The Chase CSR still gets 3% UR on any travel expenses, not only those from the Chase UR portal but yes considering the high annual costs, the 3% dining on a no-AF card chips away at the reasons to keep paying the CSR annual fee. So it’d make sense to bump up the CSR dining rewards.
I wonder if they’ll force conversion of people with Freedom cards. If not, the other question is whether you can have both Freedom and Freedom Flex cards to double the cap on 5% quarterly categories.
DoC refered to the Chase FAQ on Freedom Flex that states that you could not have 2 Freedom Flex cards. So if they converted your old Freedom card to Flex, you could effectively not keep both. That’s why I’d be cautious about doing a product conversion from Freedom to Flex rather than simply applying for the Flex card independently.
CSR needs to reduce the AF (at least back to $450) and replace / supplement the travel & dining benefits with stay home & cook benefits (prime/netflix, utilities, telecom (like Ink), groceries, home improvement), at least until enough people are vaccinated and travel & dining industries recover.
Yeah, they really clobbered the value of CSR with the addition of 3x on dining to CFU. Other than the temporary 5x on gas, I have no reason to use my CSR card at the moment. It was always kind of a gamble anyway, because some eateries use a non-dining MCC so you’d sometimes get screwed with a 1x rate. It is nice to be able to get 3x or 1.5x as a fallback with CFU.
Taking the Ink bonus categories and adding them to CSR, and lowering the AF seems reasonable to me. I also don’t know what the PP benefit is costing them at the moment, but with so many of these lounges closed, whether permanent or temporary, I’d like to see them evolve this benefit to a credit for either lounge passes or a membership to either an airline lounge or a network (like ‘The Club’). PP was of questionable value, even pre-COVID.