants have more than one MCC depending on the actual goods and services they offer. For example, Eu Yan Sang retail stores use 5499, and Eu Yan Sang TCM clinics use 8099, IKEA stores use 5712, and IKEA Restaurants use 5814.

The quickest and most convenient way to check for MCC is via heymax.ai. You can search for the most common merchants in SG and their respective MCCs. Here are some examples:

Each specialised card publishes their respective MCC codes for bonus miles in their T&Cs. While MCCs are the same across the cards, cards do not categorize them the same. For example, 5912 (eg. Watsons) is categorized as Beauty & Wellness under UOB Lady’s Card, but is categorized as Retail Stores under UOB Preferred Platinum Visa Card. Even heymax.ai gets it wrong sometimes with which card to use for the best miles, so it is best used as a quick guide.

If you are starting to get confused, hang in there, we will make sense of all these soon.

What Cards Should We Use For Local Spend?

We created a spreadsheet converting the merchants to a MCC list and identified the MCCs we spent most on. On average, we each charge between $1-2k per month to our cards. We seldom use credit cards for foreign currency (FCY) spend as the credit card charges seldom justify the cpm. For most of our FCY we use either Wise or Revolut.

Here is our concluded list of cards for miles collection:

^{1 calendar month. 2 statement month.}

Orphaned points can become an issue when points don’t pool. UNI$ pooling makes it much easier to achieve the minimum block for transfer and lowers overall transfer fees too.

This is also why we are not (yet) using Citi Rewards + Amaze combo despite it having a “blacklist” approach and a long “5-year block” points expiry. However, if you spend a lot online and have many online subscriptions, you should consider Citi Rewards for their “blacklist” approach for online transactions.

Take note that UNI$ has $5 spending blocks, and it rounds down. So charging $4.99 to UOB PPV yields zero UNI$. For UOB Lady’s, the calendar month’s eligible transactions are summed up before rounding down to the nearest $5, so this the rounding effect here is less compared to UOB PPV.

We load each other’s cards into our mobile wallets to maximize the opportunities to spend within the monthly caps. Here are the combination of cards we can use for the more common MCCs:

^{UOB Lady’s categories are highlighted in pink.}

Earn More Miles & Maximize Miles

We only transfer miles/points to Frequent Flyer Programs (FFP) when we are prepared to redeem tickets or when they are near expiry, because airlines constantly “adjust up” their rewards chart.

Our experience transferring with Citibank takes 1 working day, and with HSBC takes 3 working days. Singapore Air opens up their flight redemptions 355 days in advanced, and for popular routes (eg. SIN-IST), being kiasu(?) gives you a better chance of snagging that Saver award flight.

There are many ways to milk even more miles from our spending or to maximize our miles for flights. Here are some you should consider.

Get More Miles with Kris+ and KrisShop

Stack any of the credit cards above to get even more miles when spending at Kris+ merchants. Watch out for Kris+ promotions to earn more miles per dollar spent. Eg. Earn 10 miles per dollar when dining at select dining partners with Feast to Fly promo.

KrisShop gives 3 miles per $2 spent that stacks with the credit card as well. The prices at KrisShop may not be cheaper when compared with Lazada or Shopee. However, you can snag some deals during promotions, so keep a look out for them.

Do remember to transfer the earned miles to your KrisFlyer account immediately. If you delay more than 7 21 days or spend any of these accrued miles, the balance remains in Kris+ and expires after 6 months.

Use Less Miles with KrisFlyer Spontaneous Escapes

The best way to use lesser miles for redemption is to take advantage of Singapore Air’s Spontaneous Escape offers. These offers are released every 15th of the month. Redemptions are up to 30% cheaper, provided you can book and complete your trip within the following month. Such ticket redemptions cannot be changed and are non-refundable. So make sure your travel insurance provides cover for miles redemption.

If you are curious about how past offers are like or planning for future redemptions, check out the user-created KrisFlyer Spontaneous Escapes Analysis Tool (SEAT).

Use Miles For Other Airlines

We started our miles journey focused on KF miles and soon realised other airlines offer good value too. This is why Citibank’s transfer list of 11 airlines is attractive. Visit Istanbul with Turkish Airline? Fly on Eva Air’s Hello Kitty plane? Experience Qatar’s next gen QSuite 2.0? Other airlines offer different experiences and different routes that SQ may not cover. Other airlines may also require less miles for the same route as SQ, albeit with higher fees. So if we are short on miles for a SQ saver award, we would explore other airlines’ options.

The FFP we highly recommend, other than KrisFlyer, is Avios. Avios points can be used on a number of airlines. Notable ones include British Airways, Qatar Airways, Cathay Pacific, and Qantas. And it is relatively easy to search and redeem flights using our British Airways Executive Club account which is free.

Avios can also be transferred between different airline’s miles programmes. Qatar Airways periodically has transfer bonus promo for Citibank and HSBC cards. The Avios credited to our Qatar Privilege Club can then be transferred to our British Airways Executive Club for other flight redemptions. With such transfer bonus promo, we get even more miles to redeem other airline’s tickets! Shiok!

Some examples from MainlyMiles.

One more thing about Avios - is it possible to combine you and your family members’ Avios to book a flight! You can create a British Airways Household Account and pool Avios from up to 6 members who live with you, making full use of your collective balance. This is impossible on KrisFlyer.

We hope future Citi Payall promos will be attractive for us to purchase miles. In the meantime, we are keeping an eye on Cardup promos too for miles purchase using Citi PM. This remains our main approach for miles beyond KF.

Which cards are you planning to change to? Let us know too! We need your help to grow, do share with your friends if you find our posts useful and interesting. Thank you!